Another successful year has passed for Lime Daley, and since I like statistics, when I happened to notice a large amount of spam being silently thrown away today, I took the opportunity to check up on the stats for the last year.

EMAIL

We received 5 million emails in the last 12 months.

We bounced 74% of that email back to the original sender because it was being sent from computers known to be spammers.

We silently threw away another 12% due to the content of the message was known to be spam.

Then we tagged 6% as possible spam for delivery to your spam folder and then the final 8% was delivered to your inbox.

We occasionally get a new customer who will say that his email isn't working once they switch to our service.  In every case, the problem has been that he was so used to getting email every time he hits the "send/receive" button that he figures there is something wrong, but then I'll look up his account, and say that I can deliver the 85 spams that he received that day if he wants, but I assume he would rather not get them.

We can't claim to be spam free (and no one can, unless they can afford to hire a secretary to read their email, and even then, I'll bet there are occasionally mistakes, either in deleting too much or not enough), but I'd say that deleting 86% of your inbox without accidentally deleting real email, and also keeping your spam folder relatively small so you can more easily review it for any real emails means that we are doing a pretty good job of managing your email.

FTP/WEB HOSTING

124 domains

2,718 email addresses (excluding those customers that use wildcards for theoretically infinite addresses)

24 outgoing terabytes; 3 incoming terabytes

670GB of disk space used (excluding backups)

SERVERS

4 Servers, with 14 cores total; 86% idle (counting 24 hour days, but busier during the day time)

REFERRALS

We paid out $700 in referral fees -- Thank YOU for continuing to grow Lime Daley!

We'll be upgrading some networking equipment on December 22 between 2:00 and 6:00 AM EST.  You might see some delays and brief outages during that maintenance window.

UPDATE: 2010/12/22: 6:30AM: Most equipment has been upgraded without any downtime.  The job ended up getting split into two pieces, so there will be another maintenance window on 12/24 as well.

UPDATE: 2010/12/24: 7:00AM: All devices have been upgraded.  We had a couple minutes of downtime around 4:00AM.  For those of you who were awake at that time to notice, our sympathies...  :)

We are now using dnswl.org's mail server whitelist to bypass greylisting, which means that for known legitimate mail servers (all 101,686 of them at the moment), greylisting will be bypassed, which means that your e-mail will arrive a little bit sooner.

Our upstream provider is currently seeing intermittent network connectivity at this point.  We are looking into it further.

UPDATE: 11:05EDT: The cause was a misconfigured machine on our network causing a denial of service to other connections.  The machine has been removed from the network, and as of 10:25EDT, everything looks good, but we'll continue monitoring.

2010/08/07, 10:55AM: The company we use for DNS services is having some issues this morning and some queries are not being answered, and some are being redirected to our European servers, and causing various delays. If you host DNS with Lime Daley, you might see some flakiness in accessing services on your domain.

Incoming mail should not be lost, as the senders' servers will retry automatically.  And we've opened a support ticket with our upstream providers to make sure they know about the issue.

We'll keep you updated as we find out more.

2010/08/07, 3PM:  Fortunately, all it took was for us to post about it to fix it, as it has been stable since 10:46AM.  I should have posted sooner.  The company who runs our DNS servers, had a distributed denial of service attack on their servers, all based out of China, and the traffic reached 50Gbps, which is a pretty impressive number.  They are working on a solution to try to avoid this in the future.

There are a handful of solutions out there to integrate TinyMCE and Moodle, but some of them are obsolete, and some contain all sorts of things other than the TinyMCE files.

So, I started by reading this entire page, and then figuring out which versions no longer worked, and finally settled on John Stabinger's version (link to stabinger.us was removed, since it appears the site was bought by SEO spammers), which was pretty good, though it contained a lot of extra stuff.

I've tried to keep my version pretty simple, and hopefully you'll save some time by using it.  I downloaded John's version that was built using 1.9.8 from 05/12/2010.  It merged cleanly into my 1.9.9 2010-06-09.

We don't think it will affect anyone's current websites, but we've turned off DirectoryIndex'ing by default for security* reasons.  If you desire this behavior in a certain directory, you can turn it back on by adding (or editing an existing) .htaccess file and adding the line:

Options +Indexes

And the old functionality will be restored.

* Where "security" is defined as security through obscurity, and not any real definition of security at all, but it keeps the script kiddies away.

I just finished a fun project today for a customer that involves trying to prevent HTML from being easily copied.  It isn't possible to prevent someone like myself from getting the content, but you can go pretty far in preventing an average user from getting the content.

There are a couple commercial solutions available, but they fail in different ways, mostly notably not working in some browsers (I still need to test mine with Safari and Opera), but even in Internet Explorer, all of the solutions I saw let you "save as text" and you get the entire text content of the page.  My customer is particularly interested in protecting the text content, so those options weren't acceptable.

Most of the project wasn't interesting, just fighting with javascript and encoding and quotes, etc. but the last part: obfuscating the text, was pretty neat.

It about to be deprecated, so this information won't be worth much in a month or two, but for some reason, the documentation on how to post stuff to a page's wall is really sparse, and took me a while to figure out, so here goes, and I'll try to add in the keywords that I searched for while trying to find the answer.

Lime Daley is proud to announce that we are expanding our business into the area of consumer electronic products.  We can sometimes get better prices than what is available to the general public, but we see the added value for you is that if there are any problems with the product, you get to deal with Lime Daley, rather than some large company somewhere that doesn't really care about you and your business.  We can drop ship from Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Chicago and Fresno for 1 day delivery in most cases.

A sample of products available: Desktops, laptops, RAM, hard drives, car stereos, PDAs, printers, ink cartridges, TVs, software, home theater equipment, batteries, cameras, etc.