As of a little while ago, VeriSign added a wildcard A record to the .COM and .NET TLD DNS zones. The IP address returned is 64.94.110.11, which reverses to sitefinder.verisign.com. What that means in plain English is that most mis-typed domain names that would formerly have resulted in a helpful error message now results in a VeriSign advertising opportunity. For example, if my domain name was 'somecompany.com,' and somebody typed 'oemcompany.com' by mistake, they would get VeriSign's advertising.

This will have the immediate effect of making network trouble-shooting much more difficult. Before, a mis-typed domain name in an email address, web browser, or other network configuration item would result in an obvious error message. You might not have known what to do about it, but at least you knew something was wrong. Now, though, you will have to guess. Every time.

This will make important anti-spam checks impossible, as they check on the existance of the sender domain. I wonder how long it will take untill Verisign will add advertisement to the displayed page. Or sells this page for advertisement properties. Would you like to see an Microsoft ad-filled page every time you make a typo in an URL ?

However, you can disable this feature of Verisign : just add

127.0.0.1 sitefinder.verisign.com

to your host file. Replace the IP address with one you fancy (eg Google : 216.239.39.100)

There's a very interesting introduction to ThunderBird, the Mozilla mail client. Especially if you're using Outlook, it's a must read. Lots of screenshots too.

I took another look at the nova in Scutum; the star looked brighter than expected with an estimated magnitude of 9.1. I took the time now to explore the region around the nova; there are some nice open clusters like M11 (the Wild Duck Cluster) and M26, but also some NGC objects.

The NGC catalogue, which stands for New General Catalogue, is the little brother of the better known Messier catalogue, and contains generally more modest deep sky objects. The NGC catalogue contains all of the Messier objects plus thousands of others which Messier missed or simply couldn't observe from his location. The NGC catalogue was compiled in 1888 by Danish astronomer Johan Ludvig Emil Dreyer, who based his work on earlier lists made by the Herschel family of British astronomers. Dreyer included some 8,000 celestial objects, a total raised to about 13,000 by his first and second Index Catalogues (IC), published in 1895 and 1908, respectively. With these supplements the NGC covers the entire sky, although many objects visible with modern instruments are not listed. Benoit Schillings created a list of photographed NGC items which give a fairly decent impression about what to expect of a NGC object in your scope.

A coworker of mine accidentically destroyed his laptop filesystem with a Windows XP - Redhat dualboot. It booted into the Grub console, where it sat dead, as apparently Grub could not read its config file. The Linux filesystem was toasted, and eventually we used a Knoppix CD as a rescue system (very impressive !) to recover some of its files on the XP partition.

I allways used Tomsrtbt as a Linux emergency system, but as it has to fit on a floppy, it has rather harsh choices to make about the available programs. RIP Linux, which stands for Recovery Is Possible, is a nice bootable CD recovery Linux system with some fancy utilities to recover Linux and Windows files. Unfortunately, it doesn't contain Vim, but the rootfs can fairly easy updated with the binaries of your choice (that is, if you compile them onto it). A perfect Linux rescue CD, however, would be a crossing of RIP Linux and Debian, with a bunch of utilities to add your favourite programs. Which means I'm still having another look around for such a system.

It has been half a year that Karamba and its kin ruled the KDE desktop with their eye candy. But now Gnome has its own desktop joy called GDesklets.
After playing a bit with GDesklets, I have to admit that they are far more user-friendly and professional looking than its KDE counterpart (sorry, SuperKaramba !)