istock and shutterstock vs "pro stock" sites

This thread on dpchallenge says that, “istock / shutterstock are ruining the industry”.
SharQ recommends Alamy, Corbis and other sites that sell photos on a royalty basis. istock/shutterstock sell royalty free photos so photographers could be “underselling” their photos. It’s an interesting thread and worth a read.
According to their FAQ, Alamy require 48MB tiffs (24MB for “reportage material”) which my camera might have a little trouble creating. By upscaling a 2048×1920 photo to 3584×2688 the resulting uncompressed tiff file is 28MB. *ouch* It might be a while before I submit stuff to them!
Meanwhile, in the world of the amateur photographer I’ll continue to use the “royalty free” sites such as istockphoto and shutterstock.
Here’s a thread about how well some users of those sites are getting on. Note to self, upload more photos!

The Dundalk Blog

DERMOT AHERN DUNDALK IRELAND – Not much on there now but apparently this blog “named and shamed” drug dealers and criminals in Dundalk and surrounding areas.
They’ve taken down all the interesting slanderous bits, but it was fairly irresponsible to put it online in the first place anyway!
You might be able to find some of the content on the Irish Republican News forum.

Sky charges for repairs to non-faulty digiboxes

There I was going to subscribe to Sky+ and this story comes along. Does this bug still exist? Is it on new boxes?

British Sky Broadcasting has denied accusations that the company tried to profit from a known software fault in its digital video recorders, after customers were charged £65 for engineers to visit their homes.

Thanks Pron for the link.

WPMU Update – mod_rewrite fix for digits in URLs

Here’s a small fix to fix a big mod_rewrite rules bug. URLs like this, http://blogs.linux.ie/xeer/2005/01/06/2004-indian-ocean-earthquake-wikipedia/, won’t load properly as mod_rewrite gets confused between the date of the post and the year in the title. Here’s a quick fix:
Open the .htaccess file in your root directory and replace each occurance of ^(.*) with ^([_0-9a-z-]+)
Thanks to Kae and Darragh for spotting that.
The latest CVS update broke post editing a bit, an extra field was added. Here’s how to update your blog if you’re using it:
cd wp-inst/wp-content/blogs; for i in *; do echo "ALTER TABLE wp_"$i"_posts ADD menu_order INT( 11 ) DEFAULT '0' NOT NULL" | mysql wpdb ;done

gometric.ie :: Countdown to Metric speed limits

gometric.ie is the Irish Government’s site to inform the public that speed signs will be going metric on January 20th! It’s accompanied by a mailing campaign and advertising on radio and television so hopefully the message will get through to everyone!
“Ugh! Yeah officer, I saw the sign. It says 50mph in this area.”

From 20th January it’s kilometres for speed as well as distance.

My Meteor – why don't you work in Firefox?

There’s only 3 mobile phone companies in Ireland, Vodafone, O2 and Meteor. I’ve been a customer of each and am currently with Meteor. That might change however as their newly redesigned meteor.ie website doesn’t work properly in Firefox. They offer 300 free texts from their site but when one hits the “SEND” button nothing happens.
If you’re a Meteor user mail info@meteor.ie with your phone number and your PIN, or 3 phone numbers you’ve rung in the past month (for verification).
Ask them politely to fix their website so it works in Mozilla Firefox! The Javascript error I get is,

Error: window.smsForm has no properties
Source File: https://www.mymeteor.ie/mymeteor/phone_book/send_sms.cfm
Line: 295

Oh, and last time I checked, Vodafone’s website offers 300 texts a month and it did work in Firefox.
Later – Niall suggested entering your text message, phone number, and instead of hitting “SEND” copy and paste the following code into the URL address bar and press return: javascript:window.document.smsForm.submit();
Now how hard is that for Meteor to fix?