It’s been a while since we got up close and personal with one of our fellow Gossamer Threadians on the blog to find out a bit more about them and what they do around the office, so allow us to introduce Sydney, one of our web designers who’s been here at the office for about a year and a half.

Name: Sydney Hake
Reason for being: Web Designer
Quote to live by: “Life is too short to be self-conscious.”

Everyone in Sydney’s corner of the office insisted that she be photographed wearing her Snuggie. She’s been pining for one (quite vocally) for months and it just arrived this week.

Sydney At Work

Sydney heard about GT through the company she was doing her BCIT practicum with, Base-10. Base-10 are fellow Perl-loving folks, and even have a few former GTers in their ranks. Sydney says “they emphasized the all around awesomeness of the place, and encouraged me to apply for a design job here. It was basically a dream come true when I got the call to come in for an interview, couldn’t contain my excitement. There was lots of flailing and jumping.” Jack and Alex confirm the jumping. Thankfully, she’d already gotten the job.

Sydney and our lead designer Ian take on web design jobs as a team, and work closely to keep projects flowing and progressing. In addition to pure web design, Sydney also works on a large amount of front end development, primarily HTML and CSS, before passing templates over to our developers who add functionality (“but sometimes I get to sprinkle in a little bit of JavaScript or PHP”).

New Platforms, New Designs

A new technique Sydney’s been using a lot lately is responsive design. A responsive web site is designed to respond to the various screen sizes that exist today due to the growing number of mobile devices (cell phones, tablets, netbooks, laptops, etc). The idea is to use a single site template, and code it so that the layout would be optimally displayed on each device.

Responsive Design adjusts to browser type and size.

For example, mobile devices require larger fonts and buttons for finger interactivity, but don’t always require every single element that would be displayed normally on a full monitor. If you resize your browser window on a responsive site, you should be able to see the triggers and changes within the page for different screen resolutions. You can take a look at some responsive websites in action here.

Sydney At Play

While not at work Sydney’s usually out and about with friends or watching movies and eating popcorn. Sydney loves popcorn. While a bit of a couch potato (c’mon, you saw the Snuggie), Sydney tries to hit the gym or do yoga a couple times a week (“although I would rather be on the couch in all honesty”). She’s a big reader, and recently powered through all of the Song Of Fire And Ice books in a couple months. Said voraciousness has paid big dividends at the semi-regular Game of Thrones board games sessions which happen after work at the office, where Sydney’s been kicking Lannister keister and taking names. Winter may be coming, but with her Snuggie, Sydney’s ready.

Sydney keeps her cards close to her chest during a lunchtime game of Dominion.

Working At GT

We’re always looking for passionate, motivated folk to join Sydney and the rest of us here at Gossamer Threads. Interested in working for a forward-thinking IT company in the heart of Vancouver? Check out our careers page!

No related posts.

Part of being a hosting provider is dealing with everybody’s least favourite part of the internet: spam. Unlike most folks, we have to deal not only with incoming spam, but also outgoing spam which our servers may be sending. It’s important to handle spam complaints quickly, not only for the general good of the net, but because one server’s spamming may result in multiple servers being added to spam blocklists, affecting other hosting customers. Here’s how we keep an eye out for spam…

Monitoring Spam

There are several different ways in which we monitor and track the e-mail that originates from our network.

• Reputation: Service providers such as Senderscore and Microsoft publish IP reputation reports, based on the ratio of spam to legitimate e-mail they observe coming from specific addresses. We track and graph those scores for both individual machines and aggregated across our entire network, so that it becomes apparent if our reputation is becoming affected for any reason.


Tracking Spam Scores.

• Realtime Black Lists: RBLs are lists of known spam-heavy servers that are published online by various anti-spam groups. Getting published on a major RBL will quickly result in any e-mail you send being marked as spam. If you allow spammers to remain on your network, most RBLs will have no problem adding an entire hosting provider to their blacklist. As such, it’s important that we keep tabs on RBLs and take action as required immediately. Thankfully, we’ve only ever had to terminate service for one client due to spamming.
• Feedback Loops: Larger e-mail providers (like AOL and Hotmail) allow internet providers to subscribe to feedback loops for their IP space. This means that if a user clicks on “Report spam” in their webmail for an e-mail which came from us, we’ll receive notification about it and can investigate further.

Since IP addresses aren’t specific to a single server, we also make sure to track all of these statistics even if an IP is moved from one customer to another. This way we can make sure that a new customer isn’t allocated a tainted IP that has had spam issues in the past.

Logging and investigating spam complaints.

Managing Spam Compaints

Here are the three most common types of spam complaints we receive.

• Hacked account: A customer’s e-mail account has been compromised (by malware, unsecure wifi, or another security problem) and is now being used to send out spam. In these cases, we’ll immediately change the password and remove all e-mails from the outgoing mail queue. We’ll then follow up with the customer to advice them to run a fresh virus scan, enable encryption and make any other changes that may prevent this from happening again.
• Website forms: This is usually caused by “refer a friend” style forms which allow a user to enter an e-mail address or comment to a page without having CAPTCHAs or login requirements to deter spammers. Usually, rectifying this requires involvement from the customer as it requires site development, so we’ll clean out what we can and then contact the customer.
• Malware: Occasionally we see a website that’s been compromised due to outdated or buggy applications, in which hackers have uploaded a script to send spam. In these cases, we immediately start forensic examinations to track down which script gave the hackers access, and isolate what files they may have changed or uploaded. Once we feel comfortable that we’ve found everything, we’ll move the suspect files into a secure location, and then start restoring known clean files from backups. Customer involvement is also important in making sure that the initial attack vector is closed by upgrading or removing the scripts that were used to gain access.

Additionally, we have some customers who send messages to mailing lists but are being flagged for spam complaints. In these cases, we work with the customer to make sure that all e-mail addresses are double opt-in and have proper unsubscribe links and headers. If the customer isn’t interested in being a good netizen and making sure users actually want to receive their e-mail, we will remove them from our network.

Keeping Our Network Spam Free For Our Customers

We’re committed to helping our customers develop and build their online presences and reputations. Making sure spam doesn’t get in the way of that development is just one of the ways we do that. Read more about the other advantages that come with hosting with us.

No related posts.

Given how much cell phone debate happens around the water cooler, we thought it’d be interesting to find out exactly how many people use which mobile platforms.

As you can see, we’re an Android-heavy office, with some Apple and RIM loyalists (the latter are Canadian patriots, too!). Daniel opts for the open-source, Linux-based MeeGo OS on a Nokia phone.

…And that “Other”? That’s Chakri’s Huawei U1250, the one remaining non-smartphone in the office.

Why hasn’t Chakri sided with one of the smartphone camps in this heated battle? In his words,

“Even having a cell phone in the first place is a big deal for me, as I was cell phone free for a couple of years before getting this one. I was trying to reduce materialistic stuff in my life and also to see if I could survive without a cell phone. The reason I got this phone was to easily coordinate summer events with my friends: beach volleyball, camping, biking, etc. I’m not even thinking about getting a smartphone yet!”

Of course, cell phones aren’t just for personal use here at GT: sysadmins have to carry theirs at all times to be alerted about server problems which require quick action on their part, and we all use them to keep in contact while we’re out of the office. Additionally, as GT moves more and more into development for mobile platforms, phones and their operating systems become a necessary tool for research and testing.

Stay tuned for updates on mobile development happening here at GT…

No related posts.