Monthly Archives: September 2003

More on Blog spam

Kasia’s having a rough time of it with comment spammers, but I like an idea expressed in the comments of this post. Print an image containing text that the user must input to submit their comment. That’ll stop bots spamming your blogs at least. There’s also lots more good info in the comments there.
Update! But it’s not good for accessibility reasons. 🙁
Thanks Alex for that link.

Easter Egg in Redhat 8 and 9

I’m clearing out old stuff from one of my drives (in a bid to consolidate all my photos in one place for burning. FSlint helped so much in finding dupes – thanks Padraig!)
In the process, I discovered an easter egg in Redhat 9, which also exists in Redhat 8!
The egg is supposed to be a scrolling list of credits with music playing in the background, but it looks like RH9 didn’t get the full egg as no credits appear and the only message is ‘There is no easter egg’ :(.
I ran the egg, /usr/libexec/redhat-credits but didn’t get any music, but you can still play /usr/share/redhat-credits.ogg using xmms instead.

MSN to block 3rd parties?

Ok, I logged onto MSN this morning to find the following message which I got a good chuckle out of.

messenger@microsoft.com: You are running a version of messenger that requires an immediate security update. Please visit http://messenger.msn.com/Help/Upgrades.aspx to complete the update.

I didn’t visit the upgrade page, as well, I’m running Gaim on Linux and what could Microsoft offer me?
I happened upon the Gaim website later and found this disturbing page. It seems that on October 15th, 3rd party software won’t be allowed to access MSN without a license. The protocol is changing and that’s why an upgrade is required.
Take a look at the above page for more details but it’s not certain if MSN will be supported by Gaim or others after this date. 🙁

Photo archiving

Bah! This summer I’ve had 2 drives die on me at home. The first was a drive I used for many years so it was no surprise it died. Unfortunately it died just after I came home from the USA in July. Thankfully I had backups from last November done, and was able to recover the photos from 2003 up to the end of June before the drive died permanently. The second drive was the one I brought back from the States so I’m not surprised it died after a plane journey.
I’ve backed up all my photographs twice now. There’s 2 CDR copies of each backup, just in case.
Now this article from The Register throws some doubt on this strategy. No premium brands were tested but cheaper CDRs become unusable after a few months. I can confirm that this does happen as quite a few CDs I burned in the past are now unusable.
I’d like to look at DVD burners now. It’ll be a lot easier to reburn 2-4 DVDs rather than 12-16 CDs every year. Liam on suggested the Pioneer 106 and I’ll look around, so if you’ve used a DVD burner with Linux I’d like to hear about it in the comments below.

Irish language – Wikipedia

Fascinating page from the Wikipedia on the Irish Language. Starting from an overview of the different dialects found around the country to the history of the language it finished by discussing the Irish language used today.

In spite of all the efforts since Ireland achieved independence (some critics claim because of those efforts) the Irish language is in rapid and perhaps terminal decline… The death of the Gaeltachtaí would make a break forever between Ireland’s cultural past and identity and its future. All sides… …agree that such a loss would be a cultural tragedy of monumental scale.

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