As somebody who runs a few sites, I like to keep an eye on them and make sure they’re up and responding correctly.

My go-to for years has been Pingdom, but this year they gutted their free service (update 2021 it’s toally killed and now owned by Solarwinds… yeah, the people who got hacked and unknowingly distributed a back door to all their customers) so maybe not that service.

A couple of weeks ago I ordered the latest third-generation of the DAS Keyboard — my second generation packed away back in Guernsey and the Alps-switched one from DSI incapable of reliably registering more than 2 keys on USB.

Being that I’m fixed on the European keyboard layout (our enter key is double height with the backslash moved down next to Z) I had to order from Germany, specifically the guys over at getDigital.de

On Saturday an explosion at ISP ThePlanet took this site offline and it remained like that for 48 hours whilst power and structure were restored to the 4,000+ affected servers.

It’s unfortunate it happened when the site got some DotNetKicks and StumbleUpon love for Envy Code R but at least this isn’t a commercial venture losing money to such an incident — if it was I’d have a warm standby somewhere else — something many of ThePlanet’s commercial customers didn’t.

It’s been a few weeks since I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 and whilst the upgrade went well it hasn’t been all plain sailing.

The Manage > FilesManage > Files administration function has been silently removed despite still appearing in the on-line documentation.

Tomorrow morning at 5am where I can enjoy an advanced fee scam! I’ve had these in email format before but never in my calendar…

Oddly there are no emails about this in my inbox and I sure didn’t tell it to add one to my calendar. As there is no ‘Report Spam’ link for calendar entries I had to return to calendar view, delete it from there and hope nothing else shows up.

I’ve been having some problems trying to locate friends on Facebook and now I know why.

Facebook’s search algorithm is the most bizarre search algorithm known to man.

Google just added support for AIM to Google Chat so you can just enter your login details and chat right away from your Gmail or Google Apps for Domains account as if they were Google Chat users.

Better yet you can actually enter your ICQ number in the user-name box, fill in your password and integrate your ICQ account although this is seemingly undocumented and likely just a result of the ICQ and AIM integration from some time back.

Hello Damien

You have received this email as a customer of our sister company, Friends Reunited.

A few years ago I believed that HTML and SQL injection vulnerabilities were headed for extinction. Thanks to object-relational mapping tools SQL injection continues to die but HTML and script injection vulnerabilities are as popular as ever.

Part of the problem stems from the “back-to-basics” approach to rendering web pages, throwing out classes and controls for string-based libraries (primitive obsession) and helpers which do not encode HTML or even offer a concise simple syntax to do so.

Open source and free software projects still have much to learn from commercial software, the number one in my book being “the pitch”.

Most free software project home pages consist of a brief description, a list of technical documents and a number of download options but fail to pitch their solution at all.

I’ve posted my list of Guernsey Estate Agents as other on-line lists were not comprehensive and prevented bookmarking or copying the address to send to others thanks to the annoying framing they used (so 90’s).

Yes, I’m house-hunting again after my estate agent failed to mention (claimed to be ignorant of the fact) that all the lovely fields and views from my proposed home were already marked as a target housing area by the States of Guernsey as part of their Urban Area Plan (PDF, 5Mb).

The change to WordPress from Subtext went without major hitch. This was great considering I was tweaking the design and articles right up to going on holiday (I wouldn’t do this in a professional environment but my blog is a sandpit for such dare-devil risk taking ;-)

Here are my notes on the experience.

I’ve switched to a lightweight theme (300KB less per initial hit) whilst we are overloaded with requests from the excellent Daring Fireball regarding the font rendering philosophies post.

I’ve tried moving some images off site but it’s just typical this happens the week before I move to proper hosting. My poor home DSL line is melting!

I’ve been a user of Google Apps for your domain for some time — primarily to let me use the great Gmail interface for my own mail domains (thanks to the domain alias feature they introduced last month).

Logging into my mailbox this morning I was surprised to find that my account is now considered a Standard Edition but that a Premier Edition is available too.

I placed eleven items this year into my Amazon wish-list for my family and girlfriend to pick from and all were quickly purchased.

A few days later my mother asks if I can put some items to buy because after purchasing one or two the others have now gone.

I wrote a while back about how Rojo’s upgrade was a disaster and that it had led me to look for alternatives.

Bloglines didn’t have the same feeling of a polished interface that Rojo has tempted me with but unlike Rojo but it has been happily consuming the feeds of all my sites and presenting them without fuss or issue since I started using it a few weeks ago.

The stream of spam, scams and phishing attempts increases day after day. Reporting phishing and spam inside Gmail is all well and good but it doesn’t help anyone outside GoogleMail nor solves the issue at heart.

I can only assume the recent increase in scamming and phishing is because either:

Rojo has been my favorite on-line reader for a while despite the annoyances and quirks but this weekends ‘upgrade’ got me wondering how incompetent the team behind it is and what exactly Six Apart have purchased.

There were a couple of problems before the upgrade — the one most users would have seen is the crazy unread counts which are almost always wrong — but you can learn to live with that.

On the 16th of June an email appeared in my inbox with the subject “Love football, gambling and DVDs?”. Strange, the Gmail spam filter normally does a sterling job of blocking these.

Dear entertainment lover, It’s not long now until the first England game, and everyone’s talking about football and making bets. Well we at ScreenSelect.co.uk are no different but we also realize that there’s plenty of time between games for other forms of entertainment. ”

These Firefox extensions just keep getting more innovative and useful. Here’s the latest additions to my ever-growing Firefox arsenal.

If, like me, you find yourself wondering what the URL was of that site you visited/bookmarked on your other machine/os/virtual machine then this extension is for you. You can choose to sync bookmarks, history, cookies and passwords (if you really want — they are encrypted) across your copies of Firefox. Great for us MacBook owners using Boot Camp and Firefox :) .

Getting a new machine often spurs me to go out and find some new tools and utilities. Here’s some recent finds:

DiskMon — see disk activity

Time for an update on the state of broadband in the Channel Islands. Some interesting home tariff cuts on both islands. The Office of Utility Regulation is pushing for further wholesale ADSL cuts in Guernsey. More news as it happens.

Now have usage limits in place on their “Rapid” broadband services with the exception of the top-end business service.

Newtel are dropping the price of their Guernsey 1MB unlimited service to £21.99 a month as from this coming Monday.

This compares very favorably with C&W’s £19.99 a month Pay As You GoPay As You Go and £26.99 AnytimeAnytime unlimited services.

So the phone lines here have been out now for well over an hour. ADSL is still working as is Guernsey-to-Guernsey mobiles but everything else is giving dead tones, no tones or “Network failure” messages.

So much for a single point of failure or resilient network. They currently boast;

As a frequent user of many of Google’s various services I continually find myself finding new tips and tricks for getting the most out of them. Here are a few to share;

Gmail are constantly introducing new features however the localised user-interfaces are often lagging behind and failing to expose the options. Set your language to “English (US)” to get access to the latest options.

A few changes from the various players so a quick run-down.

While local ISPs could argue their bandwidth is limited they have no such excuse for charging 3x the price of a UK outfit for IP addresses as Newtel are doing in both islands.

I’ve never realized but Google use your browser in such a way it tells them which link you followed out from the search results. Searching for “damieng” for example will show my home page as the first result. The browser window will show https://damieng.comhttps://damieng.com but click on it with JavaScript enabled and instead you’ll go somewhere like;

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A//damieng.com/&ei=yMf5QoHUJczcQr-YvfANhttp://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A//damieng.com/&ei=yMf5QoHUJczcQr-YvfAN

Here are a few more useful bits and pieces to improve you browsing experience if you’re a Firefox user.

This great extension provides a framework that allows scripts to run against web pages from your own machine. The upshot of this is…

Currently “hot news” is the fact that Firefox, Mozilla and Safari browsers have been demonstrated as susceptible to a new form of phishing attack.

Basically all these browsers support International Domain Names (IDN) that let you use the full Unicode set of foreign characters and symbols, and some of these foreign characters while technically different from the Latin ones look identical. In the case demonstrated they have used the Arabic aa to replace a Latin aa in “PayPal” to get another site. This isn’t really anything new, even the original RFC commented on how this would be a problem and the IETF issued guidelines that would have limited their scope if only Verisign actually implemented them. (Specifically the guideline for preventing mixing of languages within a domain name would reduce the scope for attack considerably).