Latest blog posts

Just recently, MPAA/RIAA sock puppets Brein managed to convince some clueless judge to order two of the largest ISPs in the Netherlands, XS4ALL and Ziggo to block (in)famous torrent website The Pirate Bay. TPB have put up a message that is shown to anyone visiting from a Dutch IP address, as shown below. XSALL and Ziggo have both announced they will appeal to a higher court, which is a good thing. I don't even use TPB myself and wouldn't really miss it, but I do care deeply about worthless assholes doing anything limiting my internet access. So, how would this work and what can I (or anyone) do to give these lying thieves the finger and circumvent these blocks if they are upheld by the higher courts?
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You may have seen the latest well-publicised PayPal horror story. I've seen plenty of them too and was never really bothered about them, figuring those people might have brought it on themselves. Well, not anymore. Now that I have my own experience to add to the list, I'm done defending PayPal and have actually closed my account. PayPal not only inconvenienced me in several ways, but their communication actually contained blatant lies, not to mention the whole thing being drenched in incompetence. I have zero tolerance for that kind of crap from any company that has anything to do with my finances. Here's what happened.
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I routinely use Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 to run a handful of virtual machines for development and testing purposes. One of these VMs is set to run automatically at system boot. Every once in a while, it refuses to start up.
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When displaying a product summary for a product with tiered pricing, Magento shows the user how much they can save by showing the minimum price (including tax). Especially with the way the string "As low as" is translated to other languages, this can be confusing and you might want to show the quantity of the product the customer needs to buy to get it at the displayed minimum price. Unfortunately, while Magento has the getMinimalPrice method to retrieve the lowest tier price, it doesn't have a convenient function to retrieve the corresponding tier quantity.
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It's not something many people will notice, as most of the difficult bits will have to be handled by the ISPs, but it's going to get more and more important for web developers and hosting providers to allow IPv6 access to their services. We've effectively run out of IPv4 addresses. As more and more people bring more and more devices online every day the common technique to share IPv4 addresses, NAT, even carrier-grade NAT which share a single IPv4 address among a large part of a provider's customer base, is not a sustainable solution. In the future, there will be people who can access the internet solely through IPv6. At first, it will be in the areas with the fastest-growing number of people online, particularly Asia. If you want those people to be able to access your website and services, make sure your servers respond to IPv6 traffic.
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