All posts by bigpresh

Humour, Wibbles, WTF

Who do they think they are?

4 Comments

Okay, I came across this site the other day: http://www.netauthority.org/

They describe themselves as:

The Net Authority is an organization dedicated to the removal of offensive material from the Internet. The online world is teeming with pornography, depravity, blasphemy, and all kinds of hate propaganda. It is our mission to define a set of guidelines to which all information posted on the Internet must adhere, and to hold responsible those who would knowingly break those guidelines.

Erm, who the fuck do they think they are? “To hold responsible those who would knowingly break those guidelines? What the hell do you think you’re going to do about it? You’ve made up your own set of arbitrary guidelines, and want to threaten to somehow punish people who don’t abide by them?
Continue reading Who do they think they are? →

Perl, Programming

Lyrics::Fetcher::LyricWiki 0.01 released

I’ve just written a Perl module to fetch lyrics from www.lyricwiki.org and released it to CPAN.

It’s a fetcher designed to be used with Lyrics::Fetcher module on CPAN">Lyrics::Fetcher (although you can also use it directly without Lyrics::Fetcher).

Get Lyrics::Fetcher::LyricWiki module on CPAN">Lyrics::Fetcher::LyricWiki on CPAN now (it’s just been released and will take a little while to reach all the mirrors so if it’s not there when you read this, give it a little while :) )

Humour

Don’t talk to the parrot

Wanda’s dishwasher quit working so she called a repairman. Since she had to
go to work the next day, she told the repairman, “I’ll leave the key under
the mat. Fix the dishwasher, leave the bill on the counter, and I’ll mail you a cheque.”

“Oh, by the way don’t worry about my bulldog Spike. He won’t bother you. But,
whatever you do, do NOT, under ANY circumstances, talk to my parrot!” “I
REPEAT, DO NOT TALK TO MY PARROT!!!”

When the repairman arrived at Wanda’s apartment the following day, he
discovered the biggest, meanest looking bulldog he has ever seen. But, just
as she had said, the dog just lay there on the carpet watching the repairman
go about his work.

The parrot, however, drove him nuts the whole time with his incessant
yelling, cursing and name calling. Finally the repairman couldn’t contain
himself any longer and yelled,

“Shut up, you stupid, ugly bird!”

To which the parrot replied, “Get him, Spike!”

Personal

My new house!

OK, I’ve been meaning to post up a few pics of my new house for ages, but finally got round to it. So, here they are!

This is the front (ours is the one on the right, it’s split down the middle (I wish it was the whole building :)

Our new house - the outside

Inside, looking at the front door:

Inside our new house, looking to the front door

The French doors out into the garden:

French doors out into the garden

Looking across the garden:

Looking across our garden

The bathroom:

The bathroom

The bedroom (it’s slightly bigger than it looks in this picture, there’s a little alcove that goes round the corner on the right too):

The bedroom

The (admittedly quite small) kitchen:

The kitchen

In time, I think we’ll re-fit the kitchen, making better use of the space – the current kitchen is pretty badly planned, and doesn’t make good use of space at all.

And finally, this is the view looking out of our front door:

View from our front door

All in all I’m chuffed with it – it might not be a huge mansion, but it’s a good start! Above all, it has a reasonably sized garden, so we can throw BBQ’s whenever we actually have reasonable weather!

Linux

Spammers targetting “techies”?

I’ve started seeing a trend in spam over the last few months increasingly using samples of Linux/Open Source software documentation for the subject line / random text to confuse Bayesian filters. Mostly it doesn’t help them get past SpamAssassin, but they’re trying to be clever and increase their chances. It does seem kind of futile though – technical users generally aren’t stupid enough to respond to spam.

Continue reading Spammers targetting “techies”? →

Uncategorized

First spam got past Akismet

1 Comment

Oh dear – just had a spam comment that got past Akismet.  That’s the first one it’s missed, out of 842 spam comments it caught, so it’s really not that bad :)

The comment included links (as most spammy comments do) so it was held for moderation anyway.

So far I’m dead happy with Akismet.

Motorcycles

Got my bike back!

Finally, I have my bike back! A few weeks back it started to struggle on the way home on the motorway, running like a pig, and emitting worrying amounts of smoke from the back of the engine (from the crankcase breather it turns out).

To use a technical description, the engine was shagged, so it now has a new engine in (one that’s done 7,000 miles, courtesy of a very helpful eBay seller).

I went out for a lovely ride today, covering about 45 miles and loving every one of them. I took some pictures with my camera phone… here’s one of the nice country lanes I enjoyed riding on:
Continue reading Got my bike back! →