The Playground

Posted by Toni at 4:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

If you have loads of unwanted tunes on your PC then there's now a way to get cash for them. Bopaboo is a new marketplace that provides users with a legal way to buy and sell digital music, and offers you a place where you can make money selling your previously purchased digital music. To get started, you upload your unwanted MP3s, set up an online store, and name your price. Sellers can promote their Bopaboo Store on their own websites or social networking profiles. Unfortunately, the Private Beta is available only to users from the United States.

Posted by Toni at 8:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

If your internet connection seems slow or you're just curious about your download or upload speeds, it's quick and easy to test and compare your results.

Speedtest.net is a broadband connection analysis tool with a huge selection of geographically dispersed testing servers. Speedtest.net measures the performance of your broadband connection. At the end of each test, you are presented with the download (the speed of data from the server to your computer) and upload (the speed of sending data from your computer to the server) bandwidth speeds. The tests are performed completely within your web browser over HTTP (just like normal web browsing).

Out of curiosity, I took the broadband speed test tonight and was impressed with my results. The interface is graphic, so you can click anywhere in the world to check your speeds. My first test was close to home and fairly quick. I was surprised with the second test, being half-way across the world and the download speed was quicker. After checking the result summary page, however, I was disappointed to see that my connection speed is only half as fast as other users who have the same ISP, and only one-third as fast compared to an Australia-wide comparison.

Posted by Toni at 10:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

If you're a Twitter user and you want to know who's talking about you or your site, then TweetBeep is for you.

TweetBeeps will send you an email when a tweet matches your keywords. This sounds like a great idea for tracking lots of discussions. It will even search for a mention of your site if the link has been shortened with sites like tinyurl or urlshrinker.

You can add alerts for your name, your nickname, your website, your product, your company, even your passion.

Signing up is quick and easy. You can base your alerts on a domain, or on keywords, and add as many as you like.

Posted by Toni at 5:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

Browsing the web and downloading files is normal use for all Internet users. Make sure you are protected with good anti-virus, anti-spyware and a firewall. Surprisingly, some people have none of these security tools in place.

1. Be wary of files that you execute as they may contain a malicious application. This method of infection is commonly used by hackers.

2. Disable file/printer sharing whilst not in use as this may provide an opening for hackers to gain entry to your PC.

3. If in use, secure your File/Printer sharing with permission accounts and passwords to make unlawful entry more difficult.

4. Do not run unnecessary applications that require an internet/network connection. Leaving them running in the background is like leaving your front door open.

5. Get a Firewall. Firewalls are a useful tool for blocking attacks and preventing illegal entry into your PC as they monitor and inform what comes and goes from your computer.

Posted by Toni at 7:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

Page errors have continued to plague me, even after changing my DNS servers. A timely tip from PC World, Free Fix for the Latest DNS Exploit, has saved the day, and since I followed their advice, my online experience is once again an enjoyable one.

It turns out that a simple switch of one of your network settings will protect you from the DNS exploit. Just change your system (or your router) domain server configuration to bypass your ISP's domain servers and use those offered by OpenDNS. It's a two minute process and the steps are explained on the OpenDNS site.

After adding the OpenDNS domain name servers to my router, I haven't had a single page load error. OpenDNS has lots of other features that might also be useful, like site statistics, content filtering, adult site blocking, domain blocking and domain whitelisting. For anyone with a website and a static ip address, these features would be very handy. And best of all, it's free.

Posted by Toni at 8:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

I've been plagued with the "Address Not Found" errors for the past few weeks and it's been very frustrating trying to get to the root of the problem. Most of the sites are ones I regularly visit, so the error had me scratching my head. Sometimes removing the "www" from the site name would work, and the site would load. Today, my home page wouldn't load and nor would my usually reliable workaround.

I changed my DNS servers and discovered a great site that will give you the three closest DNS servers to your IP address. I thought this helped, until another error page popped up, but the pages are displaying correctly now with only one page refresh. Other suggestions from various forum sites did not work, and this doesn't seem to be a Firefox issue. The same problem has occurred using Internet Explorer and Opera.

Posted by Toni at 1:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

Posted by Toni at 12:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

I found out first-hand yesterday how clever the latest Firefox browser is when it comes to keeping us safe online. I'm a member of lots of forums and got a personal message for another member with a link to something I might find useful. Trusting soul that I am, I followed the link, and was greeted with Firefox's anti-malware warning.

Firefox 3 protects you from viruses, worms, trojan horses and spyware. If you accidentally access an attack site, you'll receive a full-sized browser message as a warning. A continuously updated list of attack-sites tells us when to stop you from browsing, so there's nothing for you to update or maintain.

Posted by Toni at 6:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

If you browse using Firefox, here’s a must-have add-on. Clipmarks is one of those tools I wonder how I ever lived without.

Instead of copying and pasting links, Clipmarks is like adding a pair of scissors to your browser, letting you capture exactly what you want others to see (text, images or video). Your clips are saved on [clipmarks.com](http://clipmarks.com/) and can easily be syndicated to FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook or other sites. You can also post anything you clip directly to your blog (supports Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type and more) or send it directly to friends or co-workers via email.

Clipmarks also gives you a way to help the environment by printing only the parts of a page that you need. By printing just what you need, you’ll save ink, paper and trees, thus making a contribution to a cleaner environment. Your clip collection is accessible from any computer with an internet connection, including your iPhone, Blackberry, or other mobile device.

Posted by Toni at 4:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

Mozilla has set Tuesday 17 June for release of the next version of Firefox and an attempt to set a Guinness World Record for software downloads for software downloads.

And not to be outdone, the final version of Opera 9.5 was released today, adopting a modernized look and feel while strengthening anti-phishing and -malware features. Of particular interest: excellent support for current standards (X)HTML, XML, XSLT, CSS 2.1, SVG 1.1 and partial implementations of new emerging standards CSS 3, HTML 5, and ARIA.

In response, Microsoft has had to add new features to IE in an effort to make it more innovative. On Wednesday, the company unveiled new features for IE’s next version, IE 8, aimed at making deploying and managing the browser easier for IT professionals. IE 8 beta 2 is scheduled to be available in August.

With IE8, Microsoft is hoping to get itself out of a jam that became glaringly apparent in IE7. With that release Microsoft attempted to improve its support for web standards, but in doing so caused some websites - those designed to display well in Microsoft’s older, less standards-compliant browsers - to work poorly. Microsoft has said that with IE8 it hopes to support web standards as well as sites designed for older versions of the browser.

Posted by Toni at 6:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

Posted by Toni at 6:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

I tried the beta version of Firefox 3 and was disappointed because nearly all of my add-ons were broken and eventually went back to using the stable version 2.

With the release of Firefox 3 RC-1 recently, I was tempted to give it another go. There's some great improvements in the new version, especially the Location Bar or "awesome bar" that learns and personalises from your browsing history. The browser has better performance, better bookmark handling, and full-page warnings about phishing sites. It also has full-page zooming for people like me with poor eye-sight.

I've even been able to get my "can't live without" add-ons to work in the new Firefox 3 by following the instructions from PC World's Neil McAllister, Make Older Add-ons Work with Firefox 3.

The key to the fix is to prevent Firefox from checking its version number before it tries to load extensions. To do this, you will need to set a new preference value. Point your browser at the URL "about:config", then right-click on the preferences list to bring up the contextual menu. You should see an option that says "New." Select that, and choose "Boolean." When it asks you for the preference name, type "extensions.checkCompatibility" (without the quotes). You have to enter the name exactly. For the value, choose "false."

Now restart Firefox. When the browser comes back up, it should give you a warning that version checking is disabled. You can double-check under "Tools:Add-Ons" to make sure everything is activated once again.

If the worst case happens and the browser won't start after you add the new preference, you'll need to remove it by hand. Locate the file "prefs.js" within your Firefox profile directory and edit it with any text file editor to delete the line with the preference you just created. (If you're not comfortable doing that, then as I've said, this fix is probably not for you.)

Also, you'll want to remember to delete the preference once the final version of Firefox 3.0 is released, or else you'll never be certain that your installation is stable.

Posted by Toni at 10:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

Quite by accident, I recently discovered Windows Live Mail, it's has been around for a while now and I've been averse to using it (don't ask me why... something to do with the anit-Microsoft thing perhaps???) but it actually seems to be quite a good program. I recently upgraded my Windows Messenger program and clicked on mail and discovered a whole new program and was quite impressed with it. All my Hotmail emails that I was previously unable to download to my computer, plus all the RSS feeds I'd subscribed to over time we here in one program.

I might need to rethink how many feeds I subscribe to though, because at the end of the day I just don't have the time to read through them all. I can see all the headers in Live Mail and skip to the ones I want but the list is quite long.

Posted by Toni at 12:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

I had a most unexpected Christmas present from my Internet Service Provider, Pacific Internet (who have since changed their name to PACNET).

As a reward for continued support, they offered to boost the speed of my current DSL service to 1500kbps, all for the same monthly fee that I'm currently paying.

That's right, they tripled my DSL speed at no additional cost with no plan or speed-change fees involved. All I needed to do was continue using their service for a further 6 months. That's not a hard ask when I was already happy with the plan I had.

The offer was only available to existing PacNet Express Off-Peak customers and not made available to the general public. I felt like for once I got something for nothing!

Posted by Toni at 11:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

Finally, some good news on the email scene. PC World announced today that specifications for a new email authentication tool to help fight against phishing and spam were published yesterday by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), opening the way for software vendors and email service providers to find better ways to protect email recipients.

The specifications were announced for DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), a new technology that combines several existing antiphishing and antispam methods to create an improved way to sort and identify legitimate e-mail.

Instead of using a traditional IP address to identify the sender of each message, DKIM adds a digital signature associated with the organization's domain name. That signature is then validated invisibly at the recipient's end. "White lists" and "black lists" are then used by the e-mail infrastructure software to validate the reputation of the sender.

This is great news for all email users. Once some well-known Web sites such as Google, Yahoo, Paypal and others begin using DKIM, a flood of adoption will occur, allowing some peace of mind.

"Industry support for sender authentication technologies will mean that [consumers] can start trusting email again, and it can resume its role as one of the most powerful communication tools of our times," said Yahoo officials.

In other related news, anti-spam campaign Project Honey Pot has filed a law suit seeking more than $US1 billion in statutory damages from spammers.

Project Honey Pot's members have installed software on their web servers that identifies the IP addresses used to harvest email addresses, and the strategy is to use the legal process to force the harvesters to reveal the identities of spammers who purchased address lists from them.

The case has been brought against "John Does Injuring [Project Honey Pot] and its Members By Harvesting Email Addresses, Transmitting Spam, And Posting Comment Spam" on behalf of tens of thousands of project members in more than 100 countries.

I've signed up to place a honey pot on my website and help track down the spammers stealing email addresses from all our websites. If you know a friend or colleague who might be interested in a Project Honey Pot account? Don't hesitate to refer them.

Posted by Toni at 9:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

Receiving spam is one thing, annoying but relatively harmless. Receiving death threats and personal attacks is another thing entirely. Kathy Sierra, a blogger at Creating Passionate Users, has for the last month been receiving abusive comments and death threats on her blog, and even other people's blogs. You can easily delete such comments but the bad feelings these comments create can't as easily be ignored.

Tim O'Rielly has drafted a Blogger's Code of Conduct following Kathy's ordeal, and many of the 330 plus comments on his site are against his idea.

This is what he is proposing:

1. Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.
2. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.
3. Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
4. Ignore the trolls.
5. Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.
6. If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.
7. Don't say anything online that you wouldn't say in person.

Lots of bloggers already have their own terms of agreement that are similar to this, and to try to enforce it would make commenters even more reluctant to have their say. Tim has created badges to let users know the code of conduct required on the sites they visit: the Sherrif's star for those that enforce it, and a free for all image for those sites where anything goes.

I don't plan on signing up for this when it is introduced, and probably won't leave comments on sites where I have to sign an agreement. It's enough that we have authenticated commenting in place, without this extra constraint.

Posted by Toni at 2:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) |

I read an interesting post on a website recently that I wanted to share. You can read the whole thread on the Site Reference Forums.

A “spam tsunami” is deluging computers worldwide with nine out of 10 e-mails now comprising junk advertising. While the government and computer firms have pledged to crack down on unwanted e-mails, the spammers are sending more than ever. In the past five months the amount of spam has almost trebled.

Daniel Druker, a vice-president at Postini, an e-mail security company, said: “The internet is under siege. Spammers are increasingly aggressive and spam has evolved from a tool for nuisance hackers to one for criminal enterprises.”

Postini detected more than 7 billion spam e-mails worldwide in November, up from 2.5 billion in June and making up 91% of all e-mails. Most big companies have spam filters but employees are still reporting increases as the spammers devise increasingly sophisticated methods to avoid detection.

Posted by Toni at 8:38 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) |

Okay, if you're like me you've been eagerly awaiting the day when IE 7 got popular enough that we could stop worrying about non-standards compliant browsers like IE 6 and stop using browser quirks to compensate. Well, that day is nearly here, and yet IE 7 is breaking sites that it should have viewed just fine. 456 Berea Street explains the Three reasons sites break in Internet Explorer 7:

1. Sites that have an XML declaration before the DOCTYPE, making IE 6 use quirks mode, but not IE 7. Both browsers still get the same CSS, so IE 7 renders it differently.

2. Sites that depend heavily on CSS hacks that no longer work in IE 7.

3. Sites that use conditional comments to feed a bugfix stylesheet to IE without specifying a version number, thereby making IE 7 load the bugfixes and mess up rendering.

Posted by Toni at 5:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

Remember when the web consisted of nothing more than a few static web sites coded exclusively with HTML? Life was simple back then. Back in 1996, a website could be created in a few minutes by inserting the content into a basic HTML template, and adding some graphics for style. Now, the internet is populated with web sites that are more complex. Modern web sites use anywhere from two to sometimes twenty different programming languages, specifications and scripts. Some of the code runs on the front end, some runs on the back end, and some runs somewhere in between.

We have the wireless revolution to thank for making web programming so arduous. Most wireless devices, such as cell phones, palm tops, laptops, and even computer screens in automobiles, now come equipped with access to the internet and email. These gadgets have web browsers and platforms that are very different from what is installed on a traditional desktop PC. Wireless browsers are often not compatible with many elements of the HTML programming language. Web programming had to evolve to suit the needs of those that surf the net on wireless computers.

As a result, a deluge of new languages and systems for designing websites were introduced. These new innovations include XML, XHTML, XSL, CSS, JavaScript, VBScript, DOM, and many others. Of these, XML was probably the most important, because it enabled web designers to define data without forcing web browsers to display it a certain way. XML files were simple text files that could be interpreted by any web browser, unlike HTML. So, you ask, what is AJAX and how is it connected to this discussion?

Posted by Toni at 11:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

I subscribe to Feedblitz for new posts at Learning Movable Type. I couldn't help wondering what was going on when the page that opened was "Welcome to About.com". All the links from Feedblitz opened the About.com page. Is it a case of hijacking do you think? Nothing on the About site even hinted at an MT article. Even typing www.learningmovabletype.com directly into the address bar gave me the same results: About.com. Using a favourite shortcut that I'd saved months ago produced the same result. Has Elise gone over to About? Somehow I doubt it. The only link that actually worked properly on the page was to BlogHer, and after searching for Elise on that site and then following the link again to LMT, guess what? Yes, back to About.com. Another shortcut I had saved was LMT links from www.elise.com/mt/links. Guess again where I ended up? Yes, back at About.com. This is no longer funny and right now I am really quite annoyed.

A link on the Six Apart forum finally got me to a 2004 post on the LMT site, and from there I was able to access the main page successfully. Talk about a frustrating experience.

This time when I enter www.learningmovabletype.com in the address bar it worked. I'm quite baffled and perhaps the problem is here on my own computer.

Posted by Toni at 5:25 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) |

Here's an excellent article for those of you still confused about the myraid of problems caused by viruses and malware. I get a regular mailing from Site Pro News and always find the most interesting reading.

What is malware?
Malware is exactly what its name implies: mal (meaning bad, in the sense of malignant or malicious rather than just poorly done) + ware (short for software). More specifically, malware is software that does not benefit the computer's owner, and may even harm it, and so is purely parasitic.

Posted by Toni at 7:08 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) |