Web Two Point Oh Fantastic little app to generate a company name and product description for “Web 2.0” ventures. Take it to your favorite idiot VC.

Some guy - a foreigner who should know better - is ripping off my blog entries! Jeez. I’m not going to link to him here. His entry on domain scams is almost a carbon copy of mine. Click on the image to see the proof. Here’s the original

Retrievr A cool flash app that searches Flickr for matches to a user’s sketch. Find by sketch.

There are some useful Airport tools available from Apple that you may not know about. I’ve no idea why these are not included as standard with Airport products. Anyway, they are called the Client Monitor and the Management Utility. The Client Monitor shows a graph of signal to noise and data rate for your wireless signal. This tool could be useful if you are trying out antenna positions. The Management Utility gives an overview of all Airports within range and shows the settings and activity log as a list. This is useful if you are administrating many Airports. Available…

Snakes and Rubies Chicago, 3 Dec. 2005: The creators of Django and Rails each gave talks and discussed web frameworks. Download the video and audio here

Security Now Notes on WMF Exploit There is a “feature” in the Windows WMF format that allows the execution of arbitary code. It has been there since the beginning (at least 10 years) but only now is coming to light. It is extremely likely that exploitation of this hole will grow. It is also likely that this hole has been used in the past but has not been publicised. A patch is available now from MS Windows Update. Patch your system, update your virus and spyware scanners.

Google’s 2005 Zeitgeist Guess the most popular news search in 2005. It’s not what you think.

In the past two months we’ve had two phone calls from Chinese ISP and domain registrars telling us that some one wants to register a domain name that corresponds to or sounds like our company name in Chinese. They tell us that if we don’t agree we can stop this by paying them RMB 13,000. Yeah right! This is one big con. And it is not just some small operator - we’re getting calls from the major network backbone operators. They explain all this to my secretary (who knows nothing about DNS of course) and make it…

Just before Christmas we stayed in a very nice hotel with very little clue about what is going on with their network. To cut down on the support calls to their “IT Butler” they, via their network service provider, had re-directed all SMTP port 25 traffic to the service provider’s open relay SMTP server.

Be wowed by the horror of Microsoft programmers designing web pages in 1994 - the Deathstar - a friendly face to customers. useit