Evilcoder.org

On the 11th of October it was that day. That day that we were going to drive to Arnhem to see Marco Borsato in concert with his “Wit Licht” tour. We were going there with the six of us, Denise, Martijn, my parents, Justin (the J from JR-Hosting), and myself. Justin joined us later because he needed to work first and then headed over by train.

While driving towards Arnhem we had dinner near Geldermalsen (hi snow office!) and continued driving towards the city of Arnhem, where we arrived at 17.30 in one of the parking spaces reserved for the concert. For the cost of 10E we could park the car all night long and take the coach towards the Gelredome (the stadium); where we arrived at 18.00hours.

At 18.30 we entered the stadium and waited till 19.15 till Justin arrived (I sat on my brother’s neck, which made it possible to see a lot of the stadium and Justin saw me because of that as well); he was Just in time to see the concert starting

Marco played all known songs including a few new ones which are terrific! At the end of the day I didn’t had much voice left but it was worth it! Eventhough the “Rood” concert was very different (more happened on stage etc) this was a worthwhile event!

After the concert we had a tad of bad luck when the coach was unable to go away, after being stuck for an hour we finally got at the parking lot where our other car was almost in Rotterdam already.

Tired but happy we arrived in Rotterdam a good hour and a half later. Thanks Marco and all that were there!

Recently I bought the Marina skin for Directadmin (the management frontend for JR-Hosting), to give a more appealing interface to our users, with an easy to implement way to customize the branding a bit for our company. For two years the skin costs 15 dollars, which isn’t that much.

What do you get for it? You get a PDF file, an install script, and a .tar.gz version of the script itself. When you use the install script, you see a bunch of quickly written shell scripts or if you use the GUI, you only see the installation being done at some point.

Now the interesting part: It does not work. The framework around it installs succesfully, one of my users can see a couple of things like the file manager, but administration options are not there. I tried debugging this a bit by hand and found a few items in the shell scripts that can be improved (submitted one of the changes upstream already, which was committed, but not everywhere ). So I decided to contact support, 2 year license, 2 year support (something didn’t match because the license details tell me that I only have 1 year support?!) and got an anwer after poking a bit. I showed the steps I took and finally a few days (!) later I was asked for a screenshot. I submitted the screenshot and then… silence.

For 15Dollars you cannot expect that much, but I do expect that one at least gets a bit of help when needed. This is bad for marketing. The knowledgebase is empty, support is slacking more then I do occasionally. My idea: Just keep the standard skin for DirectAdmin, this isn’t worth the 15 dollars (yet).

Hopefully things change a bit, the skin looks really cool, but without functionality at all, you do not want to pay for it . See the screenshot for what I can see when I have installed and assigned the skin to my testuser, which happends to be an administrator.