The RSS feed is another matter. By default, WordPress only shows those posts which are current to date. Later posts are not visible, which defeats a bit the purpose of announcing an event. If the readers following the RSS feed are only informed on the day of the event, it is of little help.

I added the following function to the functions.php file (in the WordPress theme folder) to show future posts.

function include_calendar_posts($where) {
 global $wpdb;
  if ( is_feed() ){
  // add SQL-sytax to default $where
  $where .= " OR $wpdb->posts.post_status = 'future' " ;
 }
 return $where;
}
add_filter('posts_where','include_calendar_posts');

I sent a tweet about this and, much to my surprise, I immediately received a series of direct messages on Twitter asking for the code. So here it is:  hellotxt.php.txt , as well as the diff to the original file: hellotxtpress.php.diff

There are actually four five changes:

• Added configuration option for URL shortener, so you can use your favourite URL shortener service. It defaults to mine.
• Added configuration option for post prefix. By default, it is “New Blog post: “

• Replace WP smart quotes by plain ones.  This is to prevent that some microblogging sites print out the HTML entities value, instead of the quotes themselves. Copied straight from WP Laconica Tools.
• Don’t resend a post that was already submitted.  The inspiration came from the WP Laconica Tools.
• Added configuration option for Twitter hash tags

I will submit my changes to the plugin author, who may decide to incorporate them in a future release.

This is by no means a new issue. It first appeared with the introduction of the .info TLD. Before that TLDs were only two or three letters long, and many validation routines could not cope with the 4 letters of .info. At the time, ICANN had developed a testing tool which allowed developers to test if their code took into account the requirement for 4 letters. Still, you find today on the Internet tons of library routines that do not support 4 or more letter TLDs.

Some of these routines also rely on a hard-coded list of TLDs. Even today, I sometimes find that some web sites cannot deal with my .eu domain, which was introduced 4 years ago.There are hundreds of thousands of these routines written in Javascript, PHP, Perl, ColdFusion, ASP and just about any programming or scripting language you can think of.

In the Draft Applicant’s Guidebook to new gTLDs, ICANN has clearly indicated that it does not guarantee universal acceptance of the new TLD, and rather place the burden on the registry operator to educate its customers. This made sense during the previous new TLD rounds, where there were only a few added, one at a time and with long intervals between them.

With the new gTLD round, ICANN plans to add a lot of TLDs, potentially at very close intervals, if not at the same time. The figure most often heard is 500. That is a quantum leap forward. All those hard-coded lists deeply buried in software will need to be updated. It will not happen overnight. It may take years. This time also, we are throwing into the mix TLDs which could be long strings, like .coca-cola. We are also adding IDN (internationalized Domain Names) in non-ASCII characters, which will be a real issue with all environments that do not process double-byte strings. There are tons of legacy applications that do not support that, and some never will.

The good news is that programmers do not need to worry about their job. There is plenty of work ahead. The bad news is that most of them are not aware of these upcoming TLDs, let alone the implications it will have on the code they wrote, or the code they use and written by someone else.

So, it does not make sense now for ICANN  just to say it is someone else’s problem. If the new gTLDs cannot be processed on the client platforms, this will mean their acceptance by the user community will be low. This means less revenue for registries, registrars and finally ICANN. This would also mean a partial failure of the whole new gTLD program, for which ICANN will be accountable for. It could cost ICANN much of its credibility, because it would not be the failure of one specific TLD for which the registry could be blamed, it would mean the failure of several, all for the same reasons.

Hence, I suggested today to ICANN to plan a workshop at the Seoul meeting to help identify these issues, so that clear guildelines can be given to the software community and an awareness campaign can be launched. It is absolutely crucial to identify the issues, the amount of work they represent and the time it will take to fix the code before the introduction of these new top level domains.

There are 3 RFCs, covering changes to the SMTP protocol, e-mail message format and delivery Status Notifications.

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5335.txt
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5336.txt
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5337.txt

They still have the “Experimental” status, meaning they are not yet a standard. How long this will take to see them in actual products is difficult to guess.  Software vendors tend to look at market demand before implementing new features . Hence, it is time to pressure your favourite e-mail client vendor. Tell them you need that. For Microsoft Outlook, you could try here. For Apple Mail, there. For Mozilla Thunderbird, still somewhere else.

Enter Paris-Traceroute, which tries to be smarter. In addition, it can also do traceroutes in UDP and TCP, in addition to ICMP, which is often blocked by firewalls.

It has currently been tested and confirmed to run on Linux and NetBSD. I can confirm it also compiles and works on MacOSX, but needs to be run as root. For the Redhat and CentOS crowds out there, I am currently build a RPM.

Taking the process one step further, I compiled it myself from source. This allowed me to change one thing that annoyed me in the application. Thunderbird puts subject lines between brackets when you forward a message. It is not a configurable option. This is hard-coded into the application in the file nsMsgCompose.cpp (lines 2017 and 2018) and in mimedrft.cpp (line 1350).

One other annoyance I had with Thunderbird on MacOSX is that it displayed the date in MM/DD/YY format, rather than the DD/MM/YY format we use in Europe. This happened regardless of the date settings on the Mac, and irrespective of the official build I used.  Bingo this time. Recompiling Thunderbird solved this issue. My guess is that the application takes the defaults of the platform being used for compiling, rather than the run-time defaults.

Finally, my Thunderbird.app is now 31Mb, rather than 52Mb for the official build. As a result, it starts and runs visibly faster.

Released to open source developers by NLnet Labs, Verisign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN), Nominet, and Kirei, Unbound is a validating, recursive, and caching DNS server designed as a high performance alternative for BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain). Unbound will be supported by NLnet Labs.

It is good news for the Internet as a whole there is another alternative to the venerable Bind. With a 75% market share, this means an exploit in Bind might cause serious trouble for a lot of people. With more alternatives, we mitigate the risk.

I have not tried it yet and certainly my experience on this small site will certainly not be representative. If you want to give it a try, download the source from http://unbound.net

I built RPMs for RHEL5 / CentOS 5 (WARNING Totally untested ! use at your own risk)

unbound-1.0.0-1.i386.rpm
unbound-1.0.0-1.src.rpm

See also the static page with more details for geeks.

Update: I have been using this RPM over the last two hours in lieu of Bind for local resolving and can report it works as intended

"Congratulations ! You're using IPv6 ! Your address is XXXXXXX"

In case you ask, the PHP code that performs this check is below:

Update: Martin J. Levy suggested the following, more compact code:

I am still in a state of shock. Over the last four years in my previous position, I had been using Firefox as my main browser, mostly because of AdblockPlus, a remarkably efficient advertisement blocker.

With IE6, I have rediscovered how advertising on web sites can be distracting and invading. Suddenly, the pop-up windows, Flash animations and other nasties are there again. Unlike a paper magazine, when you only need to turn the page to ignore them, advertisements on web sites really prevent you to work until you close the pop-up window, stop the animation, turn off the volume, etc.

I guess one could say that Wladimir Palant, the developer of Adblock Plus, is one of the greatest benefactors to computer productivity over the last few years. Thanks, mate. Great job. I am forever grateful.

I tried Beta 3 of Safari for Windows this morning on my office computer. The good news first.  I was pleasantly surprised by the speed at with it launched, compared to Firefox or Internet Explorer. According to Apple, it beats all the competitors for speed of HTML rendering, Javascript execution and launch times.

As is typical with beta versions, some things do not work yet.

• Importing Firefox bookmarks. I have not tried importing IE bookmarks
• Although Safari identified my company’s automatic proxy, the keychain module in the browser does not seem to work yet, so I had to enter a user name and password for each and  every HTTP connection. You may have several for each page you want to display, so in this case it is very inconvenient.
• The user interface is typical MacOSX. This may be surprising for Windows users, especially in the preferences menu, where there is no “OK” or “Apply” button to confirm the changes you made.

Overall, Safari for Windows is very promising. I look forward for the next beta and the official release in October.