Yes it really does seem that we’ve lost the plot as far as privacy goes. I’m not just talking about security breaches at companies, or government personnel losing sensitive information…. I’m talking about you and I sharing far more data than ever we surely should.

I’ve not been a huge fan personally of the massive fashion of social networking, and obsessive Twitter type behaviour, and a new site hitting the news at the moment just goes to underline my concerns.

The site is pleaserobme.com … and yes, it very simply uses a Twitter API to capture a list of people using Twitter and foursquare, and who are declaring themselves to be away from home at the moment. The result is a list of addresses that are currently ripe for a robbing! A scary use of the geo-location information that social networking sites just love us to share.

I’m glad to say from my own perspective that I’m not on Twitter or FourSquare, and even those close to me have no idea whether or not I’m at home or not, until they ring and find out… and frankly, I prefer to keep it that way!

So being serious for just one moment, we do seriously need to take a look at our activities these days, particularly on the Internet, and realise that we all share a lot of information online. The important question is, of course, whether the information we provide can be pieced together to provide more information than we would wish to provide.

Thanks to the guys behind pleaserobme.com, the general public maybe getting a slightly rude awakening to the consquences of social networking habits. Time will of course tell as to whether this site changes habits or simply provides a few minutes comedy for people.

Having needed to change the side light and d,ipped beam light on my Peugeot 206 today, I looked on the Internet and couldn’t find any simple diagram on how to change the side light (having only changed full and dipped beam bulbs before)… so I thought it would be good to create a simple guide on changing bulbs on a Peugeot 206… though I suspect this maybe pretty similar for other Peugeot’s.

This guide is based on the change I’ve just done, which was on the front right bulbs. I’ll try and add fog lights or rear lights as and when I next replace them.

Generic steps required for Full beam / Dipped deam and Side lights

Full beam / Dipped beam

Side light

Well an odd observation on my O2 broadband this week… a while back I signed up for a dynamic IP service to provide me with a static domain to use to access my PC when away from home. I received a mail saying they assume I’m not using it as I’ve not updated my IP since I signed up a few months back.

My first impression was that my O2 Router was being useless and not passing new IPs to their server… but on closer inspection there is a reason for this… in 3-4 months of use of O2 Broadband, my IP has never changed! I’m a bit of a security freak, so I switch the router off every evening when I finish with the PC… so it has to request an IP on a daily basis and seems to always get the same one.

Just an observation, but from my use at least, it appears O2 is effectively handing out static IPs, even to its dynamic IP users!

Another day, another issue to resolve… this time it was the turn of phpBB to shed some of the remaining hair from my head. I have however now got to the bottom of this, so this is another post aimed at helping others hindered by this irritating issue.

It seems that the phpBB update changed the owner of the user uploaded avatars to my own id. This meant that phpBB was unable to access these in their current state (often using user 99 (nobody) to access things). I therefore changed the permissions of all files in /images/avatars/upload to CHMOD 644 (so all can read the files). This has solved the issue, allowing anybody (and “nobody”) to access the files. I’ve also had no issue changing an avatar since, this appears to be totally resolved by this process.

Hope that saves someone some stress!

For info, more on CHMOD settings for phpBB can be found here: http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article/chmod-permissions/

I don’t know if it’s my anti-virus getting a grip onvirus ridden e-mails, but I am getting a lot of “unknown error” messages in Windows Live Mail when I try to delete or move to junk, spam mails with attachments.

I was somewhat frustrated by this, as it leaves my inbox littered with junk… I have however found a solution by accident which works, so thought I’d pass it on!

Solution: Simply right click on the mail in question and select properties…. yes, you’ll get another error message (“The properties of this message could not be displayed”)… BUT, if you now try to delete, or move the mail to junk, it WILL work!

Assumption of the situation: I assume the issue is that the mails in question have viruses (I assume this), and that my virus scanner is grabbing them and deleting or quaratining the .eml file behind the mail (I certainly do get a virus found message when replicating such mails). Windows Live Mail is probably therefore screaming because it has the mail in its index, but can’t find the .eml in the file system to remove as part of the delete or move. The selection of properties (again, I assume) must create a placeholder .eml or other reference that allows the original move or delete function to happily perform against that mail.

Hope that proves handy to someone!

A prospective client contacted me yesterday asking whether it was possible to host more than one domain against a BeachyUK hosting package. The answer is yes… and having had a similar question before, I thought it was worth adding a post on this to explain how you can do this using cPanel Addon domains.

cPanel, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a leading Web Control Panel facility, provided by BeachyUK, and many other Web Hosts to their customers. It gives customers a familiar Control Panel to access common functions for their site (statistics, software installation (e.g. forum or blog software), e-mail address setup etc..).

One of the features cPanel comes with is the ability to add Parked or Addon domains to your account (one account per hosting package). This is therefore a completely free way to add additional domains to your account. Sound to good to be true? Well do remember, your account has restrictions in terms of disk space, bandwidth etc.. your Parked and Addon domains will share these limits. You will also find a limit to the number of Parked or Addon domains you can add to your account, dependant on your hosting package.

Parked Domains

This feature effectively allows you to run a single website from multiple domains. This is usually used either:

• For domains you’re temporarily not using (so want to direct the traffic to another of your domains)
  OR – more commonly:
• For alternative domains for your site (e.g. for different extensions). For example, you might be lucky enough own amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and amazonbooks.com. If you wanted these to point to the same site (amazon.com), you’d add amazon.co.uk and amazonbooks.com to your Parked domains in your amazon.com cPanel.

It is worth noting that Parked domains do NOT have their own identity in the sense that a Parked Domain:

• Will redirect users to the main domain (so if amazonbooks.com was parked on amazon.com, typing “amazonbooks.com” in the address bar of your browser would take you to amazon.com, and the address bar would change to show “amazon.com”).
• Do not have separate statistics or log files in cPanel.

Addon Domains

This feature allows you to run multiple domains from a single account, with separated content. The content is held in a subfolder of the main account, but is seamless to the visitor of the Addon domain, to whom it will appear as a standalone site.

To all intents and purposes the Addon domain is a separate domain except:

• You will NOT have a separate cPanel login for the Addon domain, so if you propose to use this feature for friends, family, or Client sites, you will not be able to give them their own access details to a cPanel for their domain. All cPanel actions have to be done using the main domain (domain the Addon domain is added to) cPanel.
• They share a hosting package with the main domain (and any other domains parked or added onto the main domain). This means if the account reaches the hosting package limit for disk space or bandwidth etc.., the main domain, and all parked and Addon domains associated with it will suffer.

In comparison to Parked domains then, Addon domains DO have their own identity in the sense that an Addon domain:

• Will take users to the Addon domain as if a standalone domain (so if amazonbooks.com was an Addon domain on amazon.com, typing “amazonbooks.com” in the address bar of your browser would take you to amazonbooks.com content, and the address bar would remain showing “amazonbooks.com”).
• Do have separate statistics or log files in cPanel, though they need to be accessed from the main domains cPanel.

For information on the number of Parked and Addon domains available with BeachyUK hosting packages, visit http://www.BeachyUK.com/hosting

Obviously I like to keep WordPress up-to-date to ensure it has the latest security patches, and that any new features, or improvements are available to myself, and you lovely readers!

Well of late I’ve had issues upgrading WordPress. I’ve tried the automatic upgrade on several occasions, and in an attempt to keep my cool, I’ve simply walked away from it when it continues to give me a “Installation Failed” message.

It’s clear that this is permission based, as WordPress kind points to the file its just taken ages downloading (the updated version of WordPress) and says it can’t copy the file (locally, it’s already successfully downloaded it to our server). So what’s the issue?

Well I’ve tried a lot of the tricks suggested on the Internet, and I’ve also tried getting very cross with it… it turns out the below fixed it for me, so hopefully it might work for others:

- Simply goto the root directory of your blog by FTP or SSH, and make sure the permissions on your wp-config.php file are set to 0644. Switch the permissions back as soon as you’ve done the upgrade (you must change the permissions back to their original setting as 0644 gives the public access to your config file, which contains your databbase username and password for WordPress).

To minimise any security risk while doing the above, it is worth adding the below to your .htaccess file in the blog root directory. This will prevent people accessing your wp-config.php file while you are doing the upgrade.

<Files wp-config.php>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</Files>

Disasters are part of our world. I’m lucky enough to live in a country which tends not to suffer issues of the severity of some other parts of the world. I am therefore “used” enough to seeing a news story like the Haiti earthquake break, and the appeals come in to support charities in their efforts to help the victims, and recover the dead. In parallel with this, there is always a rush around by governments to put money and resources into action to support the situation.

It’s as a result of this precedence, that I feel completely angered by constant reports from the media who seem to land in Haiti, and see no signs of support being given to this country. Dead people lying in roads for days on end seems to be a standard over there now, this is not hours after the event, but days. “We’re” obviously there, and we’re obviously doing “everything we can” with the available resources, but this country is not inaccessible to the world, I refuse to believe that it is that difficult to get people and resources into the country. How come we don’t send military resources in from the america’s, and other parts of the world? Military personnel are used to tough conditions, and could split the country into sections to each “control” from a recovery perspective, recovering and burying the dead, getting power back online for hospitals etc… I’m absolutely shocked at our lack of ability to handle this situation better.

I’ve actually not donated specifically to this cause as yet, which may come as a surprise reading the above. I do give a regular donation to several charities which will no doubt be involved, but I would usually in such a situation give a specific donation to the DEC or a specific charity fund for the situation. The reason is simple, the media portray of this disaster gives me no confidence that it is money that is needed, the people of Haiti need people. People to mend their electricity supplies so hospitals can support them, they also need more doctors, nurses and people to mend the general infrastructure of their country. I can’t help but therefore be irritated by the appeals for money, feeling that it almost suggests that we have the wrong end of the stick, and that someone is going to go over to Haiti and say “don’t worry, we’ve got some money to help you”, I obviously don’t believe this is true, but the lack of action on the ground, and suffering is difficult to watch, knowing that the world pulls together on these things, and that somehow we just don’t seem to be getting it right this time, and that is clearly causing suffering, and resulting in the loss of lives of people who could perfectly well have survived this disaster.

I don’t know about you, but I’m a bit of an eco-fan myself, and I get really mad reading these constant reports that suggest world leaders won’t come up with a satisfactory way forward at the Copenhagen conference in early December.

It’s great to see world leaders making pledges before the conference, but nobody seems to be taking the size of step that scientists are saying we need to… it all seems politically driven, leaders striving to look good within their country, and within the wider community. Already it seems to be clear that they’re going to come away from the negotiations with a non-legal agreement at best.

I’d really like to see a country have the guts to stand up and signup to cuts of at least the size estimated by scientists, and be done with it. Sod the wider world, and trying to get the agreement of every leader in the world to tidy up their own acts… just take the step forward and lead by example. There seems to be far too much worry about some countries not pulling their weight, and then getting a commercial advantage over greener countries. Well at least from an imports perspective, there’s a very simple answer… bring back trade barriers. They were abolished in most countries to allow for “free” trade, but in my view, if some countries aren’t pulling their weight, this is an easy answer… add a trade barrier to imports of goods from countiries based on their “population per head” type of stats. Fair enough, this doesn’t help exports, but there are a lot of countries that want to make positive change; such a bold step would give a commercial benefit to countries who bought into large scale change.

Here’s hoping the EU, US, or another big player takes such a large step, to put pressure on others to follow suit.

Why the heck is it that ISP’s feel the need to dictate to us the ports we should and shouldn’t make use of?

I say this having just spent near-on a week of frustration wondering why the BeachyUK server hated me and refused to send my mails! After finally finding some time to sit down and diagnose the issue, I’m really irritated that it seems my wonderful new Broadband provider (O2) have taken it upon themselves to block Port 25, to encourage me to send mail via their servers.

Quite apart from the fact that the choice of server I send my mail through is my own decision, I fail to see the benefit here to O2, they’re actually encouraging me to put more load on their SMTP server rather than use my own… hmm, maybe they have an interest in the mails I’m sending

So for anyone out there with the same issue with O2 Broadband (or another overly obsessive ISP), if you have control of your server, just change your mail sending port to an alternative port (and do the same on the server that’s receiving the mail, and hey presto, you’re back in business, despite the efforts of your ISP!)… otherwise, you’ll need to use your ISP’s relaying SMTP mail server to send mails, or you can use your mail servers SSL port, and send using SSL.

One finally thing actually… searching the Internet, I found a lot of sites (in fact, even O2’s help section), saying to use “smtp.o2.co.uk” for outgoing mail if you’re an O2 Broadband customer, this however is wrong for this use. The afore-named domain is for O2 mail users. If you’re looking to relay mail on behalf of your own domain you need to use “relay.o2broadband.co.uk” (no authetication required, and the mail will be seen to come from your domain name).