Monthly Archive

After I got home from the gym this afternoon (I played hockey this morning as well!), I was delighted to find a visitor on our porch at home. Since I just moved back home from college, I didn’t know if this visitor had been here before, but my Dusty was very excited, talking to them a lot. Anyways, below are a few photos of Dusty and our visitor.

Here is our visitor.

Dusty takes a glance away from his conversation with our visitor.

Dusty in the foreground during his conversation.

Will post more updates if applicable.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be busy at work on several projects. Some are nearing completion, others have not been started yet. But here is what I am looking at:

• Screenshootr
  Screenshootr is a service that I am developing to help web developers (of any design and development experience level) see their websites in platforms that are not readily available to them. More information will be published as the release date nears.
• Mozilla Search Extension Development
  Will be developing more components for Mozilla Firefox and compatible web browsers.
• Updates on SteveCastle.org
  I’ll still be around to make various updates on SteveCastle.org. Trust Me, its not work 100% of the time. I’d be burnt out by the time I am 30 years old.
• More
  Stuff that isn’t listed here because its either under NDA or I’m not ready to make it public yet.

Keep your eyes peeled, I’ve got some great stuff coming you’re way soon.

After browsing some threads at NamePros, I came upon some top IDN Domain Sales. IN the past week, there were five reported IDN Sales (three yesterday), which shows me that IDN Names are slowly, but surely making their way into the mainstream.

IDN Sales the week May 18-24, 2006

1. May 24, 2006
   上海宾馆.com (Shanghai Hotel - Simplified Chinese)
   xn--fhqx74a4yncs5b.com
   $3,000
2. May 24, 2006
   北京宾馆.com (Beijing Hotel - Simplified Chinese)
   xn--1lq90i53itz0e.com
   $3,000
3. May 24, 2006
   新西兰.com (New Zealand- Simplified Chinese)
   xn--95q960c09z.com
   $2,500
4. May 23, 2006
   澳门房产.com (Macau Real Estate - Simplified Chinese)
   xn--wlq909bgzj3h1b.com
   $2,000
5. May 18, 2006
   長崎県.com (Nagasaki - Japanese)
   xn--8ltu81doqv.com
   $2,300

More posts to come.

Source: IDN Tools: IDN Sales

Here is some important advice before you pre-register any domain names any possibly lose your deposit.

Do your research. The following is a list of .mobi domain names that are reserved and cannot be registered. Seems like all the country names along with investor company names, among others. Enjoy.

Warning: This is a large list of terms that are reserved in the .mobi registry.
Read the rest of this entry »

After reading an older article on the Domain Blog, I thought that it was worth reposting here.

A Chengdu college student named Shi Kaisheng spent all of his tuition money and savings on an unsuccessful investment in domain name registration, Chengdu Wanbao reports. Shi had registered more than 30 domain names since the second half of 2005, including stonesea.com, dayunhui.cn and libaiqing.cn. Every registration cost Shi a 60 Yuan registration fee and a 1,800 Yuan trademark registration fee per year. However, Shi has so far failed to sell any of his domain names. Shi said that he has no money for college tuition and may be denied a graduation certificate for defaulting on his tuition fees.

Here’s what I think is a cute close-up of Dusty that I took today.  If you’ve seen the other photos that I have posted, you will see that he is a little non-traditional in where he chooses to relax.

I had heard about this a while ago and had seen some prototype photos, but nothing substantial. Below is a photo from Flickr of two of the prototypes.

On The sponsoring site, laptop.org - One Laptop Per Child, they state that these laptops will not be publically available, but hopefully distributed through a government program to students for use in the classroom.

These laptop computers are seen here running Fedora. If the initiative is carried out between OLPC and the government, I truly hope that these machines will use Edubuntu or an easier Linux distrobution where children will not have administrator access, making the computers last longer. As popular as Microsoft is for software, I think this change might be a brighter outlook for education and Linux.

Regardless, it is a step in the right direction. Check out the rest of the photos in the Flickr photostream here and make sure you visit OLPC at laptop.org.

I was scanning through Technorati today for articles relating to the .mobi domain name extension. I came across one in a particular that caught my attention. But with the following text contained in Right From Left written by Kent, you can understand why it caught my attention.

.mobi - I’m a wannabe cyber squatter. Yes I am.

Well, first off, if you don’t know what cybersquatting (domain names) is, check out the Wikipedia entry on cybersquatting. As a business owner, I’m against cybersquatting, 100%. No exceptions. But if you read on further, here’s what you will see.

I was going to snap up some sweet .mobi domain names this morning and make some big bucks, until I discovered that they won’t be available for public purchase (that’s for you and me) until August 28.

Damn. Squashed by ‘the Man,’ again.

Honestly, because of the sunrise period that implemented a domain name registration hierarchy that relates to the industry (mobile devices and communications), things like this would not happen - just yet.

Lets take a look at the last line of the last excerpt one more time:

Damn. Squashed by ‘the Man,’ again.

If anything, “The Man” which in this case happens to be mTLD CEO Neil Edwards, has economically cost Kent what he calculated to be $75 million in sales of cybersquatted domains at an average resale value of $4,687,500 at , which in my book would have cost him $2,240 to register, plus thousands in legal fees (in which he would lose, since he has no rights to the names, and the names he would have been squatting are intellectual property of multi-million dollar corporations) if he chose to fight for the right to sell rather than surrender the names to their rightful owners.

This brings me to think that sunrise periods keep people and companies (yes, some seemingly legitimate companies do this, too - for their own gain). Lets take a look at the .mobi sunrise period.

Pros:

• Sunrise periods protect the holders of trademark and other intellectual rights to ensure a fair and proper release of the new set of domain names.
• A sunrise period controls and spreads the process of delegating domain names over a defined period of time

Cons:

• Sometimes, companies and/or individuals slip through the cracks.
• Maybe “slip” isn’t the right word. “Allowed to slip” is the more correct phrase.

Currently, the date is May 23, 2006. According the .mobi sunrise and general domain registration schedule, only members of the following organizations should be able to register domain names under the .mobi top level domain.

• AMTA - Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association
• CTIA - Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association
• CWTA - Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association
• GSMA - GSM Association
• MEF - Mobile Entertainment Forum
• MMA - Mobile Marketing Association
• NZ Wireless Forum
• RCA - Rural Cellular Association

mTLD estimates that thousands of sunrise application registrations will be coming through within the next few days. Although it happened more with the recent .EU release, I am concerned about the upcoming trademark claim stage known as “Trademark Sunrise”.

An interesting thing that I see when taking a look at the whois results for .mobi domain names is that they post the trademark applied and trademark registered dates. If mTLD follows through and only grants registrations based on trademarks that are a certain age old, they can save a bunch of trouble much like that which arose in the sex.eu trademark application at EURid.

If I were Kent, I would be happy holding on to my money. Kent, economically, forwent the worst opportunity costs and ended up with the best.

Finally, college is out for the summer and now I have some time on my hands to do the things I really wanted to do. One of those first things that I wanted to do was get rid of Windows on my desktop machine nad replace is with a Linux distrobution. From an earlier post about switching over to Linux, you can see that I was torn about which Linux distro to go with for my first “Linux Experience”.

Yesterday, I chose to switch to Ubuntu, despite getting some people trying to persuade me towards Slackware. I think the main difference in why I went with a GNOME-based environment is because KDE (The environment used in Slackware - along with Kubuntu) felt too much like a Windows-based environment. But don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Slackware and am in no way comparing it to Windows.

My Decision was based upon two main points:

1. The current and growing popularity of Ubuntu (which means more user-based support)
2. After doing the (what I call) proper research, the learning curve for Ubuntu is less steep than that of Slackware.

Of course, I know that making the transition from Windows to Linux (irregardless of the distrobution) is going to take time, but I think Ubuntu is the right place to start.

Windows. Where to begin. I know the operating system is built for idiots. So I understand why you are making the formating of a hard drive so hard (for those people). But must your software run everything? After running the standard procedure in DOS, the formatting was underway. It was waiting time.

Formatting had completed. Now it was time for the installation of Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger. Not the newest out there, but stable. This is something that I wanted to have since it was my first time administering a Linux system. Installation seemed to go fine.

Once I got into the main Ubuntu login screen, I noticed that it was trying to display at a minute screen resolution of 640×480px. Definitely reminded me of the old days of pre-Windows 95. Time for some more research.

After figuring out the right search terms to use, I came across a nice tutorial on the Ubuntu wiki on how to manually detect the settings of the new monitor. I am using an older LCD, the Compaq 5017m.

After reading the wiki, I entered the following command into the terminal to find the HoizSync and VertRefresh rates:

sudo ddcprobe | grep monitorrange

These two array sets contained the screen rate information that Ubuntu needs to properly set a resolution size to output to your monitor.

For future reference of others using the Ubuntu and the Compaq 5017m which goes un-autodectected, the information is as follows.

Section “Monitor”
Identifier      “COMPAQ 5017″
Option          “DPMS”
HorizSync       30-61
VertRefresh     56-75
EndSection

This information can be entered manually into the xorg.conf file by executing the following command in the terminal and replacing the existing “Monitor” Section with the above code.

sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Restart Ubuntu and the login screen should look like its set back to the proper resolution, but after you sue the login information, you’ll see that the changes look only temporary to the login screen.  Now, you will need to go back to the Menubar and click System -> Preferences -> Screen Resolution.

There you should see more screen resolutions and screen refresh rates, and you’re all set to go.

For more detailed instructions, visit the Ubuntu Wiki, and more specifically How to Manually Fix Your Video Resolution on the Ubuntu Wiki.

Thursday May 11, 2006 was the debut of the new “mobile” logo for the .mobi domain name extension.

This new logo replaced the old logo that appears below.

Too all those who read my thoughts here at SteveCastle.org:

Sorry for the delay in posting the new blog style, life has been pretty hectic. I have been developing a new site, which I am hopefully to launch by next Wednesday. This new site is very beneficial to web developers and designers. More information on the new site will be posted here so make sure to check back in for more information.

You can look forward to a new design very, very soon. I promise. For the time being, enjoy the articles and let me know what you think of them.

I was looking through some old photos I scanned into the computer, and found an old shot of my boy Dusty.

Here is Dusty in my bed a few years back.
He’s all grown up now.

Dusty is cuddled up with his Aflac Duck Toy

and last but not least…

Dusty having fun with a catnip toy.
I’ve got some more pictures of Dusty, so I’ll post them every once in a while to change up the routine from the web and programming-related content.

Note: This is merely a review (albeit a negative one) regarding IE7 and where IE7 is taking misguided users next.

As a web designer/developer, you should generally care about how your pages look in the most popular browsers. With Internet Explorer controlling the major share of the market (~9-11%), testing sites in Internet Explorer are a must. Since IE7 beta was released to the general public, I feel that it is important to test sites in this browser as well.

Why, you ask, its only in beta and IE7 has less of a share than Firefox? Since IE controls such an immense market share, it is important to support the next major release as soon as possible.

IE7 had been waiting in the wings for a while. With the advent of tabbed browsing, integrated RSS feeds and phishing filters, IE7 looked very promising. Everything went as planned, except for one thing:

CSS Support

I beta tested IE7, and was very glad withthe features that were included with the browser. Ever since I used Firebird/Firefox, I’ve loved the tabbed browing feature. But for web developers, the lack in compliance of (W3C) CSS standards, are improved - but only for the most requested bugs.

According to the IE7 CSS Poll, CSS support within CSS needs (significant) improvement. Reading through the comments left by fellow MSDN Channel9 Members, I came across one member (DigitalDud) that got my point across, better than I could have done it.

It makes more sense for the IE team to focus on features of CSS that are most useful to web developers like fixed positioning. Implementing the entire recommendation just to say you did is kind of silly especially since it’s full of errata anyway.

Not only is that very important for web developers, but in most cases important to the end users as well. If web developers don’t fully “hack” their CSS to comply with the stubbornness of IE, the end user is going to be affected. After digging around some more, I also came across a write up he did regarding IE’s CSS Support.

I know the IE team is simply responding to user feedback in adding additional CSS support but I don’t think it’s wise to support CSS just to say you support standards. Fix bugs, but don’t bother with new features.

Relating this comment back to his original comment that appeared earlier in this post, fixing the main bugs (lacking CSS support) is definitely more important to web developers (who are providing the content that IE thrives on), than introducing end-user options like tabbed browsing. Can I blame Microsoft for releasing a glass-like, tabbed browser that includes an RSS reader?

Certainly not, but Microsoft cannot forget that first and foremost - it is a web browser and holding the market share doesn’t necessarily mean you’re making the best product.

So what’s ahead for IE and CSS. One thing - They’ve started to listen to user feedback and have started to fix limited bugs based on that feedback. Just like you’d write to your governmenet representative, if you’re tired of bugs in IE (especially the lack of CSS support), let them know.

Barbaro wins the Kentucky Derby. Edgar Prado and Barbaro came back from forth place to claim the victory.

Talk about those $1,000 drinks!

I first used internet telephony services back in the days of dialpad.com, just a mere six years ago. Since then, Yahoo has acquired Dialpad, and many other VoIP services have sprouted up. But on the 3rd of May, Skype made the next substantial step towards controlled “phone” conferences.

The following is an excerpt from an article written by Eric Auchard on behalf of Reuters

Skypecasts are live, moderated discussions that allow groups of Skype users anywhere in the world to discuss shared interests, from classes to computer support to cultural or political debates. They amount to the conversational equivalent of Web blogs, complementing the written interactions of blogs.

I don’t necessarily think that blogs can compare to a live conference-like call, but they are not easily archived as blogs are.

This feature is definitely going to add structure and give conference leaders more control during their meetings.

Find out more by visiting the Skypecast homepage here.

I’ve been playing around with a few LiveCD distros of Linux, including Slackware and Ubuntu. I defnitely like the interfaces of each, but I think for the time being, I am leaning towards Ubuntu.

Here is a screenshot of this site in Firefox running Ubuntu Linux OS.

More to come soon.

Another quote to think about.

Serenity isn’t freedom from the storm, but peace within the storm.

If you’re a user of Firefox, chances are you’ve used the search box in the top-right hand corner of the browser. Tonight, I am expanding on the possibilities of searching right from your browser by introducing four search plugins.

Search Plugins can be downloaded directly from this page and used upon browser restart. Tonight’s releases are listed below with a description of the supporting site.

1. Sedo Domain Search Plugin
   Sedo is the largest domain name commerce portal in the world wiht over 4,000,000 domains listed for sale. Sedo offers basic and professional domain parking services. Search plugin provides basic search functionality.
   Install the Sedo Domain Search Plugin
2. Afternic Domain Search Plugin
   Afternic is the world’s second largest domain name commerce portal. They take a different approach to domain name parking. They offer the services of three different PPC providers, and give you the choice of which one you want to use and what keywords to use. The search plugin covers the basic search functionality and gets the job done.
   Install the Afternic Search Plugin

3. Alexa Traffic Rank Search Plugin
   Alexa, a search engine owned and operated by Amazon.com and an offshoot of the Archive.org internet Archive, ranks websites by traffic generated by the Alexa toolbar and pre-installed system data that reports site visits.
   Install the Alexa Traffic Rank Search Plugin
4. NamePros Domain Name Forum Search Plugin
   NamePros is the largest domain name forum community on the internet. Covering many topics related to domain names and related products and services with over 1.2 million posts. Plugins provides basic (yet sufficient) search functionality.
   Install the NamePros Rank Search Plugin

All of these plugins are free and free distributable, within the terms of applicable Firefox license(s).

I really wanted to post this photo. My friend Mercedes took this and posted it onto her blog and I wanted to share it here, because I think its a great (and peaceful) shot, with minimal editing.

You can download this image as a desktop wallpaper here.

Make sure to check out Mercedes’ Blog and view her other photos.