Everything Retrix

Powered by Origins Coffee

2010-04-26T08:06:00.000-07:00

We at Retrix are powered daily by the delicious coffee roasted locally by the talented folks at Origins Organic Coffee. Thank you for keeping us alert!

Y2K+10 spam bug

2010-01-02T19:47:00.001-08:00

A bug in the spam-processing software we use may have caused some messages sent between midnight January 1st and 21:30 PST to be incorrectly marked as spam. Please be sure review all [SPAM] messages sent between this period. If you would like to read about the technical details, click here. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Superify your WordPress blog

2009-12-08T12:43:00.000-08:00

Donncha O Caoimh wrote an excellent plug-in for WordPress that does a fantastic job of caching your content. Why would you want to do use something like this? Every time a visitor views one of your pages or blog posting, a lot of work including numerous database queries is done. This isn't a big deal for a site with a casual level of traffic, but if you were ever to find yourself inundated with visitors, things are going to slow down pretty quickly. On a shared server, it will not only affect your site, but the sites of others, too. WP Super Cache works by generating static HTML files which the web server can serve up much, much faster. (MovableType has always worked this way, and it makes much more sense as the content of a posting does not change frequently enough to justify dynamically-generating everything from a database on every request.)

We highly recommend (and would even prefer) that you install WP Super Cache on your blog. In fact, we'd even be happy to install it for you with your permission/request.

PHP 5.2.8 Installed!

2009-02-15T08:06:00.000-08:00

We have upgraded to PHP 5.2.8. For all of you requesting it, enjoy!

Protecting your email address on your website

2008-11-27T22:00:00.000-08:00

You may not realize this, but when you put your email address on your website, you are essentially inviting an exponential increase in the amount of spam you receive. Software is used by the spam industry to crawl your site much like the bots used by search engines; however, the spam industry is only looking for email addresses. Once your email address has been harvested, you will be added to marketing lists that are sold to any Joe Spammer who pays $50 for 5 million email addresses. It is virtually impossible to get off one of these lists.

So, what can you do to help prevent this? Well, the first thing you can do is make it harder for the evil bots to get your email address. Introducing the Retrix Email-Scrambler-o-Matic! With a little ingenuity, we can scramble your email address so that to an evil bot, it just looks like a bunch of gobbledygook. But to a web browser, it looks and works exactly like a real email address link. Here's an example of what we mean:

Our support email address is support@retrix.com. For you reading this, it looks like we've just exposed our address to the evil bots about which we've been warning you. But if you view the source of the HTML on this page, you will see that our email address is actually written like this:

support @retrix.com

Fancy, isn't it? We've made our scrambler open for anyone to use. Just enter your address on the page, and then copy the resulting HTML code into your site. Happy scrambling!

National Do Not Call List

2008-10-11T09:27:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: Of course, this was too good to be true. It turns out that the CRTC sells this Do Not Call list to anyone and their dog for a nominal fee. As a result, people who have registered are receiving more calls than before! More information here. So whatever you do, don't sign up! Too have your number removed from the Do No Call List, click here.

It's finally here. The Canadian Do Not Call List. This list has been created to give people a choice of whether they want to take calls from telemarketers. This morning was the final straw for me. I received a phone call from what looked to be a local number and when I answered it an automated repeating message saying, "please stay on line, we are calling about urgent business matter". Eventually after a minute or so the call went dead. I decided to call back the number to see what was this urgent business matter was all about. But when I called all I heard were strange clicking noises.

5 minutes of my Saturday morning were wasted! Fortunately it takes less than 1 minute to add your phone number to the Do Not Call Registry. Ah, the silence. I feel better already.

Introducing Suhosin

2008-10-10T10:35:00.000-07:00

In an effort to tighten up security and protect our (and by association, your) servers from malicious attacks, we will be hardening our PHP installations with the excellent Suhosin project. Depending on your coding practices, this may or may not affect you. The most common "gotcha" is when you include other files using relative paths. For example:

require('../../classes/SomeClass.php');

Suhosin will not accept this because it's too easy to exploit. Instead, you need to be explicit:

require($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/classes/SomeClass.php');

The DOCUMENT_ROOT element of the $_SERVER global array will always point to the full path of your website's root. (eg. /home/user/Websites/mywebsite.com).

Please ensure you comply with this more secure style of including files.

Enhance your website debugging experience with WebKit

2008-10-08T14:33:00.000-07:00

WebKit is an open source web browser engine that powers popular browsers such as Safari and the brand new Google Chrome. These browsers are great if you simply want to browse websites; however, if you are a seasoned website developer you'll absolutely love the features that are packed into the next generation of WebKit. The Web Inspector provides all the tools you need to debug and optimize your webiste — I'd go as far as saying this is the best web development tool ever. Not only can you debug your JavaScript and CSS on the fly, you can stay ahead of the curve by playing with features of the upcoming HTML 5 and CSS 3 specs. Stay on the edge of development and try out the lastest nightly build of WebKit.

SSL Certificate Change

2008-07-30T14:48:00.000-07:00

If you are using SSL for sending and receiving in your mail program, you may experience a warning message as of 14:30 PDT, July 30th, 2008. We have installed a new wildcard SSL certificate. Quitting your mail program and reloading ought to resolve any errors you may encounter. If the POP3/IMAP/SMTP server hostname you are using takes the form of mail.mydomain.com, please change it to username.retrix.net, where username is your Retrix Hosting username.

Firefox 3.0 is available!

2008-06-17T18:50:00.000-07:00

Being a web hosting company we thought it would be a good idea to let you know the latest news in the world of web browsers. Firefox 3 was finally made available today! It is the culmination of a two-year quest to build the best browser ever. And while it’s not perfect, it comes pretty close.

Download Firefox Now!

What's your sign?

2008-02-22T15:11:00.000-08:00

You know you're moving up in the world when you get an office door sign that is etched in glass (or at least looks that way!). Rob from Syntax Signs hooked us up with some really awesome looking sparkly frost stickers of our company logos and address that he affixed to our front office windows. And the price was ridiculously cheap for the professional quality it adds to our office front.

Come by our office in Gastown (131 Water St., Suite 210) for a closer look, or just drop by to say hello!

Retrix now offers .ca domains for only $20/year!

2008-02-22T14:31:00.000-08:00

We have lowered the price of .ca domain registration to $20.00 CDN/year! This matches our everyday low price for .com, .net, and .org domains. This change also makes us one of the most affordable .ca registrars around. Register a .ca domain today and show off your Canadian presence on the internets.

Simply sign on to our Service Centre, click on the Domains section, choose "Add, Transfer or Register Domains", type in the domain you want, follow the next couple steps and you are done!

Stop junk mail! (the kind delivered to your home)

2008-02-11T07:53:00.000-08:00

Here at Retrix we are in an ongoing battle to eliminate SPAM from your email account, but alas, junk mail takes on many forms. The good people at the Red Dot Campaign are trying to bring attention to a little-known Canada Post policy that allows people to stop unaddressed junk mail arriving in their mailbox or dropping through their mail slot.

We don't want to belittle the great job Canada Post and their postal workers do — we are happy with their service. It is just that unaddressed junk mail is everywhere in every form and I, like many others, don't read it. It is wasteful, and there should be an easy, fool-proof way to just say no.

The Red Dot Campaign lists these 3 easy steps you can take to help eliminate junk mail.

Download and sign this letter and ask your mail carrier to deliver it to Canada Post.
Join the Red Dot Campaign. Download your No Junk Mail sign for your mail box or mail slot.
Sign up with the Canadian Marketing Association's Do Not Contact Registry. This enables you to reduce the number of marketing offers received by mail, telephone and fax.

Feature Updates

2007-10-22T19:18:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note about some feature updates:

Vacation notice functionality has been restored. To access this functionality, log into our webmail and go into "Filters" section. Click on the "Vacation" filter and fill out the form.

You can now update the passwords of your FTP accounts through the Service Centre. Go into "My Account", click on the "FTP Accounts" and then click on the account you want to change.

Enjoy!

Retrix Couture

2007-05-16T11:40:00.000-07:00

The Retrix T-Shirts are almost here. Below is a sneak peak of the summer fashion all the cool kids will be wearing...

Posing in this picture is Jamie. He is available for modelling and other promotional events.

ATTENTION SHAW CUSTOMERS

2007-04-24T13:36:00.000-07:00

Shaw, like Telus, is beginning to block port 25 (SMTP) without bothering to tell anyone. If you are sending mail through Retrix's mail server, you may experience problems sending mail. The symptom will be that your mail program will try contact the server, but eventually time out. If this is the case, either switch your SMTP server to "shawmail", or change your SMTP port to 587. (This is usually found in the advanced settings for your outgoing mail settings.)

Use Gmail as a spam filter...

2007-01-16T14:39:00.000-08:00

The number one problem our clients face — or anyone who uses email for that matter — is spam. Over the years we have implemented numerous spam fighting solutions, but the odd spam message always seem to sneak past our spam ninjas.

Gmail does an excellent job of catching most of the spam that our system lets by (you'd be surprised at what you can do when you have billions of dollars at your disposal!). It's easy to implement Gmail as a spam filter. Here's how to do it:

Probably the hardest step out of the whole process is creating a Gmail account. If you already have a Gmail you are almost done. To sign up for a Gmaill account you need to be referred by someone who already has one. Just email us and we'd be happy to send you an invitation.

This part is easy. Forward your email to your Gmail account.

In this example we forward all email going to the testies.com (not a real domain we own, just a whimsical example) domain to Gmail. We also have an account that's secret so no spammers can guess it (well using a dictionary harvest attack, they might be able to find it).

Now that all your email goes to your Gmail account, you have the option to forward your mail to another email address or enable secure POP access and download your messages directly from Gmail.

We will forward all our mail from Gmail to our secret account. Now you are ready to roll... Ensure you check your Gmail spam folder on a regular basis in case there were any false positives.

Happy New Year!

2007-01-04T17:32:00.000-08:00

Welcome to 2007! We at Retrix Hosting have started the new year off with a bang. Development of our state-of-the-art control panel, The Service Centre, is well underway. No other hosting company has an integrated solution as powerful as this, and we are very proud. We are upgrading our servers, improving performance, increasing bandwidth, and will soon be unveiling several new goodies and features for our loyal customers.

Stay tuned — there is much more excitement planned for 2007!

We're green...

2006-12-21T10:24:00.000-08:00

The electricity that powers our servers and office is now Green Power. Being from Vancouver, British Columbia you might be thinking we are talking about another kind of "green" power, but Green Power Certificates allow organizations like ours to ensure day-to-day power consumption is environmentally friendly.

So you can now host your website with us and help the environment at the same time!

In Memoriam: Port 25

2006-12-14T18:10:00.000-08:00

Port 25 died today, after a painfully-slow degradation of companionship with long-time friend, SMTP.

SMTP befriended Port 25 in August 1982 at the Information Sciences Institute University of Southern California. They had a long history and their childhood shenanigans were well-documented in the publication, RFC 821. One fond memory that stays with us is of their endless chatter about simple, text-based data — they would go on and on. We will also never forget their debate as to greeting one another with HELO versus EHLO.

In the early years of the decade, good friend SMTP got involved with a few sketchy characters and their relationship began to change. Port 25 and SMTP's relationship grew and amazing pace, but SMTP's sketchy dealing only got worse.

Things took a turn for the worse when system administators began blocking Port 25 and SMTP from seeing each other. This decision to seperate them was largely a response from upper-mangement whose needs to appease flocks of angry email users affected by the shady business dealings of SMTP outweighed common sense.

Surviving are his siblings Port 1 through Port 65535: all of the Transport Control Protocol.

Memorial services will be held at RFC 4409, presided over by the Network Working Group. Port 587 will be accepting all correspondance, and taking over several duties to which Port 25 dedicated his life. SMTP servers around the world vow to keep Port 25's memory alive by allowing the relay and final delivery of their much loved simple text-based chatter to continue.

221 Bye
Connection closed by foreign host.

Sparing the Cold in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

2006-12-10T14:42:00.000-08:00

It is truly inspiring what just a couple people can accomplish when their hearts call them to action. Gab Laurence and Kate Dugas have taken the initiative to spearhead a campaign to collect clothing and toiletries from their friends and coworkers around Vancouver and donate them to the homeless of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

Retrix is proud to offer our office as a drop-off point for people in the downtown core that would like to contribute some items. Come by the Retrix headquarters at 675 West Hastings - Suite 1615 (in the Royal Bank building on Hastings and Granville) to say hello and spare the cold for some needy folks this frigid holiday season.

For more info, you can visit http://sparethecold.org/

Pando - Send 1GB files over email

2006-12-06T17:48:00.000-08:00

Wouldn't it be great to send gigantic email attachments with ease? Now you can with this amazing little application that seamlessly integrates into your email: it's called Pando.

This application makes sending and receiving large files and folders (up to an amazing 1GB) a breeze with the ease of email, the power of FTP, and speed of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) transfers.

We recommend Pando to anyone who sends files, big or small over email.

Telus Adventures

2006-12-04T16:20:00.000-08:00

We are not big fans of Telus. Their business phone customer service is as close to a disaster as possible and their internet services, particularly their mail servers, have reached and exceeded the disaster point.

As many Telus customers probably know, Telus does not permit the use of 3rd party mail servers to send mail. This has been an ongoing issue when helping our [Telus-using] customers set up their mail accounts. Telus has also implemented a black hole list SORBS on their mail servers.

Ironically, they have been black-listed, and as a result are rejecting mail from their very own customers. This is resulting in Telus-to-Telus messages bouncing. Oh Telus, you never cease to amaze me.

I like you. But if you send me junk, I will crush you! Do you like me?

2006-11-30T18:19:00.000-08:00

In my company, junk post mail is a very beeg problems. Last month I receive 3 chicken heads and 1 bag full of dried rat tails from nitwits Domain Registry of Canada. I am now help Retrix launch new campaign: 'If you send me junk electronic letter, I will CRUSH you'. I find more. dzhehnkooyeh.