denyerec.co.uk

You’ll like this.
Today, as a comment on my weblog, I received this:

YOU ARE ALL GAY AND I WILL KILL YOU WHILE YOU SLEEP

Sent from a user calling themselves “YOUR MOTHER”.

Firstly, I know it wouldn’t be my mum, as she knows how to both type in normal case, and punctuate. Nor do I think she’s out to kill us all, she’s a lovely huggable person who will, and I’m serious about this, hug anyone who gets close enough.

The IP associated with this heinous crime was 195.144.131.12 and here’s the corresponding Whois Lookup

I wonder what you’re supposed to do if you receive a serious death threat via email or the internet? Some people have told me you’re supposed to report it to the police and the host it originated from but I can’t help imagining that the police, especially in the UK, would just laugh in your face and go back to not arresting criminals. (Not that it’s all their fault, bloody bureaucracy.) Oh, why don’t I consider it a serious threat? This little RvB video might explain it. For all I know whoever it was might have taken a “How are you?” the wrong way…

After some fiddling and a few shotgun blasts to my registry, the magically re-appearing and somewhat disturbing iMedia shortcut has been laid to rest.

For anyone else suffering the wonders of “shortcuts that won’t go away”, or an application that keeps trying to repair or re-install itself when you haven’t asked it to, you may want to check out \HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\ in the windows registry, then browse through all the crazy-looking entries in there until you find the one for the offending application.

Now, me being a luddite brute and not understanding what these entries really do, I simply deleted the one containing a reference to iMatch. So far, so good, but I can’t promise you that I haven’t, for example, totally broken the uninstall feature.

Follow my lead at your own risk. I take no responsibility for anything that happens if you read this and decide to have a go yourself.

Now, I can relax and shuffle my iMatch shortcuts to my heart’s content.

My Auntie J recently celebrated her birthday for 2005, just like to say “Many Happy Returns” and all that!

(No, she’s not 2005 years old, I meant this year’s birthday!!)

Grrr.
Recently I’ve been using iMatch by www.photools.com and it’s a marvellous peice of software. Still on the 30-day trial here but my initial impression is it’s well worth the $49 asking price.

However…

When you install it, it does something suspicious. If you move the origial installation shortcuts when you run ANY program on your PC *WHAM*, the iMatch installer runs. I’m in the process of trying to stop it happening but if anyone out there knows where to look PLEASE help me, it’s driving me insane.

Thanks to a kind fellow called Justin Baeder, the Amazon Media Manager has received a bit of an update. It should now work on WordPress 1.2 and upward, with a revised readme.txt to indicate the installation procedure. There are also now some CSS classes on the amazon items to let you style them as desired, but these won’t affect anything if you choose not to use them.

Both versions are available for download here.

Due to personal time constraints and working on another project, I will not be making and revisions to the script for a little while but do intend to revise it as soon as I get the opportunity.

Join me in lament, the world as we know it will soon be over.

The time of the machines has come.

Well I can’t say I’ve really been trying to fix the file uploader, but put it this way, it’s still not working. However I did get some passport photo’s done yesterday. By me. I then did a bit of photoshop magic to get them to the exact right dimensions and DPI, then sent them off via a wonderfully easy to use website to Photobox. They arrived at 8am this morning. 8 UK sized passport photos, 99p, pin-sharp.

Not only that, but compared to the ones you normally get from those dreaded booths, I’m not looking the wrong way or being startled by a chocolate eclair.

Well, I have a STACK of photo’s (No, really…) ready to upload.

But I can’t.

Why not? For some reason, unknown to me at this point, my beloved hosts United Hosting have changed SOMETHING on their web servers configuration that has shot my dynamic cropping script in the head. Twice.
Not only that but I think they may well have mutilated the body to boot.

I am fevrishly trying to find out why something I’ve been using fine for 18 months no longer works, when I figure it out, you’ll see new photos.

And no, they have not upgraded to PHP5 and there are no error messages either, which makes the whole thing even crapper.