CF Domains, Side projects, MailGun, EuroDNS

• Cloudflare domain registrar - Awesomeness. Yet it remains to be seen, if Cloudflare is really that awesome, but at least it sounds really great at the moment when the services are published. My domains are in Wave 3 to be transferred to Cloudflare @ Wikipedia.
• Made quick tests, it's obvious that Cloudflare public DNS resolver is clearly superior to Google's public DNS resolver. And there's a huge difference between those services.
• Finally decided to close down one of my long running side projects. It was a search engine, with indexing, lots of integration, database work, ORM and so on stuff, optimizations, python core. Good project, lot's of learning. But didn't "pan out" as designed. Well, you can't learn if you don't do, so no hard feelings about that. I just figured out that I don't motivation and or time to continue running a project which doesn't seem to have any practical future. integration to Twitter, Telegram (bot), MailGun (SMTP in / out) for command & control and several other APIs, Pub/Sub, APIs for 3rd party users, as well as integration to APIs were we fetched the data for indexing, so on and lots of different Web Services. Well, it was a good practice, I did run everything needed to run fully automated business online and providing value to users. All the parts which were finalized, worked as planned and were stable and performed well. Al parts of the system continuously monitored, and alerts sent immediately if something failed. Which means that I had everything required working well. One of the reasons for closure was the fact that web framework which was being used as well as the database ORM framework went through major revision changes, and the new version would have required way too much work to make it worthwhile. But I kept the project running as long as it was viable without too serious effort.
• Mailgun - launched their EU region. That's great news. That's one of the reasons why I would have preferred SendGrid for one of my projects. But unfortunately SendGrid banned me, without any explanation and for sure I weren't sending any spam or other "unauthorized" or "illegal" content, all the recipients had freely subscribed for the content being provided. Anyway, I'm also and naturally fully capable of running my own SMTP server(s). And I'm currently operating a few.
• Bandwidth Alliance is awesome development. It's absolutely great the "best of the breed" can collaborate like this.
• Usability: EuroDNS - asks users to upgrade their credit card info when the old card is expiring. Great, only funny thing is that you can't update or enter new credit card info, unless you buy something. Only sane way is just to delete the expired card, and then wait for something to be invoiced and then pay it with new card. Reminder about updating credit card info is just ridiculous trolling, when you can't practically do it. No, I'm not interested to buy your credits, just to enter new credit card info. Can't stop loving horrible user experience (UX).
• It seems that I wasn't the only one going WTF when Hans Solo said he made the Kessel Run in 12 Parsecs. Because Parsec @ Wikipedia isn't a time unit, it's unit of distance. Reminds me about the old joke. American man asked in Europe for one meter of sausage. Clerk told that they don't sell the sausage by meter but they'll sell it by the kilo. Then they guy asked for one kilometer of sausage. - Yet unit tricks are one of the classic ways of checking if the people know anything or not, intentionally use incorrect units and see if anyone corrects you immediately. - I don't actually know if our physics professor made that intentionally or accidentally, but he always said that he's just checking if people are following. Yet maybe it was just that hyperspace dimensional shortcut allowed by folding time and space, to make the distance shorter by taking a shorter route. In Babylon 5 the hyperspace was used a lot, as well as in the original Wing Commander @ Wikipedia game. - I just one day tested this approach, I said QR code, when the code was obviously PDF417, but nobody immediately corrected me. Leaves me wondering, if they don't know the difference? Because those aren't interchangeable.

2020-02-09