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Happy ipv6 Day!

For great justice.

What the hell is that, you ask? Well, we’ve all seen the stories showing up for the past few years on everything from blogs to local news about the fact that the internet is running out of unique addresses. Those IP addresses that have been flying around for as long as the internet has been around, like 192.168.1.110, are part of what’s called ipv4 (Internet Protocol version 4), which allows for a total of 4,294,967,296 unique addresses. Seems like a metric fuck-ton, right? But once you take out the special purpose addresses that can’t be used publicly on the internet (about 18 million for use in anyone’s internal networking, and about 270 million for other complicated stuff), and the number gets a little smaller. Still a whole lot though, right? Think about what these are used for. Every single website has to have a unique one of these, along with every single person who wants to connect to any kind of website or service. In 2009, there were about 111,889,734 registered domain names on the internet, each one with a unique ipv4 address. And that number has been growing ridiculously quickly. In just 2005, there were only about 60,783,042, and since 2009, we’ve gotten tons of new TLDs too. That’s just servers. Aside from that is the number of totally unique users with totally unique ipv4 addresses going to these > 11 million websites. So yeah, we’re not quite out of addresses yet, but it’s coming, and it’s coming fast. ipv6 is the long-term solution to this problem, giving us addresses that look more like 2001:470:c:11fc::2, which gives us space for about 3.4×10³⁸ addresses, or about 5×10²⁸ unique addresses for each individual of the 6.8 billion people on Earth. Now THAT is a metric fuck-ton of addresses.

So ipv6 day is a day to try this stuff out and hopefully give it a little publicity and a little push to get everybody working on getting it ready and working before the ipv4-pocalypse. And we here at PoorDecisions are doing our part to try to avoid the end of the world. While our DNS servers on the otherwise amazing ChunkHost don’t yet support the AAAA records needed to make our actual domain point to the ipv6 connection on our server, we do still have one up and running. If you have ipv6 enabled and want to give it a try, this link will get you there: PoorDecisions ipv6 [2001:470:c:11fc::2]. On the other hand, our dev server has plenty of ipv6 and an AAAA record kindly provided by Godaddy, so you can get to that one directly from the domain on either ipv4 or ipv6 using this link: PoorDecisions Dev ipv6 @osto.us. If you’re not sure which connection type you’re using or you’re using both and want to force the ipv6 version, use this link direct to our new IP address PoorDecisions Dev ipv6 [2001:470:1f06:134f::2].

Check it out and see what works and what doesn’t, and let us know how it all goes for you. It’s the only truly appropriate way to celebrate ipv6 day.

And if you want to support this glorious day on your own site, feel free to steal that corner banner from us and spread it around with just a little html:

and a little css:

Coming soon: another blog post about all the nerdy details on how we got our ipv6 day shenanigans up and running.

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So this is going to be one of those “nerd shit” posts we all love so much.  We recently decided that our former host (inmotion) was essentially a giant bag of dicks that didn’t really allow us to do what we wanted, so we packed up our shit and left.  Now we’re powered on ChunkHost (which is fucking awesome) and are running our own shit.  Instead of waiting two weeks to see if inmotion will do something about it, we can now just SSH in and fix it ourselves.

Yeah, it pretty much looks like that

So long nerd-story short, PD is now powered on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, with apache2 and mysql.  FUCK YEAH NERD SHIT

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Before you read this, just click play on this video to provide the appropriate background music.

Playing? Good.

POOR DECISION NUMBER ONE THOUSAND WILL BE POSTED THIS FRIDAY

That’s right, by the time this post is a day old, one thousand Poor Decisions will have been posted. Holy shit. That’s a lot of Poor Decisions. And to celebrate, we’re inviting every single one of you to Flann O’Brien’s. You’re the ones who helped us get here, so this is your victory too. Come celebrate 1000 Poor Decisions and here’s to making thousands more.

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Running a network is a lot of work. That’s why we need you. That’s right, you. Put your greasy fingers to work doing something other than masturbating and then telling us about it. Write for PoorDecisions.net! Not actually write, though. Just help us sort through the tons of crap we get every day, pick out the few turds that are worth posting, polish them up with a few good tags, and send them off to be enjoyed by billions* of people every day. Think you can do that? Good, confidence is good to have. But we have to approve first. Email IWannaBeTheGuy@poordecisions.net to tell us why you think you should be our newest writer, and which site you would prefer working on.

Compensation for those selected will include: your very own @poordecisions.net email address, daily ridicule at the hands of the site owners, being a part of something that is fucking awesome, high fives**
Compensation will not include: money, goods, services, reputation, career enhancement, sex, love, fame, glory, joy, presents, hugs, or any real recognition for the work you do.

APPLY TODAY!

*rough estimate.
**maybe.

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I don't speak Italian.

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Welcome to the world the newest and first real member of the PoorDecisions Network: Holy Shit I’m Old. You’re older than you remember. Check it out!

Blah blah blagpost.

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PHP Advent is one of those sites you read when you want to feel like a smart programmer and nod in approval at people who are better at it than you saying complicated things, as though all their ideas are obvious to you and you could have totally thought of that yourself if you felt like it. Except you didn’t, and that’s why they’re posting on a widely-read “authority” site, and you’re posting on a blag that you yourself put up primarily to post funny pictures of things you find on the sidewalk.

Wait, no, that’s not you, that’s me.

Anyway, I’m reading PHP Advent, nodding my head, pretending I know things about things, and then suddenly, holy crap. I actually did think of that. The post: First Class APIs by Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson. The idea: building the API first and making the site just another API user. The proof: you’re already on it. PoorDecisions.net v2 is built exactly that way. The API came first, with all its data and science, and once that was finished and working perfectly, then the site was built on top of it. As far as the API knows, PD2 is just another app with just another API Key. And it’s true, it does make things better. I think it really made building the actual site a lot faster. Having a complete set of functions for everything the site needs to do (and more) already finished and ready to use, it’s only a matter of putting together HTML/CSS and writing the simple Javascript accessors, and look. Finished site. Plus when things break, you only have to look in one place to repair the damage for any apps, including the site. Not to mention the ridiculous new set of Analytics (nerd porn) this gives us.

Life with an API sure is great. And we’re obviously pretty smart for coming up with it first. Take that, New Twitter.

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So here I am, SSH-ing into the server to do…something. I forget what. Probably just wanted to look cool. It said ***System Restart Required*** so I, of course, obeyed. While waiting for my connection to die after starting the reboot, I do what I always do when presented with a blank space to type in. I ‘lol’ into it. Apparently Ubuntu liked that, and responded by saying ‘♥’. Now this of course got me all turned on, so I said it again.

I guess the joke got old quick.

Unfortunately Ubuntu chose to hide our love after that. Why, Ubuntu? Why? We had something so special.

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Apple finally got around to reviewing our little update to version 1.2, and it’s up in the App Store right now. Nothing is actually new (yet), but it works with the new site, and holy shit does it ever. Faster than anything else on the iPhone*, PoorDecisions.net 1.2 is ready so go get it.

Oh and also, with iOS 4.2 coming out soon, iPad owners will be able to get in on this sweet, delicious app too. It’s like christmas for Apple product owners.

*probably not true.

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lolwut

WE NEED TO SET UP SOME SIGNS… TACTICALLY

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