An e-Rant about Politics, Religion, Software, etc.

Last weekend, I purchased myself a domain for this blog, finally. It was actually part of an exercise in testing the practical length of time it takes for a DNS server change to propogate successfully. I had originally been planning on purchasing a different domain for a different purpose altogether, but I was sort of luke warm about it. However, my lovely and brilliant wife thought it made sense to buy one for this blog which I slapped myself for not thinking of it sooner – especially with domain prices on GoDaddy so cheap!

Now all my faithful readers (all 2-3 of you) can find me at http://wrathfuldove.org or http://www.wrathfuldove.org.

Ever since I started looking into using Mephisto for my blog and reading about the various ways of deploying a production Rails site, I had heard about the company Slicehost and how it was an excellent hosting company that was among other things friendly to Rails development. Later, when it came time to develop a website for some aquaintances I ran across Slicehost’s name again and continued to read good things about them, but their price range and my acquaintances’ needs didn’t fit with what Slicehost offered.

But the prospect of having a virtual dedicated server with full root access and complete control over the system right down to the responsibility for the security and maintenance of the box along with complete control of the ports was quite alluring. I kept returning to the Slicehost page hungry for a Slice of my own. Read more

Today I received an email from Pandora.com concerning a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. According to the email, “the new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all”(emphasis added). The email then points out how these sharp increases in fees will effectively strangle Internet radio companies because it artificially inflates the cost of doing business to levels far above what such businesses can expect to afford.

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