stuart test blog

I’ve just created a new site called Blogtown (blogtown.co.nz) – the aim is to create a free blogging service for people in New Zealand. The site is fully funtional but is still being tested, so I’m only making the service available by invitation only.

I’m using WordPress MU, which is a multi-user version of the popular blogging software, WordPress (which also runs this site.) The themes that I have made available to end-users are customised to include discrete, Google Adsense ads at the top of each page which should cover the costs or running the site. Future plans are to include premium features that will be available for a monthly fee, such as photo albums or other plugins.

If you live in NZ and would like to test out the site with your own free account – please send an email to [email protected]. When you get set up, you’ll get a username.blogtown.co.nz web address for your blog.

Ars Technica have just produced another high quality review, this one looking in depth at the iPod Nano. Highlights of the article include the stress testing and the subsequent autopsy of the iPod. Educational stuff…

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/nano.ars/1

Read this on the Engadget website, as a current Skype user it will be interesting to see what eBay is going to do with Skype. Not sure if I’m that keen on it to tell the truth – at least there are a few other options out there now, like Gizmo or Google Talk.

Yup, it’s happened: eBay just bought Skype. The price? An astoundingly ridiculous $1.3 billion in cash and 32.4 million shares of eBay stock for a company which expects to make only $60 million dollars this year. But, hey, it’s eBay’s money to spend as it pleases, and in the press release they describe their plans to begin integrating Skype into eBay auctions in order to ‘streamline and improve communications between buyers and sellers’ as well as their intent to combine Skype with PayPal to ‘pursue entirely new lines of business’ that would monetize ‘ecommerce communications’ on a ‘pay-per-call basis.’ Rockin’, we guess.

Just noticed that Thunderbird 1.5 Beta 1 has also been released so I’ve downloaded and installed it and will give it a good testing over the next couple of weeks. First impressions:

• Offline support has been removed from the installation options, this is now part of the standard build
• Product version shows up as Thunderbird 1.4 after installation – this must be an internal product version.
• Options dialog is the same as the new Firefox beta 1, with the category icons at the top of the box.
• New feature – Spell as you type. Works very well, leaves a faint, dotted, red line beneath incorrectly spelled words – right-clicking the word presents the choices of new words.
• While testing the new spelling feature, I downloaded the English (New Zealand) dictionary which comes in the form of an XPI extension. Interestingly, after installing the extension using the Extensions dialog box, Thunderbird didn’t need to be restarted for it to take effect. I wonder if Firefox works like this too..?
• New feature – Email scams. “Thunderbird can analyze messages for possible email scams by looking for common techniques used to deceive you.” I guess this is also know as anti-phishing…
• New feature – Anti-virus. “Thunderbird can make it easy for anti-virus software to analyze incoming mail messages for viruses before they are stored locally.” This sounds like an interesting new feature, not sure how it would work though?

Wow – some excellent new features in there and that was only after 10 minutes of poking around!

I’ve been using the new beta 1 version of Firefox 1.5 since it came out and so far I’m impressed. It’s extremely stable for a beta 1 product, and although you don’t notice any significant changes at first, there’s definitely been a whole heap of changes made under the hood.

The first thing you notice when you install beta 1 is that you will probably get told that your existing plugins aren’t compatible with the new Firefox. I was running All-in-one Gestures and the official Google Toolbar, and neither were compatible. Once installed I headed straight for the Options to see what has changed there – and this is the first big sign of the new version as shown here:

The actual options are all very similar to the previous version, but they are now laid out with the categories at the top. A new feature is the “Clear Private Data” locate under the tools menu. Clicking on this option opens the following box which is fairly self-explanatory:

Another new feature which I definitely like, is the new error pages for display on 404 errors and the like. This takes away the annoying pop-up boxes that show up in the previous version.

Not sure what my favourite new feature is yet, but another cool feature which I love is the ability to drag and drop tabs so that you can change the order of them. I often have ten to twenty tabs open at a time and it really helps to be able to move them around. So far, I’m really enjoying the new beta 1 and I haven’t found anything wrong with yet – I definitely recommend downloading and testing it today!

While I was looking at all the iPod news I downloaded the latest version of iTunes to see what all the hype was about. I’ve used it in the past but never really liked it that much – I just assumed that you would only use it to sync to your iPod. Version 5 of iTunes is actually very good I have been enjoying using it and have been digging up tracks that I haven’t played for ages because of it’s ease of use. But the feature that I found the most useful – is the ability to share your music library between computers on the same network. With my two laptops and two desktop computers, I often need to access tracks stored on the network and have never found a good way to do this. I’m not sure if this is a new feature in iTunes or not, but it makes it well worth the download for this feature alone.

I’m still using Windows Media Player which is far better than iTunes at organising your music library – it’s much easier to edit tags and to download album art. But iTunes beats WMP hands-down at playing music – the visualisations are much smoother and colourful, and it’s much easier to browse music in the library. Hopefully I’ll get my iPod Nano soon which I’ll be able to sync with iTunes too.

I still haven’t bought an MP3 player – I haven’t yet found that perfect player which balances size, features, capacity, and performance. That’s all changed now with the release of the iPod Nano! This device looks incredible – thinner than a pencil and only slightly longer than an iPod Shuffle, it has a beautiful colour screen and the device comes in standard iPod white as well as a sleek looking black. Maximum capacity is only 4GB but what do you expect from an MP3 player this small? The only issue I have with it at the moment is the price… The price listed on the US Apple website is $249.00 with free shipping – this converts to just over $350 NZD which I think is quite reasonable and definitely within my budget. On the NZ Apple website however, the price is $419.00 + $20 shipping bringing it to a total of $439 – almost $90 more expensive! Unfortunately the US site won’t ship internationally so I guess I’ll have to wait and see if the price will change at all over the next month or so.

It’s been a while since I last posted – the last two months have been pretty hectic but things are starting to settle down now. The first cause of this busy period was the fact that I accepted a job offer and thus handed in my resignation at DTSL. So I completed my notice period at DTSL and managed to squeeze in three months of projects into four weeks – along with trying to catch up on documentation and admin stuff. I also managed to fit in a trip up to Auckland to do a file/print/Exchange migration project.

The new job is at Datacom Systems Ltd as a Technical Consultant. I started on the 15th August and will be focusing mainly on the Citrix side of things initially. I have just completed my fourth week now and have been working on a nation-wide Citrix migration at the Ministry of Education. It’s been a good experience for me as I’m getting exposure to much larger and complex environments.

So although I’ve settled in nicely now and fitted into a good routine, the next couple of months look like they will be pretty busy as I try to get all of my certifications up to date. First goal is to finish off the two last exams required for MCSE, after which I’ll be looking to move up to the CCIA certification. There aren’t too many people in New Zealand with the CCIA qualification so it will definitely be good for me to get this before the end of the year. The good thing about all the studying I’ll be doing is that I’ll have a chance to save up some money for the Christmas season!!

I’ve taken down the photo album from this site after my bandwidth was hammered by googlebots. The photo album was a mirror of the one on our www.debandstu.co.nz site so the googlebots were downloading the same information twice. Actually the entire album got indexed four times as it was also possible to get to it using the /gallery2 virtual directory…

So if you’d like to have a look at some of our photos, head over to www.debandstu.co.nz, especially the photos of our new kittens!

Side note – I’ve also now added a robots.txt to the site to exclude the /gallery2 sub-directory, I recommend everyone reads up on the robots.txt file and how it can help your site too.

I’ve just been reading an interesting article on the Ars Technica website about how the copy protection that is being used on new CD’s is making it harder for honest people to enjoy their music while doing nothing to prevent piracy.

This is something I’ve agreed with for some time now – pirates will always find a way to hack around the various DRM’s in use, but honest music fans find out that the CD they just bought won’t play on their Ipod or laptop. I recently bought the new Coldplay album, X&Y, only to find out that when I inserted it into my laptop it tried to autorun an application of some kind. Now this has to be the ridiculous (and ineffective) kind of protection – all I did was press cancel on the autorun application, then opened Windows Media Player (famous for its strict copy protection) and was able to rip the tracks in unprotected mp3 format. According to some sites the ripped mp3’s are supposed to have clicks and jumps in the tracks but I haven’t noticed anything yet.

Apparently, (according to the Ars Technica article) the new Foo Fighters album uses Windows Media DRM. Ipod users who have legitimately bought the album are now discovering that they can’t sync the tracks with iTunes because it will only play in Windows Media Player. So their only options to get the tracks on their iPod is to break the law and try to work around the DRM. Coincidentally, the most illegally downloaded song at the moment is the new Foo Fighters song, Best of Me – perhaps its the iPod owners wanting a way to get it onto their iPod.

I think the only way to counter these forms of protection is to boycott any CD’s that use ridiculous copy protection. These CD’s should indicate on the cover that they are using some form of copy protection so always have a look before you purchase your next CD. Also, you’ll notice that discs that do use copy protection won’t carry the official CD logo,
so when you buy an album with copy protection, you’re not actually buying a Compact Disc: