denyerec.co.uk

Last night #webdev on the Quakenet IRC network suffered an attack of what I am now dubbing “Red Button Syndrome”. Red Button Syndrome (Or RBS for short) is a condition present in a great many humans and can be summed up with the following example:

“Dave? Dave, I’m off out now for about 5 minutes. Whatever you do, don’t press that big red button.”
“Ok mate, no worries, I’ve got you covered.”
*click*
-Insert embarrasing consequence here –

I don’t know whether psychologists bundle this in with “The Human Condition” (TM) or not, but it’s observable behaviour. Adam and Eve, Adolph Hitler, #Webdev… The incident in question relates to a rather nasty Internet Explorer exploit. According to my stats, 50% of my readers have still not taken my advice and are still running the default MS browser. Well guys, you’re at risk, so whatever you do DO NOT click on this link.

Fire away Firefox and Opera users, you’re good to go.

Why do we do it? I don’t know. Perhaps curiosity really did kill the cat, then we ate the cat and thought “Hey, curiosity isn’t such a bad thing afterall.” Maybe we’re all just hopeless at taking other peoples’ advice and will only believe once we’ve seen things with our own eyes. Personally, I didn’t click the link. I was told not to, because it was a virus, so it did not get a click. Why other people find it so hard I’ll never know…

As promised, the article is now grabbable here, it’s a big JPEG and the quality is a bit pants. If you just wanna see what I said (Go me!) then, well, that’s right here.

Thanks to Valuehost playing a little too heavily on the value and not so much on the host, my site went down for 4 days. Right at the time when my webby’s URL got into a national magazine. Bummer.
Partly in anger, partly through sensibility and partly thanks to a paypal donation from a very good friend of mine (You’ll get it back when I get paid, honest!), I have switched hosts to United Hosting. They have servers in the US, and they answer tedious support queries within 5 minutes when it’s 2am GMT. Kudos.

Now the bad news… Site migration went OK, but their server setup is a little different so I can’t upload any new images with my old script until I get things fixed up. Hold in there, revisit the gallery and please, please please let me know if you find something that’s not working as I’ll need to patch it up.

Magazine extract to follow, as soon as I fix image uploads.

www.denyerec.co.uk got its first piece of national recognition today amongst the pages of Digital Music Maker magazine. It was regarding the Grey Tuesday protest which happened a bit back. Those of you who visit regularly will recall the site turning grey, etc.
Well, shortly after a journo wrote to everyone on the GT website, asking for quotes to go into an article. I obliged, he said my response was perfect and lo, it’s in print. I’m scanning the page for you good people, and will be putting it up here for you to see as soon as I can.

Me, in print! Hah. Now if only that album had been my kind of music…

My hosts, Valuehost were allegedly hit by a Denial of Service attack today, bringing all their hosted sites to their knees. Including this one.
Apologies for the interruption of service, though really they’re the ones who need to say sorry. They boast 99.9% uptime which, if you do a rough calculation, means they expect to be offline for just under 9 hours in every 8,760 (That’s 365 days, for those of you out there who do not see in nubmers.)
They were out for about 9 hours today, so I’m now looking forward to 364 days of uninterrupted service… Hah!

News in from the BBC today to make me angry, right here.
Read the rest of this entry »

A site was forwarded to me a few moment ago, it was this one, it’s got something to do with a tennis website.
The most interesting part of the article was a section toward the bottom of the document, which reads as follows…

To deter Webmasters from using these photos on other Webpages or using them outside the above permitted uses, I have been advised to set a scale of standard charges for unauthorised use. This makes it extremely easy to obtain significant damages for unauthorised use of the photos, by applying the legal process from any court in a country that is a signatory to the Berne Convention, most Countries in the world have signed this convention.

The scale of charges are:
250 US dollars per Week per Photo, starting from the date of the infringement.
Unpaid bills accrue interest.
Expenses incurred by myself and the collection Agency, in the collection of these fees are also chargeable.

I think that’s a rather good idea myself… Read the rest of this entry »

Finally, Dr Hope is going back to work. They’re out of pocket by a couple of grand, the waiting lists have grown a little and poor Dr Hope has been splattered all over the internet tabloids.

Still, at least he’s getting back to work on Friday. It still amazes me that they had to suspend him and are treating the matter “Urgently”, it’s not as if he killed anyone, or administered the wrong drugs…

That’s what the lady in my latest photograph is saying. Honest… 😉
This is one of the few shots I got off before the ignorant security gorillas…

I can’t remember her name, but I’m on the lookout for it. If anyone knows, please get in touch so I can update everything. Who knows, maybe I could make it as a sports photographer, providing I get some anti-gorilla spray 😉

Way to go ZimmerFrame (That’s one of the parties responsible for my existance, by the way) for picking out Francesca Schiavoni as the angry tennis player. If I gave out prizes, you’d be in line for one 😉