My best friend dcolumbus is in town for a couple of weeks so we’ve put our heads together on a new project we’re hoping to crank out in the next week. Development and design has gone spectacularly smoothly, and I’d even say I’ve enjoyed working – it doesn’t even seem like work. We’ve been coding like madmen all week, and I swear we’ve completed in 3 days what might have taken us 3 weeks if we were not in the same room.

So the project we’re working on basically uses mod_rewrite to change a path to a URL variable in ColdFusion. So for example if you went to www.domain.com/foo/, the system would interpret the path in the form of www.domain.com/index.cfm?username=foo.

We checked out Adobe’s ColdFusion 8 Hosting Partners and eventually decided on HostMySite.com.

We sent our payment and domain registration request, and waited for a time. Because of the way we entered the payment (the name associated with the domain didn’t match the credit card),  we suspected there might be problems processing the transaction. Sure enough, we received a note saying our payment was declined. dcolumbus and I then began second-guessing ourselves and after further investigation, we noted that HostMySite.com only offers ColdFusion on its Windows hosts. Not only that, but they exclusively use IIS – not Apache. Thus, very good chances no mod_rewrite option, which was an absolute necessity for the project.

So no offense to HostMySite.com (who have been extremely helpful), but we saw this as a blessing in disguise. So we went in search of an Apache ColdFusion host, which was slightly more difficult than I expected. As always, Google gives up the goods when you ask the question correctly. We probably should have looked for “ColdFusion Linux Hosting” and that might have shortened the search. Finally we came across Strategic Solutions which offers both Windows/IIS and Linux/Apache ColdFusion hosting packages, and are cheaper to boot. So we passed along the information to the purchasing department today, with the expectation that we would purchase a package later this evening.

The wrench came late this afternoon when I received another email on my BlackBerry stating that the payment had been accepted.

Crap.

Due to a miscommunication, we had resubmitted our payment information and it was successfully processed this time. I, for one, stressed a bit about it this afternoon even as we went for a swim at the lake, then out for dinner in town. When we returned home, I immediately contacted HostMySite.com support and requested information regarding alternatives for mod_rewrite. The support was extremely prompt and helpful. The rep I talked to said that they offered a 30-day money-back guarantee, but said he’d issue a ticked to look into what they might be able to do with IIS for equivalent mod_rewrite service, and that the ticket turnaround time would probably see me a response by Noon tomorrow.

So I eagerly await the response, but I’m no longer stressed. One way or another I’d be impressed if they came up with a solution, and I’d be equally impressed if they gave us our money back (minus the domain registration fee).

But more than anything I’m excited to get this project live.

Update:

After some back-and-forth with tech support at HostMySite.com, they graciously gave us a full refund and released our domain name. We are proceeding with Strategic Solutions after more cautiously confirming they had the functions we needed.

Well, I had resolved to write every day, but an event on Friday threw my life into disarray that has only now been corrected.

I was modding an Xbox for a friend so that he could use it as a video streaming and storage device. The simplified version of the problem is that the hard drive is married to the Xbox motherboard with a special password. And in order to soft-mod an Xbox you must first unlock the drive with this password, then copy some special files. Then you lock the drive back up with the same password and enjoy one of the best pieces of software ever written: XBMC.

Problem was, I was driven, it was late, and the less sleep I get, the more mistakes I make. And this weekend I didn’t get much sleep.

I inputted the wrong code to lock the drive back up. Worse still, I didn’t pay attention to what code I did enter. In addition to the drive password, there is a Master Password you can set in order to override the drive password. However in my infinite wisdom and foresight, I neglected to do this. Hence I ended up with a drive I could not access and could not unlock.

There are only three solutions to this problem.

1. Find out the master password, which incidentally is a closely guarded secret by the manufacturer.
2. Throw the drive in the garbage
3. Go to http://www.hdd-tools.com/ and try out their Repair Station or HDD Unlock Wizard

I did not know the master password. I did not intend to throw my 300GB drive in the garbage. So I tried the Repair Station first with no success: apparently they can’t unlock a hard drive set to the maximum security level lockout. Which left me with the HDD Unlock Wizard, which can unlock the drive but must Zero the drive in order to do it.

By then I was tired of fighting and I felt thoroughly defeated. But I refused to lose the battle and the war by losing the drive altogether, so I agreed to Zero the drive, which involved a $25 fee. At least it’s better than buying a new drive.

But then my Xecuter3 chipped box stopped working. I could not get any video unless I bypassed the box altogether and accessed the chip firmware. After hours of trying to repair this, again I was left disappointed.

Then I had to buy another Xbox for $50 and mod it to replace the one I lost. It really showed me how reliant I am on XBMC for all the TV shows and movies I watch. Then I had to mod it all over again, this time I didn’t bother moving the mod chip over as it seems unnecessary since a soft-mod will suffice. So I put it all back together after cloning the standard Xbox 10GB drive to my “rescued” 300GB, only to discover a new problem.

When you use a softmod, the mod initiates a virtual EEPROM – a sort of firmware the system uses for certain configuration. This EEPROM is reset every time you turn off or reboot the system. And so when I set XBMC to display in 720p or 1080i mode for my 52” TV, it would not oblige and upon rebooting the config was reset. And having no way to bypass the virtual EEPROM, I had to unlock the drive again, remove the mod, lock the drive, then put it back in the Xbox so I could change the Video and audio settings through the Microsoft Dashboard. Then I had to unlock the drive again, re-apply the soft-mod, lock once more, and plug it back in again. Every time I lock the drive is a nerve-wracking experience, since as I discovered earlier you must use the right password. If you make a typo and do not catch it, you would have to guess. And 40-digit hexadecimal code offers 16^{40 possibilities (my calculator can’t handle the real number).}

So last night I finally had the video settings working, the sound working, and XBMC customized to the state I wanted it. Then for some reason, the scraper would no longer download wide banners or episode screenshots the way they did to display like my previous post did. After a bit of digging I found that the site I was trying to access (TheTVDB.com) goes down intermittently, and thus the API is testy as well. After waiting a few hours it worked like a charm.

So that is my wonderful weekend experience. Thanks for listening.