Aug

11

Lesson learned: Relying on one of anything is bad (Gmail Down)

Filed Under Blogging, In the life, News, Social Media | 6 Comments

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Lesson learned: Relying on one of anything is bad (Gmail Down) (image: )The world was in a tizzy this afternoon as ’s application crashed and burned.

and Apps for domains all seem impacted.

This is a breaking event so I’ll update this post when more is known. Gmail’s Blog has nothing on it, currently.

*** UPDATE ***
It looks like the big brains at Gmail have fixed the issue.

The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing from loading properly. Everything should be back to normal by the time you read this.

And indeed it does seem to be back to normal. Excellent.

Jul

22

Bag Open. Cat Out. Internet in danger! OpenDNS to the rescue?

Filed Under Blogging, Doing, How to, In the life, News, Web | Leave a Comment


PDP-11/45 lock
Creative Commons License photo credit: Jef Poskanzer

One little secret that your ( Provider) has likely been involved with is the -wide patching of the Multi-vendor DNS Issue.

Simply, this issue could allow malicious evil-doers to redirect your surfing to websites that they control, intercepting important and private information (such as passwords, banking info, etc).

Frequent Black Hat Speaker Dan Kaminsky today announced a massive, multi-vendor issue with DNS that could allow attackers to compromise any name server - clients, too. Kaminsky also announced that he had been working for months with a large number of major vendors to create and coordinate today’s release of a patch to deal with the vulnerability.

of this industry-wide vulnerability and the collaboration (to fix the flaw) was originally scheduled to be announced at the Black Hat Security Conference in August, but due to the vulnerability being published elsewhere, the presenter thought it best to release the information so that can take the appropriate actions.

What can you do?
Basically, this is a complex issue, but it boils down to a simple test and a very simple fix.

The test:
To find out if you are vulnerable to this issue, you can use the DNS checker link on Kaminsky’s webpage here (in the upper right corner).

The fix:
If you are vulnurable, then you can either A) wait until your fixes their DNS servers, or B) set your own computer’s DNS strings to point to OpenDNS servers.

I highly recommend option B.

The OpenDNS website has friendly, easy to implement instructions on converting your DNS settings and also offer a whole host of additional features your current may not have:

Features

I’ve written about OpenDNS before, so feel to check out these previous articles and then help save the .

And if you do test your using Dan’s page, please post your results in the comment section! I’ll start things off by adding mine.

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Jul

17

Wordpress 2.6 is out — and you’re using it now.

Filed Under Blogging, Doing, News, Social Media, Web | Leave a Comment


Wordpress Plugin for iPhone/iPod touch
Creative Commons License photo credit: purplelime

It was a fairly painless update (thanks to the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin), but there were a few quirks I’ve had to address:

  • Avatars. WP 2.6 has much better support for Avatars ( used to identify authors of comments). But, my theme doesn’t natively support them so I’ve had to maintain use of the Easy Gravatars plugin.
  • Turbo mode. This is an admin. function, but basically it lets you
    speed up some admin functions with Gears integration. Gears behind my firewall is messy, but I will be trying this from more open connections in the future.

If you’re interested in seeing more of the 2.6 features in action, check out this .

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May

29

Canadian weather station on Mars brings you daily weather updates

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Perfect weather to launch an invasion of the monkey-infested Earth. Let loose the dogs of war!

One of the ‘cooler’ pieces of being done on Mars by NASA’s Phoenix lander is the study of Martian weather patterns, courtesy of a ‘built-in-Canada’ weather station. A daily spinoff of this is the daily Martian weather report. Due to a glitch, the reporting should begin tomorrow.

On a local note, the Canadian Science Team at the University of Alberta have a significant stake in the Phoenix :

When the originally planned anemometer for Phoenix was descoped,
Professor Carlos Lange and his students demonstrated that a telltale
could be used to indicate wind speed and direction with help of the
onboard camera. He then helped researchers at the University of Aarhus,
Denmark, develop and test the telltale wind sensor that is now mounted
on top of the mast on Phoenix. For Phoenix, Dr. Lange uses
advanced Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to simulate the
Martian .

May

26

We’re down, baby, we’re down!

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Were down, baby, were down! (image: n_nasa_phoenix_070802.300w)I’ve been a follower of NASA’s mars missions for a few years now. The Pathfinder Mission and the cute Sojourner were my introduction to robotic exploration of Mars.

Were down, baby, were down! (image: bounce-b)Well, today marks another milestone with the successful continuation of the Phoenix Mars Lander mission.

NASA successfully landed another probe on Mars, this time using a powered rocked descent, a riskier yet less hair-raising method of landing than the ‘controlled Michlin-man crashing into a planet’ descent of the Pathfinder .

First images are already available, but the best part today is the transcript of the engineers as the data of the landing was beamed back to . Read the entire landing sequence in this excellent Spaceflight Now article, but here’s a taste:

“Standing by for lander separation. Altitude 1,100 meters. Signal may drop out during lander separation. Altitude 1,000 meters.

“Separation detected! We have reacquired the signal, gravity turn detected. (cheers) Altitude 600 meters… 500 meters…

May

17

Blogging at the Edmonton Public Library

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Blogging at the Edmonton Public Library (image: 2478969984_8e9f2ed8b9)A week and a bit ago the Public launched a variety of blogs.

doesn’t appear to use a standard (, TypePad, etc) but rather chose to develop their own platform.

On the topic of topics, the included are rather diverse, from Aboriginal Peoples, Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels, RFID in Libraries, and more.

…and this is just another reason that my local library gets me! Well done !

Oct

31

Gmail increases online storage to 4.5Gb

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Gmail increases online storage to 4.5Gb (image: )

This may be old , but I’ve just noticed that the Gmail storage counter has increased to ~4.5Gb.

In their blog, the team did say it was coming, but I don’t read it regularly so it was a surprise to me :)

Well done !

Oct

30

69 years ago today, Earth was invaded.

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69 years ago today, Earth was invaded. (image: ) Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre on the Air brought the world the ‘modern’ adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.

 

 

69 years ago today, Earth was invaded. (image: )Personally, my favourite adaptation of this SF Classic is the rock opera version: Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds.

 

 

 

For your listening pleasure:

  • mp3 download from the Internet Archive
  • mp3 of the broadcast
  • mp3 of the broadcast (alternate source)

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