Author Archives: Donncha

Will Monster.ie get away with spamming?

Oh dear. Monster.ie is the latest company to spam bloggers. Both Michele and Tom were spammed as part of an email campaign targeting it@Cork members. Monster harvested the emails from a members list on the it@Cork website which has since been removed.

Stewart Photo Supplies spammed a large number of photography related email addresses a few weeks back, but then they apologised which is great. Unfortunately someone from a Monster IP address left defensive and abusive comments so I don’t think an apology will be forthcoming.

Damien has dugg the post so give it a digg if you can! Tom has a new post including a voicemail he received from Monster threatening legal action. That’s bad, really bad.

Just say sorry John, it’ll help (a small bit).

The legislation surrounding this kind of behaviour is very clear, data can only be used for the purposes for which it is obtained. We in it@cork were obviously naive in publishing the members directory (since taken offline) but that doesn’t confer on anyone permission to harvest that address list and spam them.

The Irish Data protection Commissioner takes a very dim view of this and has the power to levy fines of up to €3,000 per address spammed (so potentially €570,000 in this case).

Update! Monster apologised and Tom has the email.

Letterman destroys Paris Hilton

I’ve been away from my computer for a while so please excuse me if you’ve seen this already. Paris Hilton appeared on the Letterman Show to plug her new perfume, but he’s more interested in her jail time .. Certainly funnier than her last video!

Via the blog that’s ripping stuff from my funny video blog so I’m not going to give them a link. Nar! Nar!

Back from Dingle

Oh wow! We really have a beautiful country here in Ireland! We are just back from a week in the town of Dingle, Co. Kerry (or An Daingean as it’s officially known, why can’t they have both English and Irish names on the signs? It’s silly. Locals stencilled “Dingle” on many of the signs anyway!) and it was both amazing and refreshing. 7 days without Internet access. Could you survive? I admit I was tempted by the local net cafe but I resisted and we wandered the roads and explored the beaches of that rugged coastline instead.

Weather is always a concern in Ireland and it rained and it poured and gales blew for the first 2 days of our stay. Thankfully that completely changed for most of the remainder of the week and the blue skies were filled with white fluffy clouds casting shadows on the distant mountains. Breathtaking.

Bringing a 23 week old baby away on holiday does present it’s own difficulties but Adam enjoyed himself and made a huge impression on everyone he met. He was generally well behaved while out, and I have to thank the kind staff of the Old Smokehouse Restaurant for their patience as we made 2 trips there with him. On the other hand, the grumpy floor manager of the “Happy Garden Palace” up the street didn’t live up to his establishment’s name. Nice Kung Po though.

Photos will appear in time but tomorrow we’re going to head down to Kinsale for a look at Haydn’s Kinsale Gallery where some of my work is on display. Adam’s been down there already and now it remains to be seen whether any of the pieces attracts a buyer or not. Thanks Damien for mentioning the gallery too!

In other news, WordPress 2.3 came out and I need to upgrade my blogs. WordPress MU will need to be synced with the new release but it will also need a separate upgrader. Upgrading one blog and adding 3 tables is simple, but when you need to do tens of thousands (or millions) of them, you don’t want all of them doing it at the same time or your database server will melt.

Oh, and not one person mentioned the All Ireland. 🙂

Update on Sunday: Jacinta and I visited the gallery today and we’re impressed! Haydn’s son was taking care of the shop and I noticed a number of the larger prints had sold a couple of copies. Two of my images are visible behind the door if you look carefully at the second image: Innovative Streets and Rusted and Abandoned.

Gallery ICA

Gallery ICA

Gallery ICA

Kinsale Art Gallery

Haydn’s Gallery in Kinsale is now showing my work and Ryan’s as of this week. I visited the framer on Monday where I signed a number of prints and I have to say I’m very impressed with the prints made by those Hewlett Packard Z3100 and Z6100 printers. I wish I could print all my stuff on them!

If you’re in the area, call in, say hi to Haydn and browse around. The gallery is open every day but Monday and is situated on the quayside in Kinsale. Here’s a map of Kinsale courtesy of Yahoo. The cross-hairs mark approximately where the gallery is.

Try and spot the slight mispeling on one of the images I signed. Oops!

Don't Stop Believing

Thanks to Ray Foley I have Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” going through my head all the time. Just a bit of fun for your auditory organs on a cold Wednesday night.

JD, the main character in the tv series Scrubs is a huge fan of Journey. The same song made an appearance in that show too. Just try to ignore JD’s preachy soppy talk over bits

Posting has been light on this blog because I’m too darned busy but check out the photo of my son Adam I posted on my photoblog today. Yes, I may be biased but I love that picture, an uncropped version is my desktop background!

All wacked off of Scooby Snacks

You either know immediately what this video is or you’re going to be hopelessly lost ..

Yes, Fun Lovin’ Criminals and their first hit, “Scooby Snacks”. Marvellous tune. I saw them when they played in Cork a few years ago and unfortunately they sucked because the sound quality was crap. Brilliant band recorded, not so great live. *sigh*

They do however deserve an award for the most gratuitous use of bikini clad young ladies in a music video for Loco:

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As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below.

This test is used to prevent automated robots from posting comments.

Oh dear. How many times have I clicked submit on a Typepad blog comment form and moved on to the next site only to accidentally come back hours later and discover the CAPTCHA waiting for me?

I don’t think I’ve lost a comment yet, but they could have put the CAPTCHA on the same page as the comment form. If that’s impossible, the comment form should warn the visitor that a second page needs to be filled out. It’s not rocket science.

WordPress MU 1.2.5

A new release of WordPress MU, the multi-user, multi-blog version of WordPress is now available.

This is a security release to address issues brought to our attention by Alexander Concha who I must thank for his unfailing patience while we sorted out this release.

Edit: this release is based on WordPress 2.2.3. Unfortunately a last minute bug crept in where post titles looked like post slugs when viewed on your blog. I quickly rolled together a new minor release, 1.2.5a which has an updated wpmu-functions.php. The download page has been updated too. If you have already updated your install, all you have to do is go to this page and download a new wpmu-functions.php and place it in your wp-includes directory. Apologies for the mix up!

Edit 2: I forgot to mention yesterday that a lot of the functions that were in the files in mu-plugins/ have been moved into wp-includes/wpmu-functions.php so move those files out of the way if you get errors about functions already existing. As stated previously on the forum, kses.php is synced with the one in WordPress which means class and id will be stripped from posts. If you’re happy for your users to use the class and id tag attributes then the following function will come in handy. Put it in mu-plugins/kses.php where it will be activated automatically.

function addabitofclass( $tags ) {
    global $allowedposttags;
    foreach( $allowedposttags as $tag => $attr ) {
        $attr[ 'class' ] = array();
        $attr[ 'id' ] = array();
        $allowedposttags[ $tag ] = $attr;
    }
    return $allowedposttags;
}
add_filter( 'edit_allowedposttags', 'addabitofclass' );

The observant among you will notice I forgot to assign the result of the filter in wp-includes/kses.php. This has since been fixed but it was too late for this release. Making it a global in the function above was a suitable work around.

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