Welcome back, fair reader(s).
This site has been offline for a little while thanks to those nasty people who, as far as I can make out, exploited the fact that I thought I knew better than any of the decent anti-virus solutions out there, stole my FTP password, and then modified several files on my webhost to include dodgy <iframe> fragments. The blog you’re reading now just broke when they did that, as they managed to make one of the crucial PHP files into a PHP file with syntax errors. A couple of the other sites I host here continued to work and – unbeknownst to me – started to include hidden content from dodgy servers in Russia (judging by the .ru domain name). Sorry about that.
A short time after this happened, the good guys at Heart Internet disabled my hosting account. Unfortunately for me, they did this whilst I was away getting wet in the Lake District, and since getting back it’s been enough of a struggle, frankly, to fit sleeping and work into my days, without the added timesink that is de-hacking a website.
I’m all de-hacked and enabled again now though, with a slightly tidier looking hosting account. I seemed to be accumulating a collection of retired sites which have now been consigned to the great /dev/null in the sky. Hopefully – hopefully – fretnoise.com will be around for a while without incident, and may even sport some proper entries.
Stranger things have happened.
To get the ball rolling, here’s one of the good photos from our trip to the lakes. It’s (part of) Castlerigg Stone Circle, just outside Keswick (Google Map). There is actually a full circle – it was just hard to get a decent picture of more than a few of the stones at a time thanks to all the pesky tourists…
(Click for full size, or here’s an iPhone version)
Published on
August 1, 2009 in
Blognews.
I’ve just installed WPtouch 1.8.9.1, which makes this blog look really nice on an iPhone, iPod Touch or BlackBerry. Or at least it claims to – I can only test it on my iPhone. It makes it look like this:
Snazzy, huh?
Published on
August 1, 2009 in
Blognews.
Tada! Welcome to my new and (not actually) improved blog, freshly re-installed after some daft hacker mangled one of the Wordpress include files to the extent that the dodgy link that he’d gone to so much trouble to include on all my pages couldn’t be rendered at all.
Anyway, here we are with a fresh install of WP. Please let me know if anything looks broken and/or dodgy.
Grr.
Welcome to Wordpress 2.8.2, which seems to have broken my K2 theme. Bah.
…and updating K2 to 1.0-RC8 seems to have fixed it. Phew.
In my recent mini-rant about the snow breaking our trains, I said that the train company didn’t even bother apologising for not running any trains. I was wrong – they did apologise via their website, here.
They’re even offering some sort of compensation for season ticket holders, as long as you still have the ticket that was valid at the time – another reason to always ask the nice man at the station if you can hold onto your old ticket when buying a renewal… The form to fill in if you want compensation is here.
So, sorry to Southeastern for saying you didn’t apologise. Your spokeswoman could probably still do with a spot of media training though…
Published on
February 7, 2009 in
Blognews.
Akismet is really, really good. Here’s a nice little picture to show how much work it does on my little blog, with no input from me:
Published on
December 31, 2008 in
Blognews.
One of the only changes you should notice since I upgraded Fretnoise.com to WordPress 2.7 is the weird icon thingies next to your comments. These are called “Gravatars”, which comes from “Globally Recognised Avatars”. Basically, if you go and register at gravatar.com then whenever you use your email address whilst commenting on a Gravatar-enabled blog then your chosen picture will appear next to your comment. If you don’t register with gravatar.com, then you get a nice interpretation of your email address / IP address in the form of a little pattern (called an “Identicon”) instead.
The important thing to note is that although the image is retrieved (if you’ve signed up) or generated (if you haven’t) based on your email or IP address, those private bits of information don’t appear on this site. The images are retrieved (or generated) based on a one-way hash of your address which, by its nature, is very very difficult to reverse. For example, my gravatar image is requested via the following url:
http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/4e84e74a1cba73457b2d3d83e2034f38?d=identicon
(note that my email address isn’t in that url)
The Identicons for non-registered commenters are requested from the same place, but with a different unique identifier, like this :
http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/12341234123412341234123412341234?d=identicon
I hope that clears that up 
Here’s another (somewhat more geeky) explanation.
Published on
December 29, 2008 in
Blognews.
How disappointing… you wait seven months – SEVEN – for a new post on your favourite blog and it turns out to be nothing more than a bit of housekeeping…
Yes, sorry – this is just a post to say that this blog has finally been upgraded to the new and shiny version of Wordpress, which should, hopefully, get rid of that annoying hackiness that’s been going on over the past couple of weeks. (Thanks to Dan and Ant for pointing that out, by the way)
I haven’t been particularly good at the blogging game since the newest time-sink arrived, but I hope to rectify that now. Watch out for new entries coming your way ‘real-soon-now’
Published on
September 1, 2007 in
Blognews.
Right… do any other WordPress users out there (I’m looking at you, Mr Covey) know of any good ways to stop those stupid auto-spam-bots creating lots of obviously spamtastic comments on this here blog? At the moment I’m just marking them as spam as they arrive, but that gets quite boring after a while. I’m guessing that letting the ‘online pharmacies’ and ‘payday loans’ companies know that they’re hard-earned marketing dollars are doing nothing but piss me off is going to do no good at all…
Update – Mr Covey did the do, and I’ve now activated WordPress’s out-of-the-box anti-spam device, which should make me a much happier bunny. Now then, anyone have any ideas on how to get BT to listen to my complaints…?
Ian seems to have noticed that I have aspirations of turning this site into something of a photo blog (plog? phlog?) and sent me a link to stuckincustoms.com as something to aim for. It’s a nice site, although I think the HDR technique is slightly overused. I prefer it when I look at a picture and can’t figure out why it looks slightly surreal, rather than when the overwhelming feature is the post-editing and I have to spend time getting past that before I can look at the real image.
But, as I say – it’s a nice site with some pretty exceptional images, especially “Icelandic Navy in Dock” and “Purple Skies of Malaysia“
