Posted in a white envelope with a Royal Mail SmartStamp 1st Class “£0.60 72AC 582U Post by 21.05.12″ (I’m very much interested in scam emails from the sender code ’72AC 582U’: please contact me if you’ve got one). I received it on the 25th of May, but it had been forwarded from an old addres

Contact details in the letter include:
Dated: 4th April 2012
Email: lipei@yahoo.com
Tel: +852 8170 3961 (This appears to be a Hong Kong Skype number: at the very least a Hong Kong “forwarding” service with a number range very close to Skype’s)
Sender claims to be: “Lei Pei, Business Relations Manager for Chiyu Banking Corporation Limited in Hong Kong”

So if you’e received a scam email with either RoyalMail Smart Stamp code 72AC 582U (72AC582U) or referencing email address lipei77@yahoo.com or telephone number 852 8170 3961 (85281703961), please leave a comment – if you can include details of what details are the same and different and when you received the scam post, it would be appreciated.

This scam else where on the net:
* Earlswood Forshaweath – Email address taichan7@yahoo.com . Name “Mr Tai Chan”. Telephone number 852 8710 3961. Dated early May
* Who calls me – Number 852 8170 3961. Dates starting 14th August 2011. All regarding the same telephone number +852-8170-3961. Names “Cai Cheng”, “Jim Lu”, “Jin Chu”, Teddy Lung”, “David Chu”, “Lei Hu”, “Pete Zu” (also uses the number +852 8191 3202 and +852 3017 7332 and email address zu8872@ymail.com), “Kia Wu” (also uses the number +852 812 09 204), “Teo Cheng”, “McCallum Ma”, “Shun Zen”, “Boa Dishi” (also uses the email address bao.dishi@yahoo.com), “Jin Wang” (also uses email address jinwang54@ymail.com), “Leo Chan”, “Lee Shun” (also uses the number +852 8124 5797: also using SmartStamp 62AC 282U), unknown name (also uses email address xuxiao7@yahoo.com and phone number +852 8124 5797),

1. Just download the file and save it as “WordPress.xml” into your Php Storm folder such as .WebIde40/config/codestyles (on Linux, this was /home/[username]/.WebIde40/config/codestyles : I did have to show hidden files in Nautilus: on Windows it’ll be something like C:\Users\[username]\.WebIde40\config\codestyles\ ). To find your configuration file easily, run the following commands:
   • Linux: cd ~/.WebIde40/config/codestyles
   • Mac OS X: cd ~/Library/Preferences/WebIde40/codestyles
   • Windows: cd c:/Users/USERNAME/.WebIde40/config/codestyles
2. Restart PhpStorm
3. Load your project and go to “File -> Settings”
4. Select “Project Settings -> Code Style”
5. Select “Scheme: WordPress” and OK
6. Select “Code -> Reformat code…” and wait for your code to be reformatted

This won’t catch every item (such as the Yoda conditions), but it’ll at least make it a bit closer.

“Your American Express credit card PIN is here

Please be aware:

• The PIN for your VISA credit card has been sent to you separately
• The PIN for your American Express and Visa credit cards will be the same.

“

and another letter reading:

“Your Visa credit card PIN is here

Please be aware:

• The PIN for your American Express credit card has been sent to you separately
• The PIN for your Visa and American credit cards will be the same.

“

Yep – both PINs were the same: so why did they have to send two letters (doubling the chances of interception of the letters?) giving the same details? Why not just one letter saying “Here’s your new PIN code – it’s applicable to your Visa card (ending XXXX) and your American Express card (ending YYYY) which you’ll be receiving in the next few days. The PIN is the same for both cards, and you can can the PIN on either card via most high street cash machines.”

So where am I going?

Well, my fiancée and I will be starting, on the 3rd of January, a new company called Bairwell Web Development to combine our two talents. Bairwell will be offering WordPress, Perch and LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP 5 : also some Varnish, PostgreSQL, Memcache, Perl and Systems administration) development consultancy services – so if you want a well designed (Katy), scalable and responsive (me) website: then please get in touch with us via our web development site (Katy is still working on it at this time of writing), Twitter or Facebook.

Fingers crossed!

(Disk spaces on Github are “soft-limits”)
All packages include unlimited public projects.

So, what alternatives are there?

BitBucket

Plan	Price	Private repositories	Collaborators	Disk space
Unlimited	$80/month	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
50 users	$40/month	Unlimited	50	Unlimited
25 users	$20/month	Unlimited	25	Unlimited
10 users	$10/month	Unlimited	10	Unlimited
5 users	Free	Unlimited	5	Unlimited

Codebase HQ

Plan	Price	Private repositories	Collaborators	Disk space
Enormous	£95/month	Unlimited (140 active projects – unlimited archived)	Unlimited	25Gb
Large	£40/month ~$60/month	Unlimited (60 active projects – unlimited archived)	Unlimited	10Gb
Medium	£21/month ~$30/month	Unlimited (30 active projects – unlimited archived)	Unlimited	4Gb
Small	£13/month ~$20/month	Unlimited (15 active projects – unlimited archived)	Unlimited	2Gb
Tiny	£5/month ~$7/month	Unlimited (3 active projects – unlimited archived)	2	50Mbb
Free	£0	Unlimited (1 active project – unlimited archived)	10	0.5Gb

All packages, apart from “Free”, include wikis and time tracking. All packages apart from “Free” and “Tiny” include “own branding” and “data export”

Indefero

Plan	Price	Private repositories	Collaborators	Disk space
Going solo	£19/year	25	Unlimited	150MB
Business	£49/year	Unlimited	Unlimited	1Gb
Enterprise	£199/year	Unlimited	Unlimited	5Gb

All packages include issue tracking, file sharing, documenation wiki, code reviews, daily dumps, umlimited public projects.

Any others that I’ve missed?

Here’s my recommendations of products which are available to people in the UK:

JetBrain’s PhpStorm editor
50% off Personal Licences. £38 instead of £77.

OS: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
I’ve found phpStorm a lot better than Eclipse and Netbeans: and as well as PHP, HTML, Javascript syntax colouring and checking, it also does .htaccess files, YAML, XML and more (along with integration with GIT and others). Jetbrains also has the discount on WebStorm (same as PHPStorm, but no PHP editing) and RubyMine.

1Password password manager
About half price. $24.99 for a single user licence instead of $49.99

OS: Windows, Mac OS, iOS (iPhone/iPad)
Stores and manages your passwords and secure notes. Extremely useful and handy. Compatible with Dropbox, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer: so you can have all your passwords on all your computers.

Apple
Discounts from all the range (£31 off the iPad 2, £81 off a MacBook Air)

Prag Prog (Pragmatic Bookshelf)
40% off all items

Offering 40% off all of their products when the coupon code “turkey” is used. Quite a selection of books, but I’ve not tried them before…

Lavasoft Ad-Aware Pro
Save $20

OS: Windows
Buy the popular anti virus and anti spyware application for $9.95 instead of $29.95. I’ve found their free Ad-Aware application extremely good.

Any other tech deals available today to people in the UK that you know of?

Relaunching the Amazon EC2 image

1. Log into your Amazon Ec2 account
2. Select your Region again
3. Select “Images->AMI”
4. Select your image and click “Launch”
5. Ensure the number of instances of “1″ and “Instance type” is “Micro” and click “Continue”

Make a backup of the Amazon EC2 configuration

1. Log into your Amazon Ec2 account
2. Under the “My instances” select your Jenkins install
3. Under “Instance Actions” to “Create Image (EBS AMI)” and give it an appropriate name and description

It is advisable to shutdown your EC2 image when you are not using it to avoid billing (not so important with the free Micro instance, but a good practice to get into)

Continued in Relaunching the Amazon EC2 image