Richy's Random Ramblings – Page 104 – Random ramblings and ravings of Richy B

Blogging: No more comments

August 28, 2004

Due to the high level of spam comments I’ve been receiving recently, I’ve decided to close all comments on all previous entries.

I didn’t want to have to do this, but whenever I felt like blogging, I found I had to spend more and more time just cleaning up comment spam (20 contact lenses spam today alone). Easiest solution was just to close commenting. This will probably impact on the “popularity/usefulness” of a few entries (the Mystry of Time And Space game solutions and the Premium rate spam details), but, alas, there’s not much I can do at this point.

When I upgrade to MT 3 (which I still haven’t decided if I’ll do), I’ll probably install MT-Blacklist, but spammers have just taken all the fun out of blogging for me. Sorry.

Techy: O2 Coverage Map

August 4, 2004

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Reading Jeremy Zawodny’s entry about mobile/cell phone coverage, it reminded me of a site I came across a few weeks ago when attempting to diagnose problems with the new service we’ve just introduced this week at work.

Basically, and I hope I’m not breaching any NDA’s by posting it here, the site webmap.o2.co.uk allows you to see the exact coverage (planned and current) and location of any of O2 (technically mmO2, but before that Cellnet and before that BT Cellnet) transmitter, the type of transmitter it is, and any scheduled maintenance in that area. You can search by postcode, town/village (it even knows my parent’s village: which is extremely small!), motorway junction (only “map site” I know in the UK that offers this), cell transmitter reference number and “sounds like” street places.

Why can’t ALL map sites offer the town/village and motorway junction lookup? And amount of detail you can toggle on and off – and the zoom level.. Plus it works in IE AND Mozilla Firefox!

I actually think this is one of the “best hidden sites” I’ve come across in a long time.

Work: Knackering…

July 30, 2004

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Many thanks for the two people who said “Happy Sys Admin Day” to me today (cheers Neil!): I wasn’t too sure about it myself as when I received the first one (around 10am), there wasn’t any “news” about it on Le Reg or Slashdot…

Anyway, I just needed something to perk me up. Work’s been extremely busy (we’re expanding into a new office which I had to help setup today: and we’re keeping old office as well as we just need double the space), but I’m absolutely knackered. We’ve got a brand new “product range” in the hosting arena launching on Monday (brand new=not offered anywhere else in the world to my knowledge) which I’ve had to develop practically from the ground up-along with all my other work: this week, I’ve done 32 hours overtime in the office (plus, when I get home, I’m usually checking the servers, testing things etc etc and basically being on 24/7 call in case of emergencies – luckily this week has been reasonably quiet on that front).

What’s the new product range? Well, keep an eye out for the press release that’s going to around 12,000 journalists and news organisations on Monday – complete with my name as the Chief Technical Officer (or something like that): yeh, swish title innit 😉

Personal: How to confuse Richy

July 16, 2004

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To confuse me, let me go (in a drunken state) to a site such as http://www.statravel.co.uk to finalise holiday/vacation bookings. Since I’m going to Japan, select “Japan” from the Everywhere/Country drop down list. Get taken to http://www.statravel.co.jp. I understand very little Japanese Kanji, so I select “English”, and since I’m looking for a place to stay in Japan, I select “Accommodation”. Only to be recommended cheap accommodation in London (UK), but priced in Japanese Yen…

Not quite what I was looking for…

Blog: Trackback Spam

July 2, 2004

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Neil and myself have just been hit by some nasty track back spam promoting some illegal adult websites from the IP addresses 200.141.76.227 and 198.26.123.36.

I haven’t found much mention of the 198. IP address on the internet, but the 200.141.76.227 is an open proxy server: therefore, I’ve taken the (reluctant) decision to block all open/anonymiser proxy servers from accessing this blog site (details taken from StayInvisible).

If you want to do the same – a suitable list for sticking into Apache’s .htaccess file is available here: but it may block off ‘good users’ as well as spammers (as with any anti-spam system), but at the moment, I’m willing to take the risk (I hate having to go through the MySQL database by hand, deleting the spam and then rebuilding the blog).

(added: Les of StupidEvilBastard was hit as well by the same spammer)