Who are the top 10 doctors at Sacred Heart:
Feel free to rate your favourite Scrubs doctor at rateyourdoc.org. There’s no way I’d vote for JD, I’d probably vote for Perry or Turk, but Dr. Jan Itor is a strong possibility too!
Do not however follow Todd’s advice and visit his toddtime website! It’s pretty shocking. You have been warned!
I was so very tempted to name this post after Conor’s tweet about the browsing behaviour of kids but I’ll be strong and mature about it. He gave a talk today in a large truck in the car park of Wilton Shopping Centre. That might sound a bit dodgy but it’s actually part of the Lifelong Learning Festival this week in Cork. I was out there doing some shopping so I dropped by and took a few photos.
Thanks Frank for the link. Otherwise I’d never have known anything about it!
Bloody hell that Wilton crowd knew their stuff. Kids browsing pron and phishing questions galore.
A series of powerful images, taken before and after the death of each subject. The images are striking, but what I found most moving and upseting were the stories that accompanied them. Some had accepted their fate while others rallied against it.
“Death is nothing,” says Maria. “I embrace death. It is not eternal. Afterwards, when we meet God, we become beautiful.” Maria Hai-Anh Tuyet Cao, 52
“Get me out of here”, she whispered as soon as anyone held her hand. “My heart will stop beating if I stay here. This is an emergency! I don’t want to die!” Elly Genthe, 83
My new Theme Tester plugin allows you to change themes and view the results without the visitors to your blog seeing any changes.
There is one cavaet. Your visitors may notice some changes if your current theme uses blog options that a new theme overwrites. This could happen if for example you’re testing a newer version of your current theme or testing a theme based on the same engine as your current theme. The K2 theme springs to mind here because it’s the base for several other themes but YMMV.
I used the plugin already when I trawled the themes sites and the archives at Weblog Tools Collection for a new theme for this place. As you can guess if you’re a regular visitor, I haven’t changed theme yet, but I found a couple of very pretty designs that may make an appearance here eventually.
I used to believe that Windows 95 was the best version of Windows. Compared to previous Microsoft operating systems and software like Windows 3.1, how could I not think that way? DOS was great, it did the job it was supposed to and got out of the way when playing Doom 2 but Windows 95. Damn, that was a whole new ball game. Marvelous.
Now I’ve found something better. It’s a souped up version of Windows XP. Check out the screenshot. I’m getting rid of Linux. Ubuntu? Bah. It’s gone.
You can check out a fully functioning demo too. I know you’ll be as impressed as I was.
It didn’t take long. Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister, announced his resignation yesterday and already the joke emails are pouring in. (Thanks Brian and Louise!)
My own contributions:
Sunday Times, December 23rd 2007.
The Bertie score card above is from Bifsniff.com (but created by Brendan O’Connell), anyone want to claim credit for the others? Unfortunately email forwarders don’t usually give credit ..
Gavin, who has blogged the Mahon Tribunal for so long has given his own reaction as well as a chronology of events leading to the resignation yesterday. It’s scary how long the Teflon Taoiseach managed to survive in politics. Nothing stuck to him.
Edit: Green Ink created Bertie 300. Thanks for commenting!
I used the Simple Trackback Validation plugin for a while until I noticed these errors showing up in php_errors.
PHP Fatal error: Cannot instantiate non-existent class: snoopy in /home/www/wp-content/plugins/simple-trackback-validation/simple-trackback-validation.php on line 158
This morning I decided to fix it as the spammers have been going crazy. I spotted dozens of POST requests to trackbacks as I tailed my log files.
How to fix the plugin:
$stbvSnoopy = new Snoopy;
include_once( ABSPATH . 'wp-includes/class-snoopy.php' );
It’s no substitute for Akismet but along with Cookies for comments it should help keep your blog spam free!
Or, as I’ve just done because this blog is being inundated with trackback spam right now (over 17,000 in the last 9 hours), I blocked off access completely with this rewrite rule. Any WordPress blog will send a pingback anyway and MT even supports pingback now!
RewriteRule ^(.*)/trackback/ - [F]
Sunday 30th March at 9pm on Sky 2. If you’re a fan that’s all you need to know
Stargate: Ark Of Truth, the feature length episode which followed the last and final series of Stargate SG1 was released on DVD in the US at the start of March according to Barry’s post. I thought I’d have to wait until the region 2 DVD became available but Sky ponied up the dosh and I presume it was shown during the week on Sky 1? I’m still catching up on my regular programming through Sky+ and haven’t hit last week yet so I missed any trailers if there were any.
Sky+ is all set to record Ark Of Truth tomorrow night! I hope it’s better than the drivel they served for the final episode! Here’s a trailer to wet your appetite. I think it just might be a winner.
When is the best time to upgrade your blog software?
The best time is right now. Spammers are taking advantage of exploits in old versions of WordPress and inserting hidden spam links in posts and using WordPress powered blogs to distribute viruses and malicious software. They’re also using these exploits to run their own code on your server.
This morning I spotted an Irish blog in my feedreader that had hidden links added to it. I contacted the blog owner and she’s going to upgrade her blog soon.
The best way of stopping them is by downloading the latest version of WordPress which at the moment is 2.3.3 2.5 and if you use use WordPress MU you should download version 1.3.3 of that. Once you’ve upgraded change the passwords of all your users. On WordPress MU sites, it’s probably enough to ask any user with site_admin access to change their password. To make your life easier, try the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin. I haven’t used it yet but it works for a lot of people.
If you suspect that your blog has been compromised and you have already upgraded then please change your passwords and overwrite your current install with the files from a newly downloaded copy of WordPress. It’s worth checking that no extra php files have been added too.
Running your own blog is about more than just writing and contributing to the blogosphere conversation. You also have an important responsibility to be a good ‘net citizen by keeping your software up to date.
If you absolutely cannot upgrade straight away then adding a .htaccess file in your wp-admin/ directory and adding another username and password level of authentication might help. This page describes how to do that, but it is no substitute for upgrading to WordPress 2.3.3 2.5. You should delete you xmlrpc.php too, thus depriving yourself of pingbacks and desktop blog posting abilities.
Go on, upgrade. After you do it once it doesn’t seem so scary.
Update! To find any posts with hidden links search your posts for any of the following:
You can use the Search box on the posts edit page, or phpMyAdmin.
Open up phpMyAdmin, go to wp_posts, click Search and in the box next to post_content type %string% where string is one of the two options above.
That may return posts that don’t have any hidden links but it’s better to be safe than sorry.
I was shocked to see a CAPTCHA this morning when I stumbled a post not yet in the SU database. StumbleUpon to me was and is the one social network where I hadn’t come across reams of spam or annoying behaviour. The overall experience there has been so smooth and enjoyable that I wondered just how they managed to keep the spammers at bay. Obviously they’re attracting the wrong attention now because this morning I was presented with a CAPTCHA twice when I discovered new content.
A slightly more readable StumbleUpon CAPTCHA
Those CAPTCHAs look like the one on Matt Haughey’s post. I guess StumbleUpon were using ReCAPTCHA too? Thankfully they stopped and the last post I stumbled (Matt’s post above) had a big empty space where the CAPTCHA had been. Please SU, don’t bring the CAPTCHA back!
Thanks Mark for the link to Matt’s post.
