Fuddland
Category: WWW
Entries concerning goings-on in the World Wide Web.
This category also has the following subcategories [number of entries in brackets]:
- Links [39]
- Web Design [4]
We interrupt the tales from (九华山) to bring you this annoying piece of news from Flickr:
Users in China can’t see images
Since around 12:30pm ( time) on June 7th, users in China have been unable to view images on flickr.com.
Our technical staff have looked into this and determined that it’s not a technical issue from our end. Evidence suggests that our image servers are being blocked for many users in China.
Fingers crossed it’s just a temporary measure. Coincidentally — or perhaps not — Blogger-hosted weblogs have also just become unavailable again.
In: WWW & World News
2007 / 06 / 08 – 21:50 | Comment [4] | Top
Long-time readers of Fuddland might be aware that I tend to support Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day whenever it comes around. In the past this has been in the form of sponsored commenting, donating an amount to the charity based on the number of comments I receive on Red Nose Day.
This year, due to living in a foreign country and suffering complications of bank accounts and general relative skintness, I decided on a different tactic to show my support: I waited until someone else had a genius idea, and then proceeded to wheedle my way into it.
Thus, I’d like to wholeheartedly recommend to any, all and more of you reading this to make one, several or indeed nine purchases of Shaggy Blog Stories.
A collection of 100 short humorous pieces from the UK blogosphere. All profits from the sale of this book will be donated to the Comic Relief charity. Contributors include Richard Herring, Andrew Collins (BBC 6Music), Emma Kennedy, James Henry (TV’s “Green Wing”), Abby Lee (Girl With A One-Track Mind), Catherine Sanderson (Petite Anglaise), Zoe McCarthy (My Boyfriend Is A Twat), novelist David Belbin, Anna Pickard (The Guardian), and a diverse selection of some of the UK’s most talented bloggers.
Should that list of well-known names not be enough to encourage a purchase, then perhaps the tingly news that the sixty-fourth contribution to be found within its pages is from this very weblog. In the interests of intrigue, I’ll not be telling you which of the 1,656 [including this one] entries I’ve written over the last almost-five years it is. [Oh okay, one clue: it’s not the one you’re reading now. That narrows it down a bit.]
For full details of all the contributors, and more of the story behind its creation, I’ll point you in the direction of the book’s brainparent and masterminder, Mike Troubled Diva. I’m chuffed to bits to have made the final cut, but even if I hadn’t, I’d still be pimping this book like … I’m sorry, I’m just far too English to finish that sentence. Just go and buy it, and I’m sure you’ll be chuckling at at least 99 of the stories.
In: Indexed & WWW / Links & No Category
2007 / 03 / 16 – 12:33 | Comment [4] | Top
Okay, I know they don’t really want people to access certain websites, but really: causing an undersea-earthquake to sever fibre-optic cables that deliver non-China-based sites is a bit much.
Internet access has been mind-crushingly slow — think pre-28.8bps-modem days, if you can imagine such speeds. It’d have been quicker for someone abroad to print out the pages and then hand-deliver them by bicycle. Thankfully, because so many big businesses were affected, repairs have been given the utmost urgency, and things are getting back to normal after initial worries that repairs “could take months”.
Interestingly, I’ve searched a few news sources from the UK and haven’t found much fuss being made about it from abroad. Did it make the front pages anywhere?
In: WWW & World News
2006 / 12 / 31 – 09:23 | Comment [3] | Top
Continuing my occasional reports on internet access in China: within the last week or so, the restriction of access to the English-language version of Wikipedia from China was lifted — whilst this is good news for me and other users who were previously forced to access via a slow proxy service, I’m left wondering what exactly changed sufficiently for the block to be removed: was a sensitive article removed or extensively edited? If so, was the information it originally contained right, or inaccurate? [The Wikipedia page about this whole issue doesn’t have any of the answers.]
Update: More detail in the article specifically about Wikipedia access in China. The lift has been reported to be in effect only in certain parts of the country, and certain pages within Wikipedia may still be unavailable.
2006 / 10 / 15 – 10:06 | Comment [3] | Top
Just like Tom Coates, recently this domain has been hijacked as the return path for some spam email messages. If you’re visiting here because you’ve received some spam purporting to be from [random string of characters]@fuddland.org.uk, then it wasn’t me that sent it, so please don’t shout at me. There’s absolutely nothing you or I can do about it beyond ignoring the messages and praying that something very heavy falls onto the spammers’ computers [and then bounces onto their feet].
Back in March I reported on certain restricted groups of websites [specifically, weblogs], blocked from viewing in China unless you used alternative means. At some point — and I can’t be certain how recently it was — someone somewhere decided to lift part of the Great Firewall, for I can now directly view Blogger-hosted [that is, *.blogspot.com sites]. Wordpress-hosted sites remain unavailable, but for whatever reason, no-one whose weblog I read is hosted there, so it doesn’t affect me at the moment.
For the record, here are a few sites I would like to be able to view but currently cannot [directly, or even at all]:
BBC News Online. For some bizarre reason, this is the only member of the *.bbc.co.uk family that I cannot view — for example, I can listen to BBC News via the Today Programme Listen Again feature, but even the above alternative means cannot help: the BBC News site is simply unavailable. Access to other major news sites, such as The Guardian and The Times, is unrestricted, which makes things all the more peculiar. It’s particularly annoying because every weblogger and his/her mother links to BBC News stories on a daily basis and I can never read what they’re comenting on.
Wikipedia. By ‘eck it’d be handy if this was directly available, but at least I can still get there indirectly, and Answers.com is unrestricted.
Technorati. Not something I use all that regularly — I’m more intrigued as to why this weblog-tracking/searching service is completely unavailable to me.
Anyone got any sites they’d like me to test, in the interests of research? [Nothing too subversive, I don’t want to trigger too many warning flags!]
2006 / 08 / 14 – 21:20 | Comment [3] | Trackback [1] | Top
Here are a couple of small problems I had whilst upgrading to Movable Type 3.3, the solutions of which I’m putting here in case anyone else has similar troubles:
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During the database upgrade process, the error message “Categories must exist in the same blog” means that, for some reason, one of your subcategories has a parent category in a different weblog — the most likely explanation for this is that your database has gotten a bit screwed up. The solution is to either:
restore your backed-up database, then use the previous MT installation to change the parent category;
edit the database table mt_category directly, using phpMyAdmin or a similar tool if your host provides it.
If, after rebuilding your weblog, you find that all your weblog entry pages are giving a 500 Internal Server Error message, it may be due to MT setting their permissions to 666. To remedy this, delete all MT-generated content, add the following lines to your mt-config.cgi file and rebuild:
UploadUmask 0022
UploadPerms 0666
HTMLPerms 0666
HTMLUmask 0022
DirUmask 0022
DBUmask 0022
In: Indexed / GoogleAdsense & WWW
2006 / 07 / 17 – 09:29 | Comment [3] | Top
coComment is a new service that allows you to keep track of any comments you make on weblogs; it’s currently in the early stages of development and needs a bit more tweaking to make it work perfectly with the most common browsers and weblogging platforms. Here’s how to automatically allow anyone signed up to its services to keep track of comments they make on MT-based weblogs.
Read the rest of “Integrate coComment with a default Movable Type installation”…
In: Indexed / GoogleAdsense & WWW
2006 / 03 / 13 – 13:56 | Comment [1] | Top
Despite being on the other side of the world from my registered home address, I decided to enter myself in Egg’s prize draw by completing their latest customer survey — if I do win the twelve bottles of wine, I’m sure they’ll keep until I’m back in the country.
Along with the usual questions along the lines of “Egg provides fantastic service — agree/disagree” etc., was this gem:
I would like to know the people that work for Egg socially,
to which the possible responses were “yes” and “no”. It was this question that I hesitated the longest with — if I chose “yes”, would that not imply that I’m quite a lonely chap who would love nothing more than to go out for beers with the hoopy froods from Investments? On the other hand, if I answered “no”, would I have immediately been subjected to a series of emails from disgruntled employees, demanding to know precisely what my problem with them was? Or worse, years from now, would I be getting on famously with an attractive woman at a party, ignorant of the fact that she worked for Egg until I revealed my name and she threw her drink in my face and stormed off muttering, “Wasn’t good enough for him back then, probably not gonna be now…”?
[Over-analyse? Me? Never!]
In: WWW
2006 / 03 / 13 – 10:32 | Comment [3] | Top
Filed under “I shoulda sorted this out ages ago but it became a priority for me so I finally got around to doing it” was finding an easy way to guarantee that I’m always sending emails over a secure connection, regardless of how I’m connected to the network [whether directly dialled-up to my ISP, plugged in to someone else’s network, or over an unsecure wireless connection].
Perhaps it’s not common knowledge, but generally, when connecting to one’s email service provider using a client such as Thunderbird, Eudora or Outlook, the usual and default set-up is to send the username and password in plain, unencrypted form — anyone listening-in could simply read off your details and have complete access to your account. This is very Not a Good Thing. So the ability to always guarantee a secure connection, at least when sending messages, is quite a handy thing to have.
Why can’t you rely on your own ISP to provide you with a secure connection when sending emails? Most ISPs claim that sending is “secure” because you can only send messages via their [SMTP] servers if you have connected directly to them. But this is no use whatsoever if you’re not dialled-up to them, such as on an unsecure wireless connection, but you still want to send emails.
My solution: use Google’s secure Gmail server. All you need is a Gmail account and to be using an email client capable of establishing secure connections — Opera’s M2 mail offers this facility, as do Thunderbird and Outlook, and probably almost every other modern piece of email software. [It might be called “SSL” or “TLS”, or just a plain old “secure connection” in the settings.]
Read the rest of “Secure sending of emails, wherever you are”…
In: Indexed / GoogleAdsense & WWW
2006 / 03 / 08 – 09:11 | Comment [2] | Top
2005 / 09 / 12 – 15:28 | Comment [4] | Top
2005 / 07 / 29 – 12:29 | Top
2005 / 05 / 19 – 09:12 | Comment [3] | Trackback [2] | Top
Read the rest of “Use a Flickr feed to include any photostream on your site via PHP and MagpieRSS”…
2005 / 04 / 06 – 19:17 | Comment [10] | Top
2005 / 01 / 27 – 11:30 | Comment [17] | Trackback [1] | Top
2005 / 01 / 04 – 15:10 | Top
2004 / 12 / 03 – 21:08 | Comment [6] | Top
2004 / 12 / 01 – 22:13 | Comment [2] | Top
2004 / 10 / 24 – 16:45 | Comment [1] | Top
2004 / 10 / 12 – 19:46 | Comment [4] | Top
2004 / 09 / 26 – 15:20 | Top
2004 / 07 / 15 – 19:18 | Comment [5] | Top
2004 / 06 / 29 – 18:32 | Comment [7] | Trackback [1] | Top
Read the rest of “Over-used “I’ve got Gmail” pun goes here”…
2004 / 06 / 11 – 14:55 | Comment [6] | Top
2004 / 06 / 10 – 12:30 | Comment [5] | Top
2004 / 06 / 04 – 09:08 | Top
2004 / 05 / 28 – 17:01 | Top
Read the rest of “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s disabled”…
2004 / 05 / 19 – 22:58 | Comment [8] | Top
2004 / 04 / 29 – 11:35 | Comment [2] | Top
2004 / 04 / 27 – 11:33 | Comment [1] | Top
2004 / 04 / 10 – 12:33 | Comment [12] | Trackback [1] | Top
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2004 / 02 / 09 – 17:13 | Comment [2] | Trackback [1] | Top
2004 / 02 / 06 – 17:11 | Comment [8] | Top
2004 / 02 / 03 – 13:15 | Comment [10] | Trackback [1] | Top
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2004 / 01 / 27 – 02:05 | Comment [8] | Trackback [1] | Top
2003 / 12 / 05 – 16:18 | Top
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2003 / 11 / 21 – 12:46 | Comment [1] | Top
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2003 / 10 / 03 – 15:46 | Comment [3] | Top
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2003 / 09 / 03 – 11:25 | Comment [1] | Top
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2003 / 05 / 11 – 17:49 | Comment [2] | Top
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2003 / 04 / 16 – 01:54 | Comment [1] | Top
2003 / 04 / 12 – 15:24 | Comment [2] | Top
2003 / 04 / 01 – 13:48 | Comment [4] | Top
2003 / 03 / 14 – 19:00 | Comment [1] | Top
2003 / 03 / 14 – 00:00 | Comment [42] | Top
2003 / 03 / 13 – 22:07 | Comment [4] | Top
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2003 / 01 / 24 – 00:20 | Comment [3] | Top
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2003 / 01 / 17 – 13:55 | Comment [2] | Top
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2002 / 12 / 29 – 00:59 | Top
