Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer is a nice tool to view HTTP header requests, especially.
Archive for June, 2004
Time to get BackupPC running on my new hosting to make sure I don’t lose anything, and can do some form of live switch if one server breaks.
The latest research seems to confirm that passive smoking really is bad for you. Onwards with the campaign to get Caroline to stop.
Some nice advanced AdBlock filters on the development forums. Firefox and AdBlock really are a great combination - they’re kind of like Sky+ for browsing - I never see any ads and can choose to read at my leisure.
We’re now on to a hexagon when we’re talking about User Experience Design or UX as opposed to IA.
Homage to Northern Exposure has lots of Chris in the morning rants. Nice.
Evil Bible is very, very amusing, especially Retard of the Month. Summary: it’s trying to show that the Bible isn’t particularly consistent or very nice.
The Observer | Review | The Bright Stuff is the Observer’s attempt to list the thirtysomethings who will be ruling our world. a) shoot the leader writer and b) can we have a recap of how close their last attempt was?
Vischeck allows you to see the online world through red-green colour blind eyes. Very interesting, and confirms the slightly “sepia” look to the world that people like Mark Adamson have talked about.
So is it to be verified credit cards not the Gateway? Difficult to tell right now - certainly the user journey for the gateway is pretty poor and needs some help. But I’m not sure government would be happy taking on the fraud rate that there is for credit card transactions.
According to the EIU we’re the second most e-ready country. That’s got to be good news. I think all my blogging friends are the reason.
PC World’s list of The Best Free Software.
News from the man who built a suit to take on a Grizzly bear single handed. I’m pleased to announce that Troy’s Blast Cushion should let you survice the detonation of explosives near to your body without personal harm. Sheesh.
MT to WP shows a more sensible way of converting between the two systems. I’m not sure I can just do this now. One to cogitate on.
Shame the Indy didn’t have pictures of reverse graffiti - I love the idea - cleaning off muck and grime to reveal an image. Shame it came to light through advertising, but that’s the way of the world, right. Thinking of graffiti - we’ve got our own Banksy in Archway.
Tim O’Reilly on the open source paradigm shift. Some interesting thinking here.
I had some problems with the new hosting service in that there was a 30s delay when I connected by FTP before getting a file listing. Some help from Adiungo and some googling unearthed the fact that there are three places where various services might try to do a kind of reverse lookup of who’s connecting and that this can timeout depending on the firewall settings you are connecting from.
The one that seemed to fix it was this one:
/etc/xinetd.d/wu-ftpd
- - - -
# default: on
# description: The wu-ftpd FTP server serves FTP connections. It uses \
# normal, unencrypted usernames and passwords for authentication.
service ftp
{
        disable = no
        socket_type = stream
        wait = no
        user = root
        server = /usr/sbin/in.ftpd
        server_args = -l -a
# don’t do ident, it’s just us
# log_on_success += DURATION USERID
# log_on_failure += USERID
        log_on_success += DURATION
        nice = 10
}
However, I also added a configuration to /etc/proftpd.conf:
#UseReverseDNSÂ Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â off
It didn’t appear to make any difference.
Useful to remember wget settings for mirroring.
wget -m ftp://user:password@217.199.183.xxx/ -o wgetlog
21 Rules of Thumb - How Microsoft develops its Software is an insight into the seemingly soulless way in which MS approaches code delivery. I was shure they had more fun than this. then again, whenever I have to program, it most certainly isn’t fun.
El Reg "outs" Skype’s beta functionality wihch allows it to phone to a landline. Very nice indeed. This could be the end of the beginning of the end of phone companies as we know them. Provision of IP packets to the home or workplace must become another utility like water or electricity, not a high-price addition. It’s that that will kill the phone companies. Second thoughts: maybe they’ll stick around due to mobile IP provision.
