Rants from Vas

In case anyone else wants to configure third-party equipment for a TPG fibre-to-the-building service, here are the details. Below the fold are screenshots of the settings entered in the web-based configuration UI of an AVM FRITZ!Box. Note that the SIP password is not the same as your account password, and you’ll need to obtain this […]

Due to persistent issues with line quality, I switched an Internet connection from Internode ADSL2+ to TPG fibre to the building (FTTB). Although the connection quality is better, just about everything else about TPG is worse. I strongly recommend avoiding TPG. Problems include: Error-prone signup process Supplied modem/router is heavily compromised Phone service is tied […]

It’s not secret I don’t like the way the web is succumbing to JavaScript bloat and sucking in scripts from third-party sites. But I now have another reason to hate it. A few sites are blocked from China, including most Google properties such as Google search, Google APIs and YouTube (and also Tagged, incidentally). If […]

As of yesterday, my Internet connection has finally started working. It’s been unbelievably frustrating, and I cannot in good conscience recommend naked ADSL Internet – I honestly thing it would be a better experience to get Telstra or Optus cable. There are too many levels of indirection between you and the people who actually get […]

My comment spam filter has picked up a couple of spam comments of a new breed recently: spam comments advertising comment spamming services. It’s a bit odd on a number of fronts. First of all, why waste resources you could be using to push out spam for your clients? Or has the economic downturn affected […]

I’ve been using WordPress to power my blog ever since I started wasting time with it, and it’s been pretty good to me so far. However, there was something that bothered me: despite serving UTF-8 to the browser, the actual database table collation being used was latin1_swedish_ci. Now the way WordPress was getting away with […]

Yes, I really do (yes, I’m talking about the web browser, not the movie). And yet I use it every day. There are things that I like about Firefox – plugins like Aardvark, Firebug and Web developer, for example – but as a whole, I think it’s a lousy web browser. Take its text rendering, […]

As you probably didn’t notice, I’ve moved this site from a data center in the US to a data centre in Brisbane. To my surprise, the operation was completely painless. I had everything back up in a couple of minutes. The Internet really is becoming simpler and more accessible to non-technical users. I guess it’s […]

With all the talk that goes on about how and why Macs are or aren’t as secure as any other computers, I thought I’d weigh in. Now I’m not a professional security expert. I’m just a regular software developer, although I do put on the “white hat” regularly and try to find exploits in the […]