So it turned out that my little upgrade to MT-blacklist 2.01b was working a bit too well. I tested it out on the weekend as I was REALLY surprised that I hadn't gotten a single comment after I had installed MT 3.11/MT-blacklist 2.01b. Of course, clicking the "Comments" link in the bottom resulted in Internal Server Error. Yeah, sorry blog spammers about that. Must have caused a hard time for you. So I tried all kinds of things to get it solved. Actually read the installation instruction and everything. Surfed on Jay Allen's bug forum and changed permissions and stuff, but nothing helped. I gave up since I got busy with other things.
Today I tried again with no success. HTTP Error 500 doesn't tell you too much, so I needed a more specific error message. I had never before needed to access the web server logs at this hosted domain, and to my surprise there just didn't seem to be a way to do that. However, in all previous matters, my web host has provided excellent support, so I figured that I'll just open a case with them. At least I would find out if I can get access to the logs, even if it's not really their business to support arbitrary applications their users are installing.
The answer came in little less than six minutes. Somehow the update had messed up the mt-comments.cgi script with an extra curly bracket. They fixed it themselves, instead of just reporting the problem. Pretty good huh? I've opened six cases, and the answer (with fixes if needed) has come, on average, in about three minutes. Two of the cases have had less than a minute response time. And my questions haven't been *that* trivial... (e.g. "Does ICDSOFT have suexec or cgiwrap?" and "Name doesn't resolve correctly"). In all cases, I've rated their support with a full ten on a scale of 1-10.
So in short - if you are looking for good, inexpensive host for running your personal website and/or blog, check out ICDsoft. I'm just a happy user - really - I don't get a discount or any favors for advertising my host.
Triple-wohoo! J2SE 5.0 (Java 1.5, codenamed Tiger) is out. The feature set of it has been discussed to death in Java community on the net, so I won't bother re-iterating them. However, I plan to post some real-world code samples taking advantage of the new capabilities in the near future.
(Also a small note, I updated my blog today to Movable Type 3.11 with MT-Blacklist as I got tired deleting the blog spams.)