A goatse is a rude thing indeed. I am not going to tell you what it is but if you look on Wikipedia, you’ll find out. Anyway I spotted one the other day on Leyton tube!
A Lesson in Hypocrisy from Waltham Forest!
Waltham Forest in London employs CCTV both fixed and mounted in Smart cars to catch motorists parking where they shouldn’t.
As they say here “Motorists who endanger lives and cause congestion by ignoring traffic signs and markings are now being penalised in Waltham Forest. The only people who will be penalised are those who drive illegally, with no regard for their own safety that of other road users or pedestrians.”
So what did I see the other day but one of their CCTV smart cars parked on double yellow lines. The actual location is here
The car was parked BTW. I had time to get my phone camera out, unlock it, select the camera and take a couple of shots.
So will the registered owner of vehicle KV56 RVU get a £100 parking fine? Don’t hold your breath!
PHP – GRRR!
I do a fair bit of PHP development. This weekend though has seen me tearing my hair out over well, I’m not sure if it’s PHP, Apache or what. I use the pivotlog.net blog software for the portent and mensan blogs.
One of the nice things about pivot is that you can install a new one or upgrade by using a script called pivot-setup.php – BUT it was creating files and folders with user and group (on a Linux webserver) with user nobody- the same user that the Apache webserver runs under. FTP, and even Cpanel on the box could NOT make any impact on these files etc. I had to put a support ticket in to have their user/group changed- no the php functions to do this were not allowed on the server. (chown() and chgrp()).
Anyway to cut a long story short, it turns out it is php related. Under php4, on this server, files were created as I said user nobody. But if I set the default php to be 5 (you have to add this line into .htaccesS)
AddType application/x-httpd-php5 .php5 .php .htm .html
then php creates files with the same user as the domain owner. (It’s a rented virtual server from Aventure.com). So ftp and cpanel work fine with those files and folders.
That addtype also has .htm and .html files processed for php.
Oh – The Irony!!! Brainbench Java Test
I was having a nosy at the Brainbench.com website today and on the learn link for Java, when you click it, this appears. Its a stack dump from a Java Exception. Brainbench of course provide testing for developers and others…!
Sky + Interesting New episode of 24!
This was not photoshopped in any way, except the edges trimmed off. I record both 24 and Battlestar Galactica on the Sky+ box and the Sky guide made a mistake or it got a bit confused!
An apalling scheme
Today I got an invitation to join ringo.com, a photo and video sharing network. A friend had uploaded some photos. So I thought why not- I get to the second screen and it asks not only for my hotmail email address but the password. WTF!
Now I don’t know ringo from anybody-but nobody gets my hotmail password. Their idea is obviously to pick up all your friends email addresses from the contact list and invite them to join. Oh very neat- like we haven’t got enough spammers in the world already without me helping a site grow off this.
I don’t know ringo so why on earth should I trust them with this? This is an incredibly stupid policy. Their privacy policy is not exactly truthful either “The minimum information we require for a membership on Ringo is full name, date of birth, username, password and verified email address. “. Password? Yes, fine for the site, not for my hotmail account! Oh sure I could sign up and get a free email account but why should I? As you can see from the screen shot, its not optional either. no password, no signup. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Just avoid them.
Final thought. Does hotmail know about this? I can’t imagine they’d be too happy with members supplying their hotmail login credentials to another site.
Fighting Spam Scams- repugn.com
This one is mine. I have a few domains which feed into my main account and the number of Pump and Dump scam emails promoting xxx stock – well enough is enough. So repugn will name and shame every company that is being promoted.
I’m keeping a copy of every email I receive so I can show that its not being vindictive or attacking any particular company. I’ve nothing against these companies- the scammers have bought lots of their stock and are just trying to inflate the price by inducing others to invest in them and then dump the stock after it moves a bit- scammers make money and other investors lose it.
Portent’s Been Found!
I checked my Google analytics today for portent.org and noticed this interesting blip! You can see from the pie chart where this is coming from. So welcome to anyone who stumbled upon my site.
Snow in London
A very cold morning, and the pavements are skiddy and treacherous being covered in snow.
This is the view at the far end of platform for those going west, looking back towards the main station. It’s only about an inch of snow and nice to see but having skidded and slid on my way to work, the novelty has definitely worn off!
I also took a photo of my snow writing. You can see it here on Portent.
The plot thickens….Hubris?
Well, portent.org finally escaped from the Google sandbox with a reasonable PR of 4. That took 5 months. Personality-tests.eu though got hacked and taken down by the hosting company. After zapping the blog (which is where the emails originated), it’s back up with just one lost day. It was running an older version of Pivot so hopefully it was a problem in that version and not a “feature” of Pivot.
Clearly I had tempted fate by writing a review of Pivot a few days ago and for my hubris got a metaphorical slap. That also happened to me in 1995 when I was doing a bit of part time private hire driving in Blackpool for C-Cabs. After doing it for two years, I said to a driver one night “How lucky I was that no one had ever been sick in my car.”. Within a fortnight it happened four times- with four different passengers at different times. Unbelievable but true. Not an urban legend or apocryphal tale – it really happened to me. It does really make you wonder sometimes…