From the monthly archives:
October 2006
Daily del.icio.us for Oct 31, 2006
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Daily del.icio.us for Oct 30, 2006
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Save Baby Gavin
I apologize as this is a little off-topic for this blog but I wanted to bring as much attention as I could to the Save Baby Gavin website and blog. My wife's cousin Jill has a beautiful little boy named Gavin. Gavin was born on February 23, 2006 with end-stage renal failure, or congenital kidney failure. Gavin was born with only 10-15% function in one of his kidneys, and 0% function in the other. He was admitted to Children's hospital of Wisconsin immediately after his birth and started on peritoneal dialysis. Peritoneal dialysis means that he is hooked up to a machine at home every night for 10 hours to "clean out" his blood. Without a kidney transplant, Gavin will not survive.
We are launching an initial fundraising campaign to help Gavin's family with costs not covered by private insurance. Our goal is to raise $100,000 for Gavin's account, which is managed by the Children's Organ Transplant Association (COTA). COTA is a national, nonprofit 501©3 charity dedicated to helping families raise funds for transplant-related expenses.
Please visit the Save Baby Gavin site and donate anything you can. If you can, please blog about this and link to Gavin’s site to get a wider distribution of this. Thank you.
baby clothing is a great thing but it's crucial that you raise your own awareness about Gavin before looking at everyday things such as clothes.
Tags: cota, donate, donation, gavin, gavin_winslow, Java/J2EE, kidney, renal_failure, transplantRelated posts
Daily del.icio.us for Oct 23, 2006
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Daily del.icio.us for Oct 22, 2006
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Daily del.icio.us for Oct 21, 2006
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OpenDNS Rocks
I first discovered OpenDNS on Chris Pirillio's blog - OpenDNS is a free service that is designed to make your Internet browsing faster, safer and smarter. And guess what - it does that. OpenDNS is essentially a set of massive distributed DNS caches that allow faster name resolution and yet obey the TTL rules for each domain. They have a very fast geographically distributed network of DNS caches that allow for blazingly fast lookup times which allows for faster connections to those sites. The traditional ISP DNS lookup connects to one of the root name servers which in turn send you to the name server for the top-level domain which will then probably get you to the name-server that is hosting the DNS entry for the site you are trying to connect to. OpenDNS skips all of that and return the IP address of the site you are attempting a connection two in a single request.
The safer surfing part comes into play with the phishing filter built into OpenDNS. OpenDNS intercepts connections against known phishing sites, based on network analysis and feeds from other network operators including their new venture PhishTank. PhishTank is a community anti-phishing Web site where anyone can go to submit suspected phishes, track the status of their submissions and help verify others submissions.
The smarter bit comes in the typo-correction feature of OpenDNS. So if you're going to google.com and misspell Google, OpenDNS first attempts to correct the typo and get you to the right site instead of the squatter sites that are just waiting for that misspelling to land you on their site.
I have been using OpenDNS for months now since I first read Chris's blog entry about OpenDNS and have been extremely happy with the free service. Can't beat the price - I can't really tell if my surfing is any faster but cognitively I know it is and that makes me happy. 
Another thing that really stands out about OpenDNS is the service - I've had two occasions where I've contacted support to check on some DNS changes I made to move my domains from one hosting vendor to another and I got an almost immediate response both times. John Roberts, who is the VP of Product Development responded back in minutes to my query on both occasions and helped me by force clearing the cached entries for my domain.
Anyone and everyone can start using OpenDNS to surf smarter, faster and safer. Check out their Getting Started page for more information on how to change your router or computer DNS settings to start using OpenDNS.
Tags: dns, dns_lookup, Links, opendns, performance, phishing, security
