I've just discovered this tool which allows installation of Internet Explorer in Linux. I've just tried it out and it seems to work fairly well, though I've been having a couple of problems with focus and also with the control key being "locked on" while trying to fill in forms, which causes some interesting problems. Still, it at least renders the pages in roughly the same way that IE on Windows should, so it could be useful for debugging site layouts and that's one less reason to reboot into Windows. The last thing I want is better Bluetooth tools on Linux, and the capability to use SyncML over Bluetooth as reliably as Nokia's PC Suite does it. That might be the subject of a post another time, since it's not too far off with the MultiSync project.
On a different subject entirely, apparently Microsoft's new Zune
...will not play protected Windows Media Audio and Video purchased or "rented" from Napster 2.0, Rhapsody, Yahoo! Unlimited, Movielink, Cinemanow, or any other online media service.
That makes playsforsure.com look a bit daft in retrospect.
Recently a friend told me that his Internet access while in Ubuntu using a Fon router was fairly slow, but in Windows it was fine. I noticed the same thing using my own laptop on his network, which confused me. Then I realised that I'd been thinking the DNS lookups on my machine were a bit sluggish sometimes too, though I'd blamed the BIND setup on my Bytemark VM server being swapped out. So just now I decided to investigate, with the help of tcpdump. It turns out that when requesting one of my domain names, and presumably a few others, it would first ask for an IPv6 address record (an AAAA record, as opposed to an A) for the domain from the local DNS server in my router. As these domains don't have AAAA records, This would take a good few seconds to fail. It would then ask for a reverse lookup on my laptop's IP, which would also fail, then inexplicably ask for an A record for www.domain.my.lan, where www.domain is what I had typed into Firefox and my.lan is the search domain set up on the laptop that is supplied by the wireless router. Only then when that failed would it go off and ask for an A record for the domain which would then work.
The brute-force solution seems to be to disable IPv6 entirely on the machine. On Ubuntu and presumably Debian systems, this is done by editing the file /etc/modprobe.d/aliases, and finding the line that says
alias net-pf-10 ipv6
Changing this line to read
alias net-pf-10 off
and then rebooting results in the IPv6 kernel module being blacklisted and prevented from loading. So far, the problem seems to have disappeared.
According to an Ofcom survey,
Sixteen to 24 year olds, it reports, spend nearly three hours on the net each week.
I shudder to think how long I spend on the Net each week. It's terrifying.
I just spent a good 15 minutes or so trying to work out why my Thunderbird mail client stopped sending email. It came back with an error saying that it couldn't do a STARTTLS in order to encrypt email. I do this in order that people can't sniff my SMTP AUTH password when I'm on a random wireless network. Anyway, I first checked the Thunderbird Bugzilla to make sure that they hadn't broken SMTP TLS support in 1.5.0.6. They hadn't.
I next thought that the certificate for the TLS support in Postfix may have expired since it is about a year since I set the server up initially. I generated a new certificate. Still no luck. I noticed though that telnetting to port 25 locally on the server would show the STARTTLS capability in response to an EHLO, but when I did it from my DSL connection it wouldn't. I thought this was a bit strange too, so I was about to fire up Ethereal and do a protocol trace and see what was going on at that level, when I decided just to try issuing a STARTTLS command manually over telnet:
I was using Windows, which I don't often do nowadays. The antivirus I installed recently when the bundled Symantec nonsense expired was sitting between Thunderbird and my mail server. It was rewriting the SMTP session on the fly, and removing the encryption. So this is security?
220 mgdm.net ESMTP
ehlo firefly.mgdm.net
250-mgdm.net
250-PIPELINING
250-SIZE 20480000
250-VRFY
250-ETRN
250 8BITMIME
starttls
500 TLS not supported by avast mail scanner
It appears that at least someone at the British Phonographic Industry has a clue - however, the European version appear to be still a bunch of muppets. Oh well. At least my MP3 player, my computers, my phone, my DVD players, and all the other assorted gadgetry I have that plays MP3 aren't illegal in this country (or at least not illegal enough for it to be worth kicking our door down at 6am and dragging me off to Guantanamo Bay). Even some influential Americans might be rethinking DRM - they'll have to wait and see though, because there is another ridiculous law about to be forced through Congress in America that will require seperate "licences" (which is a daft term in itself when you apply it to music) for every single device that you intend to play the music that you purchased on.
DRM is so fundamentally broken and short sighted that I can't believe anyone would be daft enough to support it - it will probably then mean that nobody will buy anything from American or Japanese companies any more (Sony, I'm looking at you) and instead get things that actually do what people want from Chinese or Korean or other Eastern places, probably far cheaper too. Surely many hundreds of years of experience will show that people tend not to buy things that are useless, and are far more likely to buy things that are useful. It's not rocket science.