I’ve discovered a new feature over at flickr - you can annotate your photos by adding ‘notes’ to specific regions or hotspots. Very cunning! Click the image below to see an example - there are two notes in this image, but it only works if you view the image on the flickr site:

I’m slowly getting more people to use flickr, but it’s proving to be a bit of a challenge. I’m making a lot of use of the image privacy features which allow you to restrict photos to friends and/or family, but as very few of my friends and family have an account, no one can see my pictures.

So if I know you, get a grip and sign up for your free flickr account. Then view my pictures and click the link at the top of that page to add me to your contacts. I can then add you to my contacts list, and you will be able to see loads more photos. Sorted!

On a different note, I’m not well again. It seems ever since I had the ‘flu a few weeks ago I’ve been plagued by colds! I’ve got a really sore throat at the moment - even talking is painful. To make it worse, I’ve got no food in, no throat sweets, and the rest of the cold is coming on strong too now

… is coming back to an inbox full of spam. I had a nice trip down to Bristol this weekend [flickr set] (with two meetings down there today), and I’ve come back to hundreds of junk mails about all sorts of rubbish. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: spam sucks.

Playing with my camera

Anyway, I had a chance to play with my new camera again (Canon EOS 20D): I’m really beginning to like it now. Below are a couple of snaps from the photo set.

BritBlog queue

The other problem with going away at the moment is all the new blogs that are waiting to be approved on BritBlog. I need to get around to producing a usable backoffice so that the likes of perlworld and other helpful folk can help me with the review process. It is getting rather time consuming now! There are currently over 60 in the queue, so sorry if you are still waiting. I’ll get around to it as soon as I can.

Naff film

I watched ‘Ring‘ last night. It was supposed to be really scary, but in fact it was just a bit naff. I also watched Battle Royale 2 - Requiem [2003] over the weekend, and this too was rubbish. Neither of them beat the original Battle Royale [2001], which is still the best Japanese film I’ve seen recently.

Right time for dinner - I think I can smell it burning…

DNS is one of those magical things on the internet. It goes by unnoticed for ages, but when it goes wrong everyone knows about it! A few weeks ago I had decided that I wanted to learn more about DNS, so Amazon came to the rescue and DNS and BIND (yet another O’Reilly book) was pushed through my letter box.

Anyway, as you can probably imagine, the book is pretty boring to read, so it was rather fortuitous (for me, at least) that a couple of my customers have been experiencing DNS problems this week. Indeed, Flickr had some problems a few days ago, and several people in the forums were saying it was a DNS issue. I doubted this, and with my new found knowledge had a look into the problem. A DNS problem it wasn’t, and, after looking a bit closer, I suggested it was a load balancer issue. “Oh no!” said the site admins, “the load balancer is working fine!” Ahem. No it wasn’t. A few hours later, they finally discovered a problem with the load balancer.

So what else can DNS tell you? I’d been having some intermittent problems delivering email to an organisation, but they wouldn’t accept that there was anything wrong with their email. A quick dig MX the-domain.com told be the mail servers that they were using, and after a few short telnet sessions to the SMTP servers, I discovered that in fact three of the four mail servers wouldn’t accept mail for the recipient’s domain. MX records are slightly different to other DNS records as each record has a priority level. The preference mail server was the one that was working ok, but if this was ever unavailable the other servers would be used and it was these that were rejecting mail.

So although DNS is a rather dull subject, it’s definitely worth learning a bit more about the theory behind it, and how to use tools such as dig to tell you more about what is going on. I still have a lot to learn, but will probably post a bit more up here about it in due course. Bet you can’t wait!

I ordered the O’Reilly’s Programming Jabber from Amazon last week. It’s not a new technology, but I’ve finally got around to having a look at it.

I thought it would be quite fun to get various web sites to instant message me when things go wrong, or if there are other things they need to tell me. (My web sites talking to me - have I just gone too far??)

Anyway, I think it could be quite cool, and once I’ve got my head around it there may be a useful WordPress plugin in it. For instance, you could receive an instant message every time you get a new comment.

Something to think about.

My car finally tipped 220000 miles. Don’t expect it will see many more

Apart from Jim and Philipa (of course), I don’t think I have ever encountered a good Ford Focus driver. Now it may be that the cars are unwieldy, but that doesn’t explain why the drivers are stupid, thoughtless (some may say reckless) idiots. I’ve noticed this a lot over the last few days. These drivers always seem to try and jump one place at the lights. They block up lanes, undertake, cut you up, park across junctions, speed up then slam on their breaks, and they generally get in the way.

I know nova drivers cause a lot of problems because they usually go really slowly, but at least they are predictable - and therefore quite safe. Focus drivers just seem to do whatever the hell they like, without thinking about what they are doing.

They do annoy me.

If you’re a Ford Focus driver, STAY OUT OF MY WAY!

I’ve decided Flickr is excellent, and I’ve started to encourage friends/family to sign up so that I/we can make use of the photo permissions stuff and private groups. Some excellent stuff in there.

Anyhoo, the damn signup (credit card payment) process is naff! I’ve been trying to upgrade to the pro account, but because my ‘First name’ on my credit card is just the initial ‘M’, the form won’t vallidate it! Bah. And I’ve tried contacting the customer support folk, but so far they’ve not got back to me

Hehhe, somebody loves me

Get yours (change the query string).