I tried Coke Zero for the first (and probably last) time this evening. While the first mouthful actually tasted not bad, the familiar and unpleasant taste of artificial sweetener soon hit. Oh well. Much better than Diet Coke, but not something I'd buy again.

Not that I'm that fussed. I don't drink a lot of soft drinks - we buy pure juice for the house and although I occasionally drink Coke (or preferably Pepsi) when I'm out, it's only if I'm not drinking. I prefer ice cold water but it's usually ridiculously expensive and doesn't come in pints (tap water will sometimes do, but often isn't cold enough). Nice try Coke, but count me out.

Black Cat got another query today about offering dynamic DNS to customers. We've had people ask us about it in the past, but the DNS changes we made a while back means it's something that is possibly easier for us to offer now. So I had a think about authentication and tying it in to our current DNS interface and bits like that and decided it might not actually be too hard to get a basic service running.

Then I went and had a look at current implementations. In particular I wanted to see about client support. So I grabbed ez-ipudate, which is used on at least the Netgear DG834G and Linksys WAG54G routers. It supports a load of different services. And the only one that protects the password is GnuDIP. Various services offer HTTPS updates, but ez-ipupdate doesn't support it that I could tell.

I stopped looking at that point. If one of the most common clients doesn't care about protecting users then I don't want to depress myself by finding out how many others don't either. It's a real shame though, as it means if we want to implement dynamic DNS that'll work with standard clients we have to add another authentication system that is unique to that service.

I returned last night from my first UKUUG conference, which I'd been at since Friday (missing the Thursday tutorials, but arriving in time for beer on Thursday night of course ;). Good to see the usual faces, as well as meet some new ones. Ta to JD for providing me with crash space (and recommending the wonderful Thai).

I don't think my talk, Hardware Hacking on a Budget; the Amstrad E3 was as good as it should have been. The audience were much more hardware savvy than I expected and I went through it too quickly. Still managed to talk up until lunchtime due to the previous talk having started late so I guess that worked out ok. And hopefully some more people will get involved in the E3 work.

It was amusing to see that TFM isn't the only person who decided to replace a broken heating system with something hooked up to a linux box. And Ben's talk on DVD creation was good as I'd been fighting with that myself last week. Meeting SteveC was good as well - I've been pleased by the number of people I'd been touting OSM who have now either gone off and starting marking things up or at least started thinking about how they can make tracks.

All in all a great (if hot) weekend and too much to mention all here. Definitely something I'd go to again.

Go Joey.

Good things about the weekend:

• Discovering KLM's internet check-in.
• The fact I can walk from home to the airport in about half an hour.
• Getting upgraded to a Penthouse Suite for no extra charge due to the hotel overbooking.
• Finally getting to go to the Heineken Experience (I'm a beer bottle!)
• Checking in for the flight home at the automated terminal with just my passport (I'd forgotten to print out my ticket details and was worried I was going to have to go and find some net access to get them).
• And of course, having a nice weekend with some good friends.

On the flip side I only actually saw Andy (the reason I was in Amsterdam at all) for a few hours thanks to a combination of BA delaying his flight for over 2 hours and my body deciding at 2am that it was really time to wander back to the hotel and sleep.