Category Archives: Uncategorized

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Farewell Netscape…

It seems that, as of February 2008, Netscape Navigator will no longer be developed. Netscape may not be popular any more (certainly nowhere near the ~80% share they had in their heyday) but the Mozilla project owes a hell of a lot to the original Netscape codebase.

Netscape are recommending that all remaining Netscape users should move to Firefox – sensible advice :)

So, farewell Netscape, commendations for playing a big part in the spread of the Internet (even if the 4.x browsers were often a real PITA for web developers), and RIP.

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Pub review: Williams Ale and Wine House

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Note: this was written a couple of years ago after one visit; also read my recent re-review.

At work we’ve been trying out various different pubs in the local area, so I thought it might be a good idea to do a mini review of each pub.

Williams Wine and Ale House

Today’s was the Williams Wine and Ale House in Artillery Row (which, despite the title of that BeerInTheEvening.com page, is not in Hoxton).

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Trying out reCAPTCHA

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I’ve been getting too many spam comments slipping past Akismet lately, so I’m trying out reCAPTCHA to see if it’s useful.

I didn’t really want to add a CAPTCHA-based system in case it makes it harder to comment (and therefore might perhaps discourage people from posting comments, not that many do anyway) but I thought I’d give it a try. Also of course it’s hard on blind people.

I decided that, if I’m going to use any CAPTCHA system, I may as well use reCAPTCHA, since the effort used to decipher the image isn’t wasted, it’s helping to digitize books and annotate images.

What do you think? Does a CAPTCHA put you off commenting? Are the reCAPTCHA images too hard to decipher? (That’s something I’m particularly worried about, some of the ones I’ve seen so far looked hard to read).

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Gravatar plugin added

I’ve just added the Gravatar plugin to my WordPress install, allowing Gravatars to be displayed for comments.

Gravatars are “globally gecognized avatars” associated with an email address. The idea is that you can upload a small avatar (picture), and any site on which you post which supports them will be able to show that picture.

I found out about them from search.cpan.org which now supports them, and Andy Hexten produced a page showing gravatars of CPAN contributors (I’ve only just created one for my @cpan.org address, so I’m not on there yet).

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Friday fun post

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I’ve decided it might be a nice idea to do a fun post each Friday. So, as from today, I’ll be putting up a “fun” post each Friday, with jokes/pictures/videos/whatever to celebrate Friday. This is just a starter, next week’s one ought to be better (as I’ll have more time to put it together, and use my new-found ability to schedule WordPress posts for later publishing to get them ready in advance :)

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Scheduling WordPress posts for the future

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I learnt something new today about WordPress. I thought it would be useful to schedule a post to be published automatically at a specified time in the future – occasionally I knock up a few different posts the same day/evening and don’t really want to release them all at once but would prefer to save them to be published at intervals.

This facility is built right in to WordPress – just use the post timestamp facility and set a date + time in the future (making sure to tick the “Edit timestamp” box):

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Encourage commenter participation with Subscribe to Comments

The Subscribe to Comments plugin by Mark Jaquith allows anyone who posts a comment to your blog to elect to receive an email when any further comments are made.

This can really help to foster an active discussion from your blog readers, as people who have posted a comment will know if someone replies to a point they made, and can return to post further comments. Let’s face it, once you’ve read a post and commented, most people don’t have time to keep returning to check for any new comments.

Do yourself a favour, download Subscribe to Comments and install it (it’s trivially easy to install).

The default setup will add the “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” tickbox to the comment form. If you want to offer the ability to subscribe to comments without having to post a comment first, just add the following just after the closing </form> tag of the comment form:


<?php show_manual_subscription_form(); ?>

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Monster phishing attempts

It may be just coincidence, but shortly after I wrote about John Burns from Monster.ie spamming a load of Irish IT pro’s, I’m now getting quite a few phishing mails purporting to be from Monster. They don’t have a plain text part, and interestingly purport to have been sent using Sylpheed on Linux:

X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.8.2 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i586-alt-linux)

The mails contain content like:

Dear Monster (Jobs & Careers) member,

Monster Technical Department requests you to complete Online Employer Form.

This procedure is obligatory for all clients of Monster.

Please select the hyperlink and visit the address listed to access Online Employer Form.

It could of course just be a co-incidence, but it seems strange that I’m receiving this now, shortly after making a post about Monster. I do have an account on Monster – I’m a little concerned that my account may have been one of the ones which fell into the hands of attackers in Monster’s recent data security breach (for more info read [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]).

Sidenote: Monster.ie head honcho James Mailley issued an apology for the whole spamming fiasco.

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Monster.com spams then threatens Irish IT Pros

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I wouldn’t normally bother to publish something like this, but the attitude that John Burns, Monster’s Business Development Manager in Ireland is shocking, and I think is worth drawing attention to.

To summarise what happened, Monster.ie harvested a list of email addresses of members of IT@Cork members and used it to send an unsolicited, spammy mail to. He then tried to “recall” the mail (which only works with clients like Microsoft’s Outlook which are insecure enough to accept a request to delete a mail from your mailbox), again exposing everyone’s email addresses by not using the BCC field.

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