For quite a few years now, I’ve been a helper in the IRC channel #mIRC on the network Undernet. One of my privileges there, was the ability to help users on a daily basis and make a difference to users all over the world. Through my presence there, I’ve learned heaps about computers, administrated a bot network with services people have relied on daily but most importantly made friends that I care for very much.

Life has a nasty habit of changing, and so do the person living the life. Over the course of the last year my dedication towards the channel decreased drastically, and the passion slowly died out until I saw no other option than to leave. It’s been a great time, albeit at times a roller coaster ride. A great era comes to an end, and I find it’s time to go explore new grounds and broadened my horizon. I will most surely miss it from time to time, but it’s not like I’m quiting IRC. I would never dream of doing that, as I have many great friends.

I would also like to send out a thanks to all those that stood by me in this somewhat emotional decision. I won’t mention names, but I hope that you know if you read this.

Oh how I hate the net from time to time. On second thought, that’s not entirely fair. I do though hate some online businesses. I just recently bought a web hosting account to host a few new domains that I had acquired, and with the account there was also a domain name that came with it for a small price, so I thought what the heck. I signed up, and I was now the proud owner of yet another hosting account and a new domain name. All was fine and dandy.

But things were about to change, I found the control features of the hosting provider to be abysmal and horrid to say the least. I was not at all happy, but things were only to become worse. After having tried to getting used to the new account, I decided it wasn’t worth it and came to terms that it was about time to use the 30 day cash refund option. I canceled the account and got my money back. But what about my new domain name that I get with the account, that I paid for? The domain that is registered in my name. Of course I wanted to take this with my and transfer over to my main registrar.

Well, I logged into my account on Dotster to proceed with the transfer. As the owner of the domain, I got a mail asking me to confirm the move. Of course, I agreed and confirmed and just waited for the confirmation mail. Well guess what, the domain had been registered with a registrar-lock, which makes it impossible to transfer a domain even with the consent of the domain owner. This of course pisses me off, so I contact the registrar the domain was registered with and ask them to remove it. They tell me I have to contact the hosting provider to have them make the change. HELLO!? You can’t do changes to your own systems? That’s just great!

Well, I contact my former hosting provider to have them do the work, but guess what!? THEY WON’T, THEY CAN’T, THEY ARE INCOMPETENT! The only thing they can tell me, is that I have to wait until 60 days after the account with them was registered until I can do changes myself. What a load of shite!!! So I’ve now written an e-mail to the registrar they do business with (yet again!), and told them in short plain terms that;

• It is my domain
• I paid for it
• I want full control over it
• Stop tossing me around, I’m no freakin’ ball
• It’s your systems, your databases. Get it done!

If not, I’ll contact my .ro friends and have them hack them from here until oblivion!

Update:
In retrospect, I understand my frustration and aggression. But in this case, there was nothing I could do, nor the hosting company. After a domain has been registered, it can’t be transferred over to a new registrar for a period of 60 days. This is in compliance with the regulations set by ICANN, the governing authority on domain names. But it still pisses me off though! :) It’s still MY domain!

Even though I have quite a decent solution running on my mail server to catch spam, some spam mails still evade my spam filter. Quite often I find the spam mails I get to be quite entertaining, and outright amazing. The stuff you get offered would be a rater long list, but for those of you that don’t get much spam, here are a few of them

• Cheap Viagra
  Keeps you going and going and going. Pretty much like Duracell batteries.
• Penis enlarger/extensions
  Increase your penis to the size of an elephant’s penis.
• Get your hair back pills
  Got a bald spot? Fear not, these pills will get you hair which even the most hardcore black metal artist would envy.
• Refinance your mortgage
  Yeah by doing this you will save thousands of $$$’s, we’ll even throw in a free Ceiko digital sportswatch. (they were out of Seiko)
• Want to lose weight; just click here
  We’ll give you a range of pills which will get you slim in no time, when the package arrives on your doorstep it’s just a text book that tells you to get off your fat arse and get out to enjoy nature.

Wanna help out a poor fella; “man, I just lost all my money” or “I know this guy that lives down in XXXXXX who seriously needs some money” or some other really sad story that urges you to donate as much money as possible to help them out. Yeah right! You’re broke, but you still afford internet access do you? Hah, pull the other one.

But recently spammers have been offering stuff that I never thought possible. Spammers actually spamming trying to sell you anti spam software. Oh my, what nerve! I hope they burn slowly on an open fire when they get in hell for all eternity. Just today I received two of those.

When I thought I had seen it all, I get a mail asking me if I wanted to be a minister. If I enrolled to their engenious program I could become a minister within two weeks, and after passing an online exam I would be able to perform weddings, funerals, baptisms, forgive people their sins and what made me laugh so hard I almost wet my pants; visit correctional facilities. Now, just getting the privilege to visit correctional facilities almost made me get my credit card out and enroll to this great course. Just think of that, skip years and years of theology schooling and be able to skip to the fun part. Oh my, I’m sooo thrilled! Really, I am! NOT!

But here is where it starts to get funny, just the other day I registered a domain name for a friend of mine, as a gift. Just a couple of days after I had registered this domain, I receive a mail from a spammer asking me if I wanted to make money of my newly registered domain. As he so nicely put it; “I noticed through my searches that you had registered the domain ‘pumpingirony.net’ and I was wondering if you wanted to make some money on your domain”. I was going all like “what the fuck!”. Given the number of domains that are registered daily, no person is able to check up which domains were newly registered. So my bet is that the fuckers (read: the registrar) I used to register the domain leaked information to a spammer, which then again contacted me. This pisses me off. Spammers are the scum of the earth. If you are a spammer, and read this post I want you to know this. If I ever get my hands on one of you twats, I’ll cut off your balls and roast them on an open fire. That’s the least I could do.

Has the Mozilla team done it? Have they made a browser that will finally be able to take up the fight with Internet Explorer? In my eyes, they have and with great style. Their new release in the Firefox branch has in many ways swept me off my feet. It’s fast becoming the number one choice for web browsers, and with a good reason. Firefox is nothing short of revolutionary.

Being a blogger and also being a nerd, you tend to be concerned about your pages being compliant to current web standards. Meaning, you want your XHTML, CSS, RSS etc to be correct and compliant so that it displays correctly in most browsers. Not only does Firefox do a great job at being compliant to these standards, but it’s built in support RSS is awesome! Your feeds go into your bookmarks, and whenever you go to a feed in your bookmarks the feed is updated automatically. It’s never been easier to see if a site you’re watching has been updated.

The list of new features in the new Firefox is quite long, but I’ll list a few of them here.

• Live Bookmarks.
  The ability to subscribe to RSS feeds in your bookmarks. When you happen to surf by a site that offers RSS feeds, a icon appears in your statusbar. All you gotta do is click on the icon, and choose whatever feed you want to subscribe to.
• Improved find.
  You now have a find tool bar which appears whenever you conduct a search in the current document. And I gotta say, it’s awesome Never has it been easier to find something, and with its built in automatic highlighting of search matches you spend less time finding what you’re looking for. I love this feature, being a coder/programmer. And of course, the ‘type as you go’ find feature is still there for links.
• Managing Annoyances and Protecting Security.
  Finally the extension system blocks attempts to install extensions from all sites other than update.mozilla.org. If you want to install extensions from a site other than Mozilla’s official site, you need to add the site into a list of approved sites. If a popup is blocked, you now have the ability to open it if it was an “important” popup. God knows why they haven’t had this feature before, but at least it’s there now. Another feature that I love, is that it now changes the colour of the address bar whenever you enter a HTTPS enabled site. As long as you see that the address bar is yellow, you know it’s secure to transfer your personal details and credit card details when doing an online purchase.
• Strong Encryption For Passwords Available.
  Finally Firefox has support for strong encrypted passwords. Consider this situation, you use a computer in a place that more than yourself have access to it and use it on a daily basis. Previously, all the passwords stored by Firefox’s password manager were stored unencrypted meaning that anyone with a bit of computer insight could easily steal your passwords. Well fear no more, now your passwords are stored encrypted and each time you start up Firefox it will ask for a master password that unlocks the usage of password manager. If the wrong password is supplied, password manager just lies dormant doing nothing.

Well, all I have to say to Microsoft is; Fear Firefox. I have recommended Firefox to all of my friends for ages, and I ditched IE ages ago for being bloated and prone with security issues. By this, I’m not saying that Firefox doesn’t have any security issues, any program has security issues. But it’s all about the severeness of them that is important to me. Firefox just keeps on getting better and better, and is for me the only choice. If you haven’t tried it already, I suggest you head over to Firefox’s page right now and download it. You will not regret it.

I’ve embraced Firefox as my new favourite pet. Do yourself a favour, do the same thing.

I just gotta tell you, SpamAssassin rocks! For those of you that don’t know what SpamAssassin is I will give you a short explaination. It’s a program that goes through all the mail you get, and checks if the mail is a spam mail or not. The way it does this, is to do a series of test on the mail. These tests range from looking at what the subject is, to what is actually written in the mail, and to do checks to see if the mail comes from a source known to send spam mail.

Why do I love it so much? Well, when you’re like me and been on the net for quite a while your e-mail address(es) kinda gets around, and before you know it your inbox gets filled up with all these do you want cheap viagra? and do you want free porn?. This is stuff that might be interesting to an impotent old fart, but that’s just not me. I get around 200 to 300 spam mails daily, and since SpamAssassin filters all these mails away I don’t waste time. SpamAssassin also uses an artificial intelligence, which over time trains itself to become better. The result for me? It catches almost everything, I now see an average of 2 spam mails per week. It’s perfect, it’s bliss. So where’s the link? Well, there’s a lot of humour surrounding the topic spam, and here is a lot of examples why. Everything you didn’t want to have to know about spam.

Sometimes you get stuck with some problem that you just can’t figure out. Your server is up and should work perfectly, but does it? Hell no, there is some odd error that you just can’t figure out. In my case, it was a problem with my mail server. I could send mails, but no way in hell was I able to get any mails. At first, I thought the problem was my spam filter that stopped them, but looked through the logs and couldn’t find anything. But then I got to think of something. The domain my private server is on, does not use a real host. It uses what is defined as a CNAME, which means it points to another domain name. So what happened was that whenever someone tried to mail me, the mail got to my server but was rejected as being to the wrong domain since most e-mail clients translates the domain name into it’s real name. So all I had to do to get it working, was to enable my mail server to accept mails for that domain and everything worked like a charm.