Techie :: Techno ::: February 2006 Archives

Why oh why oh why do people get DNS so wrong? I'm really tired of other providers' incompetence when it comes to setting up DNS entries for clients. There are two basic things you need to setup reverse DNS. Without them it simply will not work:

1. A dns server
2. Delegation

There's no point making entries unless you have delegation. This article explains it in quite simple and plain English

I've been playing with the beta release of IE 7 for the last couple of weeks on and off (ie. on those rare occasions that I bother booting into windows outside office hours) It was due to its stupidity that I ended up posting the last entry twice! What can I say about it? Not a whole lot I'm afraid The tabbed browsing is a nice addition, but as a Firefox user leaves me completely nonplussed. The positioning of buttons etc seems to fly in the face of logic. Why on earth did they decide to put all the "normal" buttons on the right? And why do I get this incredible sense of deja vu? Of course the anti-phishing feature is going to attract a certain amount of media attention, but I just found it annoying and disabled it. Why? Well most phishing sites are transmitted / publicised via email, so if you block them there you won't have any problems, will you?

I was sent an invite to take the beta version of Windows Messenger 8 for a test drive. The download site didn't have any issue with me logging in with Firefox, but the download button was "dead" until I logged back in with Internet Explorer (I'm trying the beta of that as well). Installation was easy and no reboot was required, which is a nice change compared to so many windows products. So what's so new and innovative? Supposedly the level of interaction with your contacts has been taken to new levels with the addition of VOIP and video chat. I won't be able to try those out unless my contacts have the same version of the software, but it sounds like every bit of software out there is slowly but surely adding this kind of functionality. One of the features that immediately caught my eye was the ability to show my contacts which music I was listening to. Unfortunately it only works with Windows Media Player (which I've never particularly liked), but it does seem to work quite well. Contact management seems to have been expanded on, or at least made more obvious. There is also a file sharing feature, though what differentiates this from the older methods of sending files to contacts is not clear.

We've relaunched Irish ISP Test, the site we run for broadband users in Ireland to test their speed.

Anyone wishing to draw comparisons between the IEDR and the Spanish domain registry probably needs to get their head examined: - the site's SSL seems to be self-signed - there is no whois server - the web based whois uses captcha

The latest version of the VOIP software Skype supports video calls on the windows version. Screenshots and further details are available on their site

Apologies to any bloggers or readers using the IrishBlogs.info planet. I turned off email notifications the other day (I was getting tired of deleting them) so when it all stopped working for the first time since launching the site I wasn't even aware. Thanks to Damien / Iced Coffee for pointing it out

While talking to a friend last night the conversation swung round to that of analogies and how best to explain "our" world to the non-technical. Using an analogy can help, as for some people the concept of websites, hosting and domains is far too intangible and abstract for them to comprehend. Hosting companies sell or rent online real estate (space). They can help mark out your plots of land (domains) before you bring in architects (designers?) and engineers (developers?) to build your house or office Now how far can I take the analogy? :)

Apple users love to tell the rest of us how secure and user-friendly Apple computers are. However this may soon change, as Apples have been hit with the second security issue in the last week. OSX/Leap-A was, according to some reports, the first virus designed specifically to target OSX. It has now been followed OSX.Inqtana.A which is a bluetooth worm.

The fourth milestone CD released as part of the Dapper development cycle is now available. Although the CD images are not production ready, they are described as being "reasonably free of showstopper CD-build or installer bugs" More information on the developments and changes here, while downloads of the isos are available here, here and here

Unless you have a real problem! One of our clients was sent over 53 thousand spams today. Puts it into perspective, doesn't it?

Interesting to see that the European ApacheCon will be held in Dublin this year from June 26th to June 30th in the Burlington. More information will probably be available over the next few days / weeks

One of the downsides to search engine dominance is the quality of search results. If you go looking for quality results (ie. useful sites) in certain topic areas you are more likely to find highly optimised crud than anything useful. So how can you get past the junk to the content you want to find? It's not easy. You can try honing your search phrases or you can ask for a recommendation from a colleague or friend. Another alternative is to use other people's bookmarks instead. Enter del.icio.us Admittedly I was inspired by this post on Rachel's blog :)

There's been a lot of talk about the power of RSS over the last few months. In recent times it has not been unheard of for some evangelists to posit that RSS will kill email. I would disagree. Tom O'Leary has written a nice article explaining why RSS cannot replace email which is definitely worth a read.

Since the relaunch a few months ago it seems the GoldenPages.ie team have been working on adding new features, or else I never noticed them before.

According to an in the New York Times AOL and other ISPs are considering a plan to charge for email sent to their networks. While unpaid mail will still be accepted it will have to "run the gauntlet" of the spam filters etc.,:

AOL and Yahoo will still accept e-mail from senders who have not paid, but the paid messages will be given special treatment. On AOL, for example, they will go straight to users' main mailboxes, and will not have to pass the gantlet of spam filters that could divert them to a junk-mail folder or strip them of images and Web links. As is the case now, mail arriving from addresses that users have added to their AOL address books will not be treated as spam.

While I can appreciate AOL and Yahoo's perspective on this, I can also see this having a lot of undesirable side-effects. Spam filtering is not an easy thing to do without upsetting some people at least some of the time. It's a pity that solutions such as hash cash aren't more widely implemented, as they might help avoid this type of scenario. You can read about the system in detail on their FAQ, but a basic summary is this:

Hash cash is payment in burnt CPU cycles by calculating n-bit partial hash collisions on chosen texts. The idea of using partial hashes is that they can be made arbitrarily expensive to compute (by choosing the desired number of bits of collision), and yet can be verified instantly. This can be used as the basis for an ecash system measured in burnt CPU cycles. Such cash systems can be used to throttle systematic abuses of un-metered internet resources.

(taken from here) Or in plain English.. You basically "pay" for each email you send as your computer has to work a little harder to send each email. The idea being that if you are willing to put in the effort of doing this then your mail *should* be legitimate. So, could this hail the end of email as we know it? Or will it merely mean that AOL et al will lose clients?

I really like GAIM as an IM client, but some of the functions are a bit hidden. To get a multiuser chat going in MSN isn't as obvious as it could be. It's not hard to do, but it is a little obscure :)

Is there a way to invite more than one person to an MSN chat? Yes. Right click a buddy on your list and choose "Initiate Chat". In the conversation window that appears, choose "Invite" from the "Conversation" menu to invite another user. When the conversation framework gets another rewrite, it is possible that this will be simplified.

From the official GAIM FAQ

I've mentioned some titles by published by Packt in the past. What makes Packt different is their philosophy:

Packt believes in Open Source. When we sell a book written on an Open Source project, we pay a royalty directly to that project. As a result of purchasing one of our Open Source books, Packt will have given some of the money received to the Open Source project.

I don't know how that works out in reality, but the idea is good. In any case they have some very interesting titles coming up over the next few months: Implementing Sugar CRM - the book I needed last year! Building Forums with VBulletin - although they don't say which versions this covers it could be a useful read. Building Websites with Joomla! - Joomla forked from Mambo Open Source and has become very popular with developers. I'm currently experimenting with it on a couple of sites, as some of the plugins / components may help with non-technical users Building Responsive Web Applications with AJAX and PHP - they could just as easily have called this web 2.0 with php.. It seems to be the "hot" topic

Stealing content or another person's bandwidth is despicable. Earlier tonight while reviewing the logs of Irish ISP Test I discovered that a "charming" individual (or company) had decided that it would be a really "good" idea to abuse the test by hotlinking to it via an iframe. We've always offered the test for free, so why the hell would someone abuse it in this manner? Will we have to oblige users to jump through hoops to check their download speeds? Or should we simply block all non-Irish users? (yes - I am very aware of how awkward and messy that would be)

Some websites simply will not work in Firefox regardless of whether you are using windows or linux (with crossover office). This can be quite annoying, as you have to launch an instance of IE simply to view them. However there is a very handy little plugin that overcomes this issue: IEView Which is described as:

Lets you load pages in IE with a single right-click, or mark certain sites to *always* load in IE. Useful for incompatible pages, or cross-browser testing.

Kind of handy :)