Tom Sommer’s Weblog

… it’s not POP3/IMAP.
Like many of you, I also have a GMail account (tom.sommer at gmail dot com).

While I find GMail nice in many ways, especially at threading mails and mailing lists, I cannot get use to the idea of checking my mail through a browser. I normally either have my lovely Thunderbird minimized and a popup appears when I get new mail, or I just click the Thunderbird icon in the bottom of my desktop and bling it will open and check for new mail. With GMail I have to keep visiting the GMail website to see if there is any new mail. I don’t know about the rest of you, but 1 GB space is not enough to make me abandon POP3 or IMAP.

For years I’ve hated the fact that sourceforge CVS prompts developers for their password each time you perform a CVS command. So I whined about it in #firefox (don’t ask why) and everyone said they loved SSH CVS. I then discovered you can actually send sourceforge your ssh public key (without a passphrase) and it won’t prompt you for your password and still use SSH encryption when using CVS.

Now who feels stupid? :(

Check out this benchmark of file_get_contents().

I’m glad I never use anything else (unless required to by the circumstances)

In recent news VeriSign announced they would raise the update interval for nameserver changes on .com and .net zones.

The idea is good and is welcomed by many hosts, this allows us to transfer domains from one nameserver to another faster than we can today.

It does not however solve the very broken way .com and .net domains work.
In Denmark the concept is very simple and works very well.

The difference between .dk and .com/.net lies in the procedure to transfer domains. In the DK-TLD we ask Dk-Hostmaster to send the owner of the domain a request for approval of transfer, this is working quite well, since the owner of the domain can decide when to transfer the domain.

It works a little different with COM-TLD and NET-TLD. Here it is not the owner of the domain who is contacted; it is the registrar whom has to approve the transfer of the domain. This simply causes a shitload of problems, since some hostmasters are extremely slow to approve these requests, or in some cases even ignores them. The idea is good, but not better than the weakest link, which is these slow hostmasters.

So a few hours less to change nameservers is NOTHING compared to the days and weeks you have to wait for some hostmasters to actually accept the request for transfer.

Mailinator could very well be the most awesome service I have ever seen.

It’s really useful if you need to enter a email address (to get a download link or validation key) on a site you don’t trust. Thumbs up :)

So after all this “PHP Scales” discussion, I decided to register at friendster.com to see what all the talk was about.

It seems like complete copy of orkut.com, where I am also registered, perhaps the main difference being that it recently turned to PHP :)

The first thing I noticed was that it wasn’t very Mozilla Friendly(tm), which was a little disappointing.

Well now I’m registered, I have no idea how to use it or get started – but at least I have a profile there, I think :)