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Messenger Plus! Live
On Saturday Patchou released the latest version of his fantastic add-on to Microsoft's instant messenger, now known as Windows Live Messenger. Because of the rebranding from MSN Messenger, he has also rebranded his product to Messenger Plus! Live. Not a huge change name-wise, but he has recoded the entire thing from the ground up, and with a completely new GUI.
If you've used it before, or even if you haven't... grab it from the official site now!
Posted in Tech at 11:12 |
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Mess Patch For Windows Live Messenger
Didn't have to wait long at all. Rolando must've stayed up all night to get the latest release of this patch out the door.
Time to get patching my WLM! :)
You can grab the patch from mess.be or directly here.
Update: The patch has been updated for build 8.0.0792.
After patching my WLM, this is what it looks like:
Much nicer!
Posted in Tech at 14:23 |
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Opera 9
As anyone who knows me or reads this blog will probably know, I'm a huge fan of Firefox. As much as I love Fx, this isn't to say I don't like Opera. It's not IE, which makes it a good thing. In fact Opera does a few things a hell of a lot better than Firefox, like zooming, which I always use when browsing from my HTPC.
Well, on the same day as Windows Live Messenger is released, Opera 9.0 has been announced.
With built in BitTorrent support, content and popup blocking, IRC and email clients... it's incredibly full featured, and very fast. It even passes the ACID2 test!
Even with all those handy built in features, and what-not, I'm sticking with Firefox as my main browser. I love my extensions and I couldn't live without them.
Posted in Tech at 10:43 |
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Windows Live Messenger Is Gold!
As a few sites had predicted, Windows Live Messenger will be dropping out of beta tonight... and now it's been confirmed by Leah on the MessengerSays blog.
The final build number is: 8.0.0787, the last beta was 689.
To download WLM, go to the official download page.
Hopefully we won't have to wait too long for a new messpatch to clean up the contact list and conversation windows, and for a version of MsgPlus! Live that works.
Update: Incredibly, just days after release, there's an update already! It appeared on Microsoft's site, then disappeared for a bit, then reappeared again. A little confusing, no?
The build number is now up to 8.0.0792. Not much has changed between the first release and this one, mainly some extra text inserted, preparing for the eventual Yahoo! integration.
Posted in Tech at 00:04 |
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Lack Of Updates
Apologies for the lack of recent updates but I've not been able to access any CGI scripts on this server since I made my last entry. I was hoping it would solve itself but since it didn't I had to report the problem to Fasthosts who apparently have fixed it.
Although I don't make that many entries, certainly not every day, I felt a bit cut off from the world while my site was broken. I wanted to make posts, and I couldn't. It's an odd feeling.
I'm just glad to be back up and running!
UPDATE: Following my reporting of the problem, and getting it fixed, it presented itself a few more times. After emailing Fasthosts about it, they returned with an extract from my logfile that showed that the mt-comments.cgi was being hammered by requests from spammers which were using up all the available processes for my domain. Hence my inability to use Perl! Until the influx of spam has subsided I've had to remove the comment and trackback scripts from my server. Hopefully I will be able to put them online again when the attack is over.
Posted in Blog at 12:05 |
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Peer Pressure
At home I use Eclipse Internet, and today I decided to run a traceroute on Jolt's webserver which I know is based in the UK, and got the following results:
Tracing route to www.jolt.co.uk [82.133.85.65] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 10 ms <1 ms 17 ms 192.168.1.1 2 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms 212.104.130.193 3 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms 81.5.191.177 4 11 ms 17 ms 11 ms ge-1-1.metro2-londencyh00.London1.Level3.net 5 12 ms 13 ms 11 ms so-1-3-0.gar1.London1.Level3.net 6 14 ms 11 ms 13 ms ae-0-55.bbr1.London1.Level3.net 7 75 ms 38 ms 41 ms as-1-0.bbr1.Frankfurt1.Level3.net 8 26 ms 28 ms 26 ms ae-12-53.car2.Frankfurt1.Level3.net 9 26 ms 26 ms 26 ms telia-level3-ge.Frankfurt1.Level3.net 10 26 ms 26 ms 26 ms ffm-bb2-link.telia.net 11 27 ms 27 ms 27 ms prs-bb2-pos7-0-0.telia.net 12 32 ms 28 ms 27 ms ldn-bb2-pos7-0-0.telia.net 13 27 ms 29 ms 26 ms 213.248.64.50 14 28 ms 28 ms 29 ms 213.248.100.30 15 40 ms 47 ms 29 ms lon1-9.nildram.net 16 27 ms 28 ms 27 ms 195.149.20.214 17 27 ms 27 ms 30 ms secure.jolt.co.uk Trace complete.
Now that's what I call a round trip. Why on earth does my traffic leave the UK, head to Frankfurt in Germany, jump from there to Malmoe in Sweden, then head back to the UK via Paris. Very silly!
I think Eclipse need a peering agreement with Pipex, then the traffic would go directly to them instead of taking a trip around Europe first.
Using a visual traceroute program you can really see the silly pathway my ping took:
Posted in Computers at 10:12 |
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