What is DNS Propogation?

I have received this question many many times over the years as an internet … person… most recently from our new graphic artist contractor, a fine young man from Joseph Turner Graphics. And it’s a very valid question, since people are often told things like “Your website won’t be up until DNS propagates which could be as long as 72 hours.” 72 hours! This is the age of the Internet! 72 hours is an enormous amount of time. Why does it take so long? Why is the range so gaping? I mean if it was EXACTLY 72 hours, that’s more believable than “could be one hour, could be 12, could be 39, could be 72”.

Unfortunately, there is a reason. And it’s one that no one has control over.
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What in the world would we do without Akismet?

The world of online marketing is split into two separate and occasionally difficult to distinguish groups: The first has legitimate products and services and attempts to spread the word about their products and services to the attention of the masses. The second sprays the internet with unsolicited garble and hopes that enough suckers will click thereon to justify their sad existance. Predominantly, they peddle pills, porn, or poker.

This article is about the latter… and queue the Law & Order music…
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Whoa, wait, what?

Did you just seriously click on a spam link? No! Bad! Don’t do that anymore. Here is a conservative list of potentially bad things that could happen to you as the result of clicking on a spam link:

You could be…

  • Tracked and harassed by bad marketers
  • Infected with spyware
  • Spoofed and your identity stolen
  • Kidnapped by a rough trick named Jim
  • Slapped with a newspaper by your CPU’s math co-processor
  • Increasingly vulnerable to DUI tickets
  • Censored by the FCC
  • Blocked by the Electric Company

So just avoid the hassle and don’t click on spam links!

CCNA (ICND-2) OSPF key points.

I’ve been working on my CCNA and have a need to break down the concepts, configurations etc. into bite sized study topics. So instead of creating this one in my notebook as I usually do, I decided I would share some key points of the OSPF protocol. Don’t expect anything ground breaking here, but if you are also working on your CCNA or just want to review, then maybe you’ll also find this handy.  Oh and all of these are notes from the CCNA ICND2 official exam certification guide (second edition) by Wendell Odom.

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Must not sleep. Must warn others.

Chances are if you’re a geek meets nerd, semi-anti-social, A&E broadcast family addict – that is to say, anything like myself – you probably enjoy a little bit of  ‘ye olde  paranormal musings’.  If, for no other reason, the stories seem to be well thought-out.  It’s September, which, according to my local Walgreens, means it’s almost Halloween.  Let’s have a little spooky fun.  We’re going to thrash the transmission by skipping the clutch and slamming it into reverse warp!

And now for something completely different… Continue reading

Automatically starting and broadcasting in Wirecast

Recently, one of the local radio stations here in town wanted to stream their stuff live over the internet. Being their ISP, we helped them quite a bit. You can read about that and how it was done here: Multiple parallel audio streams from multiple audio sources on one Wirecast license.. Recently, however, we have uncovered a huge flaw in Wirecast: it’s inability to recover from pretty much any error automatically, start automatically, or automatically broadcast. If you don’t have a 24/7 technician who can sit in front of the server and watch Wirecast around the clock, this presents a problem.

A HUGE problem. And Wirecast’s official answer is “it’s on the wish list”.

Nice. I’m done wishing. So here’s what I did…
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Expand your desktop with Synergy.

The other day, several clients from up north came to visit as we helped them launch a new marketing product. As they sat watching me pound out code on my computers, they were quite curious about my three monitors. They watched me flow back and forth amongst the three, changing this, checking that, saving here, reloading there… normal operations for me, but not for them. One, who had some previous programming experience, asked if I preferred Linux to Windows. I replied that both had their uses and so I was using both. He was somewhat taken aback by my statement and looked closer at my monitors.

Yep, two windows, and one linux…
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