After a while, searching for the solution on my iPhone, I decided to flush the IP using CMD. To do this, I opened CMD with administrator privileges, and entered the following:

> ipconfig /all
> [results returned]
> ipconfig /release
> [action completed]
> ipconfig /renew
> [action completed]

However, this didn’t work. After that, and a few other tests (changed the PPPoA to Dynamic/Static, changed subnet masks and updated firmware etc) I decided to restore the router to factory settings. SAME PROBLEM! The flashing orange icon continued to annoyingly wink at me.

This led me to believe that it was an issue before the router/modem, and an issue with the ISP. I rang them (excellent support team – Virgin Media!) and told them the issue. Although they couldn’t tell me why it had occurred in the first place, they did inform me that restoring the ADSL modem would require me to re-enter the PPPoA username and password, which he gave me.

Hay presto! It worked!

The orange blinking internet light was because the connection to the exchange servers were active, but not connected. This could be told as the ADSL light was a solid blue (showing a connection) but not logged in (orange blinking internet light!)

In Germany the government has urged Internet users to find alternatives to Internet Explorer. In the same article (taken form BBC News) Sophos (an Internet security firm) told readers that the warning should be adhered to IE6, IE7 and even IE8 as the exploits had not only been proven to work on all these browsers but also the details of how to do so posted publicly on the Internet. Google has come under even more criticism as of late, with an open letter from security firms and lawyers asking why the security settings to enable HTTPS 100% of the time when accessing Gmail, Docs and other Google applications is so hard to find.

Google is reportedly considering it’s options regarding their operations in china. It may be that the years of strict censorship over the Chinese Internet has finally built to a head, and the recent attacks have broke the camels back. Either way, Google pulling out of China would be a devastating event for Chinese companies and civilians alike.

Not according to one company; ‘Baidu’, Chinese search engine giants recently posted the following on their blog:

“Google claims it will quit China. What it’s proved is not what the Google fans have claimed, that Google is a ‘Human Rights fighter’. Just the contrary. It’s proved that Google is a hypocrite.”

It’s a bit of a legal battle at the moment – let’s hope Google and China manage to come to some sort of agreement soon.

Images can’t be wider than 800px
Images can’t be .PNG
Padding is calculated differently

IE in general is a nuisance; things in Firefox just work! I’m currently designing a new menu for a website i’m working on, using :hover in the CSS and some onmouseover JavaScript. In Firefox everything works perfectly. However in IE (even the latest 8.0b) the onmouseover flickers. Getting around this requires extensive work – which wouldn’t be required if the browser worked like Firefox!

I realise this is a bit of a rant, but it has hit me time and time again – designing websites and previewing in Firefox, occasionally checking in IE7+ and then realising i’m going to have to re-work the site in order to make it IE6 compatible!

Merry Christmas!

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Thanks guys, and a merry Christmas.

However, after the plug-in was updated some time last week it started showing errors in Google’s Webmaster Tools. The error was the following.

“Paths don’t match we’ve detected that you submitted your Sitemap using a URL path that includes the www prefix (for instance, http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml). However, the URLs listed inside your Sitemap don’t use the www prefix (for instance, http://example.com/myfile.htm).”

To fix this is simple, but I had to search around quite a lot to get the fix. All you have to do is go to the General tab under Settings in WordPress and add the ‘www.’ prefix to both the WordPress address AND the Blog address, then rebuild and submit the sitemap.

If you are still getting errors (which I did) check that any additional URL’s mentioned in the XML-Sitemap tab of Settings have the ‘www.’ prefix, as mine reset automatically.

As I said; Simple! But it took quite a lot of re-building and re-submitting to find the answer!

Google’s latest feature is the integration of ‘real-time result’s (RTR’s) including Twitter, Facebook and Myspace updates to be shown for relevant search results. Although the feature is currently limited to a minority of key words it will be built upon to produce more and more results in this fashion. It’s a brilliant idea, gathering such vast amounts of information in one place. Although Google haven’t released financial details, Facebook have announced they are making no profit from the setup.

Google Goggles (it’s a mouth full) is Google’s next development – Using images instead of keywords to produce search queries, consequently returning both visual and text based results (including, perhaps, RTR’s). This must use some similar code to the similar image feature (another amazing feature from Google) although it must also feed to a variety of databases in order to analyze and search indexed pages using said image.

Google still dominates the Internet search market, boasting a global share of about 70 per cent share globally. The company reported revenues of £3.66 billion for the quarter that ended on September 30 this year. The majority of the revenue came from Search Advertising. Google may be seen to have competition in local times from Wolfram Alpha and Bing, but its ever-evolving search techniques and developments just show that it really is the world leader in Web Development.

I wanted to produce a type of blog which fell in between a micro-blog (140 characters) and some of my more heavy weight blogs (140 lines!).

Hopefully they will be insightful, interesting and full of techy goodness, while remaining concise and to the point!

If you have any requests for some more 1 minute reviews let me know and I’ll see what I can do!

Another nice little feature which I have recently implemented for both work and my personal site is the addition of an iPhone icon, so that when the website is saved to the home-screen on the iPhone it shows a sexy icon rather than a screenshot of the website.

To do this, I simply created a 57px x 57px box, with a transparent background in Photoshop. I used the rounded rectangle tool to create a nice little box, added a gradient and a light curve at the top to resemble the reflection. I finally added some symbols to the icons, and hay presto, its created!

To implement the icon couldn’t be simpler! Just upload the icon to the root of your site and re-name it to ‘apple-touch-icon.png’. Safari automatically checks the root for a .png of this name! If you don’t want the icon in the root of your site, just add the following code to your page/s:

<link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”LOCATION/apple-touch-icon.png” />
Custom iPhone icon for websites!

I must say, ever since I picked up the controller, I haven’t stopped thinking about it! It’s advanced so much since the days of the M1 Grand (Call of Duty 2 – My last encounter with online COD).

The addition of custom classes alongside unlocking weapon improvements gives the online play a purpose other than watching an opponent through the scope of a sniper before getting a warm feeling inside as the word ‘head shot’ flashes onscreen.

What I also like the use of the ‘wasteland’ map, which has been taken form a previous COD map and re-used here. I do think that some of the COD2/3 maps should be included (for example the one of the German courtyard with the single house and multiple walls!).

It’s honestly great! If you haven’t tried it out as of yet, do so! Just as Assassins Creed 2 has the best storyline of the year, COD:MW2 has possibly the best online game play of the year, with its franchise topping my all time favourite online games!

So now I have a dilemma – Should I autoDM new followers? Lots of people see this tactic as ‘spam’, especially when promotional links are included and to be honest so do I. On the other hand a genuine ‘hello’ can go down well and make the tweeter (me) seem more human rather than a bot spamming with promo-tweets every hour or so! (I’m not a robot – Promise!).

Feel free to comment if you use AutoDM to tell me what program you use. Also, if you could retweet this blog (so I can get more results) it would be much appreciated! Thanks guys!