Bill Burcham’s memeRocket

As you may know, this site was a casualty of the recent RegisterFly meltdown. Notwithstanding some cordial emails from my ICANN Ombudsman (”… thank you for message. ICANN has forwarded your message to Registerfly and asked them to assist you.  Please let us know if they are unable to help you or if you do not hear from them in the next five days.”), and willingness but inability by the Good Guys at gandi.net to actually transfer my locked-up domains, I have felt pretty alone in this whole mess.

So I was thinking — what do you do when you’re feeling alone in the new era of social media? Why, start a website of course. Now there is already a pretty good community site, Registerflies.com where folks can commiserate and get status updates, but the itch I really want to scratch is this: how many of us out here are actually affected by RegisterFly’s failure? What actual sites are impacted? Any sites you’ve actually heard of?

Another itch that needs scratching is that there is no such thing as a “forwarding address” on the Internet when the old address is unresolvable. Makes sense right. The analogy in the real world is you have a donut shop and a nuclear blast hits it. Your customers can’t go to the old location and see the sign on the door pointing them to the new location. On the other hand, if you step outside DNS, there are myriad ways to do “forwarding address”. Only problem is, none of them have been formalized the way DNS has.

Now starting another site is a fair amount of work even for a Ninja - and I sir, am no Ninja. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a ready-made site that hosted DNS meta-data and discussion?  A site editable and usable by all.  A free site where a guy could create a forwarding address registry for just this purpose. Well as it turns out there is just such a site operated by a bunch of renaissance wierdos out of Portland, Oregon. It’s called AboutUs.org and it hosts a page about every domain on the ‘Net. There’s a page for your blog. What’s more you can edit that page - and so can everyone else. The whole thing runs on MediaWiki so you can create any old page you want!

So without further ado, I introduce the RegisterFly Impact Registry. It’s my little social experiment. I’m really curious to see if folks will come and provide their data. And I’m really curious to see just how many people, and what kinds of services were disrupted by this whole fiasco.

I use Amazon S3 to store backups from EC2. For a while I’ve been thinking I ought to back up some of the S3 data once in a while but I’ve been putting it off. One reason I’ve been procrastinating is because the S3 “file” management tool I’ve been using, S3 Browser, doesn’t support simple things like deleting or downloading folders. You may delete a folder (=”bucket”) only if it’s empty. You may copy the files (=”objects”) in a folder but there is no convenient way to just copy the folder and all its contents at once.

When I saw the S3Fox Firefox extension a while back I was encouraged.  Unfortunately, S3Fox has some critical bugs on the Mac. In particular, folder downloads don’t work — apparently because S3Fox is using backslashes in destination paths a la Windows. You end up with empty folders on your Mac.

I was rescued from a serious bout of the crankies by Nolobe’s Interarchy. This Mac-only file transfer application apparently supports lots of protocol standards and lots of interesting automation features blah-blah-blah but what’s important to me is — it has S3 support!  Woo hoo!  So I downloaded the free 14 day trial and used it to browse my S3 buckets. In a nonce I had downloaded a couple hundred megabytes of precious machine images and subversion snapshots. Now they sit on my disk, ready for their final DVD resting place. I can sleep tonight.

Oh, and Interarchy is a lickable OS X app too. I have no idea yet if I’ll prefer it to Transmit (tall order) but for S3 work from the Mac it looks like a must-have.

Well the memerocket.com domain is a casualty of the RegisterFly debacle so you’re reading this at the replacement domain meme-rocket.com. You know … the many frustrating hours wasted trying to recover ownership, and the money spent on replacement domains and domain recovery, and the time spent telling WordPress and Apache about the new name, and proving ownership to Technorati and Google, and losing my OpenID, and having my hard-won Technorati position of 84,121 slip to 2,856,595, and having to notify all my friends of the new domain wouldn’t be so bad if … come to think of it — it is so bad. Feh.