Category Archives: Internet

Google Talk

Google have launched Google Talk, a chat service that uses GMail logon/password for authentication, and supports instant messaging and voice.

It uses the XMPP protocol for instant messaging, so other clients can connect (including those on non-Windows platforms that their client doesn’t support yet), and they say they will support SIP in future for voice.

Now… why wasn’t this included with their Desktop sidebar? That would be one killer helper app. Not that I’m convinced the world needed another IM network.

Google Desktop V 2

Go download the new Google Desktop Search and run it in side bar mode.

I’m playing with it now and it’s pretty cool. It offers way too many things I’ll never use or simply don’t need (photo slide show, ‘web clips’ – come on, just call it RSS and be done with it, no weather for non-US cities, ‘what’s hot’) and some nifty features (check the Quick Find feature and the Outlook integration along with a great little scratch pad) in a download that now works with VET anti-virus programs.

MSN Desktop Search is a far more elegant search application and much more focused – it searches your stuff, and searches it well but for sheer geek fun Google delivers.

IE’s float/margin bug

I’m at home today working on a new WordPress site… just came across the glorious IE Float/Margin bug. Thankfully there are a couple of workarounds, one involving putting an extra Div around the troublesome ones, the other involving a harmless display: inline attribute.

I also note that when wrangling with a CSS file and WordPress, continually tweaking, uploading the tweaked file, then re-loading the browser page, Firefox handles it fine and refreshes completely. IE doesn’t; sometimes it’ll only do a partial refresh, and chokes on something, which in my case means my navigation bar disappearing until I re-load via a link. Very odd.

Five years and counting

My favourite Mozilla bug, the cropping of “title” attribute tooltips, recently turned five. That is, it is now more than five years since the bug was originally reported. A flurry of new discussion has popped up around it, with some people strenuously arguing that tooltips should be cropped, as they were never intended to hold long strings of text, and people can’t read a lot of text in the six seconds displayed.

Pah, to hell with that. At least if all the text is displayed, the user has the choice of reading it or not. And it could be an option in about:config if it were that worrisome to the Inquisition. It’s not even as if the web standards spell out that the text should be cropped at a particular point.

Until bugs like this are fixed (without users having to install a separate fix such as PopupAlt), it’s hard to justify pushing Firefox onto everyday users.

(My original rant on this bug)

Google blacklists CNet

Google blacklists CNet, saying they won’t talk to news.com reporters for a year, in reaction to a news.com story that highlighted various information about Google CEO Eric Schmidt that could be considered sensitive, but was found through Google itself.

It’s interesting, because it seems so at odds with Google’s cleancut friendly image. I suppose it was a bit cheeky of CNet to use a Google executive as the subject of its searches, but the proliferation of personal information on Google and elsewhere on the Net is an important subject.

And if you’re wondering, yes, you can find this story in Google news.

(BTW, Lucas Heights nuclear reactor are nervous about Google Earth, though the Federal government doesn’t seem too concerned.)

Two things Google can do better

Google r0x0rs. Utterly. But there’s a couple of things they can improve.

If they’re clever, they should read sites like those done on WordPress and work out how to index the content at the permalinks, rather than the front page, so that people can find content on sites that have frequently updating front pages. Example: Geekrant is currently top hit for “melbourne itrip frequency”, but it’s pointing to the front page, and is no longer on the first screenful. It will have fallen off the front page in the next few days.

They need to realise that sites hosted in country X are not necessarily about, native to, or located in country X. A better way would be to check the country of the admin contact of the domain. (Tony mentioned an example of a .co.uk site he did for somebody; it hardly rated on Google UK until he moved the physical hosting to the UK.)

Stopping WordPress spammers

The blog comment/trackback anti-spam refinement continues.

I’m testing the WP-Hashcash plugin, which inserts Javascript code to calculate an authorisation code into the comment. Since comment spammers don’t actually use the comment forms (at least I hope not; not until they start using people to enter the comments), this means only real comments get through. Well, real comments from people with Javascript running. If they don’t have Javascript running, they may be out of luck. Hopefully that applies to nobody these days, and I think this solution is less painful than a captcha-based one.

But trackback spam is still a problem. One available option is to block direct access to the WordPress trackback PHP, but this isn’t very effective, since most current trackback spammers however are clever enough to call the “real” URL.

A version of Auto shutoff comments modified to close trackbacks on posts older than 28 days, however, seems more effective. I don’t particularly want to shut comments off (especially since the above plugin effectively stops comment spam), but trackbacks are less compelling to keep open.

Together with previously discussed .htaccess entries to block big bandwidth thieves, this appears to be a fairly effective set of anti-blog spam measures. For now.

Scoble vs Register

Reg: IE7 beta 1 breaks third-party toolbars!

Scoble: Only old versions of toolbars. It doesn’t break new ones.

Reg: Yes it does!

Scoble: No it doesn’t!

Reg: Yes it does!

Scoble: No it doesn’t!

Reg: Yes it does, you said it does!

And they quote an email from Scoble that is without any context, and thus proves nothing, unless you assume that the content of the email is directly in reply to the subject line. And now Scoble claims the mail isn’t real.

(Oh yeah, the recipient of the email gave the Reg permission to publish it. That’s nice. Shame the recipient doesn’t own the copyright; Scoble does. Well, if it’s real.)

Orlowski at the Reg then speculates that this somehow means the end of Scoble’s Microsoft blogging career. Talk about drawing a long bow.

Guys, IE7 is a beta. The first beta. You can expect this kind of stuff in a beta, and provided MS have pledged to fix the issues, it doesn’t matter one jot. I’d be more concerned so little progress has been made on standards-conformance, and why they put out a beta before doing more on this.

Monday snippets

From the forthcoming book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, here’s an article about how Google got started.

How to deploy Visual Studio .Net applications to Linux. (via Brad)

Now maybe I can sell off my old BBC B, once I get a Beeb emulator working. Shame I might never recover my old Ultima clone that some friends and I were working on in 1988.

More from George

More goodness from George Skarbek’s column in The Age (19-Jul-2005).

A punter asks George about sending large files across the net. One suggestion is to set up a web host, and the reader is sent off to GoDaddy to find out about domain names and hosting fees, and even ponders if a web server should be set up on their own computer. Uhh, but these days but most ISPs provide a basic web hosting facility, good enough as a drop point for leaving big files… surely it’s better to look at this first? Not to mention the many online storage services, such as Yahoo Briefcase.

A question about whether one should turn on IE’s “Do not save encrypted pages to disk” option comes up with some gibberish about “static web pages and dynamic data”. Eh? The point of this option is explained in IE’s help: it avoids the browser saving the pages onto the hard disk where they might be snooped upon by other users on the same computer. Since an HTML page is plain text, and depending on the site used, user or session IDs or even passwords could be embedded in the HTML, in some environments it might be desirable to not save this in the cache.

(Don’t get me wrong; most of George’s answers are spot on. Just a few that haven’t quite lived up to expectations, and it’s been bugging me a bit…)

Slow SSL on Fedora

So, I’ve been using Fedora Core 3 (I really must upgrade to 4) and I’ve noticed that SSL – ie HTTPS – is really slow. Logging into eBay took something like a half hour. I consulted someone who uses FC3 as their primary operating system and his suggestion was to disable the firewall. “but…” I protested. The response was simple: “Stop being such a pussy. You’ve got a firewall in your modem.” And I do.

So I did – Applications | System Settings | Security Level got me to firewall configuration, one option of which was “forgetaboudit”. A reboot of the iptables (iptables is the linux firewall: very sophisticated, very powerful, very fragile, requires a detailed understanding of IP protocols to use correctly) later – either by a command line entry (simple – just enter service iptables restart) or a system reboot (easy to remember, but takes a fair old time – FC boot time is longer than XP’s) and the firewall’s behaviour was changed. Then secure logins went just as fast as straight HTTP, and it was clear that the Red Hat Firewall was the culprit.

Hours of searching the web revealed a suggestion for a change to the configuration file, which I went to implement in a restarted firewall – and it was already there. So, to make Firefox – or any other web browser – do fast SSL when it was going slow – you need to disable, then re-enable the firewall. You can do that by picking Applications | System Settings | Security Level from the menu, disabling the firewall, opening a terminal window and entering service iptables restart, and repeating the process but enabling the firewall this time (ensure you have web turned on).

In FC3 the default firewall install doesn’t like HTTPS. And I thought Windows was freaky. I understand the FC4 doesn’t do this crazy shit.