Monthly Archive for October, 2007

Ubuntu 7.10 DNS issue

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 22/10/2007
in Linux, Open Source and ubuntu
. 3 Comments

Ubuntu 7.10 (aka Gutsy Gibbon) has a DNS-related bug.

I referred to it when I posted about having upgraded to 7.10 last week but since then I have found how to get around it.

First the problem -
After the upgrade, browsers, mail clients and other Internet-related applications run very slowly. Loading pages in Firefox can take 30+ seconds and sending/receiving emails seems interminable too.

On inspection, the Network settings seems to forget any custom settings (I had pointed it at the OpenDNS servers). Adding the OpenDNS servers to the router’s settings didn’t help. Re-adding the DNS servers to the Network Settings helped for about five minutes when it would once again lose the configuration and slow down.

Checking the Ubuntu forums I discovered that this appears to be related to IPv6.

I tried the following suggestion and it fixed the problem for me straightaway:

  1. IPv6 is supported by default in Ubuntu and can sometimes cause problems
  2. To disable it, open a Terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and type the command: gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/aliases
  3. Find the line alias net-pf-10 ipv6 and change it to read alias net-pf-10 off
  4. Reboot Ubuntu

Everything is zinging along happily on my laptop once more!

Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) launched

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 19/10/2007
in Linux, Open Source and ubuntu
. 6 Comments

Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) launched yesterday. Ubuntu is a linux distribution with a focus on desktop systems and usability. It issues major releases at pre-scheduled six monthly intervals.

I installed the previous version of Ubuntu (7.04) on one of my laptops recently and was very impressed with its performance and stability.

The update from 7.04 to 7.10 was completely painless - it was a one button click in the Update Manager!

The new version has lots of tweaks and newer versions of applications but it also has eye candy visual effects built-in (System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects:

I have had one problem with 7.10 so far and that is that it won’t remember my DNS settings. I’m not sure why that is or if it is only me. I normally use OpenDNS for my DNS - it is annoying to go back to Eircom’s significantly slower DNS servers after using OpenDNS servers for so long now.

Pedophile caught after Interpol published his photo

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 19/10/2007
in Community Interest
. 5 Comments

I posted a photo of a pedophile last week which Interpol had released to try to solicit help in capturing him.

A week later and I was delighted to see that the Guardian is reporting that he was caught in a remote part of Thailand after fleeing there to hide when the photos were released.

Pedophile caught

His name is Christopher Neil. He is Canadian and before posting his photo on the Internet police had been trying to identify and catch him for three years.

A sad day for Internet freedoms in China

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 18/10/2007
in Search Engines
. 5 Comments

If this were any other country you wouldn’t believe it but the Great Firewall of China has started re-directing traffic from the three major search engines (Yahoo!, Live.com and Google) to the Chinese owned search engine Baidu.com!

Other sites such as YouTube.com and Google’s BlogSearch are reportedly also being re-directed.

China has previously blocked sites like WordPress.com but this is the first report of it re-directing to a Chinese competitor.

I’ll bet the guys in Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft who bent over backwards to facilitate the Chinese governments censorship of Chinese Internet traffic (even to the point of Yahoo!’s handing over evidence which imprisoned a Chinese reporter for 10 years) are feeling pretty dumb now. If they don’t, they should.

This end result for people living in China is that their choice of search engine has now disappeared and the Chinese government only has to worry about controlling the results one search engine displays. A sad day for Internet freedoms in China.

Of course, it will also hit the income stream for Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! but given that they lay down with the Chinese government, I have a real hard time feeling sorry for them.

UPDATE - conflicting reports are emerging about this story, some are reporting that the story is untrue however, search engine expert Danny Sullivan has received confirmation from Google that there are problems with some of their services in China.

Is Mac OS X Leopard’s Mail App Junk?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 17/10/2007
in apple
. 11 Comments

Om Malik is taking a poll on his site today about the new features in OS X Leopard. He is asking readers to say which of the new features will compel them to move to Leopard.

Om’s own choice is Apple’s Mail app.

Personally I used Mail for years and loved it but I had to drop it eventually in favor of Thunderbird because its junk mail filters are useless. I kept clicking on the Junk button to try to train it to learn what was junk from what wasn’t but Thunderbird was orders of magnitude better at stopping spam so I had to move away from it.

Reading that there is a new version of Mail in Leopard I quickly checked out its new features but I was disappointed to see no mention of improved junk mail filtering.

I don’t see any compelling reason for me to upgrade then :-(

Do you?

First Gphones shipping?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 17/10/2007
in mobile
. 0 Comments

Rumour has it that the first 50,000 Gphones will ship from Taiwanese handset-maker HTC’s manufacturing facility before the end of the year.

While 50,000 may seem like a modest number,

“These initial phones are not going to be for sale,” Benjamin Schachter, one of the [UBS] analysts who worked on the report, said in a phone call earlier today. “These are going to be available for developers only to understand how the software works.”

There’s all kinds of speculation about the Gphone and the business model which will come with it. Some are postulating that it will be free but will display ads.

There’s no news yet on if/when it will come to Europe.

The mobile space is a no-brainer for Google though. Of the 6.billion people on the planet, only 1 billion have easy Internet access. Google’s long-term intention is to use these phones as a cheap way to Internet enable billions more people.

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