Monthly Archives: June 2005

One good, one not so.

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  1. I have a cron job backing up my db nightly. This is a good thing.
  2. PC World, despite saying on the phone that they would issue a refund have decided they will not. Yet. I have the card back and i have to take it to the store to prove it’s defective nature. Excuse me ? You had the damn card, you could have done it yourself you incompetent idiots. So yes, I will take it and I will ask them to give me yet another receipt as they plug it in and keep it. And you know what ? Unless they really watch it, it will reconnect won’t it ? PC World ? Scammers.

Must note this for future reference:
PC World Customer Service Department
1 Nunnery Square
The Parkway
Sheffield S2 5DD
Telephone: 0870 154 5580
Fax: 0870 241 1934

(And Mr Durham …. overrules staff so causing the Co. to lie. Nice. Typical too. Lying must be endemic in the Dixons Store Group).

Update & Check your version

23

UPDATE !
Version 1.5.1.3 is now available – http://wordpress.org/download.
This addresses a security issue. Use it !

  1. Go get this: Version Checking plugin
  2. Install
  3. Rest safely knowing that you will be notified if WP is updated for security reasons.

And I can STILL see lots of blogs that are not 1.5.1.3
You know… it would probably take them longer to hack your blog if you posted your ftp details.

(Bri / Daniel – you are upgraded, as is ted-crane, the sandbox installs, the trackback blog and 6 others elsewhere. Painless stuff :) )

  • BACKUP your database !
  • BACKUP your files …… then …..
  • Delete /wp-admin/
  • Delete /wp-includes/
  • Delete all the wordpress files in the same directory as wp-rss2.php EXCEPT wp-config.php
  • Upload the new ones
  • Run http://example.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php

Tom Cruise: Jackass

11

The American Psychiatric Association have responded to that idiot Cruise (Link (PDF) / BBC) and have made something of the case against him. It’s a shame that they didn’t really take the bit between their teeth and actually call him and his pseudo-cult a bunch of lying, shallow and gullible morons. As it stands, at least the news channels appears to be giving this two-fingered response equal prominence – makes a change.
Why don’t the Press have more of a go at the complete bunk known as Scientology ? EVERYONE knows it is total bollocks yet it attracts hardly any criticism from the mainstream media. Why ? They afraid that Travolta and Cruise will not make any other films ? It’s not like we’d miss Cruise at all is it ? Short-arsed know-it-all with the intellectual abilities of a rabid hamster.
Cruise says “”There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance.” (Link). I hope, I really do hope, that he or someone in his family is struck with a mental health problem and then maybe his eyes will be opened. Or maybe Scientologists (‘ologist’ – makes the idiots seem almost savant) strap people into chairs and torture the evil spirits out ?

Strange – he says something that is blatantly untrue, yet when people say “Tom Cruise really is gay” he sues.

Grokster ruling

4

“One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright … is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device’s lawful uses,” Justice David Souter wrote in the ruling.

Not just torrent authors then ? So CD burners, DVD burners (hardware and software), code that captures streaming video and many other things make a company liable ? What sort of disclaimer will be needed ? If Apple put on their iPod “Do not use with stolen music” will that be good enough ? If they don’t could it be construed that they are not doing enough to stop people ? If a torrent author releases code with a “Piracy is bad” banner, is that good enough ? Fact is, without the telephone cables, none of this piracy would be happening, without massive bandwidth (8megs for a home link ? WTF for ??) it would not happen. Quick ! Sue the companies that make CD blanks, and DVD blanks, and hey even music cassette makers too because they’ll kill the music industry too won’t they ? (Oh.. crap…that never did happen did it ?)
“promoting it’s use” – what a wooly piece of junk that is. The big Co.’s will now say that not only must products be released with lot of stickers and big bad threats, but also that code must be used to thwart pirates and then even though people will do that they will tag on more and and and, and .. and.
In the end though this has 2 effects:
- it will drive a new front of piracy. People will fight what is a nonsensical piece of kowtow legislation.
- it actually changes NOTHING for the end user.

Morbid Thoughts

1

In the early hours of this morning when I went to bed, for some reason my mind turned to Richard Whiteley’s death at 61 years old. When you say it glibly it means nothing does it – it’s just a number, but then I realised that if I live to be as old as him, my life is 2/3 gone. I’ve only a third left. When I row at the gym, I tend to use one visualisation – that of a circle. As I reach a quarter distance I picture it, then at halfway and I always visualise having only a third left. It’s because I’m past halfway, keeping the rhythm going may be difficult but I’m nearly there, not long to go, soon I can stop. Those words jumped into my mind as I thought about the last one third of my life. Not long to go. My stomach sank and I actually felt sick. The light of day has lifted what wasn’t an emotional plunge more just a sudden brilliant flash of mortality. And I’m sitting here typing this when in one hour I’ll be on that rower :)

Updating stuff.

5

The about page has been updated, and the freeware page has been recreated.

Note to rockstar games: the camera / camera control in San Andreas is supremely crap, I’m hitting far far too many dead patches where the character gets locked into a tiny area by invisible barriers and when I press a button I expect an action, not a pause. The success of your game maybe says more about the lack of opposition ? If you cost me a controller, I will bill you. (Hey, it’ll make you laugh ;) )

Updated WP guides

1

I’ve updated the backup/restore page. It is now split to a page each, and the backup includes some image help for various control panels to find phpMyAdmin and the screenshots for all of them are better (like they could be worse!). The Restore page has a little more detail than previously. Each page has a couple of anchors on for slightly easier linking. The backup page is a little image heavy – I could have reduced image size / quality or created additional pages but I felt it was better all in the one place. Page hopping isn’t what i think people want to be doing at those times.
If you see anything wrong let me know ? ta :)
http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/backup
http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/restore

Google ? Lying ? Noooo……

14

Checking stats for my WP pages, I see this in the stats:

I’ve included MSNBot there for comparison. Note the amount of data and the last visit.

Now look what is in my robots.txt:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

Now let’s check what the Google help pages say:
“robots.txt is a standard document that can tell Googlebot not to download some or all information from your web server.” ( http://www.google.com/bot.html#robots )

This site and this site BOTH say my robots.txt is valid. So what gives ? Google say they obey it – and would you believe that they are lying ?

Tom Cruise is full of crap

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“You don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do,” says the shortarse. What utter garbage. Tom Cruise knows no more about the history of psychiatry than I do the personal history of a penguin living in a zoo anywhere. That guy is full of crap on this issue and people like him should just STFU about things which in their cossetted bloody lives they have not come across or had to endure. Scientology is garbage, trash, useless and a complete fiction dreamt up by a bloke who needed psychiatric medication ffs. Tom Cruise ? bullshit merchant.