The recent release of Ubuntu’s Natty Narwhal forced me to reassess my usage of Ubuntu on my work and home machines. As I found the Unity interface drives me crazy and the release on a whole to be very buggy. So I decided to give Linux Mint a go, it…
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Anonymizing CURL Scripts With TOR & Polipo
Last week I received a typical run of the mill phishing email littered with the usual bad Engrish making the instructions far from believable but being bored I decided to take a look at the link they were pushing. They had created a believable enough looking Paypal form asking clueless…
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Removing Stolen Content From Google
From time to time its not uncommon to find sites stealing your content in its entirety with no link back to its original source whilst plastering ads around their page to make money off your hard work. Getting these plagiarised sites removed from Google used to be a hassle, requiring…
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Installing Internet Explorer On Ubuntu Natty
For years Internet Explorer 6 was the bane of every web developers life but as with all great tales it seems the characters change but the story always remains the same. While IE6 is generally not expected to be catered for by developers these days its equally twisted offspring IE7…
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Near Realtime File Replication With Lsyncd
Ever wanted real time backups ofย directories on your server? To replicate static media files for a website to a separate box to reduce load? An easy solution lays with lsyncd it allows you to watch a directory structure on your file system, and replicate any changes on a remote…
Read MoreBlocking VocusPR Spam With Iptables
VocusPR has a dubious reputation their main line of work is aggregating the contact details of journalists and bloggers and then selling access to that database so companies can contact them. Press releases from Vocus customers come with the required “unsubscribe” link down the bottom but the catch is clicking…
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Logging PHP Errors For Production Environments
Good security practices dictate PHP should be configured to never display error messages and notices to screen in a production environment due to its potential to reveal information about your server and application setup. One solution is to enable error logging on the server by setting the log_errors attribute to…
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Changing an elements visibility with jQuery
Adjusting the visibility of element within a web page comes in handy from time to time for features like tool tips, extending content after a short excerpt etc. This technique adds greatly to the user experience of your site and has been around for a long time but the jQuery…
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HTML5 Placeholders With jQuery
HTML 5 brings many new features to the browser including a lot of enhancements to the way forms are created and handled. One of my favourite features is the introduction of the placeholder attribute, this allows the display ofย some text in a text input field or text area until…
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Removing The WordPress Toolbar
One thing that has caused me some grief since the release of WordPress 3.1 is the admin bar that appears up the top of the blog when you are logged in. Call me a stick in the mud but I have never really used it since its introduction and on…
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