Archive for Rants

PHPizabi – creating a dating site

During the summer of 2007 I decided to purchase a new domain name with a dating theme.

The idea was to start a dating website. Although a fairly saturated market place, I figured it’d be another one to add to my profile.

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Don’t forget to run make test!

During my install of PHP5 on FreeBSD…

Build complete.
Don’t forget to run ‘make test’.

amber# make test
make: don’t know how to make test. Stop

It made me laugh anyway.

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What’s wrong with low version numbers?

In a presentation entitled “Why I hate Django”, Cal Henderson (head of engineering for Flickr) said, that low version numbers makes him suspicious.

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What is a hacker?

Not so long ago I was asked to answer some questions for a friend of a friend who was writing a dissertation about the “hacking and warez scene” (which I have not been heavily involved in since I turned 18).

As I had known him for a long time, I felt obliged to help out, plus I was now interested in the questions that would be asked.

Based on what had been said I knew they were going to be questions on defining what a hacker is and what a hacker does, something i’ve been interested in defining for quite some time.

Here’s what I said…

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BT Web Clicks

Today I received a phone call from one of my clients who said that they had a BT engineer with them. OK. I thought, what’s going on here…

They then proceeded to ask me “what do we rank for on google?”, my response was “your company name, unless you request otherwise”.

They then went on to mentioned that “the man from BT” can get us listed “at the top” of the search engine for “our keywords”.

Naturally I reply to this with a sigh, but how they can they go around making such statements? It’s so unethical to make these kind of claims.

After reading their marketing bumph, I found out what they meant by “at the top”. What they are offering is the ability to list as the “sponsored links” in search engines, which appear “at the top”.

They requested my email address to send me “further details” through, below is the marketing email I was sent. I couldn’t wait to pull it apart.

This isn’t at all a review of the BT Web Clicks service, in fact i’ve not used it, it’s simply an analysis of their marketing blurb.

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Google AdSense won’t let me in!

Back in 2004, I signed up my old site “hm2k.org” to Google AdSense as an attempt to raise funds for my work.

It’s content was mainly made up of what I was researching around that time, including a few controversial topics such as hacking, trojans and warez distribution. (Oh the joys of being under 18, or at least I was at time of original creation).

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Inveis.com .cn domain scam

Today I received the following email from [email protected]

[Note: If you also received this email, it's spam, my advice is to delete it!]

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10 reasons why phpBB3 sucks!

I’ve been using phpBBv2 for a long while now, on quite a few sites for one reason and another. I like phpBB because it’s simple to use, for both users and admin. Things like the “ego search” are features I wouldn’t want to live without.

phpBBv2 was great, things like the templates, and installing mods was much to be desired, however workarounds appeared and we got used to dealing with them.

Upon the announcement that phpBB3 was coming out I got excited. Now usually I wait until the first bug fix release comes out before I start using the product, however I wanted to start a new forum, so instead of installing phpBB2 I decided to try phpBB3

This is what I found…

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So how did I get infected in the first place?

People often ask me how their system got infected in the first place, this article attempts to make you aware of where infections come from, in an attempt to help you prevent them in the future.

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Next time i’m buying a mac

Recently I decided to get away for a break, so I left the country with all intention of not doing anything work related for a week.

This was all fine, but to check my personal emails I decided to find an internet café to rather than use my mobile phone to save my pennies.

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