Martin @ Blog

Two guys decided this weekend to create a startup in a weekend. They created a new webservice, called Tweetburner which can be used for creating sort url’s to webpages for use on Twitter. This is not a very innovative idea, but they added a tracking system which makes it possible to create rankings of the most popular links.
The way they created this new service is the most intersting, since they used weblogs (another one) and http://www.twitter.com/tweetburner”>Twitter intensively. This resulted in a large number of new users and new ideas they probably didn’t get when they developed it without publishing about it. I think this is a great way of creating a new service. A similar example is the creation of Fav.or.it, on which the creator also blogged a lot before the service was released to the public. This resulted in a rather large group of people knowning of this new service even before there was a ready-to-use product.
Via Erwin Blom.

I have a temporarily internet connection via Het Net (in a few weeks I get a fiber connection at 100mbit). Since I manage some domains and don’t want to spend money on external mail servers (I’m Dutch…), I wanted to run my own SMTP server for receiving mail (sending mail can be done using the mailhost of the provider).
However, since a few years, most Dutch providers block incoming traffic at port 25 and only allows it to access the smtp servers of the provider. So this is a problem when you want to run your own mailserver for your domain.

When you’re at a KPN provider (HetNet or Planet) it is possible to use a mailrelay server. In order to make this work, you should set a primary and secondary mail server in your DNS record. Your own mail server should have the highest priority. As secondary mailserver you should set mailrelay.planet.nl with a lower priority.

Example:

IN MX 10 mail.yourdomain.com.
IN MX 20 mailrelay.planet.nl.


For me at least, this solution works.

Since a few days I’m using Pulse. This is a service which providers the possibility to use a shared profile for Eclipse. You can either use this service anonymously or as a registered user. In the latter case, you create an account and can select a generic profile for Eclipse, targeted at a specific audience. For example PHP developer or J2EE developer.
Then you can start your profile after which the required software (Eclipse and the plugins required for your profile) are downloaded. You can customize your profile, which also includes the Eclipse preferences such as the size of your font in the editor etc., but also other plugins which aren’t yet part of Pulse.
The most interesting part is when you use another computer. There you can just login to Pulse, click ‘start your profile’ and presto: on this computer the same Eclipse as you normally use is downloaded and configurered according to your preferences! It is even possible to share profiles within for example development teams, in order to let everybody use the same development environment.

It is possible to download the first beta of Internet Explorer 8. I tried it in Parallels on my Mac, and it seems to work. Obviously, people on the Internet are complaining that sites are broken in IE8. Fortunately, the websites I maintain seems to work flawlessly in the new browser (but that was to be expected, since I try to keep them standards compliant). The website of my employer seems a bit broken in IE8.

I also tried the latest Firefox 3 beta for Mac OS X. FF3 seems a lot faster than 2, so that is nice. It is also more standard compliant, since it passes the Acid3 test, it scores 59 points, which is the highest score of all browsers I tested with this it (only Safari 3, FF 2.0.0.12 and FF3 beta so far). FF3 has also some nice usability improvements. For example, I like the link to the originating site of active bookmarks which wasn’t there in FF2.
By the way, IE 8 only scores a miserable 17 points in the Acid3 test, making it the worst performer on my system in this test. Even FF2 had a higher score. I also noted that it offered me to choose ‘express settings’ on the first startup, which suggested Google as the search provider… has even Microsoft loses trust in its own search engine?

According to IEBlog, Microsoft changed its opinion on the standard compliance of Internet Explorer 8. The browser will now probably break compatibility with IE7 and will be more standard compliant thant the previous versions of IE.
Untill now, the company opted for a ‘switch’ which made IE8 more standard compliant, but in the default mode it would emulate the behaviour of IE7. I think the new approach is a good move of MS.