From http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/implementation/archives/bell-canada-suffers-major-hosting-outage-10432 :

On Sunday evening (July 9th) it would appear that one of Canada’s largest shared hosting operators – Bell Canada – had a major outage to their shared web hosting infrastructure.  Their shared web hosting environment consists of 4 very large servers.  Two of those servers are known as bellhosting and the other two are known as bellwebhosting.  It would appear that somehow a routing block was created in the core router resolution of the bellhosting pair which caused 100s of websites to disappear including any associated e-mail and ftp services.

The duration of the outage was close to 24 hours before all sites were returned to service.

Finally, I found out what’s the catch with that 2 months free Sympatico Internet aceess: there is only 1 month free, although their representative said clearly there are 2 months free. And there is a 30 days cancelation notice. So, there is nothing free because surely you’ll have to pay something (unless you cancel in the same day you receive the package).

To find out these I had to pay my price. Never trust Sympatico again - they have just lost a client. For ever.

Don’t miss today’s news from The Star: T.O. to become wireless hotspot

Toronto Hydro Corp. will announce Tuesday that it plans to turn Canada’s largest city into one giant wireless hotspot, directly challenging the country’s major mobile phone carriers for a chunk of the $8 billion a year wireless market.

With the deployment, which sources say could be available in the downtown core as early as this fall, Toronto joins a growing list of North American cities, including Philadelphia, New Orleans and San Francisco, that have announced plans to bring low-cost, broadband wireless access to their citizens and businesses.

[…]

Do you know how can you have Toronto map, offline, on a PDA?

Easy:

1. Download TTC PDF map from www.toronto.ca/ttc/pdf/rideguide.pdf (or see www.toronto.ca/ttc/schedules/index.htm).

2. Install Acrobat Reader on you PDA.

3. Install PDF fiel on your PDA.

That’s it, you’re done. I’m using from time to time Toronto PDF map on my Palm.

According to Torrentfreak Rogers is throttling Bittorrent traffic. He suggests a solution: encrypting :

“Currently both Azureus and µTorrent included this new form of encryption (specs) in their latest Beta’s. The fact that these two clients are actively working together to implement this new feature is promising and will make this form of encryption the new standard since the users of these two clients cover the majority of all Bittorrent users.

There are two “encryption modes” available.

The 2 different payload encryption methods plaintext transmission and RC4 provide a different degree of protocol obfuscation, security and speed. Where the plaintext mode only provides basic anti-shaping obscurity, no security and low CPU usage the RC4 encryption obfuscates the entire stream and not only the header and adds some cryptographic security at the price of spent CPU cycles.”

Good to know.

Today, I’ve got my new free testing modem from Bell. I still don’t get the catch for this business: they shipped me a new modem to use their service for free for 2 months. At least, this is what they say.

There was a sale agent in my building trying to sell or offer (??) Bell Internet connections. I told him I already have an ISP and I won’t change it. Not that is the best possible, but I have other reasons. I don’t need other net connection, I won’t keep it, I won’t be their customer. And still he insisted to get this free modem and try it for 2 months. It was easier just to accept this free gift than to argue.

My question regards this business model. What can it bring to the company, in this case Bell? Really don’t know, because as I said, I won’t keept this modem, even if works fine. They spent money with the modem and cables, money for shipping it and surely other costs, including free net connection, which is not quite free for them. What they get? Nothing. For sure.

Maybe there is somebody to explain to me this business model and what’s the catch.

Interesting article in The Globe And Mail: Phony jobs websites closed:

“Toronto — Canada’s Competition Bureau says it has shut down two Edmonton-based websites that duped job seekers around the world with promises of lucrative salaries, but oilcareer.com is already back online and open for business.

[…] 

It took five years of complaints from Internet users and persistent work by anti-scam websites to convince the agency to act.”

Five years to act? That’s canadian.

TorontoPublicLibrary.ca is a nice website with useful online services, except one: room rentals. It works like this:

- Open the page and get PDF;
- Print them and fill manually;
- Then send them by fax.

Technology is working and there are online services, just that only to get the forms. Big deal. I’d like to see here a full online application, no fax application.

We do : Painting, Tiles, Basement Finishing, Renovations …

Call (416) 399-4714

Did he bet on professional sports or not? He is denying, again and again, but as I said in subject, I believe him. After reading what was said (and known) about this case I don’t think he bet. That’s my feeling.