Monthly Archives: February 2011

AU timezones

I’m not happy when I see someone technical quoting a time in summer (eg during daylight savings) which claims to be “AEST”.

It’s almost certainly actually AEDT.

A summary of the abbreviations, which looks reasonably official, is here: Australian timezones.

In summary, AEST, ACST and AWST apply in winter. AEDT, ACST and AWST apply in summer.

The other issue I had with a recent email was it said 12:00pm AEST. I think in this context, they meant midnight AEDT, but it’s confusing. Better to either say Midnight, or use 24-hour time: 00:00.

GMail irritation #2

I love GMail, and this error probably seemed like a good idea when they coded it…

Gmail error

…but it’s just irritating.

Please trust me. I know what I’m doing. I know I’m replying to something in the Trash. I don’t care if the sent copy isn’t saved… invariably it’s going to an email list which I have no interest in archiving for myself when it’s stored on Yahoo’s servers or whatever.

So I don’t need this error popping up unpredictably multiple times to interrupt me, when I’ve seen it hundreds of times before.

In fact despite the wording, I didn’t save the message. GMail auto-saved it for me.

And when I send the email, just to cap it off, I get this:

Gmail error

1. These shouldn’t even be Errors. They should be Warnings.

2. How about an option to turn these warnings off, once and for all?

Amusing comment spam

Amusing comment spam left on my personal blog:

Spammers leave spam comments in the belief that they will gain better search engine rankings and traffic by building as many links to their websites as possible. Spammers often employ bots or other automated systems to look for mortgage blog and website and leave self serving promotional comments links..Spam is a numbers game so if spammers can send automated spam to large numbers of websites for very little money so even if they convert a small percentage of the sites they spam they can make a profit..Spammers will also leave links to their websites in an attempt to push link juice or Google Juice to their websites but most mortgage websites and blogs add a rel nofollow tag to prevent the passing of pagerank or link juice.

And this one, from a user apparently who signed him/herself “penis enlargement”.

It’s so hard to get backlinks these days, honestly i need a backlink by comments on your blog / forums or guestbook to make my website appear in search engine. I am getting desperate Now! I know you’ll laugh while reading this comment !!! Here is my website penis enlargement [url deleted] I know my comments do not relate to the topic, but PLEASE HELP ME!! APPROVING MY COMMENT!
Regards: PoormanBH2011

Yeah right. Like I’m going to approve that.

BTW, both were caught correctly by Akismet.

IP addresses run out

At 9:30 US EST (14:30 GMT) today, the official announcement that IPv4 addresses have run out is expected. It’ll be webcast live from Miami.

On Thursday, 3 February 2011, at 9:30 AM Eastern Standard Time (EST) [14:30 UTC /GMT], the Number Resource Organization (NRO), along with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Internet Society (ISOC) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) will be holding a ceremony and press conference to make a significant announcement and to discuss the global transition to the next generation of Internet addresses.

Update Friday:

The Number Resource Organization (NRO) announced today that the free pool of available IPv4 addresses is now fully depleted. On Monday, January 31, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated two blocks of IPv4 address space to APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for the Asia Pacific region, which triggered a global policy to allocate the remaining IANA pool equally between the five RIRs. Today IANA allocated those blocks. This means that there are no longer any IPv4 addresses available for allocation from the IANA to the five RIRs.

— Free Pool of IPv4 Address Space Depleted