There is a nice collection of tools at www.iwebtool.com, specifically at http://www.iwebtool.com/tools/. It’s more than just how google sees your site, there are tools that show how your page ranks at alexa, etc.
http://www.iwebtool.com/visual_pagerank for instance is the Visual Pagerank tool and http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_prediction is the google pagerank prediction tool.
This is something that really looks interesting. Recently Linspire announced their intent to open source the CNR (Click N Run) concept for installing software, launching a wiki based web site that would allow supported linux distributions to install software (open source or commercial) with as easy a process as possible (visit web site, browse, click). Well, today Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) and Linspire have announced how some of this will look and then some. For starters, Freespire and Linspire are going to be based upon Ubuntu in the future (instead of directly based on debian linux.) That is a fair enough shift. The other part of the news is that as of the release of Fiesty Fawn (The Ubuntu Linux release due in April), Ubuntu users will be able to access Click N Run. So what does this mean?
This isn’t tech related except for the mail merge side of things. We got a letter in the mail day before yesterday from Discovercard. It had my name and address on the outside just as it’s on record with Discover and everything looked like a normal “account information notice” (read…. ad for some of our services) mailing. When opened up…. The name and address on the letter inside were different (in our town, but someone else/different road/etc.) And the last four digits of the acocunt number were listed. All in all, it could be a much worse data leak, but still…. it’s annoying to see Discovercard go and botch a mailmerge like this. (I guess this is why they use “Windowed” envelopes for their bills…) In the past I’ve had communications from credit card companies that printed my entire account number on the letter, which usually makes me grumpy at least…. My only question is how many people got someone elses letter.
I wanted to make a note here about a recent news story related to a topic that’s fascinated me for the ~10 years or so since I first heard of such things…. For some time there have been 3d printers. Devices that would use a liquid of some sort to “print” a real physical object. Usually these were plastic-ish prototype parts/proof of concept samples. These “printers” cost 10s of thousands of dollars and typically just have one material to choose from. Certainly out of reach for a home tinkerer… But recently I read this article about a desktop fabricator… The project name is fab@home and for ~$2500 in parts YOU can build your own personal fabricator….
I’ve noticed several times in the last week a server of mine that is using postfix has rejected messages due to a failure in the lookup at relays.ordb.org. At first, I thought this was just a false positive in the database at ordb… but this morning I finally “caught it” while it was happening and went to pull up the ordb.org web page. It took…. 30-45 seconds and then proceeding to do a search on the rejected IP took another stretch. In looking at the logs it appears that there may be blanket rejections if the ordb.org check times out.
Here’s the postfix config setting….
smtpd_client_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,reject_rbl_client relays.ordb.org
I saw this a few weeks back and think it’s a good idea. Essentially why don’t we have a .bank domain registration and limit it to just financial institutions the way .gov is limited to government registrations. (and .mil for military, .edu for educational institutions…..) Let’s face it, anyone can register a .com .net or .org – maybe instead of increasing the number of Top level domains that ANYONE can register in, maybe we need to tighten the restrictions and add a few new TLD’s that would be more closely restricted. There’s already a .museum, .bank would be a good one next.
For a few months now (since the demise of bluefrog actually) I’ve noticed that the level of junk mail has gone up on my own mail server. Yes, I use spamassassin to filter and tag, but the volume of stuff that’s tagged has gone up (as well as the volume that slips through.) I’ve had to flush out the bayes filter more than I would like after some massive bayes poisoning attempts (those messages with lots of random words or text.) I’ve also been following news on the topic and thought I’d detail some of it here for those that haven’t been paying attention.
I’m tempted to say “long live the cd…”, but… EMI’s CEO has declared that the CD is dead. He does point out that you’re not likely to give your Aunt an iTunes download, so “dead” just means “in decline” in this parlance. However, I can’t help but laugh to myself of the notion that I release a cd through lulu of hymns and within the week the CD is declared dead. No, seriously… I haven’t bought a cd in quite a while myself. Mainly because I don’t want to put up with all the DRM restrictions these days. I want to be able to have a simple cd that I can extract to another player IF I WANT. But I want the original CD as a “high quality archived original” in comparison to the mp3 that might be lost when a flash drive or hard drive dies and isn’t quite as high quality.
Networkworld brings us this report that exploit code removed from websites can live on for quite a while in caching servers. Which, in a way is NOT news, but it’s worth remembering. Many times when someone visits a website, their really visiting a caching proxy server that has previously grabbed a copy of data from the original website. Many networks use cache servers to improve network performance. (i.e…. we have 20 people an hour hitting cnn.com why shouldn’t we just be able to download the page once?)
It’s not really a surprising headline. I think anytime a proprietary vendor tightens the screws a bit to limit piracy they are going to force people to other, competing products. Especially when there’s a significant cost difference involved. If there are three t-shirts for sale, one for $5 with no logo and another for $50 with a brand logo (we’ll say nike) and yet another (pirated) with a nike logo for $10 and everybody thinks the nike logo is cool and in… they’ll buy the $10 “pirated” shirt unless they know that it’s pirated and are morally compelled to spend the $50. If piracy is cracked down on and you have a choice between the $50 logo shirt and the $5 no logo shirt….. hmmm I’d rather have $45 extra dollars than a swoosh on my shirt.