menu.

Yesterday’s decision by ICANN to allow any Tom, Dick or Harry to create their own top-level domain is a bit worrying.  With TLDs like .TV, .biz and .info struggling to make much of an impact (except maybe doubling the amount of spam flying around the internet), who really thinks that allowing people to make up their own?

As appealing as it might be to shift this site from SteveFerson.com to Steve.Ferson, it hardly seems worth the confusion of creating an infinite number of domains for the same company. At present you can usually find a site by typing companyname.com or companyname.co.uk into your address bar. Under these plans, even Googling for a company name could theoretically bring up hundreds of results all pretending to be the ‘real’ site.

That said, it was worth it for this headline from ZD Net.

Good news for existing proposals like .nyc for New York City and .xxx for adult sites. Depending on the costs of setting it up, I could also see a new TLD appearing for Northern Ireland (.nir ?) and am sure some enterprising spirit will attempt to register .blog.  Feel free to leave your suggestion for a new TLD below.

I haven’t come across anything truly groundbreaking in Firefox 3, possibly because I’ve become accustomed to much of the feature set through the Betas and RCs, but there are one or two improvements that are quite useful (as well as a couple of regressions unfortunately).

Wee Niggles

First the bad. When you view Page Info from the context menu it doesn’t give a link to the CSS file in the Media tab any more. I was sure it was there in 2 and a quick google confirmed this. This really sucks - I can’t see why they’ve taken it out.

Secondly, when I was looking through the options to try and return the aforementioned CSS links, I discovered Firefox had decided it was going to automatically download any future updates when they were discovered (I promptly switched the option to “Ask me…”). Bad Firefox.

Magic Address Bar

The good is good though. It doesn’t seem like it at first, but to my mind the biggest improvement of all is the address bar. Sure they’ve added a “Most Visited” folder to your bookmarks toolbar which (shockingly, given the title) contains a list of the sites you visit most frequently, but the address bar has some great, if not immediately obvious, usability improvements.

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Looks like the excitement is a little bit premature. Not just yet, but at 6pm BST the newest version of Mozilla’s FireFox web browser will be released. Mozilla want Firefox 3 to break the record for the most downloads in 24 hours, which begs the question as to why they pissed off Australasia and half of Asia by promoting Download Day as today, 17th June, when they’re not making the new version available until 10am Pacific Time which means the aforementioned regions will not see the download released until it is 18th June there. That’s without even considering yours truly and millions of other Europeans who will be finished their days work.

Good work Mozilla.

I recently moved this site to a new host because of ongoing problems with my previous hosts. Thanks to some intermittent database errors I’d decided it would be prudent to do my first backup in some time at the start of last week. By the end of that week they’d deleted my account, so I suppose I should be grateful their database server was so f**ked. Nevertheless, the move caused a few issues when my new hosts told me the complete backup I uploaded to them was corrupt. I can only assume (because some backups were corrupt and others weren’t) that it was due either to encrypting the archives using AES in Winzip or decrypting them in 7zip.

Anyway, that meant manually creating the accounts, setting up the mail accounts and subdomains in them, extracting the root folders (public_html, mail etc) individually and manually importing the SQL backup. Everything was relatively painless (if dull) however Fantastico wouldn’t recognise my Wordpress installations (I had two). To persuade Fantastico that there really were a couple of WordPress blogs I had to do two things:

1. Extract the \.fantasticodata\WordPress files from the zip (in this case it was called nerd.steveferson.com| ) and upload it to the same location in the FTP server. Of course that bar | made Windows barf, so you’d need to rename it (e.g. using an underscore instead) and replace the bar after uploading it via the FTP client (FileZilla didn’t seem to have a problem doing this).
2. I think this is might be because the blog’s in the root of a subdomain, but I also had to upload a file called installed_in_root.php from \.fantasticodata to that location on the server.

Once I did this, Fantastico picked up the blog and allowed me to upgrade WordPress to 2.5.1 - no hassle.

O hai!

I hart lolcatz.

I hart lolcatz so much dat wun dai I thoughted “I can has lolcatz wen I makes teh pooter turn on?” So I maded a Vista gadjit an now I has new lolcatz every dai.

If u hart lolcatz liek mee an wants lolcatz in ur pooter makin u laff, downlodes mah gadjit. I has tested it 4 liek rly long time. It rly works, srsly. An evry1 needses moar lolcatz.

Kthxbai.

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I upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.5 today, and installed a new copy of Wordpress on a subdomain too. Both these actions were carried out using cPanel & Fantastico.

When I logged into the backend of the new subdomain there were no images - including no buttons on the rich-text editor (TinyMCE) and no Wordpress logo on the login screen.  I later noticed there were also background images missing on the public part of the new blog.  When I right clicked “View background image” on the missing image, it took me to an HTTP 403 (Forbidden) meaning there was a permissions problem. The strange thing was the problem didn’t occur in the nerd. backend.

And the solution…? In this instance it was because I’d enabled hotlink protection in my server to stop other people using images stored at steveferson.com on their sites, because this eats up precious bandwidth.  When I created this new subdomain, I had forgotten about the hotlink protection and so hadn’t added it to the list of sites allowed to link to images at SteveFerson.com.  When I added it everything went back to working as expected.

Finally I can have events from my Outlook calendar in work sync with my Thunderbird calendar (enabled using the Lightning plugin) automatically. It’s wonderful… or at least it nearly is.

How It Works

I read some time back of a plugin that allows you to sync your Thunderbird/Lightning calendar (or Sunbird if you prefer to use Mozilla’s calendar in a standalone application) with your Google calendar, which I’m sure is useful for some people, but not me. I’ve never used a Google calendar really. However that memory proved useful when I heard that a Google have released a utility to allow you to sync your Google calendar with your Outlook calendar. I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this…

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I’ve just added a list of 24 Jack Bauer Facts to the jokes section of my web site (the first update in a while). Highlights include:

• When Kim Bauer lost her virginity, Jack found it and put it back.
• Once, someone tried to tell Jack Bauer a “knock knock” joke. Jack Bauer found out who was there, who they worked for, and where the god damned bomb was.
• The city of Los Angeles once named a street after Jack Bauer in gratitude for his saving the city several times, but they had to rename it after people kept dying when they tried to cross the street. No one crosses Jack Bauer and lives.

If you like them check out the full list. If not, I don’t know what to tell you. Go watch 24.

I have kind of a love-hate relationship with my ISP. Their speeds are pretty good (I think, anyway) and their culture (if you like) or their philosophy, is great. I like the wee touches like their community forum and blog and I love their geographic (01) phone numbers for support. I’ve never had to use them so I don’t know how good they are once you’re actually on the phone, but at least you don’t have to worry about the cost. 0p a minute works fine for me.

I know I always mention it, largely because it’s my only real complaint, but I do hate the peak-time usage limit of 8GB per month. I understand bandwidth costs them money and I know I can get more for a relatively low cost either through additional bandwidth bundles, pay-as-you-go or a £5 package upgrade, but I don’t really fancy any of those options. It would seem I’m just expecting too much, but it does leave me feeling content or happy with the product, rather than delighted. I’ve suggested extending the unmetered/unlimited usage ‘off-peak’ period (currently midnight to 8am) through to 10am or midday, but it doesn’t seem likely (cost reasons, apparently).

I blame the big providers for spreading the myth of unlimited usage (while growing ever tighter in their so-called “fair use” policies). They’ve clearly set my expectations too high because Plus.net have come out top in a customer satisfaction survey of the UK’s top 10 ISPs; it’s always nice to have your choices reaffirmed. Bigger names like AOL, Orange, Tesco and BT didn’t come off quite so well.

I have also sent a strongly worded complaint to Broadband Choices regarding their unforgivable (they’re supposedly a consumer site after all) use of the headline figures provided by these companies (like BT’s infernal £8.95/month bullshit) instead of the actual charges. I find that behaviour scummy, but unsurprising, when the companies trying to sell you their own product do it (caveat emptor and all that) but for a self-proclaimed consumer site to take them at face value (possibly something to do with their affiliate/referral fees?) is a disgrace.

I’d set up my 1.x installation of b2Evolution to use a custom HTML title in the format:

<title>[Post/Page name - ] Blog name</title>

On installing 2.4, however, I noticed that the default title is just the post/page name if it exists and the blog name if it doesn’t (i.e. for the posts list). This was based on a function call to a function called request_title. Google didn’t tell me much about this function (not the 2.x version anyway) so I went hunting and found the function in the file: \inc\_core\_template.funcs.php

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