First blog post in 1 year, 7 months

It’s pretty obvious I have never been a massive blogger, using my amazing maths skills… (also known as the calculator on Windows 7 that calculates differences between dates) I have worked out its been 1 year, 7 months, 1 week and 3 days since I last posted anything on this blog.

589 days is a pretty long time, I have never really been big on blogging or even status updates on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. I do however find it intresting looking back over stuff i have wrote, and done many years ago which is why i keep telling myself I should blog more… which never usually happens.

A lot has changed since i last posted in 2010, I have graduated from University which is the achievement i’m most proud of so far in life. I remember back to when i started in September 2007, the first few weeks were a massive shock to me… everything i was taught on the first day just went streight over my head and i remember thinking i had made the biggest mistake of my life going to Uni. At the time i was 21 and had not been in education since i finished college when i was 18, so i dont think that really helped as i was not used to been back in a class room.

However i really wanted to succeed and started doing a lot of reading up on stuff related to the modules i was taking. I have never been that great with maths, one module “Introduction to computer systems and networks” had a lot of maths related material in it. Looking back it appears quite easy now, however at the time i found it hard to get it in my head how to convert decimal to binary, binary to hex and so on. I was pretty proud when i ended up getting an “B” in that module.

In the end i graduated University with a 2:1 which i’m very pleased with, for anyone who doesn’t know you can get a First, 2:1, 2:2, Third or Unclassified. A 2:1 would be the equivalent to a B+.

I now works as an ICT / Network / Website and Office Admin for a company based in my home town, as you can probably guess my job involves doing a bit of everything, which is nice as it keeps things intresting as i never quite know what I will be doing from day to day.

I have recently been tasked with re designing the companies website, which sort of leads in to why i’m making this blog post.

I decided to use wordpress as the CMS for the website, as its very easy to customise, SEO and update. 3 things which were very important. The site has to look to to generate enquries from customers, we need too SEO as the company works in a very competitive market, and finally WordPress is very easy for a non technical user to log in and post a new blog post or news article.

Working with wordpress over the last few weeks reminded me i needed to fix this blog, its been offline since last October as we moved Digiex (a website i co-own) to a new server. After this i never re imported the database for my blog so i guess if anyone has actually visited it in the last 3 months will have just got a nice database error.

However now its back online, has a new layout, is updated to wordpress 2.3 now looks very sleek thanks to a little re design.

I actually do have a fair few posts on here, i did actually used to blog quite a bit from 2004 – 2006 on my MSN Space, mainly just random stuff really. Anyway last year i got an email to say MSN spaces was closing down, and that i had the option to download my blog or export it in to WordPress. I wanted to keep my old posts so i exported it, then imported it to this blog and set all the posts to private. Only people on my MSN Messenger contact list could see my blog, so i really need to  go through the old posts and make public the ones i dont mind anyone seeing.

I have also imported the blog posts i had on insanenutter.com and my blog on Digiex.net here. This will now be my sole blog so i can keep everything in one location.

I could go on about a lot more stuff in this blog post however i think ill leave it here for now, i just wanted to post something so i felt it was worth while restoring the database, updating wordpress and playing about with the layout.

I might do another blog post before the year is over… you never know! however as its 2:12am now i think its time to get some sleep.

Looking at the word counter at the bottom here ive wrote about 850 words in the last 15 mins, if only i could have done 2000+ word essays at uni this fast, i would have been done in 30mins!

Anyway im rambling on again now, bye for now :)

 

An effective way to stop spam on a vBulletin powered forum

As a forum myself and a friend run has grown and become more popular over the years, so has the problem of spam.

We had already taken several steps to stop spam, including:

When a user signs up there name, email and ip address are checked with the database on http://www.stopforumspam.com, if any of the details are in that database the users registration on the forum is denied.

During the registration process the user is also required to enter a reCaptcha and answer a question such as “what would you put in a toaster?” It was believed this would be effective in stopping spam as any bot registering would most likely not be able to answer the question or complete the reCaptcha.

Despite those measures every few hours the forum would be hit with a wave a spam which will be continually posted until the user account is banned.

Example of this:

Even after a user has been banned that user could be seen on the active users list trying to create a new post, despite the user been banned for several months. It soon became apparent a person was likely registering accounts then using a bot to post spam after the registration had been completed and validated.

Over the months we tried a couple of additional methods to stop spam which were really no use at all, however we then discovered the Keyword weight based spam detector for vBulletin.

This product scans any new posts from members who have less than 5 posts (can be changed to save cpu usage) it will look for user defined keywords, such as “hotfile.com”. Every time someone types a banned word in their post that word counts as one point, when that post hits a certain number of points it will be denied.

As all the warez / spam that get posted on our forum appears to be hosted hotfile.com, the word “hotfile.com” is now worth one point. The limit for denying a post is set to one point so any post on the forum with the word “hotfile.com” is now rejected.

This has been pretty much been the end of our spam problems as the bots posting on our forum never appear to post anything apart from warez hosted on hotfile.com. If required in the future we could block other types of spam too.

Wisdom Teeth

My Wisdom Teeth have slowly been growing for a couple of years now, I really do wish they would hurry up and finish… they appear to grow a bit, then do nothing for 6-8 months then grow a bit more. Usually they don’t bother me much at all when they grow, a slight discomfort but nothing more.

However these last few days it feels like a bomb has gone off in the back of my mouth, one minute my mouth will be fine then the next it will feel like someone is trying to drill in to my mouth for hours at a time.

Not great at all, Ive not been able to concentrate on much and have found it really hard to stay asleep without waking up every hour.

I never really understood how a tooth growing could cause so much pain, but now I really do understand. Anyway rant over! I hear the pain of them growing is nothing compared to having them taken out, so ill be quiet and hope it never comes to that!

Free copy of Portal for everyone until May 24 2010.

In celebrating the launch of Steam for Mac today, Valve Software has put out an enticing promotional campaign differing from their usual free weekends for content pack updates to their other games, such as Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead. This time, they will offer Portal for free, for everyone to keep forever, as long as they respond by May 24. Both Windows and Mac OS X gamers can once again play the much loved puzzle shooter of 2007′s The Orange Box that has won nearly 70 Game of the Year awards.

Portal is a first person puzzle shooter that allows players to control a “portal gun,” more appropriately named the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device. The players are “lab rats” guided by a mysterious voice known as GLaDOS who seemingly offers helpful advice to the player, but ultimately exposes much sinister motives as the game progresses. Players create “portals” that are used to transport themselves or any objects from one point to another, as they work through the Aperture Science facilities to solve puzzles. The game’s official trailer gives a nice quick overview of the game’s mechanics:

YouTube Video

To get the game, simply download a copy of Steam if you haven’t already, and visit the landing page on Steam.

How i beat domain squatters and got this domain for $8.81

Around 2 months ago i decided I wanted my own domain, to use for email and not the @hotmail.com address I had used for years.

The .com of mattyonline.com (the domain you are now reading this from) was taken by someone who was just using it to display a page full of adverts, so I thought oh well and registered the mattyonline.net instead.

Anyway fast forward to today and an email arrives in my junk mail from tom@easydomainrecovery.com which said:

Hi,

We thought that you definitely need to know that right now the .com version of your domain is secured by Easy domain Recovery and is available for purchase at our page.

What we do is take different measures to help you promote your brand on the Internet. Little things’ effectiveness can compare to securing .com to a domain with any other extension. Everyone knows .com, a lot of users will intuitively seek you at .com extension so don’t give a chance to anyone else to use that advantage of yours.

There are third parties who may be interested in your domain. Many people out there reserve .coms to existing sites and domains in order to make profit of ‘em. We may sell the domain to any of these persons and businesses but this is you who decides whether or not we do so. Please choose one of the following:

Secure your domain right now!
Let it go (unsubscribe).

I thought to myself i bet he has registered the domain and wants £100′s for it, so i checked the website he had linked to and it turns out he wanted $100 for the domain.

I never would have paid $100 for it as i refuse to help people make a living from buying random domains to sell on at insane prices. I then did i whois on namecheap.com to see when he registered the domain, it turned out the domain wasn’t registered to anyone so i instantly clicked buy and now own the domain I origionally wanted for $8.81!!

Looking on Domain History Tools it appears the the domain had previously been registered for the last 10 years, with that in mind I think i was quite lucky to get it for $8.81!

You could say the moral of the story is that it pays to check your junk email every so often!

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