Archive for February, 2006

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Windows Live Local preview

Tuesday, February 28th, 2006

Just saw it on Ricardo Saramago’s blog: Microsoft’s Virtual Earth-powered Windows Live Local preview. Prepare to drool. :)

Impressive technology, certainly, and it’s nice to see that MS can do something “cool” without restricting it to Internet Explorer, requiring ActiveX, being Windows-only, and so on.

Of course, I doubt that 1) this will ever have more than a few places, and 2) this will actually be of use to someone, in place of a GPS navigation system, or even as a Google Earth competitor. It’s great, however, to impress other people, as they’ve surely never seen anything like this. :)

Posted in Microsoft, Software, World Wide Web | 1 Comment »

An Anti-Spam gateway #9: ClamAV

Tuesday, February 28th, 2006

(NOTE: this is part of the “An Anti-Spam gateway” series)

Now for the anti-virus. Go to the ClamAV site, download the latest stable version, uncompress it, then compile and install it:

./configure --with-user=amavis --with-group=amavis --sysconfdir=/etc
make
make install

(note: 3 lines. The first one ends with “–sysconfdir=/etc”)

Edit the /etc/freshclam.conf file. At the end, add the following line:

DatabaseMirror db.XY.clamav.net

replacing the XX with your country code (e.g. “us”, “uk”, “pt”, etc.)

Now, edit the /etc/clamd.conf file.

Near the beginning, comment out or delete the “Example” line. Then, add the following lines at the end:

TCPAddr 127.0.0.1
User amavis

Test if ClamAV is able to update itself:

freshclam --log-verbose

If there are any problems, it should tell you.

Finally, make it so that

/usr/local/bin/freshclam -d

(note the “-d”)

and

/usr/local/sbin/clamd

are run when the system boots. That will depend on your Unix variant.

Posted in Email, Spam, Unix / Linux / *BSD software | Comments Closed

Future projects at The Tlog

Monday, February 27th, 2006
  • Complete the Anti-Spam Gateway guide. There are at least 2 more parts to be written, which I hope to do tomorrow.
  • Change the looks a bit. Not something dramatic, probably just fonts, colors, and some stuff in the sidebar.
  • Add some more software to the almost forgotten “Software I Like” series.
  • Update the Top 10 Posts page.
  • Ponder whether a Portuguese-language version of The Tlog (without the blogging stuff, as that already has its place, A Arte de Blogar) is a feasible idea.
  • Think about, eventually, finishing the Blogging Tips series. There’s always something more that can be said about blogging, but that kind of thinking leads to “feature creep”; the series has to end at some time, though there will always be posts about blogging – and perhaps more blogging-related series, about specific subjects – and shorter, too. Anyway, when this series is finished, I have to start working on the ebook…

Posted in The Tlog (site) | Comments Closed

New blog: "The Music in my Life"

Thursday, February 23rd, 2006

My 9th blog: The Music in my Life!

From the “About” page:

I believe the title gives one a good hint that it’s about music. :)

However, “music” in what way? Well, it won’t be a “music reviews” site. There are already thousands of those.

In it, instead, I will tell stories about how a particular band or album came into my life. What I thought about it then, and how I feel about it now. What I’m listening to at a particular time. What an album means to me. And any music that enters my life, as that (life) should always be a learning experience, and discovering new music, new bands, new experiences, new emotions, is always a pleasure to me.

Hope you enjoy it… not a lot of posts yet, but look how quickly the last one grew… ;)

Posted in Blogging | 2 Comments »

Cable Modem change

Thursday, February 23rd, 2006

Tomorrow evening (always say that with a Bela Lugosi accent, as in “ve shall be leeving… tomorrrow eeeeeevening!”), a team from Netcabo will go to my place to change my modem (which is working perfectly well), because (translated by me):

due to an upgrade action of the NetCabo network, your Cable Modem will no longer be compatible with our network.

With this upgrade, we intend to improve the security of your access, and to incorporate new features which we’ll announce soon.

I have no idea of what “new features” they are talking about, as as for “increasing security”, I really hope that they don’t start blocking ports, or other idiocies like that, which might even force me to move my server elsewhere (and, believe me, I wouldn’t stay with Netcabo). Contrary to what they might believe, not everyone uses Windows, nor is everyone a complete “noob” in terms of securing systems. Hopefully, they just mention that because they have to convince people that they stand to “win” something with this change, and “security” is a fashionable subject…

One other thing that came to mind (which I hope is true) is this: I have a 4 Mbit connection, and I know that my modem (a 3Com sharkfin) can only do 6 Mbit or something like that. Maybe they’re going to do what they did some time ago: increase everyone’s bandwidth, without raising prices, so they can be competitive with ADSL again. If it’s that, then it explains the need for a new modem… and having 8 Mbit at home would be nice. :)

Unfortunately, because of this, my sites will be down tomorrow, from 6 PM GMT until a couple of hours later. I hope everything goes well…

Posted in Networking, PC hardware | Comments Closed

Chess

Thursday, February 23rd, 2006

I love chess. I’ve loved it since I was 10 years old or so. I’m not a great player, mostly due to laziness, and have never played in any competition, nor been a part of any club. And , sometimes, I stop playing for months, even years.

But I still love the game. It relaxes me, and keeps my mind “in shape”

Chess

These days, I mostly play on GameKnot, because 1) it’s web-based, and 2) it’s not in real time (it’s more like “correspondence chess”), so I can just make my moves whenever I’m online, and not worry about them when I’m not.

Unfortunately, I know, personally, very few people who like chess, and yet it’s more fun to play against people you know (even if just from “the Net”) than against total strangers. So, if you’d like to play against a 1250-1300 player, feel free to go to GameKnot (it’s free, though there are some extras available to paying subscribers) and challenge me – I’m “dehumanizer“, there. :)

See you on the chessboard…

Posted in Fun stuff, PC games | 2 Comments »

Rojo FeedShare

Monday, February 20th, 2006

Seen in BlogSEO: Rojo, a popular web-based feed aggregator, has a new service, FeedShare. It’s basically a “link exchange” service for feeds – you add some code to show ads for other feeds in your blog, and that earns you credits, which are used to show the ad for your own feeds in other blogs using the service.

It’s free, so I’m trying it out. You can see the ad on the front page, between the 5th and the 6th post.

Posted in Blogging | Comments Closed

Google PageRank update?

Monday, February 20th, 2006

According to BlogSEO, it’s happening now.

You can use the Future PageRank tool to check a site’s PR on each of Google’s servers.

Apparently, none of my sites change in PR. The newer ones, however, didn’t have a visible PR yet, and have one now. Mostly 4s, with one 3. Not too bad. The Tlog is still my highest rated one, with a PR of 5.

Posted in Google, Search engine optimization (SEO), Search engines | 1 Comment »

Blogging tips #24: Linkbaiting

Friday, February 17th, 2006

(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)

As I’ve mentioned before, having people (in blogs and other sites) linking to your blog is a Good Thing ™. Not only does it improve your ranking in Google (and other search engines)’s search results, but people may arrive at your blog through those links. Accordingly, if something can be done to cause more people to link to you, you should do it.

There are several things you can do, of course. You can ask people to link to you, for instance – either by asking your friends for a link, or by asking total strangers to exchange links (I’ll deal with the latter in a future part of the series). You can also simply write good content, and promote your blog in terms of SEO, pinging, and such, and wait for people to link to your blog, or to particular posts. It will happen. But it’s slow, and uncontrolled.

Hence the concept of “linkbaiting“, which is the art of writing posts that have increased chances of having people link to them.

(more…)

Posted in Blogging, Blogging tips | 3 Comments »

WordPress tutorials

Wednesday, February 15th, 2006

Darren has posted a link to some WordPress tutorials. All of them are short, and very easy to understand. An advanced user will probably know what’s in most of them, but a couple of them have already given me ideas, which I’ll probably implement here in the next few days…

Posted in Blogging | Comments Closed

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This work by Pedro Timóteo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Portugal.