Trip to San Diego

September 18th, 2004 • Comments Off Travels

So we’ve headed off on a little vacation to San Diego. I was concerned that we weren’t going to be able to leave Atlanta because of the hurricane, but everything went okay. That is, until we got to Hertz to rent a car.

Apparently an outfit like Hertz with all of their computer tracking systems can’t figure out which cars are on the lot and which cars are in what parking spots. Too bad since they lost the opportunity to have me rent a larger car with the navigation system. In fact, the navigation system was the reason I went through the trouble of renting with Hertz. Standing around for nearly an hour while they figured out what was going on is not my idea of fun after a four hour flight. Needless to say, I won’t be renting from Hertz again - ever. Come to think of it, I probably should have gotten the Hertz insurance on the car so I could beat the hell out of it. Oh well.

Fortunately, the drive to the absolutely wonderful Westin Horton Plaza in downtown San Diego was really short. The hotel is great, although it is by no means inexpensive. Parking alone costs $25/day! The nice thing about Westin hotels is that they have a number of features specifically for families travelling with children. If you have an infant you can request a crib made of the same bedding material as their normal beds. And, if it is available, you can request an empty refrigerator (not sure how big it is) to be delivered to your room. Not too shabby.

The people here seem to be not as friendly as in the South. We’ll have to see how that analysis holds up over the next week.

New FireFox and Thunderbird Clients

September 14th, 2004 • Comments Off General

I just installed FireFox 1.0PR and Thunderbird 0.8. Both have a number of improvements on the old versions.

FireFox now has a find highlight bar that makes the browser highlight whatever word(s) you’re looking for on a page in a similar way to the Google cache and the blogging extensions that detect search terms in a referral URL. Now you can do it on ANY page. Great feature.

FireFox now also has the ability to “show passwords” for entries that you’ve saved in the browser but now have forgotten what is behind those little “*”s. Mozilla had this for a while and it’s nice to have in FireFox now. Not that I ever let technology take over for my brain and forget important information like a password to a random web site.

Thunderbird and FireFox both have an integrated RSS reader. This might be a good choice for some folks although I personally prefer FeedDemon.

The only downside right now is that some plug-ins for both products don’t seem to work with the new revision. I’m going to limp along without them for now with the hope that the authors of the plug-ins issue new versions soon.

So what are you waiting for? Go get your updated software!

Lock Those Domain Names

September 13th, 2004 • Comments Off Technology

I just read about a new ICANN ruling going into effect on November 12, 2004 that impacts all domain holders. Specifically, this rule affects inter-registrar transfers. “Oh, I don’t want to transfer my domain names so I don’t care about this issue,” you say. Read on about how others might try to transfer the domain names away from you.

This new ICANN policy is being put into place to help those domain name owners are with registrars who are unwilling to transfer a domain name that is properly owned and paid up for. Registrars have an economic disincentive to willingly participate in transferring domain names away from their service. Other registrars are happy to do the transfers but don’t have the staff to accommodate the requests that need to be processed. So ICANN has changed the rules to state:

Failure by the Registrar of Record to respond within five (5) calendar days to a notification from the Registry regarding a transfer request will result in a default “approval” of the transfer.

In the event that a Transfer Contact listed in the Whois has not confirmed their request to transfer with the Registrar of Record and the Registrar of Record has not explicitly denied the transfer request, the default action will be that the Registrar of Record must allow the transfer to proceed.

So if you parse the above, this means that if your registrar does not respond “yes, transfer is okay” or “no, transfer is not okay” to a transfer request, then the default answer will be assumed to be “yes, transfer is okay”. Also, if the Transfer Contact (generally the domain owner) does not respond, then the default answer is also assumed to be “yes, transfer is okay”. Now the problem with this is that there has been so much spam harvesting of registry records that for most people they either don’t look at emails for their domain email account or they have disconnected it all together.

So what is there to do? Again, back to the ICANN policy (bold added by me):

Instances when the requested change of Registrar may not be denied include, but are not limited to:

• Nonpayment for a pending or future registration period
• No response from the Registered Name Holder or Administrative Contact.
• Domain name in Registrar Lock Status, unless the Registered Name Holder is provided with the reasonable opportunity and ability to unlock the domain name prior to the Transfer Request.
• Domain name registration period time constraints, other than during the first 60 days of initial registration or during the first 60 days after a registrar transfer.
• General payment defaults between Registrar and business partners / affiliates in cases where the Registered Name Holder for the domain in question has paid for the registration.

So if your registrar allows you to “lock” your domain into that registrar, they can disallow any transfer requests away from them. Most all registrars have this capability but may charge you some amount for the capability. I use BulkRegister and I had to upgrade my account (which now costs me $99/year in addition to my domain name charges - this kind of sucks since I wasn’t paying a yearly fee before) to get the feature.

I urge everyone to check out their registrar and find out how you can lock your domain in. Otherwise you risk your domain being hijacked and held for ransom, or worse.

VoIP and the Future of Phone Tariffs

September 10th, 2004 • 1 comment Technology

Fred Wilson has a post about VoIP and phone tariffs which mentions an interesting post by Ronald Gruia about the new area code in England for VoIP phone numbers. This whole VoIP thing (along with cell phones that will seamlessly support WiFi to GSM switching) is something I’ve been thinking about lately. With the increased deployment and partnering that folks like AT&T are doing with CallVantage (see here) there are some interesting things that could be done. For example, is there anything preventing me from buying a CallVantage box in the U.S., taking it with me overseas, and then making “local” calls to the U.S. (long distance within the U.S. is free on CallVantage too). People in the U.S. could call me overseas for the price of a local or domestic long distance phone call. All that I need overseas is a faster than dialup connection to the Internet. Obviously, this is easier in some countries than in others but I still don’t see why people don’t do this all the time now. $50/month for CallVantage could be very easily recouped by the savings on international long distance costs.

Hallelujah!

September 10th, 2004 • Comments Off Technology

Netflix now has RSS feeds!