Apple Store Promotion Code

So I was looking for a new battery for my Apple Macbook laptop and popped on over to the online Apple Store, picked up the battery, filled in my credit card details and then I was presented with this tempting textbox.

Apple Store Promotion Code

Hmm, could I save a few quid if I had a promotion code? I went searching for one as I’ve had luck elsewhere saving a bit of money online. Clicking on the first link appeared to be a forum thread. It quickly became obvious that lots of people were in the same boat, and judging by the 51 pages of posts by “macrumors newbie” status users they’re a lot more desperate than I am.

Oh well. The battery was €139, including €24 VAT which isn’t too bad. Should arrive in a few days time. I’m using Coconut Battery again to monitor battery usage, but this time I’ll try the battery calibration techniques on the new battery first.

PromoCode Needed!
I got some money for Xmas and i want to buy a macbook at the apple.com store.

Can somebody please send me a promocode ?? Fast?

Looks like someone was offering promotion codes to the first 2 to PM him.

Apple is folding it’s biz agent program at the end of 2007. As a going away present, I’m putting my last two codes out there for you, dear reader.

The fine print:

* They expire 12/28 (yeah, that’s tomorrow)
* They are NOT good in the ed store
* They are NOT good if your company already as a deal with Apple
* They ARE good for refurbs

Please don’t ask for it if you can’t use it. If you CAN make use of it, PM me and I’ll send it your way!

Who or what is Xeer?

I used to go by the handle, “Xeer”. It’s under that name that I coded Commodore 64 demos many years ago. There’s even an entry for me on the C64 Scene Database! Exciting times then, but I’ve often been asked where the name Xeer came from. Now I can reveal it’s very obscure origins.

You may have heard of a space trading game called Elite that was released in 1985. If you haven’t, then don’t worry. You’re a youngster aren’t you? It made serious waves in the games scene for many years and even spawned an awful sequel on the PC a couple of years ago.
Anyway, I came across the game a few years after, probably in 1988 or ’89 and was hooked! I have to be honest, I preferred the shoot-em-up parts to the dry and boring trading bits. Games never lasted very long but it made a lasting impression on me.

One thing led to another, and I became interested in the C64 demo scene, but I needed a handle. Luckily I came across a few cheats for Elite that gave me infinite fuel or some such other nonsense and went looking around the galaxy. Here’s what the galaxy looked like back in the late 80’s.

Elite Galactic Chart

While exploring, I came across the little planet under the cursor above. Can you guess what it’s called? Yup, Xeer. Here’s the info sheet on it.

The planet Xeer

I haven’t seen any large yellow bug-eyed frogs about anywhere but I expect they’ll show up sooner or later.

More Xeer trivia: The traditional Somali Constitution is called Xeer, although the linked page on combackalive.com makes little sense to me. Anyone from that region know more?
For the Elite fans: The Zzap64! review.

10 years of me

I’ve been writing online for 10 years. Well, strictly speaking it’s longer than that because my Geocities site was last modified in 1997 and it’s still alive. I might yet import that site into this blog at some stage. Thankfully I had enough of HTML frames after that. I created a simple site on indigo.ie in late 1997 but then moved everything to http://members.xoom.com/xeer/ which later became members.nbci.com and is now long gone. xoom.com is now quite a different site!

I called the site DemoNix. It never had permalinks, but I did update it with a Perl script that built static html pages with a basic theme and then FTPed them to xoom.com. That script and the build files are long gone but thanks to the Wayback Machine I recovered a fair portion of it. All the original content I could scrape together is now in the Demonix category on this blog. I generally wrote about Linux demoscene news, code tutorials, gossip and my first 2 GPLed projects: “Time Sheets for Networks” and “Install Sendmail”. TSN as I fondly called it doesn’t exist any more but it was my 4th year college project. It was terrible. Buy me a pint some day and I’ll reveal just how bad it was. I wrote Install Sendmail because Sendmail was such a bitch to configure in those days. It was wildly popular, even being linked from the Fetchmail homepage. It still exists although the download link is now broken. It’s a sign of the times that nobody has complained about that.

Dave Polaschek recently reminded me that the web was a much smaller place back then. It was much easier to be noticed and get to the top of the pile if you posted consistently and well. My DemoNix site was read by many and even linked from a Slashdot story about Bladeenc in 1998. I’m sure it’s a simple coincidence that members.xoom.com went offline around the same time for a day or so ..

I could write more, but it’s all contained in the archives of this site. Everything from enthusiastic exclamations about the latest demos or code snippets to the short announcement of my mother’s death in December 1998. I still remember the email Mark sent me after I made that post. There were no comments in those days.

Awareness of Reality As this is a self indulgent look into the past, grab a Commodore 64 emulator and download donnchac64.zip. It’s a collection of demos and bits and bobs I wrote (or co-wrote) on that machine from early 1992 to late 1993.
Emulating a Commodore 64 is not without it’s problems. “Awareness of Reality” doesn’t seem to load properly in Vice. The speed loader I used doesn’t like the emulator and I have yet to figure out what the “left arrow key” is on a PC keyboard. That key is used in AOR and “Ionsai on Gealach”, my award winning Galaxians mod! It’s great to hear those old tunes again though.

10 years down, many more to come I hope. I’m now a dad, married to my beautiful Jacinta and work at the cutting edge of blogging with the WordPress folks. Great times.

AOR disk listing

Lunch at the Blue Haven Hotel, Kinsale

Shih Tzu with ball on beach We’ve been busy calling to relatives and making our home baby proof over the last week, so we went down to Kinsale and Garrettstown this afternoon to get away from it all. Even though there was a strong cold wind blowing in off the sea Garrettstown Beach wasn’t deserted. People were out and about walking their dogs, some with kids, others with tiny babies. Oscar, our Shih Tzu, had lots of fun chasing after a tennis ball that seemingly had a mind of it’s own as it arced through the air!

Back in Kinsale we met a friend for lunch in the Blue Haven Hotel. The hotel has been there for years but recently underwent a facelift and is beautiful and luxurious inside. Despite the crush of post-Christmas punters looking for food and/or a drink staff were great and found us room for Adam and a baby seat. I ordered an open steak sandwich while Jacinta had fish and chips and Niamh ordered salmon linguini.

Service was a little slow but as the staff were run off their feet it’s understandable. Adam was fed and watered by the time we were served our food, and we made short work of it. My steak sandwich was nice, if a little on the small side. Chips were salty but tasty. The Christmas pudding I had for dessert filled me up nicely though!

So, I definitely recommend the Blue Haven Hotel for a meal. This was our second time there in the last month. The last time I had their burger. It’s a beautiful hotel, food is good, and it’s very baby friendly!

Blue Haven Kinsale Open steak sandwich

Blue Haven Receipt

Blue Haven Hotel Burger

Do any real charities collect clothes?

Those with a long memory may recall my do not delay post from November 2006. In it I exposed a fake charity that collected clothes at people’s homes and then sold them for profit, without a penny going to a legitimate charity. Because they’ve pissed me off so much, I’ve set up a new site to expose the rest of the fake charity crooks.

Dochas Nasamu So, are there any real charities collecting clothes? Yes, there are two. Dochas Nasamu in Galway run an orphanage in Kenya. A quick search reveals lots of positive reports about them. Their last collection in this part of the world was on December 18th 2007. They don’t call to houses to collect clothes. Instead, they wait in a public area and identify themselves to would-be charity givers.
05 C 11628That’s how it worked the first time we gave them clothes, but this time all we saw was an anonymous Mercedes van, it’s back doors open and not a soul in sight. We dumped the clothes in the St. Vincent de Paul bin instead. Sorry guys! I kept meaning to ring them but I never got around to it at the time.

The Irish Cancer Society (who have an annual charity collection on Daffodil Day, but also an odd linking policy for their website) dropped in a plastic bag to the house a few weeks back. Unfortunately they never called back because we did leave out clothes!

It’s bugged me for a long time that the fake charities get away with selling second hand clothing for profit while masquerading as charities. Only last week my next door neighbour left a bag out for one of them, even though I told them they were crooks!

Finally tonight I set aside a few hours to launch a new site at ClothingCollection.org highlighting the fake charity crooks. Each post contains a snapshot of a leaflet handed in to my home along with identifying details from the leaflet/flyer/sticker. I’ll update the site as I get new flyers, and I need to fill out the posts a bit more. Those images have been sitting in my photo folder for the past 3 months so it was about time I uploaded them somewhere!

So, if you hate seeing crooks make money, and especially if you recognise one or more of the flyers, please link to ClothingCollection.org in a blog post or your sidebar. Thanks!

Bertie's yellow hair and pierced nose

Bertie Ahern
The Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, Sunday Times, Dec. 23 2007

I really would love to know how the Minister for Finance survived so many years without a bank account.

Linkies ..

The 8 bit Philosophy is a documentary coming in 2008 about some of the musicians that made the C64 a great sounding machine. The trailer has sound bites from such famous names as Reyn Ouwehand and Thomas Detert. There’s a 78MB high quality trailer too but it’s the same thing that’s on Youtube.

Long term review: Sony Ericsson W810i phone

Sony Ericsson W810i

A year ago I pondered buying a Sony Ericsson K750i but eventually bought it’s big brother, the Sony Ericsson W810i instead. At the time I was impressed, especially with the panorama function of the camera, but I’ve grown to loath this piece of technology in the year since I bought it. Here’s why.

  • “Message waiting, Too many messages. Delete some from any folder. Delete now? Despite the fact there’s a 512MB memory stick plugged into the side, the phone can only store about 130 text messages. My old Nokia 7650 spoiled me. I rarely deleted any text messages but this phone is always on the brink of being full. That’s a problem I can accept, except it’s buggy. For some reason the phone checks the sim card memory and asks me to delete messages from there too, even though messages are delivered to phone memory. That is very annoying.
  • Keyboard Lock – during a call the Menu button becomes the End Call button. After finishing a call, if the other party hangs up first and I don’t hit “End Call” fast enough it reverts back to the Menu function. Hitting that brings up the main menu of course. On a Sony Ericsson, the keyboard lock sequence is “*” “Menu”. See where I’m going? To lock the phone I need to exit the menu and then hit that sequence of keys. Why couldn’t you just copy what Nokia do with their “Menu” “*” sequence? It just works better.
  • Walkman – I have no use for the Walkman function. That’s my own fault for picking the wrong phone, but it had a good camera, integrated radio and the price was right. What I can complain about is the too-prominent position of the Walkman button. It’s way too easy to click.
  • Durability – the phone seems to be quite delicate. For the most part it sits on my desk, but about a month ago while out, it slipped from my hand. Since then the phone hasn’t been itself. At random, it will reset and a message appears on screen about an inactive sim card. I need to remove the battery to restore it.
  • Meteor, my phone company, decided in their wisdom that the first two items on the phone menu would cause the phone to go online. The first link went to their homepage before I changed it to my own blog and the second is a generic “Meteor WAP” icon. To prevent the phone accidentally going online I dug through the preferences and now clicking those icons brings up a username/password form. Much better than potentially expensive GPRS bills.

On the plus side, sound quality is good, battery life is ok. Camera is excellent for what it is. Images are noisy, but it’s packed full of features. I love the panorama function. The included memory stick makes it easy to copy files to and from my PC or Mac.

Would I buy a Sony Ericsson phone again? If they had a sensible keyboard locking sequence, then maybe. As it is, I’m going back to Nokia. For my next phone I would like a bog-standard device that makes calls, can store hundreds of texts, has at least a 2MP camera and a memory card.
Any suggestions?

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We dated on Facebook

The Facebook “Friend Confirmation” page always unsettles me. I have never met some of the people who send me a friend request. Sometimes I don’t recall those I have met or bumped into at a conference. I knew a small minority before the whole “Internet” thing took off. Of the rest, I read their blogs and meet a couple of times during the year.

And Facebook keeps asking if we dated?

We dated on Facebook

How many of your Facebook friends have you gone out drinking with or socialized with or sent baby photos to or talked with about “ordinary things” besides Web 2.0?

Says me who’s getting really bad at keeping in touch with friends ..

20f1aeb7819d7858684c898d1e98c1bb

What is the significance of “20f1aeb7819d7858684c898d1e98c1bb”? It’s the MD5 hash of the name “Anthony” and was the password used by someone who broke into lightbluetouchpaper.org. Searching for the md5 hash was clever, but it won’t work for long because Ryan is working on securing the WordPress cookies and passwords.
In case you’re wondering, the hacker got in because the blog was running an outdated version of WordPress.

Tips to help keep your blog safe:

  • Keep all your software updated, not just WordPress. Make sure your plugins are updated.
  • Use a strong password. Don’t use words or sequences of characters like “12345” as your password. Make it a mix of characters and numbers.
  • Don’t ever store your database dump online in a place Google will index it. It is very easy to use a Google search to find it.
  • If you use public WiFi or a net cafe regularly, use SSL to secure the communication with your blog. Use the secure admin plugin for just this purpose.
  • If you use Firefox, install PwdHash. It’s simple to use and works really well.

WordPress MU admins – Fire up phpmyadmin and look at wp_users. Try these sql queries to find weak passwords in your database:

SELECT count(*) FROM `wp_users` WHERE user_pass = md5(‘wordpress’);
SELECT count(*) FROM `wp_users` WHERE user_pass = md5(‘12345’);
SELECT count(*) FROM `wp_users` WHERE user_pass = md5(‘qwerty’);
SELECT count(*) FROM `wp_users` WHERE user_pass = md5(‘anthony’);
SELECT count(*) FROM `wp_users` WHERE user_pass = md5(‘Anthony’);
and because of the season:
SELECT count(*) FROM `wp_users` WHERE user_pass = md5(‘christmas’);

Scary isn’t it how many people still use simple passwords? I must release that “Strong password” plugin we use on WordPress.com soon. That will certainly help avoid account hijacking.

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