Data presentation is critically important in todays world. Choosing the right graph for the right audience is an art that even I can’t say I’m master of. Even so this presentation of w3cschools.org’s browser stats for the last 7 years is impressively beauitful. Take a look.

On the heels of last nights surprise announcement from google. Hilary Clinton has called publicly for answers from China.

Surprised by the expediency of the reaction from the official channels of the US government? Don’t be, Eric Schmidt  a founder of Google was involved in the Obama Campaign, power and money  buy influence.

Regardless the next few days will prove to be interesting regardless. With the US Government involved we stand to hear alot more about the details of the infraction, details I would love to pour over . FOI will no doubt be flying by tomorrow morning.

The BBC  Tech blog has more translated Baidu’s response on it’s blog.

On Google Quitting China 2010-01-13 13:20

“Google claims it will quit China. What it’s proved is not what the Google fans have claimed, that Google is a ‘Human Rights fighter’. Just the contrary. It’s proved that Google is a hypocrite.

“What the Google Chief Legal Adviser said makes me sick. To quit for the sake of financial interest, then just say it. To beauty itself up and ostensibly mention that Google comes under attack by the Chinese, and that Gmail boxes of Chinese dissidents have been breached, and to use all these as a pretext for quitting China, such tone is insulting the intelligence of the ordinary Chinese people. However, it may well satisfy the imagination of those Westerners who have never been to China and understood nothing of China but still like to point fingers at China.

“Let’s put forward one supposition: Would Google top executives still proclaim that they would ‘do no evil’ and quit China, if Google has now taken 80% of China’s search market?

“The only feeling the whole episode has left me is nausea.”

So you want to do something simple like monitor your hard drives S.M.A.R.T status. You go to install the smartmontools package on Ubuntu and your prompted to install Postfix, and your faced with having to setup a mail relay, what a drag.

This is a simple walkthrough on the changes you need to make after Postfix is installed relay all mail generated on your system to an external mail server that requires SMTP Authentication.

When your prompted by the postfix package configuration choose Local Only, the wizard won’t let you setup authentication so we’re going to add the rest manually. Choosing Local Only will only create a basic main.cf for you. Once the install is complete do the following.

Assume Ubuntu 9.04

Add the following lines to /etc/postfix/main.cf

relayhost = [host3.green-light.ca]:587
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_sasl_security_options =

Create a new file called /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

[host3.green-light.ca]:587  user:password

Give that file proper permissions

sudo chown root:root /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd; sudo chmod 0600 /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

Create the hash database from your sasl_passwd file.

sudo postmap hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

Reload postfix with your new settings

sudo postfix reload

Thunderbird turned 3 this month and has definitely matured. We’ve been recommending Thunderbird 2 for years and have been using the developer release of 3  internally for over a year now. It’s great!

If your using Outlook or god forbid Outlook Express (OE is a non stop virus smorgasbord, switch to anything else, today) you’ll want to download Thunderbird 3 and give it a try see the difference. It auto imports all your mail, contacts and settings for you during the setup. It does however take a different approach to “features”.  For instance, if you want a calendar visit the Mozilla Lightening Project to download the necessary add-on.

1. Download and install Thunderbird 3, run through the import wizard to get your mail, address book and settings from Outlook.
2. Visit the Mozilla Lightning Project in your favorite browser, from the nightly section choose which your Operating System, Right click and SAVE the lighning.xpi file to your desktop.
3. Going back to Thunderbird click Tools > Add-ons > Click the “install” button and select the lightning.xpi file.
4. Once the file is loaded you will be asked to restart, when Thunerbird is started back up you will have a calendar built right in.

If you would like an expert to help please call our support line @ 14036689184, support for Thunderbird is free for our hosting customers. For everyone else Remote Desktop Support is only $1.00 a minute, so take advantage of it. If it’s your a first time the first 10 minutes are free