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Posts tagged rant
Ep. 206 – Spooky Saganaki and Halloween Cheese
Nov 5th
TOPIC: Surprise guest Dave “Spooky” Saganaki joins us this week, and helps out with what’s sure to be a classic Halloween TechTalk! Mike and Dave talk some tech, answer a listener question from Hans in Germany, and go on an anti-Favre rant before we bring on the inimitable Jay Garmon, who – after answering his Halloweeniest Harry Houdini trivia from last week – gives us another great trivia question:
There are 75 man-made objects on the moon. Almost all were put there by the US and Soviet Union – how many WEREN’T put there by either the US or Soviet Union?
And then, a whole host of somewhat spooky coolsites of the week:
- Pumpkin Patches and More – Exactly what it sounds like; finds the nearest one to you. Great even in November for Hay Rides and etc.!
- Noel’s Pumpkin Carving Archive – Fantastical pumpkin carving art.
- Shuffler.FM – Pick your genre and surf the music blogs, shuffling through your musical choice! Great variety and constantly changing tunes!
- GopherWood Studios – Just a few really fun, kind of old-school games. Kill a few minutes (or hours) checking my favorite – Entanglement – out!
The awesome podcast only song of the week this week is the oldy, moldy, but still good for Trick or Treatin’ “A Nightmare on My street” by DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince. Whatever happened to that guy anyways? I hope he did as well as Jazzy Jeff …
Special Report – Who’s Your GoDaddy!? Round 2
Jul 22nd
I have some important follow-up to my last post about the GoDaddy issue.
Back on Friday, July 17, I posted to the blog here the lack of responsiveness that we got regarding what seemed to be pretty clearly a configuration issue on GoDaddy’s mail servers. I’m including my written email to their support below, as well as the eventual written response that I got from their Office of the President as well.
Late Friday afternoon I received a call from a very well-spoken and pleasant individual at GoDaddy named Daniel Butler. In that conversation he listened to my concerns, and explained how he felt that they were doing the best thing in the interests of GoDaddy by applying the Spamhaus PBL database the way that they did. GoDaddy also agreed to ‘whitelist’ our specific IP address. The bottom line is that GoDaddy knows that the PBL is a combination of policy blocks and straight up dynamic IP’s, and knows that using this list will give them false positives. They’re trying to convince Spamhaus to break these lists out so that they could use one or the other instead of being forced to use both, but in the meantime will continue to use the PBL list to block any incoming messages that reference IP’s there. Mr. Butler said that the number of people being affected by these false positives is vanishingly small, far less than 1% of their total webmail user population. Their solution to customers adversely affected by this is for them to contact Spamhaus or GoDaddy directly and get the IP’s whitelisted or removed from the PBL entirely.
I’m not 100% convinced that this would be satisfactory to everyone affected, but since they whitelisted us WRLR hasn’t had the issue anymore.
Of course, if our IP changes – which, as a hosted dynamic IP it almost certainly will – then I’ll have to ride the finger-pointing merry-go-round again, won’t I?
Ep. 155 – Mike Miller’s Selling Online 2.0!
Jul 22nd
TOPIC: Another fantastic (if a bit rushed) interview with our good friend Mike Miller! This time around he’s sharing with us the in-depth info on how to buy, sell, and market yourself online after the ‘demise’ of eBay (come on and admit it, eBay just isn’t that much FUN anymore!). His new book, Selling Online 2.0 is available at Amazon, or you can check out all of Mike’s library (over 90 books!) at http://www.molehillgroup.com.
We get rushed this week because in addition to another great segment by Jay “Geek Trivia” Garmon wherein Customer Jones becomes an official nemesis, Michael goes on a GoDaddy rant, sharing info on how your important emails might be blocked if you use GoDaddy for webmail (see our related posts here and here).
We received some questions about the TechTalk Ubuntu setup and how that was done, so continued the useful dual-boot configuration tools discussion with this coolsite of the week:
- EASEUS Partition Manager – The safest way to have your system dual-booting is, as Offspring says, to “keep ‘em seperated.” If you’ve got one giant C: drive, or maybe too many darn drive letters sharing the same physical unit, the EASEUS Partition manager will take care of that for you – free for home use!
The podcast only song of the week is “Freedom Highway” by Mavis Staples. We’re off next week, but join us in 2 when we return with another book breakdown of the “The Geek Atlas” by John Graham-Cumming.
Special Report – Who’s your GoDaddy!?
Jul 17th
GoDaddy is blocking your emails – not because they’re spam, but because they don’t know how to configure a webmail server properly! OK, now I know that typically us TechTalk guys should feel fortunate to be considered worthy to repeat the news, never mind report on it, but in this case I think there’s something important enough that it needed to be written up and shared. Call it news if you’re generous, or call it a rant if you want; it probably lands somewhere between the two.
Have you ever wondered if you’re missing emails from important people? Do you use GoDaddy as your hosting provider or webmail service? Does anyone you know use GoDaddy and complain that they missed emails from you? If the answer to those questions is yes, you may have experienced a mail server configuration issue that GoDaddy is not only aware of but are so far unwilling to correct.
The skinny is that GoDaddy is applying the well-known and highly regarded SpamHaus SBL/XBL/PBL databases in an inappropriate manner. This leads to false-positives on the spam block; which means your emails to and from GoDaddy clients can and will be blocked under certain fairly common circumstances. GoDaddy has been alerted to this problem, admits that it is incorrectly configured, and sources in management have said they are not going to do anything about it. More >
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