Sam Oliver

The fully functional version of Wishlix is now available for users in the UK and Canada. So get adding stuff to your wish lists!

(France, Germany and Japan coming soon.)

These aren’t the normal promo codes. Using these special promo codes you can get:

• Get 2TB disk space and 20TB bandwidth! (4 times normal)
• If you choose the five-year plan, you get $150 off!
• If you choose our ten-year plan, you get $200 off!

These codes aren’t available normally - and I only have 5 allocated to me so it’s first come first served!

081291766015
313690635188
933387731082
546162618349
733834186594

Just use the codes in the “Promo Code” box when you sign up at:

https://signup.dreamhost.com/

We’ve been busy on Wishlix this weekend!

Users in the USA can now search for items and add them to their wish list, along with images.  We’re hoping make this available to Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the UK within the next few weeks.

If you want to check it out, you can change your locale to USA on your Account page.

A few updates to wishlix this weekend:

• XML wish list feeds added. There is a feed for each list and a feed for each user which contains items from all lists. Links are on the appropriate pages.
• Wish list names now don’t have to be globally unique.  Any list URLs that have been set up before this update will still work.
• A couple of little design tweaks.

Enjoy!

I noticed that I’ve been saying whoops a lot when developing with rails. I don’t know if I picked that up from watching David’s screen casts or whether I did it already. In any case I’ve decided it would make an appropriate system alert sound.  So after a bit of messing about I managed to extract it from the rails 15 minute blog screencast.

Whoops in .aif format (Mac)
Whoops in .wav format

To install use it on a Mac, copy it to ~/Library/Sounds and select it in System Preferences -> Sound

Whoops also features at the end of this video:

Check out my Ruby on Rails project (and little experiment) called Wishlix.

Wishlix lets you create wish lists for your events such as weddings, birthdays and baby showers.  Items can be added from both on-line stores and the high street.

It’s intentionally simple. I have lots of ideas that would make it more elaborate but I’m waiting to get some feedback from real users to find out what features are most important. It would be great to hear from you if you have any suggestions.

We could spend hours explaining why our sites broke, but wouldn’t it be better if they didn’t break in the first place?

read more | digg story

A few weeks back one of my clients was stung by problems at FastHosts.

They developed a number of web sites and useing a Fasthosts hosting package. Without warning all of their sites were deleted and no backup was provided. Fasthosts didn’t give satisfactory detail as to why they did this, but we think it may have been something to do with the recent major security breach.

Further to this I received the following email from them today.

Dear Customer,

We wrote to you on 18th October 2007 advising that you change the password on your Fasthosts account in order to prevent any unauthorised account access following the network intrusion we previously communicated.

Whilst we have found the vulnerability that caused this issue, and have instigated a system wide security audit to improve and enhance our current security, we also advised you to change your control panel password as a precaution.

Today we have been made aware that a small number of our customers who did not change their passwords have experienced a compromise to their FTP space.

As a result, in order to totally protect all of our customers, we have today implemented an automatic password change for every control panel & FTP password that was not previously reset.

To ensure complete security when communicating your new passwords to you, we will take the stringent measure of sending the new control panel password via Royal Mail.

Please note that the email password reminder system will not work from the time you receive this mail, to the time you log in with your new control panel password.

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER SHOULD YOU TRY TO REUSE ANY OF YOUR OLD PASSWORDS

We apologise for the inconvenience that this will cause you during this period, but trust you understand that our primary concern is for our customers and for the security of their websites and data. Unfortunately, an automatic password change is the only way of ensuring that all of our customers are totally secure.

If you have any questions relating to this, please contact our Customer Support team on 0870 888 3600 or customersupport@fasthosts.co.uk, and they will be more than happy to help you.
Thank you once again for your understanding and cooperation in this matter.
Yours sincerely,

The Fasthosts Team

I don’t think Royal Mail is much more secure and reliable than Email. Perhaps they should be using TNT instead.

So at last Google are rolling out their most requested for feature, free IMAP access.

Reportedly some users have IMAP anabled already (although not me yet!). If you have IMAP access on your account, let us know your findings in the comments.