JohnBs personal blog

So it seems in their wisdom ICANN has voted to relax the strict rules on the top level domains, ie .com, .uk etc meaning now that anything could become a tld, so I could register a domain ‘bah’ – so my web address could be http://foo.bah (as long as I can show a business plan and technical capacity???? That’s some requirement!!!)

Great idea – but what about email addresses? – Of course I’ll want to use my shiney new domain to host my email and I’ll want it to be foo@bah – I bet there’s not a single site out there that would let me register with that as my email address – let alone mail server/application that let’s me set that as my email alias!

Better get on with fixing it guys, it’s going to be here next year!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7475986.stm

Top Gear returned to our screens on Sunday night with many stories about the current fuel prices. In one of the stories the fuel economy of a 4 lt BMW M3 was pitched again a 1.5lt Toyota Prius. Each car had to do 10 laps of the track, the Prius was at full bore whilst the BMW had to remain behind the Prius – it turns out that the BMW is more fuel economical than the Prius! Not to mention the enormous distances the materials that go into the Prius travel.

What I (and many others I imagine) found to probably be the most useful Firefox tool, Google Browser Sync will not be developed any further - so no Firefox 3 support.

I had hoped that the Browser Sync team were just being slow off the mark to get a Firefox 3 compatible version out the door but this now confirms that it’s a dead project.

There are few alternatives of course, at the minute I’ve changed over to using Foxmarks which seems to do a pretty good job. Whilst coming down the pipeline Mozilla Weave (and here) looks like a pretty sweet almost direct replacement for Browser Sync.

Read more here.

ok, so first off - look at this web page.

It’s a web page for ‘Deaf and Hard of hearing people’ and it has videos of a lady doing sign language of the text…

Am I missing something? Deaf people can read - so what’s with need for the special page? Or is it just a triumph of a salesman and the ultimate in accessibility?

A week ago today I, almost to the minute I returned from lunch to find my (new) Dell XPS M1530 laptop (Vista) wouldn’t let me log in so i had to hard reset it, only to find it had suffered from a corrupt disc - a few hours later of running SpinRite I had a working system again. It’s ironic since Kroll Ontrack Data Recovery are in the same building, directly opposite us and people spend a fortune (£1k+ for data recovery) - they should try SpinRite. Anyhow, I digress.

You’d have thought that the period beep (and i mean beep) that my hard drive occasionally omitted, or the loud clunk too would have made me aware that my hard drive was definitely suspect - but no….so I logged a support call with Dell and on Monday morning had a new replacement drive sitting on my desk at 9am (great job guys!).

I’m been dabbling with Ubuntu, both as a WUBI installation and a partition prior to my drive failure so went ahead and installed 64 bit Ubuntu on the entire new disc, along with an XP VirtualBox machine. I soon had everything up and running, Evolution Mail work just fine with Exchange, Eclipse + Aptana plugin + CF Eclipse etc etc - but the one thing that meant I’m now back running Vista - dual screens. Either I missed something completely or dual screen support on Linux sucks - especially if your two screen differ in size (laptop is 1280×800, lcd is 1280×1024). I got it partially working using 2 X-Server sessions at the correct resolution but couldn’t drag windows between the sessions - did i miss something that would have just made it work as on Windows or is multi monitor support on Linux just naff?

http://www.moanmyip.com/ - enough said - I guess it’s one way of finding out your IP address….ps, turn your volume down

Thanks to my new desk neighbour Neil I’m trying to (re)discover what Twitter can do for me. I’ve been using Google Apps now for quite a while on this domain for Google Mail, Docs etc I’ve been using GTalk and it’s been working fine talking to existing Google Apps users and normal Google users but today I tried added the twitter bot, twitter@twitter.com with no success. It is supposed to authorize you straight away but I was having no such luck - so time for some digging.

It turns out that it’s pretty well documented, here and here - but what the heck are these SRV records, I’ve seen them but never used them before. Anyhow, I needed to add a few records to the DNS for beynon.org.uk - I’m use Windows DNS to manage my own DNS here’s what I ended up adding;

here’s the property tab for the record (click for larger image)

it wasn’t clear from the documentation how you add the first part of the record ie. _xmpp-server._tcp.yourDomainName.com on Windows DNS. Turns out you just need to edit the service field to be _xmpp-server, select _tcp as the protocol - you don’t need to enter your domain name anywhere.

Hope that helps someone.

As I posted on Saturday I managed to pick up Wii Fit on Friday when it released here in the UK (damn, April has been an expensive Wii month what with both Mario Kart and Wii Fit releasing).

So is it any good? Well so far I can certainly feel it working. You start off with a centre of gravity test followed by a body test, you enter your height - it measures your weight and then tells you your BMI. Then the fun starts - you set a goal, telling it how much weight you want to loose over what period so it then tells you how much you have to loose per week…

Now for the activities. They are broken down into various categories, yoga, muscle workouts, aerobic Exercises, balance exercises. I’ll skip the first two, and talk more about the latter.

Aerobic exercises starts with Hula Hoop. It sounds silly but boy does it work - standing on the board you have to move you hips to get the hula hoop spinning whilst Mii’s throw additional Hula Hoops at you to catch and then get them spinning - time is ticking down and the number of spins is measured, I’m currently maxing out at 292 spins. Also in this category there’s Step (think Dance mat - on/off the balance board), Jogging - this is suprisingly effective with the wiimote in your back pocket and running on the spot….about another half dozen activities to unlock mind you.

Under balance, skiing - definitely harder than it sounds, ski jumping (crouch then extend) - and the table top. On the screen is a table with a hole(s) in it and you have to move your weight on the board to get the balls to fall through without them falling off the edge. And just like Aerobic, plenty more activities to unlock.

I think I need to get my other half off it now so I can have another go….

I recently received an invite for Woopra (woopra.com) - think live Google Analytics. It comes with a desktop app for Windows, MAC and Linux. Here’s what i’m currently seeing, click for a bigger image. Once I’ve got some more data in it, I’ll post a more thorough review.

Despite all the usual online outlets of Wii games being out of stock and only taking limit preorders, I was able to walk into my local Gamestation and but Wii fit as a surprise for my other half. Only managed a few games on it last night but boy can you feel what it’s doing - i’ll cover it in more detail after the weekened when i’ve had more opportunity to play….erm, excercise.