Blog

Nextgenhacker101 Is the Best

Richard Green on

I got sent a link to a Microsoft Blog yesterday by a friend who had posted a link to a funny YouTube video. The blog posting is at http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2010/01/29/nextgenhacker101-owes-me-a-new-monitor.aspx but I’ll also just link directly to the video below:

This script kiddie (if we can call him that) is so ‘leet that he’s managed to discover a way to monitor who is viewing Google or any other website at a given moment in time: Unless that is, you have an internet connection faster than him else all he see’s is * and Request Timed Out.

Thank you for making my Monday afternoon Nextgenhacker101. For more classics you can also check his Channel on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/NextGenHacker101

 

Changes to the Blog

Richard Green on

Being that I’ve been posting a bit lately with Windows Phone and other related things, I realised that the blog looked a bit dire.

I’ve re-coloured everything to white and it’s looking much nicer. All I need to do now is fix a couple of the Silverlight XAML elements from black to white to match the new colour but aside from that, it’s looking much better.

I hope you all like it.

Updates and Changes to the Blog

Richard Green on

I made myself useful this morning and made some more changes to the blog.

I started using Twitter recently and wanted to make it easier on myself to keep everything consistent, so thanks to a Facebook Application, I can now update my Facebook status which automatically when I update Twitter, which  which then should appear on Windows Live also.

Posts I make to the blog already appear on my Facebook wall, so that’s not a problem.

What I have done now though is added a Twitter plug-in to the blog which means you will be able to see my Twitter tweets on the right.

I’ve also added a Save/Share plug-in which appears at the bottom of every post or page on the blog. This means that you can Digg, Tweet or share entries here to your favourite social media / networking sites.

For any mobile users, I’ve replaced the existing WordPress mobile plug-in with a new one which according to the author and screenshots loads faster on mobile browsers and will look much better on devices like the iPhone and other devices with high resolution displays (like my HTC Touch HD for example). It also includes a mobile version of the Admin Center so I should be able to blog from my mobile device (if I wanted to that is).

In addition to the new features, I’ve made a fix to the comments system. Nicky showed me last night a problem whereby if you type a long sentence in the comments box it overflowed into the sidebar. That’s fixed now.

I know that there are still problems with the header and I am working to get those issues fixed. When I do manage to fix the header I will be changing the Live Search element at the same time so that it uses the new Bing Search styling.

Gravatar – Unifying Social Media

Richard Green on

Yesterday, whilst working on trying to make the blog look beautiful I noticed something bizarre.

A comment of mine had my picture against it which good, however I was confused as to how it got there because I have never put my own picture on the Baby-Green Blog anywhere.

I looked at the URI for the image and it was this:
http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f582c100a1c12ef21361c5b06a9ab278?s=32&d=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32&r=PG

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Still Ugly, but Improving

Richard Green on

So if you’ve been looking over at the Baby-Green Wedding website, you’ll see that nothing much has changed on the design front, and that it’s just content missing now.

Well that’s because I’m pretty much settled and finished on the design over there, but the issue now is bringing that over to the blog and the forum. Unless your reading this over RSS, you’ll see that the blog looks partly like the Wedding site now – The background, font and some elements of the design are getting there, but these theme based content driven sites like the blog and forum are hard to reverse engineer, so give me time.

I guess it’s times like these that it pays to use RSS.

The Change The Blog

Richard Green on

In line with the changes to the design of the blog, I’m going to be making some other changes.

I’ve never used Categories properly. This is because I was using this WordPress installation as a MUI even though it was the standard installation.

As of today there will be a Category called Personal and anything by Nicky, myself relating to family or anyone else family oriented will go in the Family Category.

I will be creating a load of categories over the coming days and weeks to accommodate my posting habits and over time, re-organising my posts into them.

The net result will be a better and more effective experience using WordPress. This, coupled with the recent Permalink structure change on the blog giving it nicer URLs will also help.

Finally, I’m going to be changing the name of the blog.
As the only person to use it is me and as I mostly talk about technology related stuff these days, here’s the new name:

Baby-Green Blog :: The Mostly Technological Ramblings of Richard Green

It is a little bit of a mouthful, however it will better suit the topic of the site and will hopefully help improve the SEO of the blog.

UPDATE: Actually thinking about this, I’m going to stick with the categories, but instead use them for authoring, so whereas my posts are currently split into Richard for personal and Technology for my drivelling posts, everything for me will be under Richard now. This makes more sense based on how effectively I’m tagging my posts.

My Eye’s Hurt – The Blog

Richard Green on

So to anyone trying to look at the blog at the moment, you may be thinking to yourself, oh dear god my eyes hurt.

Well yeah, I’m sorry about that one.

As I said in a previous entry a few days back, I’m in the midst of redesigning everything all spawned from the Baby-Green Wedding mini-site, and due to it’s fair simplicity compared to the forum and the main site, the blog was the next victim.

Over the coming days, I will be chopping and changing between my development theme and layout and the current theme and layout to compare and trial my work in progress theme to make sure it makes the other sites perfectly.

On the bright side, Baby-Green will be better soon.

ISP’s and Peer-to-Peer

Richard Green on

The Baby-Green Blog has been something has has passed me by since Jessica’s birth, and I really need to get around to catching up with some things I’ve missed to date, but something in the news today really got my attention.

I heard about a month ago about plans in France for French ISP’s to monitor Peer-to-Peer traffic and to block the service to offending illegal downloaders. This didn’t bother me because it was them and not us, and I almost did actually feel sorry for a minute when I heard a planned black list would be introduced to prevent offenders from getting service from other ISP’s within a time period.

Today though, it did actually bother me when I heard the British government has similar plans for this country and that if the ISP’s do not do this at the governments request, then they will introduce it as law. For the normal user this poses no problem, and to me as far as Peer-to-Peer goes it poses to issues either. Any Peer-to-Peer usage that I see coming or going is so low in it’s volume that I wouldn’t been set a single alarm bell ringing as they will only be interested in the big fish for frying at this stage.

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Continuation

Richard Green on

So I thought I’d blog a little more to finish off what I was writing last night before I was rudely interuptted by Nicky wanting sleep: I suppose I can let her off, but only because she’s pregnant.

Quite convienient that I choose to blog some more today, becuase dearest Mr Zuchini uploaded all the images of his from the weekend to his PhotoBucket account, and decided to tag me in some of the pictures on Facebook, so anyone who’s in my friends list on Facebook can see all the images in the gallery if they like.

For those of you without access to my Facebook account, I’ve added one of the images from the lot to this blog, assuming you can see, you’ll see a nice picture of me and Fruity walking down the road like some kind of couple…not that we are…honest.

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Will It Ever Work?

Richard Green on

More time passes by and still my PC is broken and still no news from Gigabyte. Me and Nicky have been trawling the Dell Outlet site for cheap PC’s which are suitable to my liking for me to buy as a replacement and sell my older parts on eBay, and today I found one that was up to the job.

A AMD Athlon64 X2 2.8GHz with 2GB RAM and all the other goodies I need to be able to keep the Baby-Green website running which lets face it, it hasn’t been of late (or since April even!). Our digital camera came back today from Sony which is now all working well, so we will be able to start taking some better pictures of Madison now she is getting so grown up again, although you won’t be able to see them until I can get the site going again. Here’s a picture of the PC for anyone that’s interested.

Dell usually take about a week to deliver the PC and I’m guestimating around 2 weeks for me to get the site full up to speed. I’d like to point out to everyone that views the site and this blog site (obviously) that you will not notice anything happening with the site immeadiatly, but fear not, for this is because I am re-building the site from stratch will all new content, which will make the site more professional looking like it’s been made by someone with some skill and not just someone who picked up a website creation manual.

If your interested to see how I’m getting on with re-designing the site, you can by all means take a look at what I’m working on, but do bear in mind that content on their is very liable to change, and not of, if any of the links to other pages will work, so the single page that you see is all you’ll get for now I’m afraid. Check it out here http://www.baby-green.co.uk/dev/testmain.php.

I’m going to get back to my Microsoft exam revision now as I’m planning on taking my Windows XP exam next week, so I will be sure to let you all know how I get on with that.

Bye x