Technology

Apologies to those wondering about the lack of updates of late, it was due to a couple of server moves and an incompetent ISP.

After much investigation, and a push from my old ISP courtesy of poor service, I opted for iiNet. However, the site hosting had just been paid for the year and was still with the original ISP.

Wait for it, this does have something to do with the site being brunk for over a week.

I asked old ISP to send my domain mail through to my new ISP, which I though was a simple enough task. It did happen, with much grumbling and it was suggested that as the server the site lived on at the old ISP was old and unstable, perhaps I would like to be swapped over to a shiny new server with cPanel at no charge. Why not.

Site got moved, ran the check utility for MT and found some missing perl modules. Old ISP has not been able to install basic perl modules in a week. On top of that my webspace and bandwidth were a hell of a lot less on the new server than on the old.

Back into research mode and a bit of poking around on the MT support forum found a thread of MT friendly hosts. Decided on Total Choice Hosting, as they seemed to have a lot of happy MT customers. Signed up yesterday, account was confirmed overnight, spent the day uploading files and redelegating the domain, by the time I got home the domain delegation had gone through and I’ve just been rebuilding the site.

And why, I hear you ask, am I rebuilding the site? Because old ISP was incapable of porting my original database from the old server to the new server. That’s one blog rebuilt and three more to go. Never have I been more happy that the old server couldn’t manage PHP archive pages, it meant that while the site was not functioning, it was at least accessible. And as a bonus it kept the comment spamming scum at bay for a while.

Update: That’s the last of the blogs rebuilt. From signup to completion was about 36 hours, I wasn’t at it continuously, which is quite a difference from the week down and still counting to install the missing perl modules at the old ISP.

Australia’s communications watchdog is investigating the Liberal Party over Prime Minister John Howard‘s pre-recorded phone messages used to bombard households during the federal election campaign

Scientists at The Digital Evolution Lab at Michigan State University have created virus-like computer programs that replicate, mutate randomly, and compete with each other… in other words, they evolve. Among such feats as learning to add and compare numbers, these digital life forms also once avoided scientists attempts at killing them, by playing dead. You can download the project from SourceForge

Telstra will not build its planned multi-billion-dollar residential fibre-optic network — designed to replace copper lines over the next two decades — without iron-clad guarantees from the competition regulator, but will consider partnering with rivals for the project

Slate’s Paul Boutin reports on the sordid history of the oldest scam on the Internet. For almost as long as the Web has existed, there’s been a thriving economy of sites, services, and software vying to grab you as soon as you mistype an URL. Studies estimate that 10-20% of all hand-entered URLs are mistyped, adding up to at least 20 million wrong numbers per day, helping to enrich the likes of porn purveyors, ISPs, Paxfire, Microsoft and VeriSign

Wiki Media Foundation, the group behind the Wikipedia online encyclopedia project, said Friday that search giant Google has volunteered to host some of its content on company servers

A newly found security flaw in popular browsers, including Firefox and Opera, could be exploited by hackers to carry out phishing scams, security experts have warned

If you think you’re safe from identity theft, take your eye off your PC and make sure you know where your wallet is. That’s because a new survey has found that you may have more to worry about from careless paper management than from evil online forces

Mark Jen, a blogger whose candid comments about life on the job at Google sparked controversy last month, has left the company. It is not clear if he resigned or was fired but references a post at Google Blogoscoped where it was suggested that he may have been fired over his blog Ninetyninezeros. Given Google’s push into the blogging space with their recent acquisition of Blogger it might be interesting to see how this shakes out

Why is this not a surprise? The cleaning done, now About.com is for sale, according to NYT. The asking price is $350 million to $500 million. Five companies are bidding for it and the bids close today: bidders are Google, Yahoo, The New York Times Company, AOL and AskJeeves — via paidContent.org

A microchip so powerful that it could turn mobile phones into pocket-sized desktop computers has been unveiled by Sony, Toshiba and IBM. Ten times faster than its rivals, the new Cell microprocessor is being billed as the world’s first super computer on a chip, it will be used in the new Sony Playstation 3 due out next year

Gmail, the Web mail service operated by search engine Google, could be gearing up for its official launch after users of the service found that the number of invitations they could send out increased from four to fifty

A recent independent report did a hatchet job on municipal wireless networks, damning them as an expensive failure. Glenn Fleishman took the report to pieces in a series of long blog-posts, exposing its shoddy methodology and dubious provenance. Now he reports that the organisation that produced it, the New Millennium Research Council, is a front for the telecoms lobby — via BoingBoing

Eureka Aerospace in Pasadena is developing a High Power Electromagnetic System that can fry a vehicle’s microchips and slow cars to a halt — it leaves the suspect in control of the car; he can steer, he can brake, he just can’t accelerate. The antenna array could be mounted on police pursuit vehicles or helicopters. It’s slated to be ready for testing by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department by late summer — via BoingBoing

Toronto police have found a new application for computerized photo editing. The police released edited photos on 3 February from a series of child pornography pics in an attempt to locate where the photos may have been taken. Two days later, they have identified the Port Orleans hotel in Disney World as being the location. This seems to be the first time photo editing has been used in law enforcement this way and strikes an interesting line between protecting the victims and being able to get public tips. It looks like it may be used quite heavily in the future given this success. The girl from the photographs has been found and is safe. Her abusive adoptive father is already in jail for other child porn charges, and may face more time for the Disney World photos

Fuji Photo and CMC Magnentics are two of six companies, who have formed a consortium to promote HVD technology, which they say can be used to put 1TB of data onto just one disc. The consortium say that a HVD disc could hold about 200 standard DVD’s, and transfer data at speeds 40 times that of DVD, about 1GB per second. HVD is being seen as a possible successor to Blu-ray and HD-DVD technologies

Sunbird, Mozilla’s standalone cross-platform calendar project, has reached its first official relase: version 0.2, for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. This is good news for all of us waiting for decent free calendaring software