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Apologies for the outage on the web site this morning. We had both web servers fail at about 10:50 and back up at about 11:25.
We're currently working on trying to diagnose exactly what happened and to prevent it happening again.
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The site maintenance over the last weekend went smoothly and I hope you're enjoying the much increased speed of the Ecademy website. We have two problems as a result.
Some people have been receiving email from the site that is dated December 2007. It seems we had a large queue of email that had been held. When that was copied across, the new email server finally delivered it. If you receive email notifications, particularly about subscription problems, that you weren't expecting then check the date. If the Sent date is very old, then simply discard it.
The main Contacts Search seems to have got out of step and some searches are not returning...
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We've now got Yahoo OpenID fully working to log into Ecademy.
1. Go to My Settings, Manage OpenIDs
2. Type in "yahoo.com" into the "Add a new OpenID" field and hit "Sign In"
3. After a moment and perhaps an intermediate screen, you'll be presented with a Yahoo screen asking if you want to log in to Ecademy.com. Click on the "Let Me In" button.
4. You're returned to Ecademy and your Yahoo OpenID is associated with your Ecademy account.
Now when you need to log in to Ecademy, the process is very similar.
1. Go to the login screen...
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A second virus email has appeared with text about Ecademy, Subject: "ECADEMY will close work in April 2008". It appears to be from info@ecademy.com <krenfrey99@yahoo.co.uk>. Again it has a Yahoo Message-ID although it hasn't been anywhere near Yahoo's servers. The email has an attachment Ecademy_Instructions5164.zip which contains document.exe which may be a Trojan or Virus.
One copy we've seen was sent from a Korean home broadband PC using Outlook Express. This makes it look as though it's being sent by a botnet of infected PCs round the world.
Needless to say this is not from Ecademy, and is in no way connected with Ecademy servers, systems or people.
Ecademy never...
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Over the last couple of days and again this evening we've had some problems with our database server.
It looks as though a request for an RSS feed was being made very frequently and this particular request was launching a database query that was inefficient and slow. The combination was overloading the database and leading to the site being extremely slow or unavailable.
This particular problem has now been dealt with and should not arise again.
Please accept our apologies for the outage.
Julian Bond
Chief Technology Officer
Ecademy
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There's a virus email doing the rounds that appears to be a message from Ecademy support. It's a Virus or Trojan. At least one copy that we've seen appears to have come from an ADSL broadband line in Chile. The headers are forged and made to look as though it's from a fake Yahoo email address with a fake Yahoo message ID.
Needless to say this is not from Ecademy, and is in no way connected with Ecademy servers, systems or people.
At first glance the message could be taken to be designed to be a malicious attack on Ecademy but I'm inclined to think that it's actually just an example of clever...
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Some of you may have noticed that the Skype icons on Ecademy have changed and a lot of them now show a gray question mark.  We made a change to the way Skype presence was displayed and these icons are now served direct by Skype's servers. This means that display of whether you're online should be more or less instant rather than delayed by an hour or not at all.
If you want your presence and status to be displayed, then you need to enable it in Skype. Within the Skype program the switch can be found in Tools, Options, Privacy, Privacy settings, and then check the box "Allow my status to be shown...
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This is a little tricky so pay attention!
Go and get yourself the following:-
- A Twitter Account
- A Facebook account
- An OpenID
- The URL for the RSS from your Ecademy status. This will be something like
http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=status&op=feed&uid=9999
Where 9999 is your Ecademy #ID number.
1) Sign in to Twitterfeed with your OpenID.
2) Create an entry in Twitterfeed for your Ecademy Status RSS. Route it to your Twitter account.
3) Add the Twitter application to your Facebook profile.
4) Click on the button at the top of the Twitter...
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I'm going to try to Skypecast the London Event tonight with Don Tapscott for people who cannot attend.
At around 7:30pm (UK time), go to this web address and follow the instructions. You will need your Skype ID and Password.
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Here's a challenge.
You're in Thailand.
You have your UK passport.
You have a UK bank account with internet banking and money in the account . You don't have your cheque book with you.
You can get to an Internet cafe.
The ATM has just swallowed your Bank card.
How do you get cash in your hand?
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