I noticed last week that monster rolled out a new updated version of their website. They added a lot of new ajax stuff on the front, which might seem cool, but obviously they didnt adequately test it. After using it for several days, I have experienced a lot of bugs.
Here is an example:
I find a job I am interested in. I click the apply button and the dialog box for me to enter in my information is off the top of the screen leaving me unable to apply for this position. This is just one of the many user interface bugs I have found. Not being able to apply for a job is a pretty big problem if you are a job site. At this point, I have to say the new monster.com sucks.
One of the worst things about being a webmaster is the constant battle we wage against spammers and scrapers. A majority of these creeps have IP addresses which originate from outside the United States in countries like China, Russia, Latvia and Nigeria.
After years of being a webmaster, I have found that a majority of these countries send only bots and other nefarious users to my sites. So I use htaccess IP banning to handle these net-scumbags most of the time.
IP banning in a htaccess file looks like this:
<Limit GET HEAD POST>
order allow,deny
deny from 202.70.112.0/20
allow from all
</LIMIT>
There are many services online that will give you IP CIDR block listings by country such as IPDeny, Block a Country and Country IP Blocks. The last two will actually generate the htaccess deny statements for you, which is a huge time saver.
If you ever find the need to block country IP’s, be sure to check out the sites above.
We had Trevor’s new swingset delivered and installed on Thursday. We got it from Creative Playthings in Shrewsbury. The installers did a great job with the install. My yard is not level, so I will need to do some landscaping work around the set. Trevor loves it!
So we have had Tivo on Comcast for a full month now and I have to say, it sucks. It’s terribly slow and often gets a green screen of death. Can you say beta? Seriously, what is Comcast thinking releasing this buggy POS? It give’s Tivo a bad name.
The most annoying bug is the aforementioned green screen, where the entire screen fills with a bright green color and stays that way, seemingly frozen. After many times rebooting when this happens, I have learned a trick to recover from it, at least on my DVR. It usually “green screens” when watching a hi-def signal. I have found if you type a non hi-def channel on the remote keypad, the TV will change to that channel and come out of the green screen state. Then you’ll be able to change back to the HD channel you were previously watching.
Thinking of getting Comcast Tivo? I’d wait…
Here’s a tip for you. The next time you watch a video on youtube, simply append “&fmt=18” to the end of the video url to see a higher quality version of the video.
Of course, the original quality of the video is also a determining factor in how much better the video look
Since I got my new nifty Macbook Pro I have decided to visit Panera bread more often to work on some of my web sites and also get some blogging done. Working remotely offers a refreshing change from my home office.
Since I will be working off public wifi in these situations, I needed to have a VPN solution to protect myself from possible traffic sniffers and other nasty things that can happen on open wifi.
After a decent amount of research, I found Witopia and their PersonalVPN service. PersonalVPN uses SSL-VPN (via OpenVPN) which is more secure than other methods such as PPTP.
When using the VPN service, I haven’t noticed any network speed difference. I have had one issue though pertaining to the tunnelblick vpn software client they use. If the client is left running when shutting down, my macbook takes about a minute and a half or so to shut down. Not a big deal, but it was a little frustrating not knowing why it took so shutdown OS X.
If you are working remotely and rely of free wifi access, you need to protect yourself and your data. I highly recommend Witopia. Witopia is for BOTH Mac and Windows, but I can only comment on their Mac service.
For a Witopia discount use shxpt to save 10%, bringing the cost down to only $36 for the year!
Early in 2007 I purchased the Adobe CS3 Web Premium addition for Windows because I was still using a PC for web development. Later, I decided to get rid of that system and go 100% mac. I was now left with the dilemma of what to do with my CS3 suite that I shelled out $1500 for. After some poking around the adobe website and making a phone call to customer service I found a solution. Adobe offers a “cross platform” upgrade for software owners who want to transition from Windows to Mac, or god forbid, the other way around. :p
Here’s what you do.
Call Adobe customer service and explain that you are changing platforms and you would like to exchange your registered product to the other platform version.
You will be assigned a Case Number by customer service and will need to pay them for the new media costs / shipping fee, which was $5 when I did my exchange.
After making payment, you will need to download a “letter of software destruction” form, fill it out and fax it back to adobe at 800-955-1610. Although Adobe doesn’t ask for the software back they do disable your old serial number as soon as you fax the LOSD form over to them. So no selling your old copy on eBay to make a few extra bucks. Another thing to keep in mind is that you will be without your Adobe product during the time it takes for your new software to arrive.
It takes about 2 weeks in total from the time you fax the LOSD to receive your updated software and new serial number.
In a previous post I mentioned that my new macbook pro was taking a long time to shutdown. Well I have found the problem, at least on my machine and tunnelblick seems to be the culprit. If I close the tunnelblick software before shutting down, my laptop immediately turns off.
I picked up the new Macbook Pro last week. This is the latest installment in the MBP line featuring the new intel Penryn Processor. I went with the 2.5 ghz model, with 4 gb of ram, 250 gb hard drive and 51 2mb nvidia video.
It’s a great machine, but I have been having a weird issue where shutdown seems to take a long time. It nags me a bit. I hopefully will be able to figure out the cause soon.
One of my new years resolutions is to free myself from using ANY Yahoo! products and services in 2008.
Why? Yahoo! Mail is now almost unusable due to the fact that their spam filtering has become so poor. YSM (Yahoo Search Marketing) continues to suck and not deliver ROI (at least in my experience). And of course, YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network) is a complete flop, with piss poor targetting of ads. On top of all of that, I am starting to get random spam on my Yahoo Messenger account on a regular basis.
And to top it off, Yahoo! search results flat out suck. They are certainly slipping into the # 3 search engine in my book behind MSN/Live.
See ya Yahoo!
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