Christmas Blackberry wallpaper

I decided to whack some new wallpaper on my Blackberry, so grabbed a Christmassy image and resized it to the right size (320×240) for my Blackberry (an 8310 "Curve").

In case anyone else wants it, here it is:

Christmassy wallpaper for Blackberry (320x240)

I can’t remember where it came from originally, I found it via some other blog; if anyone knows the source, feel free to let me know.

Selling dodgy DVDs FAIL

Fake DVD dealer tries to sell films to trading standards officers

The hapless dealer hoped to make a quick profit after spotting a group of office workers in the Rose and Crown pub in Streatham, south London.

But he made the mistake of offering up to 300 fake DVDs to officers of Lambeth Council who are responsible for cracking down on counterfeit sales.

They showed the man their identification before seizing the discs and his mobile phone. He will be questioned by trading standards officers and police this week.

Whoops :)

Empty page after posting comments fixed

It seems that anyone posting a comment on my blog (and me, when I created posts) got a completely empty page. The comment or post was saved successfully, but no page was displayed afterwards.

A quick look in the error logs showed the following:


[Sat Dec 20 14:18:56 2008] [error] [client 82.18.18.58] PHP Catchable fatal error: Object of class WP_Error could n
ot be converted to string in /websites/davidp/blog/wordpress-svn/wp-content/plugins/sitemap/sitemap.php on line 1026

So, it was the Google Sitemaps plugin causing the problem – disabling it cured the issue. I’ll see if there’s a newer version of the plugin which solves this.

VPS.net beta testers wanted for new VPS products

VPS.net (a brand of the UK2 group) is looking for VPS beta testers to receive a free VPS for testing.

There’s only 50 places available so, if you want to take part in the beta, go sign up now! We’re looking for users with some experience of VPS/servers, who can provide useful feedback on their experiences with the service.

See also the description of what a VPS cloud is, and how the design provides scalability and reliability for VPS users.

Spam blacklisting is massively useful

I use SpamAssassin to filter spam out of my incoming mail, and it does its job admirably. I didn’t bother using DNS blacklists, since I didn’t really want to hand over control of what mail I accept to a third party, and was worried about false positives. However, with an average of about 3,000 spam mails per day getting shoved down to my home server for it to run spamassassin on, it was quite a waste of resources.

Recently I configured Postfix on my public-facing server to check against a couple of DNS blacklists – the most effective of which seems to be zen.spamhaus.org.

Here’s the number of spam mails which reached my home server each day:


[davidp@supernova:spam]$ grep -c '^From ' spam-2008-11-{27,28,29,30} spam-2008-12-*
spam-2008-11-27:3048
spam-2008-11-28:2759
spam-2008-11-29:3439
spam-2008-11-30:2853
spam-2008-12-01:3113
spam-2008-12-02:1231
spam-2008-12-03:155
spam-2008-12-04:193
spam-2008-12-05:78
spam-2008-12-06:92
spam-2008-12-07:61

See if you can guess which day the blacklisting was put in place :)

Where’s the security?

Protestors on runway halt flights at Stansted airport.

How the hell were these idiots able to even get on the runway? Surely there should be enough security to prevent them from being able to reach the runway.

More puzzling, the article says:

“Due to this event the runway is closed and will continue to be so until further notice. The advice to passengers is to contact their airlines directly who can advise them but we are expecting delays.”

How bloody long does it take to get the police in to haul them off the runway and off to a cell? It certainly shouldn’t take long!

David Precious – professional Perl developer, motorcyclist and beer drinker