Have you ever had your website hit on a topic that people find conflicting? When the site gets viewed by the masses, you need to be prepared. If you have access to modify your web server .htaccess file then go and have a read of the Coral CDN Overview For those interested in the techie bits, here is my .htaccess for news site flood protection, and to allow CDN to serve up all my site images – thus offloading from my puny connection the bandwidth burden for images.

A recent post on SlashDot quotes an IT professor saying: People are unwittingly trusting the information they find on Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading After reading this, I thought it was time to write about a something I found that backs this up. An anonymous user added information about Sacha Baron Cohen (known onscreen as Ali G.) to Wikipedia on November the 14th 2006.

Telstra announced yesterday that their ADSL 2+ (what’s with the plus?) upgrade has now been completed Australia wide. What does this give the average end user access to? The Telstra PR and discussion site explains: The ADSL2+ upgrade of 907 telephone exchanges serving 2.4 million homes and businesses announced in February is now complete. This means millions of additional Australian families, businesses, non-profit organisations and government agencies across every state and territory can now enjoy the benefits of high-speed broadband

Australia is a mixed bag at Broadband. In some ways we resemble the US, and in no way do we resemble the Japan style FTTN networks (yet). But the infrastructure is starting to be there. What sucks is that sometimes to get the 30 Mbps connections you have to pay quite a bit for it (AUD$90/bundled per month for 25GB, Bigpond Cable). Yes I’m only with Bigpond cable as no ADSL service exists in my area that comes close to that speed.

We’ve had some stong winds in Melbourne yesterday. Up to 130 kph! These winds were good enough to cause a 24 hour extended power outage in my area, meaning my provider had upstream outages and the internet connection was down. Add that to the errant html comment in my last post which made the whole page commented out. All resolved now. Now what else do I have to debug that is technical?

I needed a quick way to send some files from the command line when logged into a Solaris server via ssh. This assumes the server is already configured to deliver your smtp mail. I also used mailx for the sending client. Here is how I did it, for your geeky reference. First write your message: cat << EOF > /tmp/mailmsg<br /> Hi this is a message<br /> And this is the second line<br /> EOF

You may have noticed that my last 3 posts were about free software. I like free stuff. Everyone likes free stuff. Why talk about free stuff? A friend told me that the reason he enjoys using Open Source (and usually free) apps is he can customise them. He finds it frustrating that when you pay $1K per seat for an application like Mercury (now owned by HP) that sometimes it just wont do what you need.

I use eReader on my Palm, but only for free documents and not often enough to warrant paying for it. Now that is no longer required. As I noticed at the downloadsquad, eReader Pro for Palm and Windows mobile devices is now being offered for free. If you would like your own copy for Palm (or windows mobile) you can download it from the ereader website.

I received and email from the MacHeist directorate today. The controversy has been solved by YazSoft offering a free upgrade to Speed Download 5 for MacHeist customers, but only for a very limited time – March 13 2008 until March 27 2008. It is nice that I got the email, albeit 5 days after the offer was extended. This list of changes that come with SD5 are available online. So if you purchased Speed Download 4 with MacHeist II, and choose to upgrade, then proceed to yazsoft’s website in a quick and orderly fashion to get the upgrade offer.

David Watanabe announced the most recent upgrade to Newsfire RSS as now free for all users. In David’s own words, he explains what the buzz about news aggregation is, and why Newsfire is a must for ALL mac users: For those new to this, NewsFire is a news reader for blogs, news sites, and anything else that publishes an ‘RSS’ syndication feed. It watches for news so you don’t have to.