Category Archives: Internet

Lost in translation

Welsh translationNews that council workers in Wales sent an email request to their translation officer to translate the English “No entry for heavy goods vehicles”… what they got in reply was an Out Of Office reply in Welsh, but not realising, they printed that on the sign.

So the Welsh part of the sign reads: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.”

Youtube RSS feeds

It's not widely publicised, but Youtube publishes RSS feeds so you can track the latest uploaded videos from your favourite users.

They take the form: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/USER/uploads

Quite handy at times.

McCain vs Obama.com

johnmccain.com and barackobama.com are both registered with GoDaddy, but McCain appears to have registered through GoDaddy India via Domains By Proxy… (Why does his campaign need to use Domains By Proxy, which is designed for anonymous domain registration? Maybe they just love outsourcing?)

JohnMcCain.com has been around since 1998; BarackObama.com since 2000.

McCain uses IIS running on Linux (?). Obama uses PWS running on Linux.

And the running mates? joebiden.com has been around since 1998; sarahpalin.com is not owned by the campaign, but is registered through the same proxy company as McCain.

Sarah runs Linux with Frontpage extensions (yeuch!); Biden’s running Apache.

Westpac banking online is broken

I’ve been handling my dad’s banking. Westpac banking online really needs some work.

The logon uses one of those awful click on the buttons to enter your password interfaces. C’mon, is keylogging really that big a problem? What about people watching you individually click each on-screen button?

The logon asks if you’re a personal or a business account. The bank lady explained that for some reason the account I’m using is business. If I forget to change it from the default Personal, but it hardly seems to make any difference. The colour scheme is slightly different, a few of the buttons are re-arranged and some extra options are available. All fine, but why ask me this in the first place? Can’t the system work that out based on the account number?

It’s broken in Firefox. The menus disappear under other elements, making it very difficult to click on things sometimes. Looks positively wizard in IE6, of course.

If you go into some screens, it insists it wants the password when you’re finished. Stupid.

It keeps badgering me to stop receiving paper statements, but when I try that option, it tells me the account is ineligible.

Mind you, I don’t remember seeing any of these paper statements, so Lord knows where they’re going to. I can’t find an option to view or change the postal address.

I looked for ages, and I couldn’t figure out where to order a chequebook. The Help feature was useless. I hope this doesn’t mean I have to go into a branch.

The basics like BPay and funds transfer work, but jeez, this could do with some work.

Chrome initial impressions

Initial impressions of Chrome.

Don’t mind the interface, but did we really need another non-OS-standard Close button?

Seems to periodically pause, doing something under the hood. At first I thought half my tabs had crashed.

Renders nicely.

Has problems playing YouTube videos. Embedded clips don’t display. On Youtube itself, it says “Video not available”, even when it is. Umm, this is owned by Google. Odd.

OK with other Flash stuff though.

I kinda like the status bar which vanishes when you don’t need it.

Like the Home (most frequently visited pages) view, but how do I get back to it?!

Will keep playing as time allows.

Larry Dignan on ZDNet — Chrome first impressions

4:15pm. I was having trouble with both Youtube and Facebook claiming not to be available. Right now, www.youtube.com works (but only with the www), but claims every video is unavailable. www.facebook.com works (again, with the www), but fails during the logon process. Surely it can’t be some scheme to stop me wasting time?

For some reason it installs the application just for one user, into C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application … which means I’m going to have to jump through some hoops to get it installed for the kids on their user accounts.

Spam bounces

I’ve been getting an extraordinary amount of spam bounce email. One mailbox got thousands and thousands over the weekend, and I know I’m not the only one.

Which means of course that my address is being used in vain by some git of a spammer.

Unfortunately my spam detection software isn’t so crash hot on zapping the bounces, because it’s a bounce, not an actual spam message. And there’s probably not much to be done about spammers forging my address.

After trying in vain to keep up with it all, I eventually blocked the common bounce From address, by adding them to the Plesk blacklist:

mailer-daemon@*
postmaster@*

Hardly ideal, since I’d never see genuine bounces. But it has slowed the flow.

What’s annoying is that about 10-20% of bounces come from a myriad of other addresses. These include the intended recipient’s address, and a variety of apparently semi-random addresses set up as support emails or automatic bounce processes.

There’s also a smattering of “MAILER-DAEMON@” — which isn’t even a legal address. And a lot of them come in with no date field. Very dodgy!

HOW ABOUT SOME STANDARDISATION, PEOPLE?

And maybe it’s time someone came up with a viable way of verifying sender addresses, and stopping From address fraud.

GMaps parseable locations

Trying to make location descriptions parseable in Google Maps (eg for putting in Google Calendar)?

Include the state and country, even abbreviated, so it doesn't default to DefaultTown, USA. And put the human-descriptive bit of it in parenthesis. After the computer-parseable bit of the address works okay.

So even though the locals will know exactly what y

ou mean, don't use: Parliament House, Melbourne

Instead do something more like this: Corner Bourke and Spring Street, Melbourne, Vic, AU (Parliament House), which GMaps can accurately map and point to — and nicely puts your (Title) in a big font.

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