Motorcycles, computers and beer
Just found Facebook Chat for Pidgin - a plugin for the popular Pidgin (formerly Gaim) multi-network IM client.
It allows you to chat to your friends on Facebook using Pidgin rather than the little chat widget on the Facebook site, and supports showing the profile picture and current status etc too. Very nice stuff.
Here’s a story I just posted at work about Network Solutions holding domains to ransom:
It appears that Network Solutions are immediately registering all domains searched for. In what I consider a highly shady move, Network Solutions have started immediately registering domain names when customers search for them via the Network Solutions website, and holding them for 4 days - effectively meaning that if you checked whether it was available using their domain search tools, you now have no choice but to buy it from them, locking out all other registrars.
I tested it by searching for network-solutions-stole-my-domain.com which was previously untaken, and within minutes, they’d registered it - see a whois lookup for confirmation.
Continue reading ‘Network Solutions holding domains to ransom’
It seems that, as of February 2008, Netscape Navigator will no longer be developed. Netscape may not be popular any more (certainly nowhere near the ~80% share they had in their heyday) but the Mozilla project owes a hell of a lot to the original Netscape codebase.
Netscape are recommending that all remaining Netscape users should move to Firefox - sensible advice 
So, farewell Netscape, commendations for playing a big part in the spread of the Internet (even if the 4.x browsers were often a real PITA for web developers), and RIP.
It may be just coincidence, but shortly after I wrote about John Burns from Monster.ie spamming a load of Irish IT pro’s, I’m now getting quite a few phishing mails purporting to be from Monster. They don’t have a plain text part, and interestingly purport to have been sent using Sylpheed on Linux:
X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.8.2 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i586-alt-linux)
The mails contain content like:
Dear Monster (Jobs & Careers) member,
Monster Technical Department requests you to complete Online Employer Form.
This procedure is obligatory for all clients of Monster.
Please select the hyperlink and visit the address listed to access Online Employer Form.
It could of course just be a co-incidence, but it seems strange that I’m receiving this now, shortly after making a post about Monster. I do have an account on Monster - I’m a little concerned that my account may have been one of the ones which fell into the hands of attackers in Monster’s recent data security breach (for more info read [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]).
Sidenote: Monster.ie head honcho James Mailley issued an apology for the whole spamming fiasco.
UK2 asks "What scripts have you found most useful during the last year?"
Ditlev from UK2 is trying to put together a list of the most popular scripts & web apps and asks for feedback on your favourites - whether it’s WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, phpBB, phpMyAdmin, SquirrelMail or any of the thousands of scripts out there, go and cast your vote
Updated my DNS propagation tracker, so that you can specify a set of nameservers to query rather than using a random set, or enter a domain to query the nameservers listed for that domain (useful if you want to check that all nameservers for your domain are giving the same answer).
Here it is: DNS propagation tracker
Recently I’ve received a number of spams where it looks like the spammer hasn’t set up their spamming tool properly, containing just placeholders:
06/03/2007 (13:53 GMT +03:00)
1.0
Content-Type: text/html
Date: %CURRENT_DATE_TIME%MESSAGE_BODY
C’mon, if you’re going to spam a message to thousands of people, at least test it first!
For ages I’ve found Firefox on Linux very, very slow when I go to Digg. It takes a while to load the page, and scrolling is horrible.
Finally found a solution to the problem.
Continue reading ‘Firefox slowness rendering digg.com - fixed’
I’d thought about joining Facebook a few times when friends mentioned it, but never bothered signing up. To be honest, I think I expected it to be much like MySpace - full of ugly, garish, horribly-”designed” pages filled with immature drivel
I gave in the other day when a couple of friends from work recommended it, and I have to say I’m *very* impressed. It’s full of features to help everyone stay in contact. I’m particularly impressed with the photo upload tool and the ability to “tag” people in photos - very slick. It’s a clean, simple design, and there’s plenty of slick AJAXy magic in use, to make the site even nicer to use.
Here’s my profile on Facebook - if you use Facebook, add me as a friend!
In another acquisition today (see also last.fm’s acquisition by CBS), eBay has purchased website discovery tool StumbleUpon for approximately $75 million.
StumbleUpon offers a browser toolbar allowing users to submit sites they want, and discover new sites suiting their interests by clicking the “Stumble” button, and giving the option to indicate whether they liked the site or not. Continue reading ‘eBay buys StumbleUpon’
Posts elsewhere I've found interesting lately
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