Category Archives: General

“Getting Converted Has Never Been So Easy!”

It’s OT for the site, but important IMO. A new poll on the CorkLUG site asks, “Should smoking be banned in the work place and pubs on January 1st?” I’ve already voted but please don’t abuse it by voting multiple times.

Eddie Irvine’s house is for sale, and a steal at the €6.5m guide price!

Tim has a frightening cartoon explaining copyright. Dare you sing’ Happy Birthday!’ now? You might get busted!

Here’s a few of the books I’ve read over the past Summer. These are “un-put-downable” and I stayed up many a late night reading for as long as possible.

• High Society by Ben Elton. This was the first book I read by Ben Elton. It’s about the drug society in the UK. Great read, and terrible what happens to some people affected by drugs.
• Emporer – The Gates of Rome by Conn Iggulden. Just glancing over the reviews on Amazon this book is controversial! It might not be 100% historically accurate but the author states that at the end of the book. Here’s a video interview with the author. I haven’t looked at it yet.
• Life Of Pi by Yann Martel. I was not expecting the story that unfolded when I started reading this. This book was recommended by a friend and and I’m passing on the same recommendation!
• Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain. I’m not sure why I picked up this book in Waterstones last year but I’m glad I did. I don’t usually read non-fiction or biographies but this is a great read! I just wish I had called to the restaurant he works in now in New York, but we didn’t have the time.

Proinnsias tells me that I should look at these two flash movies when I get flash installed again.. Must downgrade Galeon again.

• Whatever – thanks Pron for the link.
• MAME Jump! – (via Simon Willison)

While investigating errors in my php_errors log file yesterday I stumbled across someone leaching data from one of our sites. I blocked him with a .htaccess entry but by the time I left work yesterday they hadn’t noticed that their application wasn’t working.
I came into work this morning and saw that the requests had stopped. Good! Then I grepped for libwww-perl and was disappointed to see requests going to our main server for the same data. A .htaccess file stopped that too but it’s tiresome.
I should check referers but that’s not guaranteed to work and that method actually bit us hard a few years back when a partner couldn’t access data from their site. 🙁
Are there any apps out there for detecting this sort of thing from the log files? I’m guessing that a statistical analysis of the logs would show up lots of the same or similar requests over a short period and/or repeated on a regular basis.
Anyway, thank you 66.33.193.57 for adding one more job to my list of things to do. I’ve already mailed abuse at your ISP. They may be in touch soon.

If you can’t run Spam Assassin (or TMDA, Kevin!) then you’re probably using Windows. Give SpamPal a whirl to filter out your spam. How well does it work?

I ordered a DVD writer and HD from komplett.ie yesterday morning. Earlier I checked the tracking page and saw that my purchases were shipped from Norway last night and arrived in the DHL depot this morning. They arrived a few minutes ago!
This is my second purchase from komplett and I’m very happy with them so far!
Good! Looks like my favourite CD burning software, gcombust supports DVD-r burning!
It looks a bit more complicated if you want to use DVD+RW though. 🙁

Just when I think I have a project finished and sorted out a spanner is thrown into the works clogging everything up and requiring fixing. *bah*