Month: November 2006

New golf game

Discovered Albatross18 Season2 the other day – a free downloadable multiplayer golf game. It is golf as you’ve never seen before as the whole thing is done in a manga cartoon style with various special effects too. Very addictive and well worth downloading. The game can be totally free but if you want some of the premium characters,equipment or utilities you can buy cookies online to redeem for items. The ability to create your own rooms and password protect them means that you can host your own mini lan party and play golf instead of shooting each other 😉 The link above has my userid as I get extra panga (the ingame currency earned as you play) for each signup.

Vonage price increase (again)

Vonage prices have gone up again – their socalled $14.99 package now costs $19.02 (up from $18.12 last month) with the extra costs being 99c Regulatory Recovery Fee, 99c Emergency 911 Cost Recovery, $1.15 sales Tax (45c in april and now $1.15????), and the new 90c Federal Universal Service Surcharge. These prices do not vary (apart from sales tax if I make over my 500 minutes) which means that they should really be advertising their 14.99 package as 19.02 – In the UK it was nice to know that the price you were quoted (and on the sales tag) was the price you paid. It is bad enough when you go into a shop here and buy something marked as 99c and it ends up being about 1.06 but the “extras” for the phone system are crazy (and vonage isn’t the only company doing it – they’re all just as bad as each other 🙁

Laptop battery fire demonstration

A video showing the effects of a laptop battery exploding – After watching this I’m not sure I ever want to use a laptop again! What makes me laugh is the comment “if this happens move away from the laptop” – I think that if smoke starts pouring out of a laptop it wouldn’t be on MY lap for much longer. The speed, temperature and explosion of the subsequent battery cells is pretty scary (but needs to be seen, especially by people who don’t want to send their laptop battery back after it has been recalled.)

AWstats access without using hosting login

Danny wanted the ability to have stats for his subdomain so he can see where visitors were coming from. However the stats program that he used to use started to generate popups when the website was visited. I was not happy with this so the script was disabled. By following the instructions at AWStats Access I was able to provide him a url, username and password so that he could access stats for his website without having to provide him the control panel username and password. As he doesn’t have ftp access to the directory the stats program is loaded, it is secure from the end user downloading the control panel password. (I hope!). I’ve also renamed and edited the couple of files to ensure that the filenames are not common to avoid any guesswork and file inclusion via any vulnerable xss scripts that could occur.

OS Packaging

It was interesting to see that details about the packaging for Windows Vista was released today – JCXP links to MS Tech today which has a picture of the neat dvd box. Contrast this to the cd’s that I received from Dell for the SBS 2003r2 server I opened. Not only was the media on CD (which means a painful 4 cd install after Dell’s install creates a small 25gb boot partition) despite the server having a dvd drive, but the cd’s were in the paper sleeve envelopes that you normally get with an OS installation from Dell. What was worse that disks 1 and 2 were in the same envelope with a piece of paper slid between them, the same for disk 3 and 4. This is really cheap, likely to lead to scratches and not a good first start impression of a brand new server!
(Note that I don’t know if SBS was requested on cd instead of dvd or whether that is how it comes but even if it was ordered on cd, it could at least come in a reliable case.

Published in a book

Ages ago I wrote a feature on how to backup a cpanel account. Just recently one of my clients purchased a dedicated server that uses cpanel as the website hosting manager. I purchased cpanelAric’s cpanel userguide and tutorial book to assist with learning some of the more obscure features and functions and as I was reading through the book I got to page 93 – and my site is quoted as a way to backup the system – how cool is that!
Naturally I now have to go back and make sure that the script still works and make any changes necessary.