TW Blog :: Entries for Peregrinations

Words are wise men's counters... But they are the money of fools Thomas Hobbes

SoBig - Coming To A Mail Box Near You!

This post does not relate to any other topics

While the SoBig.F virus spawning was successfully blocked over the weekend, it seems to have come back with a vengeance to a few of my mailservers these last two days. Today I had 75 virus bearing emails in one mailbox, and one of my webmail servers (from a mojor UK ISP) seems to have been totally shut down. Following a spasmic burst of SoBig mail to my boxes middle of last week, it certainly seems to have returned with a vengeance at the moment. Mailwasher is proving a very versatile ally in the cause, allowing me to just remove all infected messages with a single click. Evenso, I have found it unwise to check mail mid-afternoon, when new infected messages seem to appear within the time it takes to clear out with mailwasher and connect to a mail server with my mail client. It would be refreshing to know that September 10th would be the end of this irksome beast, but the warnings are out for a more malicious variant and the patterns suggest it could be very soon - a sobering thought!

Posted on Aug 26, 2003 at 21:43:02. [Comments for SoBig - Coming To A Mail Box Near You!- 0]

A Few Quick TitBits

Also relates to PHP and Accessibility

Been very busy the past couple of weeks, so not much time for blogging…Here's a few bits and pieces from around the web…

Need to hone those Photoshop skills? I rediscovered some handy tricks within Janee's Photoshop Tutorials.
The new Accessify.com Forum is well and truly active and already looks set to be the topical place for accessiblity-minded developers.
What's it like to be without power for 29 hours…Let Zeldman tell you.
The best Chicken pie I have had for a long time, and a picturesque setting at the Saracen's Head.
After a quick perusal of the PEAR IT/ITX modules for templating, finally dived into Smarty to speed up some CMS based PHP development and to avoid mainifesting globular chunks of XHTML within the API.
A good starting point for developing DOM based Client Side Table Sorting scripts.
The main set of Chrome URLs for Mozilla and Firebird (Still using it and loving it!)
XForms is getting ever closer to REC status, and what a difference it will make to the laborious task of developing user forms. Of course you can easily test the benefits and potential in X-Smiles Java Browser during the inevitable laborious wait for implementation in the main player…
Symantec's ever efficient security response to that sneaky critter lurking the web. Some friends fell foul within 48 hours of Blaster's release, and we had an arduous clean up session over the phone. Of course if your infected, you probably will not be reading this, at least not beyond the page title!!! At least XP users now know they are not 100% secure, as a certain corpora$ion would make them believe!
Oh, and in less than 10 days I will finally be able to see what happens in the last 15 minutes of the Two Towers following an unexplained shut down of the cinema last Christmas. Still scouting for the official release of the RotK Trailer…

Posted on Aug 17, 2003 at 21:20:43. [Comments for A Few Quick TitBits- 0]

Clean Up, Clean Out And Slants On The Side

Also relates to CSS Design

Unfortunately I had to say goodbye to a few childhood memories today. My home has suffered a bit from damp the last few winters and I got a real shock when I opened my video/games cabinet last night to discover an entire culture had evolved, that even Mr Bellamy would have been proud of! So the day has been spent restoring my living area to a more habitable balance, paying the bus fare for my herd of woodlice to go and live elsewhere, and disposing of some now unrecognisable classic board games - Risk, Stratego and Dungeon Quest to name a few. Still I did rediscover a few old CDs slipped down the side of the cabinet, including Northern Exposure, which is now bringing back a few memories of those heady clubbing days in the hot Leeds sun of 1997.

Back to the engine now, and been toying around with Python and the transaction capabilities of the InnoDB on MySQL server. Oh and after reading this fun article on using CSS borders to create slants, here is a little herald I created last night (just for amusement). Mozilla and Firebird only for this one.

Posted on Jul 06, 2003 at 18:33:03. [Comments for Clean Up, Clean Out And Slants On The Side- 0]

Personal Promulgation

Also relates to Blogging

And so the journey begins.

It wasn't long after discovering Simon's excellent Blog that I was inspired to start my own Web Log. I felt it was time to start giving something back to the community from my own peregrinations around the Internet. At first I was tempted to give Movable Type a go, but never satisfied with just using other software, and constantly compelled to deconstruct code I get hold of, I decided to start with a Lockian-esque blank slate, figuring it would probably take a similar time to develop my own customised system than to learn the intricate details of a pre-packaged blogging tool.

Well, ok, I was a bit over zealous in my estimations, and it has taken longer than forecast to get a system up and running, but I have enjoyed the journey into the intricate workings of RSS builder classes in PHP and my first face-off with RDF.

I wanted to be able to write up my logs on my local machine, so to avoid unnecessary transfer of data between my local and remote MySQL databases, and tedious FTP tranfer of directories and files, I compiled a PHP script to run from the command prompt that will do all this for me.

So now I am quite excited! As I have been building and wandering the web, there are so many remarks I have wanted to make. Be they for my own satisfaction, or global consumption. So I hope my personal Blog may perhaps be of interest to you, and that perhaps some of my peripatetic path may help us all make new discoveries.