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Talk about scary situations . . . .

I was looking around at my [tag]server[/tag]’s file structures today and noticed something funny – my [tag]hard drive[/tag] usage had run up to 81% somehow. Not thinking too much about it, I reminded myself to check back again later to see if something was going on. An hour later, my drive was 84% full. 2 Hours later – 88% full. 3 hours later 93% full.

WE HAVE A PROBLEM HERE!

Turns out a temporary backup somehow went awry, and kept growing in size. When all was said and done, this file had approached almost 25GB!

Good thing we caught it and fixed the situation. That could have caused some MAJOR problems…..

Anyone else ever have something like this happen?

Taking Care of a SPAMMER . . .

I was notified earlier today that someone had been SPAMMING members of one of my forums. Of course, I was upset, but instead of getting annoyed, I took action to ensure this person was stopped. I looked up WhoIs record using my favorite site for the occasion, http://whois.sc. From there I was able to determine who his host was, and contacted their abuse system (Hosts do not like SPAMMERS! It is illegal to SPAM and if they find out that you are using their server to SPAM, they will boot you immediately).

I’ve been notified that they are handling the situation . . .

Sometimes, the people you’re fighting host their own servers, and reporting them is not so easy. In that case, you’ll likely need to report them directly to the various Blacklists. Follow the directions below to find out how to contact the various blacklist providers.

How Can You Check to See if You or Another Website Have Been Blacklisted?
There is an easy way to check the blacklists!

• Go to MX Toolbox
• Enter the domain of the site you are interested in, in the lookup box and select the button [MX Lookup]
• You’ll now see results including: Preference, Host Name, IP Address, TTL, and you’ll see two buttons (Diagnostics & Blacklists)
• Click on the Blacklists button and you’ll see a screen with the site’s IP address in a box.
• Click the [Blacklist Check] button

What you’ll see is the IP address checked against 122 known blacklists. If the status is OK, then there are no problems. If it is not OK, there should be an explanation.

There will be links to all of the Blacklists, and if for some reason your site has mistakenly been added, there are usually explanations on their sites of how to remove yourself.

Hope this helps!

Everyone these days has a webcam, and I’m pretty sure most people don’t really use it too much (outside those of you voyeurs & teenagers out there). I actually use mine almost daily making video phone calls through Skype. It’s great! I keep up with my family, friends, and business associates by making these video calls.

There are, however, other great uses of these cameras. I did some exploring yesterday and found a bunch of cool resources for doing online broadcasting via your webcam. These tools can be used to start your own live online TV show, to create a video blog, or to just make interesting web-videos. All are worth checking out!
Live Web Broadcasting Tools

• Operator11
• Stickam
• USStream.tv
• YouCams

Scheduled and On-Demand Web Broadcasting Tools

• Kyte
• SplashCast * My Favorite *

Thanks to Masternewmedia.com for putting out a great web broadcasting guide and list of web broadcasting tools!

Looks like MySpace wants to go back to its roots and launch another crappy product without style or functionality. The recently launched their MySpace News Beta (of course they had to include the uber-lame BETA tag – more about BETAs in another post), which looks like a really poorly modified Pligg clone. You would think that with all it’s resources, NewsCorp would make sure they had a good product before putting out an ugly piece of junk like this, but nothing seems to surprse me anymore.

The site, steals borrows the now famous Digg voting system and presents blog posts and news stories (I have yet to see anything other than a blog post) for users to read and review. The output is just poorly designed. While I do appreciate the vast number of categories the site offers, and the events options (they aggregate events from Backpage, CitySearch, amongst others) I don’t really see any reason to rate an event that I, nor anyone else has attended. It just makes no sense. I see nothing else about the site that I like.

In addition, when I attempted to include my blog’s feed to the site, it simply timed out. I tried again later with another blog and got the same result. I realize its a “BETA”, but these kinds of problems won’t win the MySpace team any kind of good buzz.

According to Playfuls.com:

The news feature of MySpace is built using Newroo technology, a company they acquired in early 2006 for a rumored $7 million. Newroo never had the chance of displaying the merits of its technology in public because of the acquisition.

I’m not sure, but I think they got ripped off. I’m pretty sure this could be developed for somewhere around $.75 (not a fan, can’t you tell?)

Here are some other links to thoughts about this new site:
- MySpace News Kinda Sucks
- Social Media Now: MySpace News Not Ready for Prime Time
- MySpace added News aggregation
- Will MySpace News Ever Fly? (The Answer May Surprise You)
- After the (brief) Honeymoon: MySpace News Still Sucks
- MySpace News: failure to launch, no one is reading