Category Archives: Internet

Playing with Google Trends

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Google have a nice new toy called Google Trends – here’s some searches that I’ve come up with that are amusing..

Fun for all the family!

Wonderful Photography

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Joseph Holmes – Natural Light Photography

Category: Personal site

Topic: Photography

Overall rating: 4 out of 5

Content rating: 4 out of 5

There are some simply stunning images here – Joseph Holmes – Natural Light Photography – an amazing collection spanning over 2 decades. Here’s what’s on his front page as I write..

Hills, San Benito County, California, 1986

Via Alec Muffett.

Tags: photography

Partial PHP5 Fix to Rich Boakes “Most Wanted” Plugin

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Figured out that if you replace:

MostWanted::mostwanted();

with

$m = new MostWanted();
$m->mostwanted();

It gets rid of the annoying PHP-5 error:

Fatal error: Non-static method MostWanted::mostwanted() cannot be called statically in [...]

The only downside is that for me it lists the top-5 twice, for some reason. Oh, that and when I left a comment with the fix for Rich I managed to miss the leading $ in the second line (which is present above).

NB: I’m using this as the widget version, caveat emptor.

Stupid CNN

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Clicking on the video link on this article I get a pop up that says (in an image, just to make it even dumber):

Dumb CNN Plugin Image

In text, it says:

PLUGIN WARNING

The CNN.com video experience is optimized for Windows Media Player 9 or above.

No Windows Media Player detected

They also give you a “GET THE PLAYER” link to click on and when I do, the Microsoft site helpfully tells me that:

Your operating system is not currently supported by Windows Media Player.

What a suprise.. I’ve sent a whinge to CNN to ask them to fix this bug and support more video codecs – be interesting to see what (if anything) happens..

Upgraded to PHP5

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I’ve taken the plunge and upgraded Apache to use PHP5 (with mod-fcgid) and so far the only casualty has been Rich Boakes’s Most Wanted plugin (so if anyone has any PHP5 foo to spare, could they point it in Rich’s direction please ?)

The only other issue was with wp-cache 2.0 which needed this little tweak by Kelson to fix the “odd blank screen bug” properly.

Now if only I could figure out how to get stattraq to play nicely with wp-cache all would be good..

Using Shorewall to Limit SSH Attacks

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Firewalling with Shorewall SSH brute-force attacks

Category: Personal article (non-blog)

Year created: 2005

Overall rating: 5 out of 5

Content rating: 5 out of 5

There’s an excellent post over at Debian Grimoire which gives a simple recipe to defend against SSH brute force attacks using Shorewall, including a whitelist port-knock in case you manage to lock yourself out. Very useful!

Tags: shorewall ssh

3 New Serious Internet Explorer Bugs Found

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The BBC is reporting that three new serious security bugs in Internet Explorer have been found, two of which will let an attacker take over your computer.

Security firms said specially written websites and hijacked servers were already being used to host the malicious code that uses the loopholes to invade vulnerable machines.

Microsoft will not fix this until April 11th so until that day everyone using Internet Explorer on Windows is vulnerable.

Don’t panic – there is a free alternative! Firefox is a state-of-the-art web browser that will let you surf the net safely.

Get Firefox!

Mikal’s Not An Overactive Anti-Spam Engine :-)

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Oops, looks like I inadvertently upset Mikal, which wasn’t intentional!

The only reason I got a little miffed was because I got a message that instead of saying “1 comment held for moderation” said something like “1 spam comment removed, you can be the first to leave a real message“. Anyway, it’s all fine now..

I’m using the Akismet plugin to WordPress (now a standard part of the install) which does a damn fine job of spotting spam.