I’m using Xwrits again. My hands are falling off me by the end of the work day and I need to force myself to take regular breaks. 🙁
Author Archives: Donncha
PHP5: Coming Soon to a Webserver Near You
harry Fuecks has written a very long article on PHP5 at sitepoint. It’s been a very busy day so I haven’t had time to look at it, but after a quick scan it looks like a good read.
The Parking Lot is Full
Lots and lots of cartoons here. I have to admit I never came across this site while it was still active. 🙁
Strange photos and images
GIMP 1.3.17 is out
I read this on the GIMP-Users mailing list but as their archive is broken now, here’s the scoop via gnomedesktop.org (and thanks to Feedster for finding it for me!)
The next major release will be 2.0, not 1.4. Unfortunately this means that some features slated for a 2.0 release won’t make it until later. All you print shops will have to wait a bit longer for CMYK support.
I'd love to test Mozilla Thunderbird except..
I’d love to give Thunderbird a spin for a few days but there’s a problem. It doesn’t support the Maildir format!
Currently I’m very happy with Kmail and lots of my mail folders are in Maildir format. I’ve over 1GB of mail (yes Mark, I still keep almost all my mail!) so having an easy way of exporting it to another format is important.
There is a feature request in the Mozilla bug database but it hasn’t seen any developer attention in a few months. 🙁
I could always start from scratch again with Thunderbird. Copy over the contents of my inbox and archive the really old mail in a tar ball. hmm. Nah, the last time I moved mail clients it was to move from the Netscape 4.7 client (used for years) to Kmail. I don’t know that there’s as much of a reason to move from Kmail now. (Well, besides the fact that I don’t use any other KDE application!)
Before you think, “He’s going to write a script to convert those formats!” No, I have too many plenty of other ways to scratch an itch!
I’ll let this one up to someone else.
teergrubing referrer spammers
Justin Mason posted a message to the ILUG complaining about referer spam on his blog. I replied with a few ideas, and hopefully we’ll get more ideas on that thread. Unfortunately I forgot to include a link to a useful feedster search on the matter but JM will see it here I’m sure.
- Load up the referering page. If it doesn’t load then ignore the referer (removes private pages on intranets). Check the page for a link to your site, and in particular, checl for the url the refering ‘browser’ visited. If it’s not there, then ignore the referer.
- Setup a moderation system and manually filter the referers.
- Only print a referer after they’ve refered more than a couple of visitors. (Only mildly effective however.)
- Dave Winer at Userland added a robots.txt to his referer log page. It stops
Google indexing that page. He then notified the world of what he did, and hopefully the spammers got the message.
Mars at the Moon's Edge
Amazing photograph on APOD today. It looks like someone was flying over the moon to take it with mars rising over the horizon. Wow!
Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1
A new release of Mozilla Firebird is out! I’ve been using the XFT/GTK2 builds available elsewhere for the past week or so and I’m well impressed by stability recently. The one major bug I found, (as did everyone else it seems), was the auto-complete bug, and that’s certainly been fixed. I’m rushing out the door, but search my blog for ‘xft’ to find the download site for those nice looking nightly builds.
Have You Seen My Job?
Tim posts yet another good read on his blog. This time on a subject dear to all of us in one shape or form. Congrats on the new job too Tim!