PreshBlog

Happy Christmas! Hope you’ll have a wonderful Christmas, with plenty of celebrations with those you love.

In the words of Slade’s classic Merry Christmas Everybody, “It’s Christmaaaaasss”!

I posted the Christmassy blackberry wallpaper I’m using, but while I was resizing that image, I decided to crop & resize some others too, so for anyone that wants them, I’m sharing them here.

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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:

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.

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 :)

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 I’ll see if there’s a newer version of the plugin which solves this.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 (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.

Ministry of Justice spends over £130 million to refurbish an office block.

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This is old, and I’ve seen a smaller version of it before, but just for giggles – shit happens, as seen by various beliefs:

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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 :)

I downloaded the free trial version of Warhawk from the Playstation Store the other day, and now I’m hooked – it’s the best game I’ve played online so far I think.

To get an idea what it’s like, see these video reviews: [1], [2] (the poor Youtube video quality doesn’t do the games graphics justice, but you’ll get the idea).

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