I was wondering how the geekrant.org domain name propagated so fast. Turns out since September, DNS updates have been happening about every five minutes, instead of twice a day.
We also got a quick path on getting indexed by Google, courtesy of using Google’s AdSense, which evidently bumps you to the top of the indexing queue so they can serve more relevant ads.
Speaking of Google, for people in the US, there’s now Google via SMS.
I like Firefox a lot. I use it almost exclusively at home. At work it’s not so easy, as something in its password caching plays havoc with the corporate proxy, hitting it with an old password continually, and constantly locking my account. So IE6 rules the roost there.
But I do have one big problem with Firefox, and the way its development goes. My series of annotated photos on my blog uses little popups to describe things in the pictures. I wanted something easy* to implement, completely standards-based, don’t rely on any hyper-funky overkill technology like Java or Flash, nor on an external service provider like Flickr (which looks really good, but these things have a habit of going west after a few years, and I intend my blog to be online virtually forever, or at least until they prise my credit cards from my cold dead hands).
So I used the <title> tag in the hotspots of the pictures. But Firefox abbreviates long tooltips, rather than wrapping.
This is a known bug in Firefox. It’s been a known bug in Firefox for four damn years. Jeez. Is that a failing of the open source community, that sometimes it can take them so long to agree something needs to be fixed, write a fix, and then get it released? I call that pretty piss-poor. At least with monolithic corporations like Microsoft, some jackbooted Program Manager would have clicked their fingers and had it done by now.
By the way, if you’re playing about in Firefox, but some obscure option you’re looking for isn’t on the dialogs (like when I turned off the closing all tabs warning and couldn’t turn it on again)… then check try about:config in the address field. Very groovy.
*Easy as long as doing HTML hotspots is your idea of fun, or you have a tool that can do them for you.
Update 10/11/2004: This bug is still not fixed in Firefox 1.0. It can be cured using the PopupAlt extension, but that’s not the point. Firefox should work. It shouldn’t be up to individual users to go out hunting for a solution they have to download to get around a known Firefox problem.
WordPress 1.21 is out. Bug and security fixes. Upgrade City, here we come.
Just so you don’t think Gmail is perfect… It displays most HTML mail okay, but see how it displays replies from its own invitations:
Clinging to IE, but wishing there were more security zones, so you can tighten the thumbscrews to varying degrees where appropriate? Add a fifth security zone to IE. (via Greg)
Once upon a time to display JPEGs in DOS, you had to run an obscure JPEG Viewer program, and on my ancient rattling 286, it took a good few seconds to look at the file and actually show it on the (16 colour) VGA screen. Nowadays JPEG display is built into practically everything. Which makes Microsoft’s JPEG display vulnerability doubly-scary. Affected software: just about everything they sell. (Microsoft thanks those who work with them to protect customers, by putting their e-mail address on their web page so they can be bombarded with spam.)
Looking for a freebie FTP client for Windows, but sick of CoreFTP’s vagaries, WSFTP’s oldness (is it even Y2K compliant?), and IE/Explorer’s astounding lack of functionality? FileZilla rocks.
It’s interesting to see the rise of corporate blogs, particularly in the IT sector. As a way for companies to get employees talking directly to customers (though not necessarily vice-versa) they seem to be a useful tool. Not to mention going some way to humanising the drones sitting in their hutches within the monolithic evil corporate empire.
Microsoft has a whole bunch of blogs happening, varying from technical to personal and a fair mix in between.
Sun has also jumped on the bandwagon, as has IBM and Borland.
Google has an official blog, a joint effort from various company people, which is the most corporate-like of them all. (Perhaps a tad ironic, since they own Blogger and have a reputation for fostering employee creativity.)
So what’s the real difference between personal and corporate blogs? Well Mark Pilgrim (who has his own blog and an IBM one) reckons a corporate blog is just like a personal blog, except you don’t get to use the word “motherfucker.”
Ooooooooooh. Seems Age IT writer Charles Wright isn’t too keen on people disagreeing with him. In today’s Age he writes about Hotmail’s cancellation of free WebDav (Outlook/Outlook Express) access (bastards!) and mentions in passing that Fastmail.fm is great (so I’ve heard) and that it’s better than GMail, which has “no spam protection to speak of.”
Oh. Coulda fooled me. So I left a comment on his blog, mentioning that actually GMail does have spam protection. He replied reckoning yeah but it only catches about 30%. I replied saying it was catching most of mine. This apparently inspired a followup blog entry making note of overzealous Google-lovers writing to him if he criticises the company.
Well, what can I say. I’ve been using GMail for some months now, and feeding it mail addressed to one of my oldest and most spammed email addresses (dbowen at custard dot net dot au, circa 1997). GMail catches most of them. I just logged in after being away for three and a half hours (gasp!) and it’s caught 18 spams — no false positives, none slipped through into my Inbox. It’s not always this good, but I have no major complaints.
Maybe he looked at GMail early on, when the filters weren’t as good. Or maybe he attracts a higher class of spammer than me. Dunno. But it works for me.
…
By the way, anybody want a GMail invitation? They keep giving me lots, and although I’ve tried giving some away via GMail swap sites, they keep on coming back. Leave a comment with your email address in the email field (it won’t display publicly, but I’ll see it).
A while back I was given the task of setting up encryption for sending files around. Ooh. Sounds tricky, I thought. I’ve seen PGP signatures on privacy freaks’ e-mail for years now, but it all seemed a bit like black magic. I had no idea how it worked.
I went looking, and it turns out it’s not really particularly difficult to figure out or get working. But I had to wade through a few hefty (in web terms) manuals to find all the info I needed. I never really found a web page which detailed the basics in an easy to digest format. This could be that page.
PGP is Pretty Good Privacy, invented by Phil Zimmerman and now run by the PGP Corporation. It’s the defacto standard for this kind of stuff. It’s fairly secure, and has the added benefit of compressing text quite well. PGP sell a number of solutions, but if you’re wondering about freebies, then…
GPG is Gnu Privacy Guard, which is the free implementation of (most of) PGP. It lives here: www.gnupg.org.
Encryption of this type is all about keys. If you haven’t grasped the key concept before, here it is in brief: a recipient has a public and a private key. The public key is given to anybody. Senders encrypt stuff using the public key. Only the recipient has the private key, and uses this to decrypt stuff. Obviously if communication is two-way, you need multiple public and private keys. Okay? Easy.
Continue reading
When I look at this site, in the Google Ad I consistently get public service announcements, or more commonly, an advert for a Word to HTML conversion tool.
When I looked at this site at Tony’s place, it came up with ads for AFL memorabilia on eBay.
Interesting, very interesting. Tony’s a big AFL fan, and I can only speculate that Google is doing some tracking of sites visited.
Other ad operators such as DoubleClick got flack when they originally started doing that, serving tracker cookies with their ads, building up usage patterns. I don’t recall hearing about Google doing the same thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised. After all there’s thousands upon thousands of sites using Google AdSense now, plus they could track your Google searches (it’s known that they do use a user cookie to keep your preferences). Might be time to trawl through Google’s T&Cs again.
PS. Okay, I just got an AFL ad. Maybe they’re not tracking?
Obviously in a geek blog, you should blog about how the blog got setup.
Domain name. Geekrant.com and .net were already taken, but .org was free. I registered it with Gandi. They’re a French company, have been around for a while. I think I first encountered them some years ago in a list of domain registrars. At the time they were up near the top of the recommended registrars not only for being reasonably cheap and reliable, but also for having a domain registration policy that precluded all sorts of the kind of legal mumbo jumbo that some other registrars had at the time, which theoretically gave you rather less than complete control over your domain. Whatever the reason I originally went with them, they’ve been good over the years, and provide useful stuff like free domain and e-mail forwarding. At 12 Euros a year, perhaps not the cheapest around, but reliable and quick. Quicker than I thought, actually. I assume Those In Charge have improved the speed of new domain propagation over the last few years, because everything seemed to be done after a couple of hours.
Hosting. The hosting is at Aussie Hosts, a mob in Brisbane who specialise in shared hosting on Linux, and using the Plesk7 web site control software, which is frikkin’ marvellous. I’ve never come across a web control panel quite so useful and user-friendly. It does everything, and is light-years ahead of most of the other very clunky web control panels I’ve seen.
Software. Installing WordPress is dead easy. Upload the files into the http directory, create the MySql directory and its user in Plesk, then run WordPress’s install script. That’s it. It creates all the tables, creates the initial user, and away you go. Then I logged-on to WordPress and created the users, set the various options like comment spam parameters, and structure of permalinks. For the latter it tells you what your .htaccess needs to look like. You just paste it into the file and you’re done. (Admittedly it shat itself the first time I tried it. I wiped it out, and tried it again a bit later. Not sure what was different the second time, but it worked.)
Template. For WordPress’s templates, you basically need to edit: index.php (the main page), wp-layout.css (the stylesheet), and wp-comments.php (the comments section, which for some reason WP’s default installation has quirks like the caption for the comment fields appearing after the fields themselves. Wacky). I’m not entirely a master of CSS yet, so I just fiddled with the fonts and colours, and fiddled a bit with the links and so on. I’ve messed the template up slightly — right now the XHTML validation gets a thumbs-down. Will fix that when I get the chance to look at it.
We started creating a (perhaps over-ambitious) hierarchy of categories for articles to fall into. Hmm. Probably should have just copied out of DMOZ or Yahoo or something. (Just the hierarchy that is. If you look around, it’s incredible the number of directory sites that have swiped content completely from Yahoo.)
Also created a basic logo in my trusty old copy of Corel Photopaint, added in a Google advert to try and recoup some of the hosting and domain name costs, and that’s about it for now. Further fiddling can (and no doubt will) come later.
A colleague was pasting a picture into his Powerpoint presentation. Some kind of diagram, and unfortunately he didn’t have the original document it came from, so no matter which Paste Special option he tried, it came through as a bitmap. Saved it to disk, e-mailed it to someone else, and wondered why it took so long.
Then he saw the size. It had blown out from a couple of hundred K to over 4Mb.
So he tried zipping it. WinZip took it down to, believe it or not, 80Kb.
No wonder people complain about Microsoft bloatware… sometimes it’s not just the apps, it’s the way they store stuff as well.
Digging out an old Word97 document at work, I loaded it up into Word 2K. It displayed fine, but I noticed an embedded Draw98 diagram in it that needed updating. Double-clicked, it produced an error to the effect that it wasn’t going to happen ‘cos Draw98 wasn’t on the machine. Okay. Right-click… ah… it can convert it to something else… choose that, and what do I see but this:
Very handy, eh? And if you’re wondering, clicking OK got the error again. Pretty sloppy from a coding point of view.
I did a bit of digging and found an MSKB article which said no problem, just install Draw98 again… and even a handily placed link to it.
Click, download, run. Nup. It wants an Office 97 application on the machine to install! Triffic. And all this recommended in a KB article purporting to apply to Word 2K.
The article also suggests digging into your archive for Word 2, for a copy of Draw (that’d be 16 bit, surely? Eugh!)
If you don’t have 10 year old floppies hanging about, you can also get at the picture and edit it in Word’s Picture Editor. Not as good for this particular drawing, but it might have to do if I can’t do it any other way.
Or else re-do it from scratch in Visio…