The Top 100 Sites on the internet.

Check it out!

MeekTech isn't on the list for some reason :P

Top 100 Sites on the internet

Vista Upgrade Coupon: Hidden Costs?

An article over at PC World analyzes the 'coupon' being offered by Microsoft - where if you buy a computer with Windows XP through select vendors between October 26, 2006 and March 15,2007 - you will be able to upgrade to Windows Vista for free.

Two good points are brought up through the article. First, the consumer is the person that will be doing the actual upgrade, and depending on the consumer it may not be as 'easy' as Microsoft claims it to be. Second, depending on the vendor you purchase the upgrade from, you will more than likely be paying (at minimum) shipping and handling, and maybe even upgrade fees to match the flavor of Vista you want.

Check out the full article here: http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/003020.html

Firefox 2 Released

The headline speaks for itself!

Grab firefox 2.0:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html

Halloween Case Mods!

Check out these great Halloween case mods!

http://www3.uark.edu/bkst/pumpkin/
http://www.rendered-dreams.com/pumputer/

News: IE7 Released, Firefox 2 to follow

Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7, which includes tabbed browsing, new security features, and a new look amongst other things. Check the new Internet Explorer 7 here.

Mozilla Firefox isn't sitting by idle while IE7 is released. Firefox 2.0 will be released October 24th, according to Christopher Beard - Mozilla's vice president of products.

Both browsers seem solid from what I've seen and read. One 'issue' that has been discussed regarding firefox 1.x and the beta's of 2.0 has been the memory usage. Firefox caches previous pages viewed in RAM and causes a large amount of memory usage if the browser is left open for an extended period of time. How will IE7 handle memory usage though? The guys at Lifehacker have done some testing on both of the browsers and written up an interesting article here.

(I personally will most likely continue to use Firefox. However, competition seems to breeds great software, so I encourage everyone to try them both.)

Quicktip: Figure out your external IP address

Need to figure out the external IP address for the computer you're using?
Sometimes when you're inside a private (NATed) network, you're not sure what IP address you appear to the rest of the world as.

Use THIS great website to find out!

HOWTO: Reverse Lookup Woes

Having issues sending e-mail to big companies such as AOL? Getting undeliverable messages you can't explain?

AOL and many other e-mail providers and ISPs will no longer accept e-mail from SMTP servers that do not have a reverse lookup assigned to them.

You can check to see if your e-mail server has a reverse lookup (PTR Record) assigned to it by bringing up a command prompt in windows and doing 'ping -a ' followed by the external IP address of your e-mail server. (not sure how to find your external IP address? click here)

(a successful reverse lookup)

(an unsuccessful reverse lookup)

Note the two screenshots above. You can see in an unsuccessful reverse lookup, instead of the next line containing a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) followed by the IP in brackets, it simply just contains the IP. This lets you know that there is no reverse lookup record available for the IP you attempted to ping. Note:It is important that you try this test from an external computer, as testing it from inside your network may yield misleading results.

OKAY! Now that we've confirmed that there is no reverse lookup for your IP address, what do we do now? The first step would be to contact your Internet Service Provider and request that your servers external IP address be assigned a reverse lookup record and have them point it to a valid address such as mail.yourcompany.com, which they may need to have created.

(Sometimes, when your DNS hosting is provided by someone other than your ISP, you will need to contact two different companies. Your DNS provider first off to have mail.yourcompany.com created, and then your ISP to have your IP address pointed to that new address.)