Telecom New Zealand DNS fail

This tickled my fancy, so just had to write a up a few words about it.

Telecom is the largest telco in New Zealand, and it appears they can't run a robust DNS setup for their own domain.   Their ISP, Xtra, had some problems last year with their DNS, which caused problems for many of it's customers, but this time around it's their own corporate domain, telecom.co.nz that has fallen into the cyber bit-bucket....

Underscores vs Hyphens and an apology

If you read my blog via an RSS reader you probably noticed at few odd goings on earlier today. I changed a few things on the site and all of the posts going back to last year appeared as new again, even if you'd read them.

Sorry 'bout that, but there was a method to my madness, or at least a method to my fiddling.

Although it's not entirely obvious, one of the main reasons I started running this site was to mess around with search engine optimisation and try out the theories of various experts who also run a blog but with a great deal more focus that me.

To that end, I've re-written the code that generates my rss feed, and included some in line formatting to make it easier to read.  Now when you read the blog from a feed reader it should look a bit more like the website, give or take. Well, more give than take.

While some of the changes were purely cosmetic, I also changed the URLs for all my blog posts.

The new URLs is the bit that caused them to pop up as new posts in at least feedburner and Google reader. The change to the URLs was to remove the....

Javascript compression with Apache 2 and Debian Etch

If you're trying to wring every last drop of performance out of a website you're probably wanting to compress all your content before it hits the wire.  While I was messing about with another project I noticed that the javascript from this blog wasn't getting compressed.

If you just want the solution to the issue, skip to the bottom of this post, but for those interested in the finer detail, read on.

This site uses Apache 2 on Etch, and after a bit of Googling I didn't really find a direct mention of this issue, so I though I'd slap it on here for other folks afflicted with un-compressed javascript.

First step is to enable mod_deflate in the first place...

Google Location, the best of results, the worst of results

Google announced on their official blog a couple of days ago that location was the new black.  Enhancing search results by allowing the surfer to rank results 'nearby', or pick another location by name.

This is just a continuation of the direction on-line technologies have been moving with social media leading the charge.  Services like foursquare giving people their constant location fix.  Twitter has even gone local allowing you to share your location in 140 character chunks.

Up until now the only real down side of this location hungry trend has been the exact same thing touted as the benefit of telling the world where you are. Namely that the world knows where you are. Privacy concerns are rife...

Taking joy from simple news: IE6 and Youtube

Anyone who has anything even remotely to do with web development will be smiling at the news today that Youtube is going to discontinue support for IE6.

Not only that, we've got a date.  13th of March, 2010.

While this isn't really the end, it will certainly put that little bit more pressure on the roughly 15-20% of internet users who still cling to the 9 year old version of Internet Explorer for various reasons I fail to fully comprehend.

You can read more about...

Security in the cloud, KISS

The second article in a series on using cloud computing services.

The idea of keeping things simple when it comes to server security is not at all radical and cloud servers provide the ability to reach the not so lofty goal of keeping your servers simple and secure without breaking the bank.

The theory is simple: The smaller the number of processes you have running on your box the less there is to go wrong, or attack. This is one area where...

Working on a cloud

This blog is now coming to you from a cloud. A rackspace cloud server that is. Two of them in fact, the front end server running the CMS, and the back-end MySQL server.

The concept of cloud computing really isn't all that new, but if you're all at sea when it comes to clouds you might want to toodle over to Wikipedia and read about it there.

The service I'm using is probably better described as cloud provisioning, in that I've got two virtual servers living somewhere in the bowels of the Rackspace data centre. I don't have to care about memory sizing, disk space, network infrastructure, or anything else for that matter, I'm just renting some resources out of the cloud.

I picked how much memory and disk space I wanted in a few clicks then before the kettle had time to boil the server was on line and ready for configuration. If this service was available back when I was running a hosting business I'd probably still be....

Yahoo plus Bing, strange bedfellows

The news that Bing is set to become the search engine behind Yahoo is quite old now. The ten year deal between number two and three in the battle for search dominance was cut back in July this year.

There's nothing too strange about Microsoft and Yahoo doing business together on the face of it, this came a bit of a year after a failed attempt by the Seattle software hawkers to buy out Yahoo lock stock and flickr pages for a cool $44.6 Billion in change.

What is strange is the positioning of Bing search results in the Yahoo pages.

Existing Yahoo search users have made a concious effort to not....

So much for a Search Engine Race

I've just finished watching a re-run of the BBC's Top Gear. Richard Hammond took on an RAF Eurofighter in a Bugatti Veyron in one of their classically contrived races.

The Eurofighter came in first, but the Veyron wasn't too far behind. It was a race of sorts, give or take. I only wish I could say the same for my attempt at search engine spider racing.

Google came in first by a country mile, with a complete indexing done in about 84 hours. We're 10 days, a full 240 hours, into the race now...

I felt special for about 30 seconds

"It is my pleasure to inform you that on September 30th, 2009 your information was reviewed and accepted for inclusion in the 2009/2010 edition of our registry.

Strathmore's Whos Who each year, recognizes and selects key executives, professionals and organizations in all disciplines and industries for outstanding business and professional achievements."

It sounds almost too good to be true. Well, as it turns out....

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