Email "Issues" - Due to Dynamic DNS?

My wife sent my son and I an email, and the address for my son got munged somehow. After an evening of sending test messages it appears that when I get my copy of the email through a forwarding service and the forwarding service fixes my email address it also "fixes" my son's address. His address is to a domain at home, and the home system uses dynamic DNS, and the hosting service has a CNAME alias record to the dynamic address at dyndns.com. So I think the CNAME alias is what is causing the problem.

So my solution is to use the dynamic address service at Namecheap. Since namecheap doesn't have a Macintosh client, I had to go looking for something to use. I found ddclient, which is perl based so therefore compatible.

Dynamic DNS client:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/ddclient/wiki/Usage

Now, there are a couple of problems. One is that I host several domains on the same Snow Leopard Server. So I found a patch that allows ddcleint to update several domains.

Patch for multiple domains:

http://www.op-ezy.co.uk/~ian/blog/2010/09/03/making-ddclient-work-with-multiple-domains-on-namecheap/

The next problem is how to get ddclient running on system start.

Startup items on OS X:

http://osxfaq.com/Tutorials/LearningCenter/HowTo/Startup/index.ws

Set it all up and tested. Got bit a couple of times by the cache. It's really important to delete it when changing the config and testing to see if the provider is getting updates.

rm /var/cache/ddclient/ddclient.cache

It did indeed fix the problem.

E-Book Reader Progress

"Plastic Logic demonstrates e-reader"
http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=210600214

By creating transistors on a plastic surface they can be made less expensively, helping drive the price of the display down.

Prediction Diagram

Seems we are supposed to provide some form of visuals regarding our predictions. I though a fishbone diagram of the factors currently inhibiting the use of electronic textbooks might be useful. Being too lazy to try to draw such a diagram in Word, I downloaded a demo copy of SmartDraw (www.smartdraw.com) which makes drawing the diagrams easy. Here is my diagram (click on it for a larger view):

Social aspects of Web 2.0 - troublemakers

So you have a troublemaker on your forum. They're rude and offensive, and you've warned them to clean up their act but they don't. You'd like to ban them, but they love an audience, and so they would be right back under a different user name. What to do? Use the "bozo" feature. Some forum software is starting to include a bozo feature. This feature is similar to automatically blocking the bozo for all other users. The bozo still sees their posts, but no one else does. The bozo doesn't get the attention they seek, and eventually leave. There's an article here:
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/09/01/the-bozo-feature
The discussion about the article is interesting also.

A longer term solution is "Saving the internet with hate":
http://savingtheinternetwithhate.com/

Web 2.0 - "posting aggregation"

So you blog, tweet, put photos on flickr, bookmark on delicious, and so on, and you expect your friends to subscribe to blogger, twitter, flickr, and so on to see what your doing?

Do them a favor.

friendfeed.com and sweetcron.com will aggregate all of your sources for your friends.

Here's mine:
http://friendfeed.com/davecs855