Mr Mist’s Blog

Yes it seems I am being quite techy this last week, fiddling about with internet hosts and stuff. Both providers are pretty good on first impressions. It’s going to take me a while to set anything proper up on either of them - especially the dedicated box as that needs me to tinker with it a lot. Well, it doesn’t really need that as it comes fairly well set up, but I desire to tinker. I have forgotten how you can spend ages just fiddling with various different settings on Linux boxes. I think I’ve sorted out the qmail stuff and now I need to have a crack at getting Apache to handle the cgi requests properly. Currently it is not doing so well. Hmm. It’s all quite geeky.

I’m currently experiementing with different web hosts. So this all might change over to elsewhere, or it might not, depending on how good they are. I’ve so far arranged stuff from QIQ and OVH.

So far, OVH is laging behind, because despite a 1 hour suggestion on their website it’s been a day, whereas the QiQ stuff was set up pretty instantly. We’ll see what happens next with that I suppose. Not that there’s particularly anything wrong with my current hosts, but lately things have been a bit slow online so it’s worth casting around. Edit - The OVH server is ready, just took a little nudging.

So we didn’t win the 90 million pound Euromillions jackpot the other week. Man that was unexpected, I felt sure of a win. Ahh well. In the absence of that life carried on as normal. It was valentine’s day this week, so that involved the traditional sharing of cutsey gifts. Funnily, the traditional shops such as Thorntons were all crammed full of much more people than normal. I could not explain this.

In other events, I have been looking at the BBC IPlayer [www.bbc.co.uk] as I thought it might be a neat way of watching missed stuff, but it seems that it uses the same hidden PTP technology as the 4OD stuff does, and numerous folk have said that it uploads the content even when you have turned off the IPlayer, using up all your bandwidth and CPU. There is a configurable options page that tells the system not to share files, but it doesn’t seem to do anything so you have to work around it like this chap did.

The whole thing is troubling. I mean, I like the idea of the content on demand, and peer-to-peer seems a reasonable distribution method, but you have to allow the users to control the sharing. Simply having the service take over the computer at its whim is not acceptable. I hope this gets sorted for future, better, releases - but seeing as how it hasn’t been sorted in the time frame between 4OD and IPlayer I won’t hold my breath.

There is a page about the IPlayer etc. and links to how to remove the kservice here.

Not quite sure why I got on to that rant, but there you go

As Polaroid ceases production of its film [news.bbc.co.uk]. Stocks are expected to see the year out, but then that will be that, unless some other company licenses the technology. The format war in this case has landed quite firmly in the digital camp, with Polaroid moving their focus onto digital devices. I never had a Polaroid myself, but they are [were] quite funky.

Looks like there is a new type of 419 scam, where the scammers hack into a hotmail account, and then pretend to be one of your friends in need of urgent assistance in a foreign country. Oddly, the peril that your friend has gotten themselves into has also sadly caused them to lose all control of English language structure, so you’d best get the 4000 UKP to them by Western Union credit transfer quickly, so that they can collect it with their international passports.

In other news, it seems that many people spend only 17 minutes deciding on a new house to move in to, and 26% of those people then regret the decision. oops.