Google recently announced a new service they're offering... "Google Public DNS".

I'm kind of surprised that it's taken this long for one of the major players in web technologies to have released a service like this. DNS is such a huge part of the internet... and it seems as though I've been reading more and more about DNS poisoning...etc.

Security is always a huge issue and it's but one of the things Google is trying to help address with this project.

Quoted from their website:

The DNS protocol is an important part of the web's infrastructure, serving as the Internet's phone book: every time you visit a website, your computer performs a DNS lookup. Complex pages often require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading, so your computer may be performing hundreds of lookups a day.

This is a service I'll be looking into. I've never used my IPS's DNS servers but I've used a few services that were included with domain purchases.

I'll be giving this a look.

 Hi there!

It's been so long since I've posted on this blog.

I got busy blogging on sports and only touched a little bit on drumming.. which I intend to blog more on in coming weeks.

My plans for this blog is to blog solely about my work in technology and other technology related articles.

I was also planning to redo the graphics which is long long overdue.

Lot's has gone on in my personal life over the last several months.... it's pretty wild.

Anyway. Hope the internet hasn't missed me too much!

 Alot has been going on for me. Something I decided earlier in the summer was really to learn about blogging and learn about the possibility of growing traffic... or better put "readership".... getting it "out there" so people who share the same interests could find the blog. The next challenge with that of course if writing something that is worthwhile in reading!

So I started a couple of blogs and then moved on to my 3rd.

yvesdrummer.com

On this new blog, if you haven't guessed it by the domain name, it's centered around drumming. I've been playing drums since the age of 12 and have had the pleasure of playing in many different styles and have also had the pleasure of teaching.

So this new blog will revolve around practice techniques, drum videos of drummers who inspire me, drum videos of me, stories... ideas.. events... whatever I come up with.

The art of drumming is something I've always been passionate about.

 Some time ago I had started a blog on my favorite NHL hockey team the Montreal Canadiens. Writing on it really became a fun hobby..... reading all the other hockey bloggers out there also became quite a fun hobby.

It was first started on a Blogger.com blog and I found there were numerous limitations so I was quite tempted to move it to a WordPress blog on 3rd party hosting.

After seeing a really great deal for a cheap hosting account, I decided to jump in and do it.

I used WordPress's import functionality to get all the content from the old blog onto the new one. This worked very well but there was a hitch. I used Blogger's labels as "tags" and not categories. Of course in the import the labels were treated as categories... so I spent lot's of time re-working the categories and redoing the tags for every post on the blog. Thank God that's over with.

So now I can concentrate on writing some stuff again. My new blog can be found here:

Mostly Habs Talk - Yves on Habs

Ever hear of Tesla motors?

They make really sweat electric sports cars. They're out of my price range of course but that's another topic.

Apparently, Tesla motors have had their first profitable month. Although that might not sound great... to have 1 profitable month it still means that maybe their brand of high end electric sports cars are taking off. 

CNN Money reported on their profits.

I think they're beautiful cars... and for the sports car lovers out there they seem to boast power. The Roadster gets 0-60 in 3.9 seconds... not  bad.

Check out Tesla Motors on their website!

I had the task of installing Zend Optimizer on a client's new VPS and it was proving a bit challenging, not necessarily because I could find any info on Zend Optimizer or anything on the server.... but because my home office internet connection kept crappin' out on me!

When I was getting ready to attempt the install it occured to me to look around to see if I could find a YUM repo. I first became familiar with YUM repositories a few years back while working with a server which used CentOS.

This new VPS that we setup is using CentOS 5 and out of the blue I thought... ."What if I could find a repo for Zend Optimizer"... I thought for sure I wouldn't find one.

But as I looked I found.

This is a short "how-to" explaining how to set it up on the Question-Defense website.

Thought I'd just throw this out  there.

Recently I've been looking to play some gigs, play more music again.

I've had the pleasure of playing with Platinum Drive a few times lately and will be playing with them at The Silver Fox in Summerside on Friday night.

Last sunday afternoon I had the pleasure of sitting in with Muddy Buddy for a Canada Games volunteer rally at the Credit Union Place. 

I'm still looking for work... and would gladly consider a full time gig.

As some of you have experienced working with Internet Explorer 6 can be frustrating. Increasingly harder to support.

There's been a movement towards trying to free the world of Internet Explorer 6. One such website called "IE6 No More" explains in a simple way what the goal of the movement is.

I saw that CNN took notice of the movement and wrote an article about it entitled "Web citizens trying to kill Internet Explorer 6". Great name.

They estimate that there are still 15 to 25 percent of people still using IE6. Still a very large number.

 Today I ran a little search and found a nice little script I had never seen before... not like I've seen them all!

It's called GreyBox and I've been playing with it on a project and it's very easy to use.

What's really nice about GreyBox is that you can easily use it to display image galleries but you can also use it to open webpages. Pages on your own site or even external sites.

There are nice easy to follow examples on the website and you can find out more about it by visiting the GreyBox website.

Reading up a bit tonight and saw that Google Chrome will support themes and their preparing to launch a theme directory.

I've been using Chrome since it was released. I don't really use 1 browser exclusively but I generally test stuff in a few different browsers (FireFox, Safari, Opera, IE, Camino to name a few others).

I've never really been a huge fan of themes just because I don't feel the need for it. Widgets on the other hand are something that I find quite useful.

In Firefox for instance there are a few widgets that I find quite handy for debugging a web application or  Delicious bookmarks... twitter...etc.

Found and read a short article on the new Google Chrome Themes on TechCrunch.