/bin/tim

I was just looking at a friend’s Asus EEEPC which are all the rage right now.  Its very cute, and I was sorely tempted to buy one,  its £229 for the 4GB SSD model.  However,  its just not quite convincing enough for me, yet.  The 7″ display is too small,  I like the SSD but again its too small and needs supplementing with a USB stick, the keyboard is small but I could get used to it.  Its cheap …. did I mention that?  but hey,  I can buy a full laptop for another £70.

What does attract me is the almost fixed function of the device.  ie its designed to do a few things, but do them well, or well enough, specifically low impact tasks like email, web browsing etc.  I thought about its possibility as an eBook, but really I need 1024×768 to get A4 page fidelity enough to read (fit to page view).

So, whilst I like the EEEPC, I think I would actually spend a bit more on a real laptop and then downgrade that to the capability of the EEEPC.  this would be mega performance in comparison although I guess the battery life would be less.

Maybe I could rip the hard disk out and configure a bootable USB stick to start from to save battery.  Windows couldnt save much this way as its too chatty with the registry and is always doing something even when you aren’t.

So, I think I’ll try that first, I have the measure of the EEEPC so thats my target for a ‘utility’ laptop.

I’ve been waiting years for the eBook I need.  I’ve seen and tried the Rocket, the Sony PRS, the iRex illiad, the starEbook and the Kindle. and they all fail miserably for me.  Each one has something good(ish); worthy of note is the illiad has the much needed 1024×768 display; the Kindle has great connectivity. The downside is they all cost huge and offer low bang for the buck.

Tantilisingly, what I need is far simpler than what these guys try to produce.  I don’t need something that works for 40 hours without charge, I dont even need something that weighs less than a feather.  In fact I think my requirement is similar to many pro’s who want eBook capabilities for work purposes.

Actually what I need is more or less a standard cheap notebook and i’ll sacrifice a real keyboard for a tablet style display.  I rarely need more than 3 hours running away from mains charging, and I can accept some weight. I can cope with a shared memory graphics adapter but I do want colour, a 1.4GHz core duo and 1GB RAM. Probably running some lightweight Linux preferably on an SSD disk to save power. At a minimum I want it to render PDF and preferably also DOC and PPT. I’d love it to be able to playback video and audio as well as view images.  I definitely want an RSS client and a web browser.

Tesco can seel me a Fujitsu laptop for £299 with 1.8GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, 120GB Disk, DVD Rewriter, 128MB Graphics, 802.11g, Modem, and Vista!  so why can’t I have that in my eBook format? Please!

SPF, Sender Policy Framework thats what.  Its a TXT record you can apply to your DNS zone to allow receiving mail servers to determine whether your email domain is being impersonated to send spam (UCE).  Why is this important?  Well if you have more than 1 SMTP sending server then your IP address ranges may be different.  This means that some of your email may be rejected as spam at servers like Hotmail and never reach the recipients mailbox (even the junk mail folder).  Once added, mail servers can check the SPF record to confirm your email is valid and hopefully your email won’t be rejected.

So what does an SPF record look like ?  Well here’s an example;

 v=spf1 ip4:62.21.98.128/24 a mx include:spf.myispmail.net ?all 

But working it out is a chore, so go to an easy to use online configurator here http://old.openspf.org/wizard.html

This is a great idea!  The original Star Trek has been remastered for HD-DVD and they have replaced the special effects with new modern effects, very cool!  Check out the new graphics here http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/news/TOS/article/28095.html

… and look at this cool phaser remote control!

On Saturday I had a call from someone because the email they sent me had bounced back to them as undeliverable.  I immediately thought this must be a problem with this persons email skills, wrong name, domain etc. but I thought I’d check.  I opened Outlook and saw the last email to me at this domain had arrived Thursday morning, and suspiciously, there was no junk mail since then … so alarms bells started ringing in the distance,  but I wasn’t to worried as this was surely simple and quick to check and fix…how wrong I was!

My first inclination was to check the DNS settings at my ISP, especially the MX records.  These were all fine and my MX was pointing as expected to Hotmail,  as I use the Live Custom Domains option. So, nothing wrong there.  Next stop the Live Admin for custom domains.  Bingo! warning messages all over this console;

But Hang on! it says my DNS is not configured ‘Pending DNS Configuration’ and a careful check between this and my ISP DNS settings shows no differences … what gives? So after a struggle I find an email address to which Live support queries can be sent and ask them what the pending change is as there is no direct reference as to exactly what setting is wrong.  After 30 mins I hadn’t got a reply (even automated) and I realised that I had used the failing email address so I resubmitted a new ticket.  Shockingly, the new ticket was over 9000 higher than my last one half an hour previously!  I guess a lot of people worldwide have issues with Live.  Apart from the automated reply I have not received a reponse.  So no immediate help there…

So, I needed to be more proactive and sent a few test emails which all disappeared without being received.  So I decided to get low level and see if I could track what was actually happening so my first step was to see where the email sever was being told to send email in case my ISP DNS had failed.

I used the trusty NSLookup utility to see what was going on with DNS.

NSLookup -sil -qMX timcarmichael.com

Server: 209.68.2.46
Address: 209.68.2.46#53

Non-authoritative answer:
timcarmichael.com canonical name = blog.timcarmichael.com.
blog.timcarmichael.com canonical name = timcarmichael.wordpress.com.
timcarmichael.wordpress.com canonical name = lb.wordpress.com.

Authoritative answers can be found from:
wordpress.com
origin = ns1.wordpress.com
mail addr = mmmmmm.gmail.com
serial = 2005071858
refresh = 14400
retry = 7200
expire = 604800
minimum = 60

EEEK!  wordpress.com have become my home nameserver!  they obviously have no knowledge of my real settings and list the MX as GMail.  No wonder I stopped receiving email.  But there is no way to contact their support as they are on holiday… so I contact my ISP to see whats happening and how on earth my real settings got orphaned and wordpress took over.  I didn’t even know that wordpress had nameservers.

Now I knew what the problem was I could fix it.  I unlocked my domain at my ISP and reset the nameservers back to my ISP.  Nothing more I could do now as DNS updates can take up to 48 hours to propagate.

That still leaves me with the question, still unanswered, how did wordpress.com become my nameserver? my domain was definitely locked at my ISP which means no-one but me should be able to make changes.  So how did they?

I’ll update when I know … but I’m not holding my breath as to when I get a response.  What this proves though is that when faced with a problem like this you are really on your own to resolve it, if you can, no matter how urgent and important it is.

The worst thing was I lost all my existing email in the hotmail account!  Fortunately I have a backup, but this would definitely catch the unwary.  When live domains eventually re-found the DNS was correct again it seemed to associate me to a brand new (and empty) hotmail account.  So beware! 

What a nightmare, and no-one to help! These free services are only good if you can sort any problems out yourself,  assuming you can discover and understand the problem.  So I hope this helps someone else, or me again in the future.