It's not a bug … It's a convenience issue

Random tech things that I come across.

Radisson best rate guarantee rocks

Aug 27

Posted by Ryan in Random | Comments off

At the conclusion of this summer I was planning a 4-day weekend trip to serve as my vacation and stumbled upon the extreme usefulness of Radisson Hotel’s best rate online guarantee and comparison shopping. I wanted to book an ocean-view hotel room at a Radisson location for 2 nights. Radisson.com quoted $159 for Thursday night and $169 for Friday night. I checked orbitz.com and they quoted me $159 for Thursday night and FREE for Friday night. Orbitz was running a Friday night is free promotion. So that brought my average nightly rate with Orbitz to $80 and Radisson.com at $165.

While on the Radisson.com site I noticed a link that said best online rate guarantee so I clicked it. Their policy is if they do not have the best publicly available online rate they will match that rate and beat it by 25%. Sweet! The catch? You have to book with Radisson.com first, then within 24 hours of your booking submit an online claim form. This seemed risky to me because I was signing up for $400 bill(w/ taxes) when I could only afford the $200 bill. But I took comfort in the fact that at least with booking on Radisson.com I could cancel if my claim gets rejected. Then hopefully Orbitz would still have the great rate.

I eventually booked the hotel on Radisson.com then immediately sent the claim form. Within 24 hours I received an email stating that my claim had been received and approved. So I received 2 nights state at an average nightly rate of $60 in an ocean-view, quality hotel!

The hotel was ok and it was great to be right on the beach. Not sure if I would have wanted to pay the full rate but at my discounted rate…. this hotel was fantastic!

I just had to post this blog to let people know the Radisson best online rate guarantee does not seem to be a rip-off or scam. I searched before I tried my claim and only found one other person who reported results just as mine. So now, hopefully, people will find 2 success stories.

Server 2008 Bluetooth

Jul 18

Posted by Ryan in Operating Systems, Windows | 3 Comments

Why did Microsoft feel the need to remove bluetooth drivers from Server 2008? Seriously? The installation data for these drivers is MINIMAL disk overhead. We’re talking < 2MB. There isn’t even RAM/kernel overhead if the user doesn’t have a bluetooth device! Yet, Microsoft shipped Server 2008 without Bluetooth drivers. This of course was a pain for me because I run Server OS on my personal laptop.

Server 2008, on a laptop? Yes. Basically the server operating systems are less frilly, more performance oriented versions of Microsoft’s latest OS. So Server 2008 is nearly the same platform as Windows Vista. And since I am a university student with a school that has an MS partnership I get my choice of OS free.

So as you probably gathered by now, I’m frustrated that MS removed Vista’s bluetooth drivers from Server 2008. Well luckily we have friends on the internet who help out in these situations. If you’re trying to track down bluetooth drivers for Server 2008 see Komeil’s blog for downloads and instructions.

Lastly, booooo Microsoft for doing this. I haven’t tested Windows Server 2008 R2 (Windows 7 comparable server edition) but I hope you included bluetooth drivers!

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Virtual server changed

Jul 18

Posted by Ryan in Linux, Operating Systems | Comments off

Last April I moved this website to a new virtual server with the same hosting provider. Previously I was on an OpenVZ platform. This was such a nightmare for me. I’ll explain the details in a bit. I really liked the hosting company, VPSLink, because of their communication practices, network speed and full-featured control panel. So I stuck with the same company but bought a new server on the Xen virtual platform. Now I’m much happier.

The real problem I had with OpenVZ was the lack of swap space. Swap space is disk space set aside by the operating system to be used as a stand-in for RAM when there is not enough RAM free to run all of your programs. Using swap space has a penalty and that is access time because program data has to be fetched from your hard drive before it can be used. Leased virtual servers typically are quite limited in the amount of RAM you are given so swap space is really a must unless your server will only be running 1-2 applications.

For example, my leased server is a one stop shop for website and email. To perform these tasks it needs these daemons running all of the time:

  • Apache webserver
  • Named/BIND DNS server
  • Spamassassin spam filter
  • Sendmail smtp
  • Dovecot IMAP server
  • Mysql database server

I should have known I was in for trouble when I couldn’t even start Apache + Named at the same time with their default configuration without running out of memory. I followed a few guides on the net and got their footprints trimmed down to a workable state. But the penalty was that now all of my applications were so memory constrained their performance suffered a bit. Furthermore, I was at the threshold of memory usage. Linux would routinely kill my dovecot mail processes to try to reclaim memory, this of course closed IMAP connections which I noticed from a client user perspective. I also could not run yum to update packages without running out of memory.

So one day I got fed up and bought a new server with the same company but the new server was Xen based. I couldn’t be happier now because I have swap space. Most of my applications are still quite fast and my dovecot processes are no longer getting killed.

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