Category Archives: Internet

Banksy on the British Council Australia website ? (Updated)

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For some obscure reason I’d ended up on the British Council Australia website and was surprised to see what appears to be a photo of a piece of Banksy graffiti there, seemingly acting as the logo for the Landerer Scholarship.

Here’s the photo on the British Council Australia site:

Possibly Banksy rat at British Council Australia site.

Here’s a stenciled Banksy “parachuting rat” in a photo on the Art of the State site.

Banksy Rat on a Parachute photo, Art of the State.

Hmm..

Update: This might explain it…

Comment for Michael Carden about comment spam

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I read on PLOA that Michael Carden briefly tried to open his blog for comments, only to find:

The WordPress UI balked at deleting 194,000 (okay, I ignored it for a while) comment spams. I had to dig in as admin and run a fun sql query on the database to delete all 47 meg of them.

I guess I’ve got a couple of suggestions for Michael to make his life a little easier should he decide to try again.

  1. Akismet has an option to “Automatically discard spam comments older than a month“, that might help (though it’d be nice to be able to adjust the time).
  2. Run, do not walk, to Rich Boakes most excellent Worst Offenders plugin. This will both group comments for deletion based on various criteria but also (if you have permission) add Apache “Deny From” rules for the offending IP addresses. It’s also worth bumping the number of IP addresses it can ban up, Donna’s blog is up to over 8,000 at the moment!
  3. There are also tools like Bad Behaviour to try and catch bots before they get to you and if you are a member of Project Honeypot then there is the http:BL WordPress Plugin to check and block IP’s listed as baddies there.

Anyway, I hope that helps some people out.

Getting Some Perspective – The Earth from Space

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The Planetary Society has some amazing images & animations of Earth taken by planetary spacecraft.

My favourite at the moment has to be the image of Earth from the surface of Mars, taken by the Spirit rover in 2004 and the first image taken from the surface of an object beyond the moon.

You Are Here

Shades of the Total Perspective Vortex, for those HHGTTG fans out there.

Speaking of which, Paulo Ang has a rather wonderful Flash animation entitled “The Total Perspective Vortex” which makes powerful use of planetary and astronomical imagery alongside music and a liberal smattering of Hitch Hikers quotes.

Oh the hard cheese of old England

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This is, er, cheesy.. but in a good way.. 🙂

Since www.cheddarvision.tv debuted in December, the Web site offering a live broadcast of a round slab of English cheddar cheese slowly maturing has had more than 1.2 million hits.

There is also a YouTube time lapse film of it maturing over the last 3 months.

It even has its own MySpace page where you can pledge allegiance to the Cheese (if you use MySpace). Where’s Les Barker when you need him ? 🙂

Blocked by the Great Firewall of China

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Inspired by Alec, I just checked using the Great Firewall of China checking site and found out that my site, along with Donna’s, her blog, her podcast, the site for her first book and the web site we set up to promote self-employment for folks on the Autism spectrum, Auties.org, are all blocked!

Blocked by the Great Firewall of China

Presumably it’s working by IP address and so anything that happens to be on that IP address is persona non-grata in China. 🙁

I did a bit of testing and found that VPAC (where I work) is blocked too, as is Melbourne Uni.

Oddpod – Donna’s new Podcast with Caiseal Mor

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Well after a few months of tinkering around my fab wife Donna has her new podcast Oddpod off the ground!

Her first guest is Caiseal Mor:

Caiseal Mor is best known as a bestselling fantasy fiction novelist. Those managing his public image have portrayed him to the public in many ways, none of them as a man with autism. Here Caiseal talks to autistic author, Donna Williams, about his decision to go public with his autism, a diagnosis he had in late childhood.

ObTech: The podcast is recorded using Cubase and then some extra tweaking done with Audacity under Linux. We’re using WordPress with the excellent PodPress plugin to deliver it from our Debian Etch Linux virtual machine (using Xen) hosted with those nice folks at Rimuhosting.