Wow! Microsoft research are churning out some cool ideas at the moment! I really hope they turn some of these concepts into real products based around Courier sometime soon!
Check out the video below to see how they’re using both pen input and touch input to work together on a surface display. Some of the ideas look so natural!
For more information – see "Manual Deskterity” over at Microsoft Research Labs
Following on from the recent post on UCEProtect and my client being added to a spam blacklist, once we were removed from the blacklist I expected email bounces to stop?
Unfortunately we’ve been getting some odd random (at least I thought) bounces with the following errors:
554 5.7.1 <hostname>: Client host rejected: The sender’s mail server is blocked
Now this isn’t really helpful as the error doesn’t state why you’ve been blocked?!
Time for a little investigation:
From a DOS window, type “nslookup”
Now type “set type=mx” (this tells nslookup to look-up the mail server for a domain)
Now type the name of the domain e.g. “scotiasystems.com” (note – don’t include a subdomain such as www")
nslookup will now return a list of mail servers which will accept email for the domain.
From a DOS window, type “telnet <mail server name> 25”
This will attempt to connect to the mail server – at this point you may see a disconnect message which gives further instructions on how to follow up.
After a little more investigation, it appears that the mail servers in question belong to rr.com and emailsvr.com.
These companies host email for many smaller companies and appeared to be the common link with all the bounces I’ve found.
Now I’ve checked all known blacklists and we’re not listed – so why are these companies blocking us? Well it seems once you appear on a blacklist – they continue to block you, even when you’re removed from the blacklist!
To manually remove the blocks use the following:
rr.com : http://security.rr.com/mail_blocks.htm
emailrsvr.com : postmaster@emailsrvr.com
If I find any more sites like this – I’ll add the removal instructions to this post.
If you’re running a blog, chances are it is probably running on a version of WordPress. However, did you know that there’s a major new revision (3.0) due for release soon?
WordPress 3.0 is currently in Beta testing, and the full release is due on May 1st.
But what can you expect in this new release? Well here’s a quick run down of the new features.
This is quite a major change to the core functionality of WordPress, however it’s a feature which has been used for some time on the WordPress.com site for hosting multiple sites.
Version 3.0 merges this functionality so that anyone can host multiple WordPress blogs on their own machine.
There’s a new default theme called twenty ten. This new theme, along with menu and post changes (see later) show how WordPress is become more of an all-round CMS tool rather than just a blogging platform. It’ll be interesting to see how these changes alter the CMS marketplace share of Joomla and Drupal.
WordPress also have a Twenty Ten Template Demo site up and running which you can play around with to see how the template works.
The New version of WordPress will now include Woo Navigation menus as default. You can see how these are used in the sample twenty ten demo site mentioned above.
And here’s a demo which shows just how easy it is to add predefined pages and categories using Woo Navigation.
Another change which positions WordPress as a CMS is the inclusion of custom post types such as move, album, quote.
Instead of going into the details in this post – here is a good article which discusses custom post types in wordpress 3.0.
A simple change, but one which will harden the security on future WordPress sites. By default, on older installations of WordPress, the administrative account was always created as “admin”.
Although it’s possible to change this, many installs keep the default which makes hacking the site easier.
Now when installing WordPress you’re prompted to choose a name.
Well to me it looks like WordPress really wants to establish itself as a full blown CMS to compete with the likes of Joomla and Drupal.
I like the WordPress interface and how it can be customised, so I’m looking forward to implementing some test sites using 3.0.
I think this will bring the world of CMS development to many more people which can only be a good thing.
Bring on May 1st!
Further Screenshots of WordPress 3.0 are available at www.wpbeginner.com
