Category: Uncategorized

At work we are all mobile employees. I often work from home near Portsmouth, and stay in contact with colleagues and customers via the Internet. Skype is bloody brilliant, frankly. I know the technology isn’t new, but it’s the simplest Voice over IP tool I’ve used so far, and the quality is great.

We also use MSN Messenger, but very recently I’ve noticed an appalling drop in its reliability. Lines of chat are regularly lost, and its only when one of the participants repeats a question (looking for an answer) or when the conversation seems disjointed that a loss is apparant. I reckon a few lines per session are lost. Maybe 3-5% in total.

That’s enough to cause confusion and demand tedious re-interation of conversation, and is likely to result in our using another IM service if this continues. I don’t quite understand why lines of text appear to be lost, nor why it has only started happening recently. Is anybody else getting this?

In the past month or so, Blogwise’s performance has been through the floor. This is because most of the scripts used for maintenance of Blogwise are run on the server itself. The site has grown much faster than I expected, and the bits and pieces that run in the background are starting to feel the strain.

Classic example: one script which I ran at 2am daily was designed to go through and grab particular bits of data from every site listed. This was nice and simple originally, so I set it up as a cron task. Earlier this year it got to a point where the run-time was longer than 24 hours – instant slowdown. Since then, I’ve had the bots run only if an existing instance is not already active.

These scripts shouldn’t normally cause too much of a problem, but another factor – spam – is really causing me a headache now. Some lovely individual out there decided to send a whole load of emails out with the From: address at {randomstring}@1do3.com. Result: every bounce came back to us. At its peak it was hitting 3,100 messages per minute. That is going to put a strain on any system. I’ve set up secondary and tertiary mail servers but UK2’s DNS manager refuses to acknowledge my updates (grrr….) to the domain name.

So anyway, I’ve spent the past few weekends trying to optimise the Blogwise code (and its underlying system) and it seems to be giving some positive effects. Front page load time is better (albeit still a bit sluggish), and I’ve also shifted a lot of the maintenance responsibility to other computers, which can easily sit behind an ADSL line and just chug away.

It’s remarkable how quickly a site can grow beyond what you expected, and how rapidly one must respond to changing circumstances – I’m hoping that now I can last for as long as possible without the (inevitable) need for a dedicated Blogwise server, particularly since that’ll probably mean I’ll need to set up a company to manage the assets.

If you are running an application full-screen when it crashes, the taskbar is left invisible. To restore the taskbar to its visible state just follow this little procedure:

1. Press the Windows ‘Start’ key on your keyboard to bring up the Start Menu
2. Press ‘Esc’ (to remove the menu)
3. Press the ‘popup menu’ key (the one just to the right of Alt Gr).
4. Click ‘Properties’
5. Click the Taskbar tab
6. Click the ‘Auto-hide the taskbar’ option (to activate it).
7. Click Apply.
8. Click the ‘Auto-hide the taskbar’ option again (to clear it).
9. Click OK. Your taskbar is now restored.

This should work in Windows XP, and previous Windows editions as well (although the words might be slightly different). It also assumes that you don’t have Auto-hide on already. Might seem like a long process, but it’s the easiest way I’ve found of restoring the taskbar after a full-screen app crash (like a game, or media player).

Just spotted on Freeview Channel 15 (UK digital terrestrial service)

….I’ve no idea what ABC is like in the states, but I guess we’ll find out next month!

Apologies I haven’t been posting much recently. Time consumed > time available and whatnot. More soon!

In case you use PuTTY, the free Windows SSH client (and I know a lot of people who do), there is a rather nasty security vulnerability in it. Simon Tatham has just announced to the mailing list "…it could be as bad as allowing the server to execute code of its choice on the client."

Anyway, the best thing is to mosey on down to the PuTTY website and grab a copy of the latest version, 0.55. More details about the security hole will be found at the site.

Am I going mad, or is the woman in Apple’s famous 1984 advert wearing an iPod? It looks like they’ve superimposed one, but there’s no mention of it (the iPod, or Apple rejigging the advert) on any nearby links.

Had over 700 spam comments posted this afternoon to this blog, sometimes as often as three a second. I very quickly wrote up a regex-based spam filter which worked a treat, but this is indicative of a real push by spammers on my blog – this is at least a 70-fold increase on the last ‘attack’. I wonder how other bloggers are faring today?

As an aside, what are people’s thoughts on my releasing of the regexes I used to catch the spam? Obviously it gives the spammers clues to get around my filter, but spam is becoming such a major problem a collaborative effort seems the only way.

Perhaps I/we/somebody should run a web service. Comment content goes in, yes/no response comes out. There are privacy issues though, and a nice juicy target for DoS attacks (cf. previous attacks on anti-spam outfits).

Hansard have done some research into blogs for political means. Looks like an interesting document; I will certainly find time to read it this evening. The Guardian’s interpretation of the report is that it is rather negative of the use of blogs for politics, describing it as ‘frequently damning’. Would be interesting to see a report on the impact of, and interest in American political blogs, particularly in the run up to November’s elections.

Unexpected email in my inbox today (addressed to my 1DO3 address….?), asking for me to promote a business blog survey at the University of New Brunswick. ‘ere it is. Results should be interesting.

Just got sent this. It’s a clothes tag from an American company that sells in France. A lovely little stab at the President. Thanks for the link David.