Monthly Archive for July, 2006

Some AdSense trouble, and some Roger Waters too…

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
1 year, 9 months ago
in AdSense and Music
. 0 Comments

I’m too tired to do it right now, but tomorrow I’ll have to block a bunch of “bad” referrers, which have earned me a nice warning email from Google’s AdSense department. Googling around, I see I’m not the only one. More details tomorrow… but, meanwhile, one suggestion: check your logs, especially your top referrers. If they’re suspicious, it may be a good idea to start blocking them.

This is related to referrer spam, but it’s apparently something much worse - it can cause your AdSense account to be closed. As I said, more to come.

Meanwhile, WordPress 2.0.4 is out.

And I’ve just bought Roger Waters’ Ça Ira. Yup, it’s opera. Real opera, not a metal opera like Avantasia. Something to listen to, tomorrow.

ProfiMail and the Gmail "untrusted certificate"

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
1 year, 9 months ago
in Email, Mobile phones and Mobile phones software
. 5 Comments

If you read your email on a Series 60 phone, you probably use ProfiMail, a very nice mobile email client.

However, when you configure it to access a Gmail account, you will always get the “This site uses an untrusted certificate” message. Quite annoying, since it requires 2 key presses to pass. Every single time. There’s no option for “I know, just ignore it from now on”.

The cause of the problem is that Series 60 phones, much like web browsers, have a list of trusted root certificates, and the one Gmail uses, from Equifax, isn’t in it.

How to fix it? I search around, and didn’t find a single page with instructions on how to solve this thing. But, by combining this and this, I was able to remove that annoying prompt for good.

Here’s how to do it:

  • Using the phone’s browser (Opera also works), browse to http://www.ocasta.co.uk/cert.html. Click on the only link on that page.
  • It should prompt you to install the certificate. Accept it.
  • It should ask you what you want to trust the certificate for. Choose “Internet”.

This works on my Nokia 6630. Other phones may simply install the certificate, after which you have to go to Settings, Security, Certificate Management, and set the new Equifax certificate as “Trusted”.

SSL Certificates available here with 256 bit encryption certs. A trusted secure server authority.

Ubuntu vs SUSE

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
1 year, 9 months ago
in Unix / Linux / *BSD
. 11 Comments

Last week, I bought a new PC, with an AMD64 CPU, which was (and is) to be my main work PC, when I start working at home full time next month. Of course, it was going to have Linux - Windows, to me, simply isn’t usable as a non-gaming OS: in order to be user-friendly for newbies, power users are sacrificed. I simply don’t understand how people can work without multiple, instantly switching desktops, decent copy & paste, and a decent command line. But I digress, that’s not the point here.

Now, I started with Slackware many eons ago, then switched to Red Hat (at version 3.0.3) and, two years ago, I moved to a company where SUSE was the default distro (it’s the company I’ll be leaving at the end of August). I liked SUSE a lot, and still do. And I got quite used to it.

But I’ve been hearing so many good things about Ubuntu that I decided to try it. I chose Kubuntu, as I prefer KDE, and installed it.

Well… I wasn’t impressed. Sure, I only used it for a couple of days, but it didn’t “feel” right, for several reasons:

  • when installing, it tried to download updates before asking for a proxy server. At home, my PCs have to use one, so the download failed, and, worse, it marked all update servers as down. I had to re-add them manually, because it thought it had no servers to update from.
  • by default, the list of update servers is very sparse; you need to add several ones to make it useful.
  • ugly, ugly fonts in KDE.
  • in the AMD64 version, no Java, and no Flash.

So, after a week, I moved to SUSE 10.1, and I’m quite happier. Fonts look great, I have Java and Flash in a 64-bit Firefox, KDE isn’t “crippled” by default, it asked for the proxy server before attempting to update, and so on.

Now, I’m not saying I know something nobody else does. It’s quite possible that Ubuntu is much better, that those problems are easily fixable and I just didn’t look in the correct place, or do things “the Ubuntu way”, and so on. If that is so, I’d really like you guys to tell me why you prefer Ubuntu. :)

Firefox tip: closing tabs with middle-click on Linux

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
1 year, 9 months ago
in Browsers, Firefox and Unix / Linux / *BSD software
. 7 Comments

In Firefox, on Windows, it’s quite useful to be able to close tabs by middle-clicking on them. But on Linux, by default, what middle-click does (either on the tab or on the main page display) is to open whatever is on the clipboard in the current tab.

But you may prefer middle-click to work as in the Windows version. If so, just open about:config, then search for

middlemouse.contentLoadURL

and change it to False. Simple as that.

You know you’re living in a country full of idiots when…

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
1 year, 9 months ago
in Consoles and Gadgets
. 11 Comments

… the UMD movies section in the average store is bigger than the Nintendo DS games display.

Really, how many people are buying UMD movies? Last time I heard, the format was dying (has Netcraft confirmed it yet? :))…

But I guess that retailers just see the fact that it has “PlayStation” in the name, so it must be a huge success… except that it isn’t.

Or… scary thought… could I be living in the only country in the world where people actually buy UMD movies?

(Note: I’m not talking about the PSP itself, or PSP games, just movies in the UMD format, which for some reason have huge displays in most stores here in Portugal.)

Blog widths

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
1 year, 9 months ago
in Blogging
. 15 Comments

Have you noticed that most blogs and sites are designed with fixed widths? They’re made as if 640×480 was still the “standard” resolution, and, if the browser window is larger, they don’t adapt.

Most of them look really bad at 1600×1200, with a smallish column in the middle, and most of the screen (assuming you have the browser maximized) being wasted.

What’s odd is that virtually all the successful blogs are this way! Consider ProBlogger, or Steve Pavlina’s blog, or GamePolitics, or most of the blogs at Planeta Asterisco.

Steve Pavlina's blog

It’s incredibly rare to see a blog like Performancing, which looks good at 1600×1200.

Performancing

But why do most people configure their blogs this way? Is it apathy? Laziness? Because the WordPress and Blogger default themes are like that? Lack of theme editing skills? Is it because everyone else does it that way?

Or do all those people know something I don’t? For instance, has it been proven that people prefer to read blogs that way? Does it make them easier to read? Do they work better in terms of AdSense conversions?

I really don’t know the answer. It can’t be purely technical, as in “most people still surf at low resolutions”, because it’s really easy to write (or edit) a little CSS to make blogs use the entire browser width, and look good both at 800×600 and at 1600×1200.

So… what do you think? Do people do this simply because everyone else does :), or is there an actual reason behind it?

AMD and more AMD

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
1 year, 9 months ago
in PC hardware
. 0 Comments

Two news concerning AMD I’ve just seen on Slashdot:

  1. AMD buys ATI. What will it mean? As far as I know, ATI has been doing pretty well, especially after it managed to to the graphics components for both the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii…
  2. AMD is slashing CPU prices by about 50%. Apparently, the new Conroe processors from Intel are so good that AMD has to do this to stay competitive…
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Portugal
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Portugal