PreshBlog

BBC News reports:

Premiership footballers who agreed to donate a day’s wages to a nurses’ hardship fund have coughed up less than a third of the money, organisers say.

Five months ago, 255 players promised to make donations to the May Day for Nurses appeal.

Big names, including Steven Gerrard and Thierry Henry, agreed to participate. More than £750,000 was pledged but just £200,000 has so far been collected.

These guys get paid ridiculous amounts of money for kicking a ball around a pitch, and can’t be bothered to fulfil their promise to donate a single day’s wages to help out nurses who do a worthwhile job actually helping care for people?

(Via Random Acts of Reality)

Today’s xkcd cartoon rather amused me:

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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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(); ?>


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.

Found this on DeviantART, and thought it was worth sharing here.

An animator faces his own animation in deadly combat. The battlefield? The Flash interface itself.
A stick figure is created by an animator with the intent to torture. The stick figure drawn by the animator will be using everything he can find – the brush tool, the eraser tool – to get back at his tormentor. It’s resourcefulness versus power. Who will win? You can find out yourself.

– This took three long months.. i think it’s worth it.

Animator vs. Animation by *alanbecker on deviantART

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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