PreshBlog

I watched Ghost Rider tonight, and I have to say I’m actually quite impressed.

I didn’t know whether it would be any good, and I have to admit it was somewhat far-fetched in places (but then, it’s a fantasy storyline, based on a Marvel comic, so I guess that’s allowed!), but overall it was very good.

Nicolas Cage put in a rather good performance as the Ghost Rider, alongside the rather aesthetically pleasing Eva Mendes. (continue reading…)

My blog hasn’t been running long, but the excellent Akismet has already caught over 100 spam comments for me – with a 100% success rate – no false positives, and none missed either.

Akismet recently cross the big milestone of one billion spams caught – that’s a whole lot of spam! According to the stats, of all submissions passed through Akismet, 95% were spam. With Akismet seeing about 10 million spam messages per day, it’s a good illustration of the scale of the problem.

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Meant to post about this a while ago. I’ve set up the DoFollow plugin, which disables the automatic rel=”nofollow” that WP adds to links to combat comment spamming. Akismet is doing a pretty fine job at catching spam, and I mostly moderate comments anyway, so I’m happy to provide Google Juice to people whose links end up on here :)

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Video of some Norwegian dude skiing down the escalator at Angel tube station in London:

Looks like fun :)

OK, you couldn’t make it up.  A London woman is trying to sue her landlord after falling through a garage skylight. (continue reading…)

Apologies for the slowness and occasional downtime lately – the server this blog is hosted on is a little VPS (a virtual dedicated server) hosted with Bytemark. It’s been a great little server and great value, but I think we’ve outgrown it now.

It only has 80MB RAM allocated, and watching vmstat shows that it swaps like mad reasonably often. I just had to restart MySQL, as presumably the kernel did an OOM kill overnight.  I’ve asked for an upgrade to give it more RAM, which should keep things going until we can finish refurbing our new server and whack it in a rack somewhere.

How not to rob a liquor store – Youtube vid from security cameras of a thick bungling criminal attempting to burgle a liquor store. It’s just not his night :)

Taken from a funny post on Visordown, a rundown of what tools are really used for:

HACKSAW: One of a family of cutting tools built on the Ouija board principle. It transforms human energy into a crooked, unpredictable motion, and the more you attempt to influence its course, the more dismal your future becomes.
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As much as I liked the theme I was using before, Glued Ideas Subtle, I wanted to make my blog look, well, mine, rather than being identical to too many others.  Plus, my mate Jim said (probably quite rightly) that the flowery header image didn’t really suit me.

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Okay, I thought I’d seen it all, but this is too funny.  The Irish Cancer Society have a policy that you may not link to their website without first filling out their link request form, ticking the boxes, then, er, printing it out, signing it, and faxing it to them.

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