May 15
I today received an email from Dyn (previously DynDNS), stating:
Starting now, if you would like to maintain your free Dyn account, you must log into your account once a month. Failure to do so will result in expiration and loss of your hostname. Note that using an update client will no longer suffice for this monthly login.
(emphasis theirs)
Now, if this were a service which requires interaction then this would be an unfriendly but potentially fair way to weed-out inactive accounts. This isn’t one of those cases, though – I can happily go for months or even years where my only interaction with Dyn(DNS) is via auto-update clients. And this is the heart of the problem – many routers and embedded devices have built-in DynDNS clients, frequently with no option to switch to an alternative service. Possibly this is worth $25/year, possibly it isn’t. Personally, I’m not paying a penny to a company trying to hold its users to ransom like this. For my usage, there are a handful for hostnames in a Dyn(DNS) domain – and therefore these cannot to transferred to a different provider. I keep them going purely so that historic links will still work.
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Mar 23
For what must be many months now, my local installation of WordPress has been hassling me to install the Jetpack plugin.
It sounded sorta useful, so I dutifully clicked on Install and was told:
register_http_request_failed
… with a ‘GnuTLS recv error (-9): A TLS packet with unexpected length was received.‘ error.
Having looked around to try to find a solution, the only suggestion appeared to be to rebuild PHP or to wait for the stabilisation of the newest PHP development branch. This turns out to be wrong, however, and the solution is both simple and maddening…
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Jan 08
Hotmailers Hawking Hoax Hunan Half-Offs
Server seems to be coping for now (and saying that’s likely the kiss of death…)
Original post here – be gentle 
Oct 12
Well, how do you read this?!
Click to enlarge
Apr 06
Yesterday, April 5th 2009 at approximately 4:30pm (BST), several messages were sent from my HoTMaiL account to every single one of my MSN contacts. Luckily, this account is long-dormant – but unfortunately, Windows Live operates a shared list of contacts between Mail and Messenger (which I do still use, for my sins).
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Feb 10
We’ve recently been working on remodelling our corporate website, and the decision has been made to make use of the SilverStripe CMS.
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Oct 27
I’ve just added a new top-level page named Downloads in a first-pass attempt to provide the framework to allow the migration of all of the data from my (old, off-line) O2 server to this new Mini-ITX system. For nostalgia purposes, I’ll probably migrate all of the content at some point in the future – but right now the downloadable content is probably the most relevant.
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Aug 06
I have a somewhat complex home network setup consisting of seperate 802.11n and 802.11b/g wireless routers, HomePlug AV (which is supposed to present a maximum throughput of 200Mb/s to 100Mb ethernet jacks), and a mixture of gigabit ethernet and fast ethernet devices – but I’ve never actually checked to see how these connection methods differ.
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Jul 15
I noticed recently that when certain house-mates turned on their computers, suddenly my internet connection would become very slow and highly unreliable – ah, the joys of Bittorrent and P2P traffic <sigh>
Rather than just trying to ban people from using these services (like that’d ever work… and anyway, BitTorrent has legitimate uses and they’re all paying towards the cost of the connection anyway, so it’s not my place to get all dictatorial) I decided to be a bit smarter: a packet-filtering system which can prioritise certain traffic whilst holding-back other types would not only allow people to run P2P software with abandon, but also keep everyone’s connection steaming along whilst hopefully improving subjective responsiveness.
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