Plans to Prosper

Using Domains To Scam For Money Part 1

2010-03-06T08:41:00.001Z

Image by Bill Strong via Flickr

It's not often I get emails of this ilk but these do cause concern and worry for some people. Here's the email:

Dear Sir/Madam

We are a internet service (software development, website design and development, wifi network works to promote the protection of brands, search engine optimization, etc.) company in China,

Several days ago we received a formal application submited by Robert Jiang who wanted to use the keyword "mswd" to register the Internet Brand and with

suffix .cn / .com.cn / .net.cn/ .hk/ .asia/ .info/ .tw/ .us/ .jp/ .fr/ .de/ ...domain names.

After our initial checking through Internet , we found that the keyword "mswd" to be applied for registration is same as your keyword.Accordingly,before we finish his registration,we would like to get your final decision about this,whether you mind his registration,if you believe his registration would affect your bussiness and produce conflict,then we could give your priority to register them,as the keyword is first used by your company.However,if you do not think so,please advise of that and then we will finish his registration.

For proceeding the next step, Please contact us by Fax ,Telephone or Email as soon as possible. Under the circumstance of no your reply during the next 5 working days ,we will consider you to give it up and finish his registration.

Yours sincerely

Cherry

Checking Department

Basically what these pond scum do is to trawl through domain records and tell you that some punter has been in touch with them to buy up all the domains that contain your domain name word. How it could cause conflict with your business and may even harm it. But of course being kind and godly people they wish to offer you the chance to get these domains first. And of course you can use their service. Which you can bet is going to cost hundreds of pounds or dollars, unlike the few bob that your regular domain registrar will charge.

So my website offering website design and hosting is at http://www.mswd.co.uk, hence the 'mswd' in the email I received.

You know of course that there's no such 'Robert Jiang' looking to buy up all the domains with 'mswd' in the url. But they want you to think so and rely upon your response to a fear or concern that they are trying to generate in people who may be unsure with all things internet.

So if you do get such a mail, bin it, mark it as spam, blacklist their email address, do whatever. Just don't reply to them. And relax!

Back to Feedly from iGoogle

2010-03-02T19:43:00.000Z

You may have noticed my previous post where I had some issues with Feedly and sources that wouldn't disappear. In a huff I dumped Feedly and went back to iGoogle. Now I've found out that the feeds I couldn't delete were being autorepopulated because I was following them with Google Following.

So now I'm back to Feedly and feeling right at home!

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Fring brings video calling to the Nokia E71

2010-02-06T23:09:00.001Z

Image via CrunchBase

Saw a tweet from those nice people at Fring recently asking people to contact them for early access to fring 4.2.02 with video calls for Nokia E71 (and other Symbian 9.2 devices. Interesting I thought. Especially as I was under the impression that I didn't have a front facing camera device on my Nkia E71. But there is! It's only a small charge couple device but good enough for voip video calling.

So Fring 4.2.02 was installed and to check it out I fired up Skype on my pc and logged in with my wife's Skype account. A quick call later and everything was working fantastic. The Fring video screen on the Nokia E71 shows a larger image of who you're calling together with a smaller image of yourself. Very nice layout for the E71 screen.

I haven't found out if any other updates are included with Fring 4.2.02 but the video calling setup is really good. Well done to the people at Fring!

chrishall57 at Fring
chrishall57 at Skype

The End Of Dreamlinux?

2010-01-12T22:41:00.000Z

Image via Wikipedia

Or at least the forums.

Hi everybody,

On the 20th of January Dreamlinux Forums will be closed down.

New user registration has been disabled, and we will proceed to try and move the database and the forum to the LxH servers as an archive.

The head dev of Dreamlinux has been AWOL for several months, leading us to doubt whether Dreamlinux will continue. We have spoken with another dev team member who has also been unable to contact the Dreamlinux head dev.

We were thinking of continuing the forums for one more year to see how things pan out, but have finally decided to take the bull by the horns and create our own distro and start a new community for it. If any of you are interested in having a look, it is Tota Linux at: http://totalinux.org

It's in its early days and we are still working on the first Alpha, but all input is welcome. The forums will be run exactly the same as here, and you will recognise some familiar members. Only this time the Forum Staff will also be the Dev Team.

We will be looking for Forum Staff, Developers, Translators and any other input a project like this requires, so if you are interested, join up on the Tota Linux Forum.

Thanks for everything over the last two years, this has been an amazing community, and hopefully we can create a new one.

rich

A shame as Dreamlinux was one of the best Debian base distros available. Light, fast and flexible with a fantastic user base.

It will be missed.

Opera - A Top Class Internet Browser

2010-01-05T16:24:00.000Z

Image by theukhalls via Flickr

My laptop is a branded Uniwill and runs Zenwalk Linux. It's got an AMD +3400 64-bit processor with 1Gb of RAM and an 80Gb hard drive. It's also about 4 years old. It's also fire damaged after an encounter with a Christmas candle :(

But it soldiers on, reliable as ever, being used for several hours each day.

One of my key applications on their is, like for so many other people as well, the browser. Not using Windows I don't get to share the joy of using Internet Explorer but I do have the ability to use a number of other browsers. The main ones I use are FireFox or IceWeasel, Google Chrome and Opera.

For a number of years FireFox has been my browser of choice. Fast, reliable, extensible, standards compliant, all in all a pretty good browser. Or it used to be. As of late it seems to have become a memory hog on my laptop. CPU usage goes through the roof opening even the most simple of pages and I get a lot of temporary system lock ups.

The recent release of Google Chrome, especially the build enabling extensions has provided some good competition for FireFox but it's still very much a beta release and there are a few too many bugs to make it a working browser.

Which leaves Opera. I first came across Opera when it was a paid product back in what I think was Version 2? Opera is now up to Version 10.10 and is proving to be a very capable browser.

The killer feature with Opera on my laptop is that it uses minimal resources compared to the FireFox. And I mean minimal. It deals with complex content without breaking into a sweat. Where FireFox huffs and puffs Opera sails along like a spring breeze.

So let's run through a few of the bad points about Opera.

Poor website design means 'some' sites fall over when used with Opera
A lack of compatible extensions against what FireFox is capable of
Erm, that's it

Image via CrunchBase

And to balance things up a few of the good things.

Fast
Low resource use
Reliable
Innovative

So what do we mean by innovative? There are a number of features with Opera that really make it stand out or at the least put it on a par with Firefox or Google Chrome.

Opera Link is the ability to synchronise all your bookmarks and passwords across the range of Opera's browsers, which includes Opera Mini.

Opera Unite is the incorporation of services to basically allow your running Opera to open up content remotely. Streaming music, sharing files and photo albums from your machine to anywhere on the world. A lot of new applications are being developed for Opera Unite. This truly is innovation.

The browser is skinnable but the default theme is good enough for me.

Widgets are applications that can run in their own window as part of Opera. Interesting but perhaps not as useful; as expected?

All in all Opera is now my browser of choice.

Back to iGoogle from Feedly

2010-01-01T16:49:00.002Z

Image via CrunchBase

** update to this post - this issue of the feeds returning is not down to Feedly but Google Reader - see comment #6 **

For the past couple of weeks I've been using Feedly as my homepage. Feedly organizes your favorite sites into a fun, magazine-like start page and it's based on content from Google Reader and Twitter.

To be honest I have really enjoyed using Feedly as it truly has made my homepage a place that I actually do find loads of good reading gathered from all the sites and people I find interesting.

But, and it's a very big but, Feedly has pointblank refused to delete feeds that I've asked to be deleted. Doesn't matter if I delete from Feedly or Google Reader or both, next time I visit the page the offending feeds are again being served up.

Looking through the getsatisfaction boards for Feedly I see a number of posts with this issue but the response always seemd to be that It's been sorted in the latest release. But for me the issue always remains.

So I've reverted back to iGoogle.

Printing issue in Zenwalk

2009-12-05T22:26:00.003Z

All of a sudden I find that I can't print from IceWeasel / Firefox or from Evince on my laptop running Zenwalk 6.2. Evince even comes up with a message about "Too many failed attempts".

Turns out there was a problem with the printer.conf file. Not sure how it got changed but all is well now.

Here's what I did:

# /etc/rc.d/rc.cups stop

# cd /etc/cups
# vi printers.conf

-- edit the file as below --

# Printer configuration file for CUPS v1.3.11
# Written by cupsd on 2009-12-05 20:19

AuthInfoRequired username, password <-- change these to your own
Info HP PSC 750
DeviceURI smb://192.168.1.2/psc750
State Idle
StateTime 1260040751
Accepting Yes
Shared Yes
JobSheets none none
QuotaPeriod 0
PageLimit 0
KLimit 0
OpPolicy default
ErrorPolicy stop-printer

Then when that's done:

# /etc/rc.d/rc.cups start

And it's all done!

Feedly as my browser homepage

2009-12-02T08:49:00.003Z

I've slowly noticed that the web content I want to read comes from RSS or other feeds from blogs and sites that are of interest to me. I was using Google Reader ( and still do ) but have now been using Feedly as an addin for IceWeasel for a while and am very impressed with it.

Feedly uses the feeds in my Google Reader, combines it with my Twitter feed and then serves it up in real time in a way that is very pleasing to the eye!

Highly recommended!

Google Chrome on Zenwalk Linux

2009-12-01T08:45:00.001Z

Those nice people at Zenwalk have knocked up an install package for Google Chrome.

Have now installed it and it seems to be working very well.

Zoho by mobile

2009-08-01T20:56:00.009+01:00

Image by emilychang via Flickr

Those nice people at Zoho are continually pushing the boundaries of their offerings in the SaaS (software as a service) field. Their pricing structure is extremely competitive, and for the individual / small business may even be free!

I've been tempted by their email offering for a while. I've had an account with them that I use now and again, mainly to see what innovations and capabilities they have introduced.

The other day I decided to access my Zoho mail account via my Nokia E71 mobile and I have to say I was impressed by their mobile site.

All of the things that I wanted to access at my Zoho account were there - mail, writer, calendar, sheet and show. Their site has been put together extremely well. In fact I may now consider changing from GMail as my main email access point.

Default access page at http://mobile.zoho.com

Accessing one of my spreadsheets

Zoho Mail view.

Fantastic Theme for Symbian from Fring

2009-07-08T09:03:00.004+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

Given my dodgy eyesight I struggle with the text on my Nokia E71 and am always tinkering with the theme to make it more useable.

But I have found a fantastic theme that is extremely usable for me. It's offered by those nice people at Fring.com.

Some screenshots from my E71 below.

You can download the theme from here.

Lansbury's Lido

2009-05-26T20:45:00.003+01:00

I've decided I need a new blog to cope with the increase of my political posting. So anything political will now be posted over at Lansbury's Lido.

Thanks!

RIP The Labour Party 1900-1995

2009-05-18T09:01:00.006+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

The Telegraph is doing a great journalistic job on the saga of the MPs' expenses. Every time we think it can't get any worse, it does.

The latest tit-bit relates to possible collusion by Speaker Martin's office that gave secret permission for some MPs to over-claim for thousands of pounds in home loan interest in deals that led to the systematic abuse of the taxpayer-funded expenses system. The Labour MP for Wirral South, Ben Chapman has revealed that he was allowed to continue claiming allowance for parts of a home loan that has been paid off. This follows hot on the heels of another two Labour MPs, Elliot Morley and David Chaytor, claimed for mortgages that did not exist.

So it seems that we have a situation where it's not just the MPs that are corrupt, but the whole Parliamentary system and officials. I bet Speaker Martin will be trying to cling onto his position to retain his £100k pa pension. If he jumps then he wouldn't be eligible for it. Let's hope he has the decency to 'fess up and stand down.

Anyway, back to Labour. The revelation that Ben Chapman was allowed to make these fraudulent claims was, according to the Telegraph because

“By paying off capital I am forgoing interest and investment opportunities elsewhere,” he told the fees office.

For the love of all that is holy! This is a Labour MP! What has it come to when a Labour MP can behave like some parody of an investment banker. My dear hope was that when Blair moved on and the Blairite rump were no longer interested that the Labour party could be reclaimed from the New Labour experiment. But methinks the corpse has been dead this past fourteen years.

Hardie would be spinning!

MPs' Expenses - What The Labour Party Should Do

2009-05-15T09:12:00.005+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

It seems like every day that the revelations from the Telegraph newspaper are getting more and more obscene in the milking of the system ny MPs. I think we are now in a situation where the whole concept of a Parialimentary Democracy is under threat. Unfortunately most of that threat seems to come from within the current political class at Westminster. Any reforms have the possibility of further reducing the representativeness of our Parliamentary Democracy by the back door.

For myself I have to say I would be unsurprised to find any of the Tories 'maximising' the system. However, to find members of the Parliamentary Labour Party doing so goes beyond the pale. I think this current mess that the PLP finds itself in is an unavoidable consequence of the adoption of the career politician and the creation of the 'political class'. These are the MPs and members who have been attracted to the Labour Party for what it can offer them and have swung into positions riding on the coat tails of Blair, although I personally find the root of this starting with Kinnock. Judging by the recent dramatic drop in the membership of the Constituency Labour Parties I think most of the New Labour acolytes have already left and there is now the opportunity to send the New Labour PLP packing.

So, here's my foolproof plan to keep Labour in power for the foreseeable future!

Make all of those MPs who have made claims judged as excessive by the 'court of public opinion' face an immediate reselection process.
Make all of those MPs who have made claims judged as excessive by the 'court of public opinion' pay the money back.
Consider prosecution for all those MPs who have made claims judged as excessive by the 'court of public opinion'. I'm sure that they can be had under malfeasance.
Set the pay for MPs to represent the average pay for their constituents.
Get rid of the concept of MPs being able to fund second homes, have the taxpayer pick up the tab and then flog it for a profit. If they need to stay over for Westminster business then they can get a hotel room.

That should do it!

If anybody wonders I left the Labour party over 20 years ago when it lurched to the right when Kinnock took the reigns. I wouldn't rejoin it if you paid me. Leastways not until the New Labour corpse has been well and truly buried. :)

Dennis Skinner on the Minimum Wage

2009-05-13T19:15:00.002+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

Nice to see Dennis Skinner back in the chamber and supporting the minimum wage.

Nice to see a 7p increase, better than nothing.

Another reason to shut down the House of Lords

2009-05-12T21:58:00.003+01:00

Exposed as the biggest bunch of grasping parasites this side of the Atlantic they refuse to acknowledge their theft and try and turn things around.

Wasn't there a New Labour manifesto pledge to shut this lot down? Blair's got a lot to answer for, not just war crimes.

Pah!

Nokia E71 look at the time

2009-05-12T21:43:00.003+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

I've had my Nokia E71 for a few weeks now and I have to say it's one of the best phones I've ever had. There's always something new to learn or a new feature that you discover.

Today I discovered that if you want to look at the time when the keypad is locked just press the big middle button and it'll display the time in big white letters on a big screen.

Very handy, especially for the optically challenged like myself.

The Future of the Gurkhas?

2009-05-12T12:48:00.004+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

As much as I was pleased by the UK Government's swift about turn on the issue of residency for the Gurkhas and their familes, I do wonder whether there are plans for revenge?

Given the incomptence, vindictiveness and corruption of this present lot of New Labour cronies I'm betting they'll be seeking to remove the Gurkha regiment from the British Army in the future.

Strangers into Citizens

2009-05-09T15:59:00.006+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

STRANGERS INTO CITIZENS is a call by the UK’s largest civic alliance to bring thousands of long-term British residents within the scope of the law. It starts from the truth which all admit but few face: that a mass deportation of thousands of UK residents is both impossible and unacceptable. At this point the matter ceases to be a legal question to become a political, social and moral one. Reality has exceeded the confines of the law, and the law must adapt for the sake of human dignity.

Here in the UK for whatever reason we have between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people who live a life of uncertainty, concern and often fear. These are people who have overstayed student visas, awaiting asylum claims, have been denied asylum or have come into the UK by other means. These people are living an existence that does them no good and does society no good. They often have to work in black market employment jobs where their rights as workers are woefully absent. They often work without the concern of safety that we have, and are put upon by all sorts of pressures.

Here's a story from http://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/20090506_1.htm about Jacob which illustrates the situation of many.

‘Oh, Jacob will do that’, I remember being told when I first arrived at St. Ignatius parish in Stamford Hill, ‘he’s always happy to help.’ Jacob was well-known in the parish. He was an usher at the Sunday Masses and helped to serve the teas and coffees afterwards. An exuberant young man in his early thirties, he had arrived from Nigeria on a student visa 15 years before. One day, I received a call from a solicitor telling me that Jacob was being detained and prepared for deportation. Three days later, despite our best efforts to intervene, he had gone.
It was long after Jacob’s departure that the story emerged of his undocumented status in the UK. Only a few trusted friends – parishioners – had known of his shadow existence. He had overstayed his student visa by twelve years and in that time had changed address eight times, frightened that anything too permanent might lead to detection by immigration authorities. He had been detained five years before and had avoided deportation, but since that time had been required to register every Monday at an immigration office. He worked illegally as a part-time security guard on the other side of London, and did various cleaning and dishwashing jobs in the early mornings and late evenings. As the eldest of 10 children, he would send his family a substantial amount of his earnings each month. His father had passed away during Jacob’s time in the UK and was buried without his eldest son’s presence because Jacob couldn’t leave the country. His aged mother and aunt depended on the remittance sent home every month, and many of his younger siblings had been educated on the strength of it

I see it as irresponsible to leave this situation as is, we only have two choices:

Deportation
Residency/Leave to remain

Deportation is often the call from certain sections of society and those of a certain political viewpoint. However it would be totally impractical to deport this number of people. It's estimated that it costs £12000 to deport someone. So 12,000 x 500,000 = 6,000,000,000 or six billion pounds. Seeing as the bankers seem to be at the top of the pile for public handouts at the moment this option falls flat on it's face.

So offering a one-off residency/leave to remain seems a good choice. It takes people out of illegal employment, it generates tax revenue, it enables the 'humanisation' of some of our country's most marginalised people.

It's not going to be a carte blanche for everyone though. There will be criteria such as two years without a criminal record and gainful employment or community recommendation.

Hopefully this will be put into action, as long as the media stop ignoring it.

And oddly enough Strangers into Citizens is attracting support from left and right, from faith groups and others.

If You Go Down To The Woods Today...

2009-05-04T16:14:00.002+01:00

04052009001
Originally uploaded by theukhalls

...it's going to be very noisy as the army are doing their thing!

Twitter Client for Nokia and Symbian

2009-05-02T12:55:00.003+01:00

Image via CrunchBase

Twitter is one of those applications which at first glance makes you ask "Why?" But regardless it's taken off as it makes connecting and networking easy, and of course it's fun!

There are loads of twitter clients for Windows/PC and Apple Mac platforms but less so for us linux users. I tend to use a Firefox add on called TwitterGadget which is installed on my iGoogle home page.

But what if you're not stuck in front of a pc? There are a number of twitter clients for mobile phones. I use on called Gravity which is one of the best installations I have ever come across for the Nokia.

Compatible with Twitter and Laconica
All functions available on your S60 phone: tweet, reply, DM, follow & unfollow, create favourites, search, auto-update and many more …
Tabbed view of your Timeline, Replies, Messages, Friends, …
Configurable Audio Alerts for Timeline/Replies/DM’s & Searches
Setup and use as many accounts as you want at the same time
Group support for creating custom tabs with user-defined filters
Twitter-Search section with multiple search tabs and Twitter Trends
Post pictures to MobyPicture, TwitPic, TwitGoo & Posterous
Preview pictures from MobyPicture, TwitPic or TwitGoo
Open URLs from any Tweet
Kinetic scrolling on S60v5 ( Nokia 5800 and Nokia N97 )
Theme support on S60v3 ( fixed dark and bright theme )
Full-Screen mode on S60v3
Built-in auto-update function and beta access for testing the latest features

Well worth checking out.

Times are hard in the recession

2009-05-01T14:47:00.005+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

But not for everyone it seems.

Barclays boss John Varley who received a £2.9m pension top-up in 2008 despite the share price of his company falling from 700p in August 2007 to 234p now.

At insurance company Legal & General, chief executive Tim Breedon was awarded a £1.5m pension pot increase last year despite presiding over a share price collapse from 130p to 52p.

Karam Bhutalia, head of private equity at Standard Chartered left the company in April 2009 with a £16m pay off.

In America, two unnamed highfliers at HSBC failed to heed the company's call for executive pay restraint and between them also pocketed £16m.

One survey showed that 16 top execs saw rises of more than £1m in 2008 including David Brennan, chief executive of drug giant Astra Zeneca who saw the value of his pension rise by £4m.

And John Watson, chief executive of Bellway homes was awarded an extra £3m despite the dire state of the UK housebuilding industry.

Wouldn't it be nice if we call get paid accoring to this system?

Quotes courtesy of Unite.

Just testing mobypicture

2009-05-01T14:10:00.001+01:00

- Posted using Mobypicture.com

Jack Jones RIP

2009-04-22T19:38:00.002+01:00

Jack Jones, 29 March 1913 – 21 April 2009

The video says it all.

Print Error With PDF In Linux

2009-04-20T21:59:00.008+01:00

Just installed antiX linux and am impressed so far. It uses icewm or fluxbox as the window manager without excessive gnome or kde libraries installed. Maybe even without any?

So antiX is a fast, low footprint distro. But with these benefits comes one disadvantage. All of the hand-holding that a desktop manager like Gnome or KDE does behind the scenes is missing. The issue I had with not being able to print from any of the pdf viewers is one such instance. But if you have experience with these window managers or are willing to search the internet then it's not usually an issue.

So when I try and print with these viewers the print queue bombs out. I have my printer installed on the networked family windows pc so I access it using through SAMBA using the CUPS interface. Trying different print queue commands in acroread gives me no result.

/usr/bin/lpr

/usr/bin/lp

Nothing except an error about printer not found. The answer to this is to set the default printer using the commands below:

To see what the default printer is: $ lpstat -d

In my case no response so there isn't one!

To see what printers are available: $lpstat -a

Which returned psc750, success!

To set the default printer: lpoptions -d psc750

And checking again shows me that the psc750 is now my default printer. So back to acroread and setting the custom print command to /usr/bin/lp produces my pdf on my printer.

Sorted!