My editor of choice is Scite and there's been an enhancement with one of the 'packages' I use that just drives me crazy. Autocompletion of quotes and brackets. This feature autocompletes your quotes, such that everytime your enter a single or double quote " the editor will automatically put in the second ". Feature drives me crazy.

I get a phone call this morning from the ‘Eua clan pointing me to a new project their involved in.

http://peanutsfunnyfarm.blogspot.com

Peanut’s Funny Farm is an activity farm for underprivileged children aged up to 18 years. We have designed Peanut’s Funny Farm specifically to be a safe and happy environment for children and Animals. The children are welcome to come and stay at the farm where they can play with and care for animals, ride horses and take part in a number of different outdoor activities. Our goal is to help children spend some quality time with animals that do not judge them or cause harm to them, but will love them for who they are. We also give refuge and shelter to as many unwanted animals as possible.

Trust the ‘Eua mob to come all the way in from the Islands, to find happiness on a farm.

They’re out there with their palangi-loi mum helping out with setting up the facilities etc. If you think you can be part of the fun, or someone you may know may find it useful, head on over and take at look.

And a beautiful day in Sydney it is for being out doors.

What is Clonezilla

You're probably familiar with the popular proprietary commercial package

Norton Ghost®, and its OpenSource counterpart, Partition Image. The problem with these software packages is that it takes a lot of time to massively clone systems to many computers. You've probably also heard of Symantec's solution to this problem, Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition® with multicasting. Well, now there is an OpenSource clone system (OCS) solution called Clonezilla with unicasting and multicasting!

Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla server edition. Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla server edition is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency. At the NCHC's Classroom C, Clonezilla server edition was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting!

Some people still don’t think they need a disk image backup solution, and they may not.

But if you have to maintain a network of computers (whether for a school, work, or social club) today’s increased capacity in disk drives (and their relatively lower prices) demands you consider this as a solution for making your maintenance life easier.

Computers can be configured to ‘wake-up’ to certain peripheral device activities, something (as I recall) pioneered in the PC Space by Apple’s Nubus back in the ‘dark ages?’ The idea is that we can conserve electricity by putting our computers to ‘sleep’ and have some event (such as someone wanting to talk with the computer) wake up the computer.

Today, ‘wake-up’ is a common feature offered on computers.

Apart from the security implications of a computer activating (or being owned) when you plug in a Firewire / IEE1394 device (such as some external drives and Digitial Video Cameras) there’s a nice feature in Windows Vista that would ‘wake-up’ my laptop when I move my external/usb mouse.

Wake-up on USB is a nice feature, that you love half the time, and hate the other half.

Put the laptop into sleep, or just let the screen saver do it and go away from your desk for a cup of coffee or something. It is seriously convenient to just get to back, bump the mouse and be back online browsing the web (oops, working!!!.)

On the other hand, it is hugely inconvenient to put the laptop to sleep, shutdown the screen and then have someone else bump the mouse for the laptop to be active while the screen is down (i.e. no clear indicator for me that my battery is draining away.) It doesn’t help that it seems that since I have my laptop authenticate after waking up, it doesn’t go back to sleep so my battery can be totally drained with the lid down.

Don’t even go into the problem that many people have, where something wakes Windows/Laptop up while it’s in your bag giving the laptop a good chance to drain the battery and heat it self up silly.

As a given, if you put your Windows box into sleep mode, and you don’t want it to wake-up because you’re putting the laptop into your bag, pull all the USB devices out before Windows gets into ‘sleep’ nirvana.

The lessons.

Decide on the level of inconvenience your prefer. Until Windows is intelligent enough to figure out that Monday ~ Friday between 5:00 and 6:00pm when I put the thing to sleep, I don’t want it to wake up until I open the lid, live with it. Actually, if Windows and this laptop can just figure out I don’t ever want the laptop to wake-up while the lid is down, that would be a huge success.

Like, how often do you hear of people on battery power turning on their laptops while the screen is shut. they must be in a different world over at Redmond?

For battery life, get another power-brick for your laptop (unfortunately I’m over-geeked and carry two laptops with one power-brick between them.) Come to me sayeth Windows, for I will make your yoke heavy.

Of all the naysayers, fanboys out there for Google’s new engine.

Has anyone noticed the contribution Google is doing by BSD licensing the product?

Just as OpenBSD ‘saved’ the world by contributing OpenSSH as a BSD licensed product (so everyone and their dog can use the best SSH server/client without reprisals or arguments) is Google trying to push Chrome’s Javascript Engine V8 to become a new standard that everyone can use ?

If V8 is faster, more compliant then any other pseudo javascript engine out there, then why would you not incorporate it into your browser? Especially if it gives your end-users (browsers and developers) a better experience.

Go Google, Go IE9

Had my first session of validating firewall rules on Monday and Tuesday, wohooo that’s an experience. My previous installations were of small systems, so I have previous experience in ‘drafting’ the firewall rules, putting it in and letting it go live. Testing and validating the firewall essentially meant sitting there in front of the firewall server and watching traffic, tweaking issues as they became known.

Firewalls are the quality of the walls between buildings. The higher grade your firewall, the higher probability your building isn’t going to burn down, should the building next door go up in flames.

The quality of the construction material of your firewall is just part of the toolkit for minimising danger to your building, you also need to ensure that there’s no open passage for the fire to enter your building while avoiding your firewall barrier. One building that went up in flames had a decent firewall, but they had large ventilation shafts between the building and the next building, leading directly to highly combustible material. Fire from the adjoining building spread into our building through the ventilation shafts and the building came down, while the firewall held firm.

The burnt building looked like the aftermath of a bombing, the inside collapsed in soot while the firewall stood alone.

Lesson 1: Physical firewalls have the same limitations as their electronic / communications firewall counter-parts. They are only as good as the material their built with, and the ventilation shafts between your side of the firewall and the next.

Unless you want to burn your firewall to test it, the general idea is to test the materials and the process of producing your firewall.

With our computer firewall firewall, we have existing best practise procedures for designing and building the firewall, and we’re now in the stage of testing the “ventilation” shafts built into our firewalls to validate whether the rules we’ve set up for what to allow in and out through the ventilation shafts behave as we expect.

I haven’t heard of any automated tools for doing the testing, so if you’ve heard of one please do tell us.

At the moment the process of testing the open ventilation shafts (in computer speak “open ports”) is to set up a simulated network on either side of our firewall and generate network traffic trying to get through the firewall in both directions. Unfortunately, the generated cannot be purely random, each “open port” or “potentially open port” has to have a specific test.

Unless you have the money, you can’t really duplicate your live network in this test environment, so you end up spending a lot of time doing the network configuration dance, continuously readjusting your various test machines to simulate other machines and providing different services as well as simulating trying to get through the firewall to the other side.

Lesson 2: You really want a set of command-line tools for doing this. Windows greater user-feedback (GUI?) is nice, but it can really use up your time when things don’t work as expected (and how often is that the truth in a test environment.)

This is when it’s good to have several machines on an independent set of networks (i.e. at minimum you’re testing the firewall with two networks) but just as importantly several monitors, keyboards, and a cool smooth swivel chair to spin around in.

Don’t bother doing this using terminal/ssh connections, that is just a recipe for frustration and avoiding configuration options you need to consider (because often enough changes you need to do will throw you out of your terminal/ssh session)

Lesson 3: Physical hardware is way cooler than the virtual world on its own.

Most of what we tested only needed testing a direct connection to the server, but our last test before quitting for the day last night was to test whether a connection from a connection would go through on a virtual connection (VPN.) Woo hoo, that wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t as hard as initially expected (since we’d done similar stuff previously.)

If you’ve got almost the cash, where you can’t afford a full simulated network, but can afford a good size beefy duo of machines for either side of the simulated network, then you would probably go with using a network of virtual machines on either side of your firewall. Now, that would be way cool, but I don’t think my laptop is beefy enough (yet)

Oh yeah, my preferred firewall ? OpenBSD with PF, of course. For user VPNs, I’m doing pretty good with installing OpenVPN.

You don’t here it as often these days, but one of the oft cited errors with Microsoft’s Operating Systems was what became generally known as “DLL HELL”

The problem summary: When a user installs an application on their machine, most of these applications do their “thang” through libraries they either create or source from someone else.

As MS Window’s popularity grew with software developers, so too the need for libraries to do their “thang” and subsequent fixes/tweaks to these libraries to do their “thang” correctly, add that extra feature, fix that extra feature ad-nauseum.

The problem, in the MS Windows ecosystem, as has come to *Nix, are the incompatibilities between different versions of these libraries and their proliferation on users machines.

In the beginning, there were weak guidelines where certain types of libraries went here, and others went in the “application” space. Disk use outgrew disk space for a time, and consolidation of space was required. Today, it seems disk space is well beyond general user requirements.

The solution we begin to see in the MS Windows ecosystem, is for applications to install all their libraries within their own space (there’s enough disk space, just use it) to minimise picking up the ‘wrong’ library.

I wonder how long it will take for this new ‘developer feature’ to be incorporated into *Nix applications (if not doing so already.)

it would sure solve a lot of problems with a lot of Open Source packages if all the dependencies were supplied with the package in installed under /Applications/Uber App.

There’s a new release of Windows Live Writer (a Technical Preview?) so any of who budding authors out there can dribble just as easily as moi?

Windows Live Writer is an application that should simplify your blogging workflow, at least it lets me compose some of my random thoughts while I’m on the train (the lengths we go to seeking sanity within this world?)

I'm running Microsoft Windows Vista - Business Edition on this Tablet PC because it's the OS of choice for this thing, and because I paid the extra cash so I can get a high class Tablet. (Let's hope I don't learn to regret that one)

Now that I'm working in a security paranoid company (well it wouldn't do good to be electronically compromised if your business is providing security for other people.)

One of the key things we do at Nullcube is make sure all laptops have full encryption installed. This means that:

1. When the machine starts, even Windows cannot start without you knowing the humoungously long password I've used.
2. Even if you take the hard drive out of my cold dead hands, you can't get to the data (it's all gibberish without my passphrase)

Since I don't have Microsoft's sanctified OS SKU (Stock Keeping Units) that comes with Microsoft's HDD Encryption tool (bitlocker) I have to look around for some other solution. In my case it came down to looking at two Open Source projects, primarily because they were FREE and been around for a while have hopefully had someone qualified looking at their code.

I've installed both FREE OTFE (On the Fly Encryption) but chose to use TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org) Both tools are great, but TrueCrypt 5.01 supports full disk encryption of the System (boot) Disk. As per above, this feature means that you can't get into my computer unless you put pliers to my fingers and ask not so nicely.

There are however some serious gaping holes with TrueCrypt that is one of the banes of security. Security is not a product. Windows has this great feature called Sleep mode, where the laptop will go into a rest mode where you can shut the screen throw the thing into your backpack run off to your meeting and open the laptop up to see it staring at you with all those applications still running. Great feature, saves you time of waiting for the inevitable 10 minute boot cycle for Windows.

If you have sleep mode on when someone steels your laptop (and presumably the backpack may have a battery charger with it) then you've just given the thief full access to all that 'secured' data.

Presumably, in a corporate setting your Network Administrator will intrusively get into your Group Profile and set it up so the laptop cannot go into sleep and must power down (whoaa, so much for that feature.) Another intrusive but not so intrusive solution would be for laptop policies to allow sleep mode, but with requiring authentication on un-sleeping. Obviously there still is the problem that your Windows password may not be all that good, but with the newer laptops including biometric authentication mechanisms, this might be more secure?) Of course, if you steal my laptop and cut off all my fingers you can probably get in as well.

LIghtning/Sunbird 0.8 has been released and I wanted to try it out, since it has great potential but didn't really work for me last time (probably because I don't really have a life to calendarise?

I kept getting error messages for calendars that were installed in previous versions of lightning that I couldn't access, so I couldn't remove it.

Short answer:

Storage.sdb

The calendar information seems to be stored in a file called storage.sdb and since I was starting from scratch, it was just a matter of deleting the file to get a working Thunderbird/Lightning again (well, actually it was working previously but with too many annoying error messages.)

Now I have to get the kids calendar back online et. al.

We can sometimes get ahead of ourselves, as techno-geebs. The solutions people generally want rarely needs new flashing lights with special coolant, our priorities should be solving problems, not installing new technologies.

Re: [OT] Pursuing Management to adopt OpenBSD

Chris wrote:

> I been trying (rather unsuccessfully) to convince various clients and
> employers to adopt OpenBSD. Most people, I find, are resistant to
> change and would not use anything they are not familiar with. Others
> would say that if I leave the job, it would be hard to find people who
> can use (or even heard of) OpenBSD and in some places Management never
> heard of OpenBSD and have very little clue as to how good or bad it is
> compared to Linux/ Solaris and Windows thus they will just knock off
> the proposal in 2 seconds.
>
> Is there any way I could convince these people to make the move to
> OpenBSD? Suggestions, tips and tricks along with real life examples
> would be much appreciated. Thanks.

 

Had an external reason to be reviewing my knowledge/status information on Multilingual CMS and it was timely to note the blog entry Tom Lazar over at tomster.org

The state of the Union^WLinguaPlone

How well does Plone 3 support multi-lingual content at the moment.

use Plone >= 3.0.6

install plone.browserlayer

use LinguaPlone 2.1/svn

use PloneLanguageTool >= 2.1

don't use the default Language selector portlet provided by Plone

LinguaPlone has come a long way to tackle a truly ambitious problem and I'm very sure, as of today, that Plone will prove to be one of the best solutions for managing multi-lingual content on the web. Again.

Definitely have to get my hands on a new machine that can start hosting something.

www.centrelink.gov.au

Looks like one of the fields in the centrelink claim forms doesn't filter input correctly.

I try putting in 'Ofa for my wife's fist name, and I get errors messages for some other part of the form until I get rid of that leading single-quote. That's so 1990's!!!

Imagine if I had no idea about database query problems and use of quotes and single-quotes (read: that would mean I would be for ever confused about why I can't fill the form in). Or worse yet, what would happen if I was malicious and tried to wipe the database back-end with some sad query 'DROP DATABASE *'

It doesn't help that the website doesn't respond to centrelink.gov.au. Ahhhhhh, the joys of being online.

Got a message from Google (you know, those guys that do the search thing on the INTERNET) and they're letting people set up their websites using Google's services (well, we've known this for a while but they've added a few more services.)

Services that Nomoa.com are making use through Google include:

Start Page  http://partnerpage.google.com/nomoa.com

The Start Page lets you create a unique, dynamic place to preview your @nomoa.com Gmail inbox, your Google Docs files and your Google Calendar, collect relevant information from your organization, and search the web. You can customize the layout and content, choosing from thousands of handy Google gadgets.

Chat / GTalk

Google Talk provides a free and simple way to connect instantly with your contacts with instant messaging and free PC-to-PC voice calls anywhere in the world. You can even exchange files with your contacts using Google Talk, with no file size restrictions.

Chat with colleagues from within your start page Now you can chat with colleagues and friends from right within your Google Apps start page. The new Google Talk gadget also allows for multi-person chat, so you can schedule a meeting or get input from multiple people without switching back and forth between chat tabs. If your administrator has activated the start page, add the gadget by clicking on the "Add stuff" link on the top left corner of your homepage, open the 'Google Apps' category of gadgets, and click 'add it now.'

Web Pages http://web.nomoa.com

Sites http://sites.nomoa.com

Google Sites is the easiest way to make information accessible to people who need quick, up-to-date access. People can work together on a Site to add file attachments, information from other Google applications (like Google Docs, Google Calendar, YouTube and Picasa), and new free-form content. Creating a site together is as easy as editing a document, and you always control who has access, whether it's just yourself, your team, or your whole organization. You can even publish Sites to the world. The Google Sites web application is accessible from any internet connected computer.

Email http://mail.nomoa.com

Email with up to 6 GB of storage per email address, mail search tools and integrated chat, powerful search to find messages as fast as you can search the web, and instant messaging built right in. The Gmail web application is accessible from anywhere, and you can even sign in from your mobile phone. Or if you prefer, you can access email from your favorite mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird using POP or IMAP at no additional cost.

Straight Google GMail, but using @nomoa.com as your base address

Calendar http://calendar.nomoa.com

Google Calendar helps individuals and whole organizations manage their time. Not only can you organize your personal calendar, invite others to meetings and events, and keep track of RSVPs, but you can also create shared calendars that multiple people can view or edit. You always control who has access, whether it's just yourself, your team, or your whole organization. You can even publicize events to the world. The Google Calendar web application is accessible from anywhere, and you can even sign in from your mobile phone.

Google Calendar gallery Many organizations and individuals choose to share their calendars publicly through Google Calendar. Now Google Calendar users can access these calendars through an easy-to-browse gallery. You can find all sorts of interesting public calendars that you can overlay on top of your school or business calendar, so you can keep track of your favorite basketball team's schedule, know when your favorite TV show is a repeat, or follow your favorite band's concert tour. To see the gallery, click the 'Add' button at the top of your list of calendars and choose 'Add a public calendar'

Docs http://docs.nomoa.com

Google Docs makes creating and collaborating on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations simple. Not only can you create and edit your own docs, but you can also have multiple people view or edit together. With Google Docs, you don't have to manage multiple versions of the same attachment from different people. You always control who has access, whether it's just yourself, your team, or your whole organization. You can even publish docs to the world. The Google Docs web application is accessible from anywhere, and you can even sign in and view docs from your mobile phone.

Localisation?

And, what does this all have to do with Talanoa Oceania 2008? Well, you can now go to a new Talanoa site @ Google specifically for the event http://sites.google.com/a/nomoa.com/talanoa/Home . The simplest URL is the generic Nomoa.com sites hosted by Google at http://sites.nomoa.com

Talanoa Oceania 2008 - http://sites.google.com/a/nomoa.com/talanoa/Home

Talanoa Calendar of Events - http://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/nomoa.com/render

 

Of course, you're not going to see anything on the Calendar until you page through to September ~ October.

I'll try to keep the Talanoa Calendar and Talanoa Details/Site up to date. When the event goes, we'll hopefully have some interesting information (videos?) we can put up on the 'NET for the rest of the world to see.

Had the need, and wandered the Ether to find Mail PassView

Mail PassView v1.42 - Recover lost mail passwords
Copyright (c) 2003 - 2007 Nir Sofer

Mail PassView is a small password-recovery tool that reveals the passwords and other account details for the following email clients:

It saved a phone call to customer support, which is another whole story of its own.

Thanks Nir for a great, working, product.

The regular problems taking for ever and a day to resolve happened again when I tried upgrading (due to security warnings) to a more current version of Gallery2.

Unfortunately, the upgrade coincided with Tonfon deciding to give me a hard time with Internet connections.

Clear problems from the upgrade.

FailedLoginsMap

Login fails due to a missing table row, unfortunately the error message isn't too intuitive unless you've been bashing Gallery2 code. The error is apparently caused by a failure in the following query:

select g_info from nomoa_gallery.g2_Schema where g_name='FailedLoginsMap';

If you install Gallery2 and have a login failure with an error message referencing FailedLoginsMap, then try the above query on your database. If you get an empty result, then you probably need the solution I found (from someone else's backup which was indexed through google.

INSERT INTO `g2_Schema` (`g_name`, `g_major`, `g_minor`, `g_createSql`, `g_pluginId`, `g_type`, `g_info`) VALUES
('FailedLoginsMap', 1, 0, 'CREATE TABLE DB_TABLE_PREFIXFailedLoginsMap(n DB_COLUMN_PREFIXuserName varchar(32) NOT NULL,n DB_COLUMN_PREFIXcount int(11) NOT NULL,n DB_COLUMN_PREFIXlastAttempt int(11) NOT NULL,n PRIMARY KEY(DB_COLUMN_PREFIXuserName)n) DB_TABLE_TYPEn/*!40100 DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 */;nnINSERT INTO DB_TABLE_PREFIXSchema (n DB_COLUMN_PREFIXname,n DB_COLUMN_PREFIXmajor,n DB_COLUMN_PREFIXminorn) VALUES(''FailedLoginsMap'', 1, 0);nn', 'core', 'map', 'a:1:{s:15:"FailedLoginsMap";a:3:{s:8:"userName";a:3:{s:4:"type";i:2;s:4:"size";i:1;s:7:"notNull";b:1;}s:5:"count";a:3:{s:4:"type";i:1;s:4:"size";i:2;s:7:"notNull";b:1;}s:11:"lastAttempt";a:3:{s:4:"type";i:1;s:4:"size";i:2;s:7:"notNull";b:1;}}}');

Image Block.

Got upgraded during the install as well, so you have to specifically 'upgrade' the plugin as administrator.

Image Thumbnails

For some reason, new thumbnails weren't getting created correctly. And I obviously just had to rebuild all the thumbnails to verify (i.e. now the whole gallery had no thumbnails.)

I checked my Graphics Toolkits and they all had the correct references (i.e. toolkits point to the right files on disk) and all tests from the forms worked out ok.

I think I resolved this by just reallocating things around, but that shouldn't(?) have been a solution?

Open Workbench is touted as the "Open-Source Project Scheduling for Windows"

Open Workbench is an open source desktop application that provides robust project scheduling and management functionality. Already the scheduling standard for more than 100,000 project managers worldwide, Open Workbench is a free and powerful alternative to Microsoft Project.

Released in December 2005, Open Workbench 1.1.4 provides significant new enhancements and bug fixes. For more information on version 1.1.4, please review the Open Workbench 1.1.4 Release Notes. The source code for Open Workbench 1.1.4 is also available on SourceForge.

Open Workbench provides all the functionality and benefits that project managers expect in a world-class scheduling application:

• Open Workbench can be used and distributed free of charge throughout an enterprise.
• Open Workbench is a stand-alone desktop application that provides robust project scheduling functionality.
• Open Workbench provides the unique ability to generate project schedules based on resource constraints.
• Open source developers will find a ready-made community of business users interested in their enhancements and extensions. The source code and other developer information are available on SourceForge.
• The open source distribution and community development model will now bring quality, innovation and cost advantages to the project management world.
• Open Workbench can also be used in a fully integrated fashion with CA's Clarity solution. Please visit www.niku.com/go/owb for more details.

The only difficulty with the above project is it seems that since it differs in some philosophical approaches to Microsoft's Project Management software, a full use of the system kind of indicates a choice of philosophy. One either chooses the OW way or the MS way.

It also seems that the software was released in 2005, and no clear indication on the website whether it has been updated. Sourceforge file release is December 19, 2005. Documentation files are dated 2005.

Nonetheless, if you want no money software, and you don't want to go the piracy way, then this could be an alternative.

Always good to know information.

Universities With the Best Free Online Courses

No tuition money? No problem! There are many top universities that offer free courses online. This list ranks some of the best free university courses for people who want to enhance personal knowledge or advance in their current field.

I've spent a number of hours listening and viewing a few of the courses over at UC Berkley, and there are definite merits for users.

The University of Southern Queensland is actually on the list, which is interesting since I've recently read a paper on some of their IT Governance and Management efforts.

They even have an online course that should be relevant to many Governments in the Pacific:

Communications, Technology and Policy

Technological change has had major impacts upon the modes of transmission, processing and storage of information and electronic forms of communication. This course explores the social and policy implications of the digitisation of Australian (and international) telecommunications and broadcasting. Specific policy and technology themes and debates will be selected to illustrate the choices facing the information society. The course will also examine media discourses of communication technology.

Course objectives

On successful completion of this course students will be able to:

1. explain how the means of communication are shaped by complex social factors;
2. understand the impact of communication technologies on government policy and planning;
3. understand the impacts of contemporary means of communication on politics, culture and the economy
4. analyse the changing nature of media and communication institutions from a number of theoretical perspectives;
5. engage critically with media discourses of communication and information technology.

Too bad I don't have any major downloads at the moment.

I'm still having problems with DNS and Tonfon.

This time, instead of just failing for a few websites (like commbank.com.au) it is now failing to let me browse any website by using their name (e.g. google.com.) I can only see a website, if I use their IP Address (e.g. www.nomoa.com's is currently: 72.215.205.147)

Simple Windows solutions? (phase 1) reboot (if that fails) reinstall (if that fails) install new hardware (if that fails - blame it on the customer)

Being as this problem continues for me, I of course am not overly enthusiastic about our Internet service at Tonfon.

Oh, I can of course go to Tonfon's website. Like, now that everyone else's website fails, I really have a keen interest in reading my ISPs pages that says they are beautiful and not the cause of world hunger. 8<

Why is this an issue?

E-mail.

Well, not only is my web browsing effected, but now I can't get my email and I am not sure whether email destined for me is coming to Tonga or is in limbo, or worse, just eaten up by the cyber-sphere.

Transactions.

If you use the Internet for anything other than just browsing (i.e. you might be a big BEBO player) then you really need to have these foundations things working at the ISP.