Author Archives: Donncha

Ubuntu WiFi problems on the Dell D630 laptop

Wireless networking was always a bit patchy for me on my Dell Latitude D630 while running Ubuntu Gutsy version of Linux. It would work fine for ages and then freeze up suddenly, requiring a hard reboot to get things working (Apache would become unkillable, I guess because it was attached to the broken Wireless networking driver.) Problems always showed up when I transferred large amounts of data between Linux and my Macbook. Files copied fine for a few minutes and then the whole house of cards would collapse. Crash! Boom!

The first time I looked for a solution nothing turned up, but eventually I went searching again, and after digging into all sorts of forums and websites I found the simpe solution on the Dell Linux Wiki:

Create a file called /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-ipw3945 and add:

blacklist ipw3945

Add to /etc/modules:

iwl3945

Reboot after doing that and all will be fine in the world again! I haven’t had any networking issues since replacing the ipw3945 driver with the iwl3945 one!

A pint of Guinness flavoured spam

It seems that someone signed me up for “Guinness Poker Nights” and Guinness, God bless their black hearts, saw that as an invitation to spam me in the future.

I don’t know how to play poker, I have no interest in it, I don’t like the taste of Guinness. Why didn’t Guinness ask me to confirm the invite? That would seem like the most polite thing to do. Who the hell is Conor Wiley? I bet he knows the other Donncha who told all his friends and colleagues that my gmail address was his address. I was CCed on a few very personal emails for a day or two going back a bit ..

Since that time I’ve received a couple of spam emails from Diageo, the owners of Guinness. The first one gave me a start. I wondered if Guinness had started spamming people, but then I had things to do and never investigated. Here’s the latest email from Guinness:

There is a “Privacy Policy” link but that brings you to this page where I’m asked for my location and date of birth. The form has to be filled out before reading the policy. *sigh*

The “unsubscribe” link goes to http://trc1.emv2.com/I?a=A9X7CquNqKyt8QHHs6FEYtzjJX which the redirects to www.diageobrandsunsubscribe.ie. Finally, I thought I was getting somewhere, but no. To stop them sending me more spam I must fill out my name, address and email, despite the fact that I clicked on an identifying URL in the email.

Thankfully, entering, Mr. Blah Blah of 131215 and my email address into the unsubscribe form worked. I hope.

Diageo – please learn from your mistake. You should confirm invitations and registrations by email, especially when you send out marketing material.
Here’s what the Data Protection Commission says about spam. I certainly didn’t opt-in anywhere to be spammed. What do I do next?

How China Digital Times moved from MT to WordPress

Can you improve performance when moving from a statically generated site to a dynamic environment? You can if the conditions are right. In the case of CDT, publishing times were a nightmare with Movable Type. Search performance was horrible, and the comment spam problem caused such a drag on the server that we’d had to disable commenting altogether. Now, with the site fully tag-enabled, searchable and comment-able, loads are down dramatically and publishing times have dropped from 15 minutes to a few seconds.

Notes on a massive WordPress migration. Scot moved the China Digital Times site with 16,000 posts and 6,000 tags from Movable Type to WordPress and saw a huge performance increase. Nice.

Anatomy of an AIB Phishing Email

I’m well used to getting phishing emails for American or internationally known banks but this morning an email supposedly from AIB made it past Gmail’s spam filters.

AIB phishing email

AIB posted an alert a few days ago to watch out for fraudulent emails, but this one appears to be different. I’m forwarding it on to alert@aib.ie

The content of the email is a Jpeg image, and it links to a php file on http://internetbanking.aib.ie.2.3h8ax3.com/

As the rest of this post has a number of large screenshots click the link below to read the rest. You can probably ignore this if you’re not living in Ireland. 🙂

Continue reading “Anatomy of an AIB Phishing Email”

Tea and Sandwiches with Donncha

Tea and Sandwiches

Anyone for tea? Here’s what I usually put into a sandwich:

  • Cucumber
  • Ham
  • Coleslaw

And all contained within lightly buttered brown sliced loaf bread. Yum.

O’Briens Chocolate Cake

Here’s the delicious chocolate cake we had in O’Briens in Blackpool Shopping Center a few days ago. Beautiful rich chocolate cake, with a layer of chunky chocolate cream through it. You don’t think I’d stop to take a photo of it before eating, do you?

Yes, there is a reason to this post. What do you eat for lunch? If it’s all sensible and boring, pig out once in a while, it’s good for you!

PS. I got nominated in a few sections of the Irish Blog Awards. Thank you to whoever nominated me. (No, it wasn’t me!)

Will Prologue bring the Twitters back?

I bumped into Tom Raftery in Cork Airport on my way to Arizona. As luck would have it, we were both on the same flight to London, although he was going to Munich for a conference.
Unfortunately we weren’t sitting near each other on the plane but in the airport he said he spends more time in Twitter than reading blogs. That came as a surprise to me, but I’m sure it’s happening to many other busy people too.

That’s one reason I’m excited about Prologue, the new Twitter-like theme for WordPress. Automattic is already using it internally as a private discussion tool and for a group of disparate people spread all over the globe it’s a really useful tool to find out at a glance what each of us is up to.

Tom lives and breathes social media all day long. I’ll have to ping him on Twitter to read this and get some feedback from him!

I’m already thinking it might be an easy way to introduce blogging, social media and networking and Twitter to some of my non-blogging friends who slave away in offices all day long. Set up a private blog on WordPress.com, activate the Prologue Theme and invite them all on as contributors. They probably use RSS aware browsers too so keeping up to date on what’s happening should be a simple task.

Prologue is a perfect fit for WordPress MU too. You’ve already got many users who probably chat on your support forums. Let’s get our thinking caps on and create some sort of group blogs so people can converse right within the blogging environment!

Interested? Download the theme and play with it. It’s GPLed. Also, keep an eye on Joseph and Matt who will be updating the theme.

Finally, Matt describes Prologue really well:

Prologue was designed for something different—easily setting up and sharing a dialogue within a fixed group. It puts aside the standard “behind the scenes” method of blogging and makes the act of posting part of the experience. It creates a kind of archived and searchable conversation, like an IM window that’s archived, taggable, and accessible from any web browser.

WordPress MU 1.3.2

WordPress MU 1.3.2 was tagged earlier today. This is a major security update that brings together the fixes in WordPress 2.3.2 and a number of critical WordPress MU specific security problems.

Details of the fixes will be posted to the WordPress MU forum next week to give administrators time to upgrade. This release should be seen as an urgent upgrade.
Thanks to Alex Concha for his help with this release.

Please note: If you have plugins that uses options.php to save it’s options you must whitelist those options using the new add_option_update_handler() API. More information on this can be found on this forum post.

Download WordPress MU here

I'll have a second helping, please!

One important element of a successful tech gathering is food. If you don’t feed the troops then your army isn’t marching. We’ve been very lucky this week with breakfast, lunch and dinner. We’ve been completely spoiled by David, the cook at the Ranch (and Diane too!)

dinner

I didn’t have a second helping today, there was a gorgeous cheese cake for dessert. Too tempting!

Biosphere 2

Can you imagine staying inside a sealed building for two years without physical contact with the outside world? That’s what happened at Biosphere 2 in 1991. It makes an interesting story and the Wikipedia page has a lot more on that mission and a second one that followed.

We visited there today, here are a few photos!

Biosphere 2
Matt wants us to go live in Biosphere 2, away from the Nintendo Wii distractions to help get WordPress 2.5 out on time.
Biosphere 2Biosphere 2Biosphere 2Biosphere 2Biosphere 2Biosphere 2
A room with a view
I asked for a room with a view and they gave me this. WiFi reception is spotty but the view is stunning!
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