 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||
 |
Founder and Lead Developer for Magic Hat Software LLC, creators of Irth Online.
Irth Online is a modern Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game built from the ground up on the latest technologies. It creates a virtual reality environment rich in detail and interaction.
Please check out the screen shots section chronicling the early to late development of Irth.
Periodically I do business with companies that go out of their way to stand out of the crowd. They perform in some memorable way. In many cases this a very bad thing. I consider it my obligation to share the stories of companies that have done me wrong. In the future I need to always remember to do a web search before doing business with new companies. Maybe some other pissed off consumer is doing what I’m doing. Maybe I would have avoided being the one to write these. Just do a search for “CompanyName sucks” before giving someone your business. You might be surprised what you find.
POWWEB.COM (web host provider)
On 09/30/2002 I decided to find a new host provider for my site (http://www.sphereserver.net). It requires MySQL, PHP, sub-domains and roughly a 1GB transfer per day. After a thorough search of the web using host tools like www.hostsearch.com, I found POWWEB, the self proclaimed “perfect host”. Not true. Well their web page sounds really great. They offer full services and 30G transfer per month for cheap. Don’t be fooled! As far as I can tell they have no intention of actually honoring that agreement. In my case, the site had been running tolerably for 2 weeks, one day I found the site not working. After days of trying to contact the admin I finally got the explanation it had been turned off for “resource abuse”, not for data transfer but CPU usage. Not so much as an email. In fact it took 4 days before they even responded. The site had been running for over a year on other servers without a hitch.
Evaluation: POWWEB sucks. Read the fine print in the agreement. It turns out they can turn you off and keep your money for ANY reason. (and do) It seems they overloaded their servers. When they discovered this they simply picked the top 2 sites on the server and turned them off. Sounds like good business to me, makes room for more paying customers with less popular sites. They already had my money anyhow. I had foolishly paid for a year in advance. Well hopefully a few people do a search and find this page before going to POWWEB.
SPHERE is a persistent gaming world Role Playing Game server that anyone can setup and run with up to 500 concurrent players online. The opportunity for adventure is limitless, and even small connection home users may host persistent games of up to 30 players with little to no game lag. Menasoft has discontinued work on this but it does live on. Go to sphereserver.com or spherecommunity.net for more.
SphereFTP is a small, simple and secure FTP server for Windows XP, and Windows CE platforms. Not to be confused with the Sphere (game) Server. It is very light weight and can run as an application or as an NT service. It is configured via the registry editor.
Check out the FileZilla server as well.
Sound Pad is a full featured sound wave editor for all versions of Windows (XP, 2000, 95, NT and 3.1). It is a bit out of date compared to open source programs like Audacity, but it still has some useful features.
RIFFPad is a viewer (some day to have editing capabilities) for RIFF formatted files. It is a bit rough but I’ve found it to be very useful when working with RIFF files. Common RIFF files are things like WAV, AVI, DirectX resources as well as many Mac file formats.