After yet more outages and phone calls to helpdesks I finally have my Internet issues sorted out. The helpdesk guy was pretty stumped on what was causing my outages but I managed to convince him that it was due to another computer on their network somewhere competing for my static IP address. Once he had come around to the idea (and talked to his supervisor) I soon had a fresh static IP and a working Internet connection. Throughout this time I was quite thankful I had recently moved my email hosting onto Google's hosted services. I

I've been having weird Internet outages today. The Internet will suddenly just drop off for twenty minutes and then mysteriously come back. I called in the morning to report the fault but they had a 40 minute wait for service (probably because others were experiencing similar issues) so I gave up. However after the fourth such outage this afternoon I rang TelstraClear and this time someone answered straight away.

I told them that my Internet was down and that it was not an issue with my internal network because I had checked it all. The guy replied that it was probably spyware and that I should get my computer seen to. His hopes were dashed when I told him it was not spyware because a) it is effecting all my computers, b) none of my desktop computers run Windows and c) the device that 'talks' to the Internet on my network's behalf is a NetScreen and even this can't communicate with the outside world.

I was listening to the Gillmor Gang yesterday and the guest was Jason Calacanis, CEO of Weblogs Inc (now part of AOL). He put forward the most logical argument for Google bringing out an operating system I have heard that actually sounded like it could be a success. He believed Google would release a free Linux-based operating system that would be distributed pre-installed on Dell and HP computers. Not only would the operating system be free but it would make extensive use of AdSense in order to deliver targeted advertisements in some integrated manner to users. A good portion of this income would be shared with the PC manufacturers (up to 80%), which would provide significant incentive to ship and support Google OS instead of Windows. Also this post-sale income stream would allow Dell and HP to significantly lower their retail prices on the basis that a good portion of their income would occur post-sale.

SORBS is a Realtime spam BlackList (RBL) that is far from helping the spam problem. I am not alone in thinking that rather than being professionally run and attempting to target real spammers SORBS solution to the spam problem is just to add half the Internet (figurately speaking) to a blacklist. Case in point yesterday I got a call from a friend who mysteriously could not send email to certain people on the Linux server I had setup a few years ago. I checked on the server and found nothing wrong yet still some mail just was not going through. He rang up his ISP (TelstraClear in this case) only to be told that his entire subnet (about 500-odd TelstraClear users) had been added to the SORBS blacklist two days ago. On the blacklist there is no reason given as to why this subnet is banned nor is there any attempt made by SORBS to contact effected parties. The only clue for the ban is that SORBS considers the ip range dynamically distributed even though TelstraClear issues static addresses to their business customers on this ip range.

I have been trying out SuSE 10.1 on my iMac with the Release Candidate version of Parallels. Parallels is awesome, there is nothing like being able to play with (and blow away) Linux and Windows at almost full speed directly within OSX. On the PowerPC I have used Virtual PC and the Intel iMac has also gone through Bootcamp but Parallels is far and away a better solution for most tasks (you would not want to run games through Parallels).
From a website design perspective it really eases the testing of html/css in all four major environments (Windows Explorer, Firefox, Linux Konquerer and OSX Safari).

One new default feature in OpenSUSE 10.1 that is really very cool is AppArmor. It makes the task of securing server and client based applications simple through the automatic creation of application-based rules (i.e. Firefox can execute these files, modify these files and access these devices). The SUSE Diary has a nicely written tutorial introducing the application and describing how to easily create rulesets.

Java One is turning out to be quite interesting this year. Not only has the Java license been changed to allow for easier distribution in Linux channels, but there is also a lot of buzz about coding in different languages for the JavaVM. The most tantalizing from a business perspective is Sun's commitment to get Visual Basic running within the JavaVM. Whilst it will not be practical to get Visual Basic applications written specifically for Windows frameworks running, (that is what Mono is for) it still will be interesting to see whether this significantly grows the Java (as a concept rather than a language) developer community. Even though Visual Basic may be ported across the fact it won't be tightly integrated into Windows like traditional Visual Basic it will more than likely not encourage a mass-migration of low-end, practical developers as some would hope. Still it will be nice to be able to get basic software written in by someone who only knows Visual Basic and have it able to run on any platform that supports the JavaVM.

Thomas Fuchs, the guy behind script.aculo.us recently did a presentation in San Francisco about AJAX that looked pretty interesting. He has is slide show online in PDF format here. Associated notes made during the presentation have been put online by the guys at Ajaxian.

Weighing in at a couple of hundred dollars the Linksys NSLU2 is a very tidy little NAS device. It's a small (three CD cases stacked) unit that holds a 266mhz PPC processor (underclocked to 133mhz), 40meg of RAM, two USB ports and one network interface. Linksys have fashioned together a Linux-based OS running Samba to provide a very tidy, home/home-office level NAS device that can be easily administered via a clean web-based interface.

Where the little box gets really interesting is its ability to be hacked in almost any direction. There is a large community of Linux hackers producing custom Flash images that allow everything from the addition of extra software packages to the installation of a full-blown Debian system on the tiny box. The hackers have cleverly got around the flash memory limits of the onboard hardware through a method known as 'unslinging', or more precisely the ability to boot and run the device off a connected hard drive. Coupled with this there is a raft of hardware hacks that range from the relatively simple (removing the underclocking on the CPU) through to the really difficult (boosting RAM to 256meg by soldering together RAM chips).

This little MacWorld tip is a great idea for presentations, rather than creating a complex presentation that zooms in to a particular area (or gesture with the cursor) activiate OSX's accessibility zoom (Apple+Option+8) feature to have that particular part of the screen zoom in. To zoom out again just turn off the zoom (Apple+Option+8).

Mozilla have not exactly gone out of their way to promote this feature but it sure is useful. Keyword searching makes performing common searches on websites much faster by enabling you to create a 'keyword' that associates the search url to what you type in the address bar. It is not exactly the best description but it means that rather than visiting a site to perform a search (say for a recipe or book on amazon) you can assign a keyword like 'recipe' and then in the addressbar just type 'recipe roast duck' to have Firefox perform a search in your favourite recipe site.