We have received confirmation from Shaw that they too as well as Telus and some other high speed internet providers block Port 25 for any email traffic that is not from one of their own email accounts, this will cause customers sending email using Islandnet.com based email addresses (this includes Islandhosting and Highspeedplus) to have problems sending email using port 25.

Workaround
We have had in place a solution that works well for users of Telus high speed and can be employed the same way for Shaw high speed users and that is to change the outgoing port number in the email account settings from for 25 to 2525.

Customers who use many different networks, for example mobile laptop users we strongly recommend changing the outgoing SMTP port number 2525.

Documentation on how to change the port numbers in the most popular mail clients will be posted shortly, if you find you cannot send email and need assistance in changing the port number please call Islandnet.com on 1-800-331-3055 or use the live chat option from https://helpdesk.islandnet.com/.

That's changed now. High speed cable access is available on Pender Island. Here's the posting from our Helpdesk News and Announcements page:

We are happy to announce that we are able to provide the high speed cable internet for any who are interested in upgrading their services from dialup.

Please note that there are some enticing promotions that we are able to pass on to our customers. If interested or have any questions, call our office @ 250-383-0096 or Toll Free 1-800-331-3055.

You can talk to any of our staff that are logged onto the "Live Chat: (Please note the new gadget of "Live Chat" for the convenience of our customers. Try it out! 8-)

Customers should note that high speed cable access is not yet available throughout Pender Island.

Need another way to contact us? Go to Islandnet.com and Click on Live Chat) or E-mail us...

Well, we've got something new to report! Someone sent us a hard copy! That is, we got one of those Nigerian scam letters via regular Canada Post.

This particular letter, like many others, appeals to people's greed. The money at the center of this scheme supposedly belongs to a family, the members of which have all passed away. This leaves a great, huge pile of money in an account just begging to be released from the clutches of a faceless bank and government bureaucracy.

The letter comes to us because we have the same last name as the family who's members perished in a tragic car accident. Convenient, eh?

Cool, $31,080,000 for taking money from the Spanish government, who won't miss it anyway right?

We laughed too.

Islandnet Picks

Watch Stuff Get Shredded	Clever Bus Ads	Free and useful Cool Web Development Tools	Dafont.com
Little boys do it all the time, throw rocks at tin cans, drop stuff from great heights to see what happens, drop huge rocks on stuff to see what happens. Of course, they sometimes go over the line and destroy stuff that shouldn't be destroyed. Well, if you've got such a child, point them at this website. They'll get hours of vicarious enjoyment from watching everything from a BMW automobile to mattresses and oil drums getting shredded to bits. COOL! And there's no guilt involved. After all, it's all being done so that everything gets recycled. COOL!	You'll get a hoot out of these advertisements. They use the sides and backs of buses to the absolute best design advantage. We know you'll at least crack a smile when you see this page.	Even if you're not a “pro” web developer, FREE is good, “right?” Well, these tools are really something. There's almost everything you need to develop web pages here, in addition to some tools that will make your life easier if you want to get into the “nitty-gritty” of CSS design. Did we mention it's all FREE!	While our favourite word "FREE" doesn't apply to everything you'll find on this website, you will find some free fonts here, as well as shareware fonts and many fonts for non-commercial use. With that said, if you love to have every font known to man at your disposal, this is a place to check out. They don't have everything here but there are some pretty interesting and impressive fonts available..

Islandnet.com Hosted Sites

Echo Valley Vineyards	Phil's Farm	Pacific Rim Paddling	Peninsula Plodders Running & Triathlon Club
Over the last two decades there have been many vineyards started on Vancouver Island. Moreover, Vancouver Island vineyards have gained a reputation for excellent wines. Echo Valley Vineyards is one of our local Vancouver Island vineyards and we're happy to say, one of our customers. Go on, visit the site to see where they are. Then go for a drive and visit them this weekend.	Farm fresh blueberries and raspberries—m-m-m-m-m-m! What's more is you can get pasture fed chickens--no hormones, no antibiotics, no animal by-products in the feed, no cruelty. If you want to buy locally (remember, buying locally means goods don't have to get transported from timbuktu) and buy ethically, check out Phil's Farm, an Islandnet.com customer.	Do you like to go places where few, if any people have been before? Do you get excited at the sight of sea otters, bald eagles, killer whales, and seals? If you've answered "yes," you'll want to check out this Islandnet hosted website—Pacific Rim Paddling. Pacific Rim Paddling offers “professionally Guided Sea Kayaking Tours on Canada's West Coast and International Kayaking Trips in Baja Mexico, Tonga and the Arctic's Baffin Island” (from their website).	Well, when we saw "Peninsula Plodders" was the name of this club, we thought "man, this is for us." Then, we saw it's a club for running and triathlon enthusiasts. Hmmm--it may not be for us but it sure sounds as though it's a good place for fitness & thriatheletes. Go on, check out this Islandnet hosted website.

We Love Websites!

Websites are our business—hosting them and building them. If you need a website—blog, retail, business-to-business, personal, database-driven, or something else—Islandnet has plenty of website development and programming experience. Call or e-mail us if you'd like anything from graphics to nit-picky programming.

We're pretty excited nonetheless. Potentially, customers will be able to run PERL, Python, Ruby, C (compiled for FreeBSD), and other languages on our system!

We're currently looking for beta testers to explore the practicality of this potential support. So, if you want to run something written in a scripting language we currently do not support and you'd like to test drive it on our system, let us know and we'll setup the support for it.

This does not require a Virtual Server or any other special environment. If deployed, it will be available to all customers from within their existing account setup.

E-mail us now if you'd like to give it a try.

But, we gotta advertise, right?

That being the case, we're looking for customers who'd be willing to “go on the record” for us. In particular, we're after people who use our anti-spam features to wash their e-mail spic-'n-span.

You see, there is more spam zooming around the Internet than there is legitimate e-mail. Amazing, isn't it?

Yet, most of that spam zooms around without many of us at Islandnet seeing much, if any. Call us the gleefully oblivious.

The gig doesn't pay much (maybe an Islandnet mug or two and a ball cap) but you may be on the radio. And, if you're a business owner your business may get mentioned in the ad.

If you're interested in helping us out, e-mail us.

Ubuntu 7.04 or “Feisty Fawn,” as it is also called, has been released. A new release of Ubuntu is done every six months, meaning there will be another upgrade before the end of the year.

Regarding the newest release, here are some of the features we thought are notable:

• NTFS formatted drives are supported “out-of-the-box.” This means if you have lots of files on a Windows drive, you can now access them from Ubuntu without any custom configuration.
• Windows Migration Assistance is included. This means users setting up a new Ubuntu install can migrate many of their Windows settings. Switching will mean there is less “getting used to” the difference.
• Easier installation of many proprietary multimedia drivers and codecs. This means it is easier to deal with file types like Windows Media Player format, Quicktime, MP3, and others.
• Amazing desktop special effects. Not to knock Windows Vista's "Aero" interface (it's really pu-u-u-r-rdy) but the effects available with Feisty Fawn are amazing. So amazing, in fact, many users say it puts Aero to shame.
• Improved networking and wireless network support.

Go on. Give it a try. It's free and you can try it out without touching your current installation. It runs from a CD, which you can use for a test drive.

As an aside, you may want to take note. Dell Computers has stated that they will offer Ubuntu pre-loaded on their computers. Many Linux users lobbied the computer maker to pre-install Linux on their machines and it appears that Dell has listened. In fact, on the official Dell site, the bio for Michael Dell (the founder of Dell Computers) states that Mr. Dell himself uses Ubuntu 7.04 on his laptop.

We recently added a PEAR module to our servers at the request of a customer. For those with glazed eyes or eyes rolling at another technical term, you may move on to the next article.

For those with just enough interest to read on, PEAR is a way for us to install PHP extensions on our server. PEAR PHP extensions can be used to “extend” the functionality of PHP. For example, there is a PEAR module that converts to and from roman numerals.

PEAR allows for easy updating of installed modules. So, when a new version comes out it takes very little time or effort to update the module.

If you want to read more about PEAR, click here.

Use your domain in your e-mail address

We've brought up this topic before but believe it's worth mentioning again.

We see many customers who have websites who use either Islandnet.com, Telus, or Shaw e-mail addresses. Of course, we're only too happy to have our domain name advertised with every e-mail customers send. However, there are advantages to using your domain name for your e-mail messages.

Say your domain name is “example.com” and the e-mail address you use is “example@islandnet.com”. Why not use “theowner@example.com” instead? Here are the advantages as we see them:

As an aside, we recommend that customers connect directly to our e-mail servers to retrieve their e-mail. Although you can forward any e-mail related to your domain (or any e-mail at all for that matter) to another e-mail address, connecting directly to the server that hosts your website means it does not have to travel anywhere over the Internet, except to your machine when you retrieve e-mail. This means there is less chance of anything happening to your messages (not that the chance of something happening to it is very high in the first place).

Use “PNGs” instead of “GIFs” in your web pages

You may recall in an earlier newsletter we discussed the PNG image format. All modern browsers now support the PNG format, though Internet Explorer 6 and earlier doesn't fully support all the PNG format features.

We're talking about anything with 256 or fewer colours (8-bit) though. All browsers properly support 8-bit PNGs.

So why use PNGs instead of GIFs for 8-bit images? The PNG format is generally more efficient. Identical images with exactly the same colour palette will be slightly smaller in the PNG format than if rendered as GIFs. Here's an example. The following two images are 8-bit images using an adaptive colour palette with 88 colours:

The image on the left is a GIF, while the image on the right is a PNG. The GIF is 1.17 kilobytes. The PNG is 1.05 kilobytes.

It should be noted that some very small images or images with very few colours in them (16 or fewer?) are smaller if rendered as GIFs.

Legal Stuff

The information displayed in this newsletter and any previous or subsequent newsletters is for information purposes only. Islandnet.com, AMT Solutions Group, Inc. and related companies are not responsible for any losses or damages resulting from the use of information in the newsletter. While the information contained in this newsletter is believed accurate, readers must verify information for themselves. Sites we link to do not necessarily represent the opinions or policies of AMT Solutions Group, Inc.