Gerhard Potgieter

After doing my daily morning routine of getting coffee and reading a few forum post on mybroadband.co.za I came across a interesting post.

For those of you that know about the One Red Paperclip this is something similiar. This is about a young 21year old student wanting to make his dream come true of being a pilot.

The site www.abadge.co.za is where Itai Etzman has placed his first trade option online. What he is aiming to do it trade item for item as till het gets to say a fully paid flying coarse or something of the likes that can send him off to flying school.

Itai placed his first item, a F16 badge, up for trade. If you have anything worth while of trading please go help the guy out.

First Item up for trade is this F16 Badge.

Today I discovered a new site dedicated to listing broaband packages. Its brand new as ISP’s are still adding their packages on the site as I am writing this entry. The site www.broadbanddeals.co.za looks like it is a MyBroadband.co.za site. The goal of the site is to list all types of broadband packages available by ISPs for the 6 types of broadband services offered in South Africa. The site has a nice control panel for ISP to log into and add packages and details about them in a convenient way. So if you are a ISP feel free to register on the site for free and help make the site a success.

So lately some peeps cant seem to get the hang of connecting to a irc server, luckely i stubled across a nice thing called mibbit. Users can now connect to the CTWUG channel with the push of one button. To check it out or use it follow the CTWUG IRC link at the top of my site. Happy irc’ing noobs.

Have you ever tried waching a video on YouTube and gotten the message “We’re sorry, this video is no longer available”?

If you are a South African and using Telkom then your answer probably is yes.

The problem arrise from transparent proxies SAIX pushes all traffic through. This results in your connection to the site having a different IP each time, and then this can be seen as a hacking attempt of some sort.

Some forums out there operate on the same principal, say you are logged in and your IP changes you are then automatically logged out.

Good news is there is a work arround. You can use a fixed proxy, that will result in you having the same IP address each time you load a page.

To make use of this simply edit your browser proxy setting and add cache.saix.net:8080 as the server and port.

Now you should be able to browse sites uninterupted.

I’m an active MyBroadband member and a few times have seen a thread called “I am the Thread Killer” in the off-topic section, what drew my attention everytime was the size of the thread.

I hardly ever post in the thread but just now I had a look inside and again the post count got my attention and I started wondering what the largest thread is in the world. Im sure “I am the Thread Killer” could surely be there with the top of them, if not the number one thread.

I did some research on google and couldn’t realy find any other thread that mached “I am the Thread Killer“. Currently it consists of 165 702 replies, 11047 pages, and a enourmous 2 881 061 views to date. The thread was started on 10-03-2005 so it quite old, yet still it is a very active thread.

A while back I read the the owner of MyBroadband wanted to close down the thread cause it seriously cripled the server where the site is hosted but the formnites didn’t like the idea very much, so they upgraded the server quite a bit.

Firefox 3 got released today. And with the release is an attempt to set a new world record for the most downloaded software in 24 hours. So if you are a Firefox fanboy, help contribute to the world record by downloading Firefox 3 here.

South Africans have until 17:00 hours today to complete their downloads for it to count toward the world record.

The Firefox community is always up to some cool original way to declare their passion for Firefox. This time it’s not exception, and what better way to do it than to set a Guinness World record for most software downloads in 24 hours.

So if you are a Firefox fanatic all you have to do to help contribute to this world record is to download Firefox 3 when it goes live on Download Day sometime in June. In the meantime you can check out Download Day Headquarters and pledge to download Firefox 3. Mozilla will then let you know when Firefox 3 gets out the door, kicking of the 24 hour attempt.

If you would like to help assist in the run up to Download Day, you can do the following

• Get the word out; tell your friends, your neighbors, your grandma, anyone and everyone to participate in Download Day.
• Host a party to download Firefox; you provide the people and Mozilla will provide the party favors.
• Put a Download Day badge on your blog, profile or website.

So all you Firefox fanatics out there, lets help contribute toward this world record. If you would like to put a badge on your website or blog, you can get badges here.

With the increased popularity of wireless technology today more and more homes and businesses are starting to use this technology.

What most of these users don’t know is that if you don’t secure your wireless network anybody within range of the network can gain access to it if you don’t have security measures in place.

A while back Telkom started giving away free wireless ADSL routers to all new self install users signing up. This move contributed to a even larger percentage of unsecured wireless networks out there, and these networks are unsecured without the users even knowing it.

If you are into wifi like I am, every now and then you would do a scan just to see how many networks is in your area. With these scans almost every time I picked up at least 2 unsecured wireless home networks. Just to mention I can then easily connect to these networks and then use the ADSL, some cases I could even log in to the wireless router with the default username and password. In a country like South Africa where bandwidth is so expensive there are allot of people out there that exploit these unsecured wireless networks and use up all the bandwidth there is, leaving the owner flabbergasted to hear from his ISP that he used up all his bandwidth.

So I thought it would be a good thing just to list a few things you can do to ensure that your wireless network is protected from unauthorized use.

1. First thing you do when you receive your wireless router is to always change the default username and/or password.
2. Enable some form of security, like WEP, WPA, WPA2, or MAC authentication. This will ask new users to the network for a passkey to be able to connect to the network, or the user’s mac must be enabled on the router.
3. Use static IP addressing rather than a DHCP server. This will make it harder for an intruder to guess your IP range and Gateway IP for internet use.
4. If you are a large business running advanced wireless network use RADIUS to authenticate your users.
5. And last if you can check your router logs as often as possible to see attempts of unauthorized access.

If your are still not sure how to secure your network feel free to leave comments and I’ll try and direct you into the right direction to help you secure your wireless network.

Remember a wireless network is never safe from unauthorized access but you can always make it harder for a person to be able to access it. Always remember a form of security is better than none at all.

The guys at Adecco sent me the link to their brand new blogspot. Its a blog containing all the available positions they have aswell as what the specifications is to apply for it.

They are also in the process of setting up a blog for Employers where you as a job seeker can post your qualifications and experience and then employers can visit this blog and seek out future employees.

Nice job Adecco for making job positions more freely available to the IT job seeker. The blog displaying all the current jobs available can be found here, and the blog where you can advertise your expertise and experience can be found here. All you have to do to feature on the employers blog is to send your CV requesting to post it on the blog to Hennie Swart at Hennie.Swart@Adecco.co.za, and a short description on your skills will be placed but with no name.

Mozilla has issued the first official release candidate of Firefox 3, the next major version of the popular open source web browser. This Firefox 3 Release Candidate is a preview release of Mozilla’s next generation Firefox browser and is being made available for testing purposes only.

One of the most impressive features in Firefox 3 is the new Places system, a massive overhaul of the browser’s bookmark and history functionality that is built on SQLite and provides noticeable improvements to performance and data integrity. The Places system has facilitated a number of very compelling user interface enhancements, like the new combined history and bookmarks organizer and an impressively intelligent new autocompletion implementation for the browser address bar.

Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 33 months. Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 14,000 updates including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot more under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers.

Performance and memory efficiency were high priorities for Firefox 3. Firefox 3 now uses less memory than Safari and Opera in some benchmarks.

Mozilla provides Firefox 3 for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X in a variety of languages. You can get the latest version of Firefox 3 here.

I installed it and did not have any problem to date, so if you are a Firefox junkie like I am or even a plugin developer I would suggest you install this RC and start testing or making sure your plugins is compatible with Firefox 3 before the final release.