It's been an interesting few days in terms of this website. People may be wondering on why they're unable to post comments on this blog at the moment. About two nights ago the server that my website is hosted on came under a DOS (Denial of Service) Attack.

In order to respond to this attack, part of the counter-measures used involved disabling all the non-essential items on the server. This involved disabling the stuff used to generate the verification code image needed to enter comments.

I am aware of the irony of me implementing image verification to stop spammers, whilst a DOS attack and the counter measures used after that seem to stop all the comments altogether because of it.

Things seemed to have settled down after the DOS attack about a day ago, so i'm very irritated that my host hasn't reactivated all the services that were shut down.

The flip side of the coin is that my host has just reviewed their plans. The plan i'm on comes with a price-freeze guarantee. That basically means that i'll keep paying the same price that I signed up for indefinitely for the plan i'm on, as long as I don't change plans. It also means I get all the upgrades each year for that plan without having to pay the revised increased pricing.

This year the plan i'm on has quintupled the amount of space and add-on and parked domains I'm allowed: space went from 500MB to 2500MB, and extra domains went from 1 to 5 each.

Needless to say i'm very happy about that, especially in terms of the storage.

So i'm both very happy and very unhappy at my host at the moment.

In other geeky news, people will know that I'm a strong advocate of Firefox, the
leading browser alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. A few days ago I stumbled upon a humorous site which gives 13 reasons to switch to Firefox: Kill Bill's Browser. Very funny, and mostly very true.

Recently there has also been a campaign in which Google will pay people $1 for each person they successfully refer to Firefox (which will also be bundled with Google Toolbar), called Explorer Destroyer. I've been tempted to sign up myself...

In the past few days I have also tried the new beta of Internet Explorer 7, the next version of Microsoft's browser. I like the look of it, and the tabs are a long overdue addition, but other than that i'm not impressed at all. Microsoft seem to be aiming at making it more CSS compliant, but i don't think they're doing a very good job (but granted it is still in beta). Nowhere near enough to switch me back to IE, one of many reasons is that they still have got the useless old text size options, but they have implemented an Opera-style zoom function of which i'm not the biggest fan. Many other things I could talk about why it's currently still garbage, but overall two big thumbs down for me so far.

Sorry for all-geekiness post, hopefully the image verification for comments will be working again soon.