A lot was said about Google becoming the Big Brother of the internet. A lot was said about the quantity of personal information, available to Google via it’s numerous services. It was even discussed (elsewhere), that the history of someone’s Google searches might be used (or even is already used) to identify candidate’s fitness for the position in question (e.g., if you were once searching for child porn, then it automatically marks your “Google search profile” as illegal; the same goes for the searches like how to make a nuclear bomb, idiot’s guide to making biological weapons, terrorism how-to for dummies, how to join Al-Qaeda, and even smuggling a gun in and out the aircraft ).

What I’m taking you to: Google sends out PIN codes to AdSense account holders, to verify that the postal address is correct. As you already understood, this binds your postal address to your Google account (with all it’s services), and if police decides to check your search history, and finds some nasty query, they will already know where to go and get you.

So, if you are one of those how-to: nuclear bomb searchers, and you accumulate money for that bomb using AdSense - then either use “on demand” postal address (which is slightly more secure - but you’ll have to hire bodyguard services, when checking mail), or move regularly

Or, ask everyone you know to search for the linked phrases from the post above . In this case, the “noise” may just well overcome the “signal”, to render “Google search profile” verification practically useless.

Also, you can just use filtering alternatives like scroogle.

Get it here.

It adds Referrer of the person who’s leaving comment on your WP blog. May help to take the right action for seemingly legit, but really spam comments (e.g. if someone was just searching for blogs with enabled commenting to leave a comment with name linked to their biz-website).

Problem report at menalto forum. Another one, also with no solution.

I can confirm - URL rewrite + DHTML Album Select produces two forward slashes in the Matrix theme, in my gallery 2.2.4 setup, after a single use of the Recalculate button in Disk statistics tab in Statistics plugin from Community repository.
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ExpressionEngine (EE) by EllisLab (see dislaimer). EE is available both as free and as paid-for: free has somewhat limited functionality, but enough to start the simple news site or blog. ExpressionEngine is suitable both for content-centric and news-centric (blog-like) projects, though in my opinion it’s more geared towards news/blog-like sites.
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I know it’s kind of old now, but check this image out:

Via webplanet.ru - reddit.com.

Today I learned that eco-hosting (or green hosting) exists not only as a words combination. On one of the “hostings rating” websites there was even a category titled “green hosting”.

In short: green hosting operates on the principles of minimal ecology harm. E.g., solar energy is used (mostly in the form of photovoltaic panels - PVs), and a bunch of other “green” technologies.

I expected green hosting to be more expensive than common shared hosting… so I took a look at aiso.net’s hosting plans. Well, at least it doesn’t look 1000%-oversold, as many shared hostings look. For 10$/mo, you get 500MiB web storage, 500MiB email space (who needs it anyway?), and 5GiB traffic/mo. Everything else seems as usual - PHP, MySQL, Perl etc (I was looking at Linux hosting). Not much, but if you can use those 5GiB of traffic in one day - that is, if there are no other stronger limitations such as low CPU - then it’s still good. And - this is the most “basic” plan, I took it only because it’s also the closest to what is widely known in the shared hosting market as “common price”. This isn’t the only green hosting provider out there, I just satisfied my interest and didn’t look for more.

AISO - see for yourself.

Note: this a collection of scraps, describing how values (de)referencing works in Python, and describing when your variable is either a value or a reference. Primary source of knowledge for this post (also here).

Python passes references-to-objects by value (like Java), and everything in Python is an object. This sounds simple, but then you will notice that some data types seem to exhibit pass-by-value characteristics, while others seem to act like pass-by-reference… what’s the deal?

It is important to understand mutable and immutable objects. Some objects, like strings, tuples, and numbers, are immutable. Altering them inside a function/method will create a new instance and the original instance outside the function/method is not changed. Other objects, like lists and dictionaries are mutable, which means you can change the object in-place. Therefore, altering an object inside a function/method will also change the original object outside.

Immutable variables - such as integers [strings, numerics and tuples are immutables] - are passed by value. That is, if your function accepts some integer argument, you are safe assuming that your function won’t be able to modify your integer. Mutable variables - such as dictionaries and lists - are passed by reference, and so if your function accepts mutable argument, it may modify the contents of that mutable variable outside the scope of the function.

When doing :
s = “Hello “
s += “World”
… you are not modifying the string object bound to s, but creating a new string object and binding it to s.

If using object’s methods within a called function, variable is considered “passed by reference” - it is modified out of the function’s scope. If using assignment on a mutable object, it is created a-new within the function, and global value isn’t modified.

When you call a function with an arg, a “local variable” is created, which references the object passed as the argument. (well… an entry with the formal parameter name as key and a reference to the object passed in is created in the ‘local’ dict).

So, rebinding this local symbol does not impact the binding in the caller’s namespace - because the symbol lives in another namespace.

*But* - and if the object referenced is mutable of course - modifying the object in the function… well, just modifies the object, because it’s the *same* object that is bound to (’referenced by’, if you prefer) both symbols (the one in the caller’s namespace and the one in the function’s namespace). So yes, the object *is* modified when the function returns.

Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population (or here, if that link doesn’t work)

Worth reading for any IT guy, especially for people dealing with lots of HDDs.
Also might be interesting for those, who have Gmail with (now) over 6GiB storage…

Most frequent use: convert database from latin1_swedish to utf8_general_ci.
Original script found at: MySQL and UTF-8.

Update: the original script had an error, it would generate queries likes this one (note the bold part):

ALTER TABLE `links` CHANGE `link_rel` `link_rel` varchar(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NOT NULL DEFAULT NULL;

This is clearly wrong syntax (and logic). I fixed this by making comparison to NULL strict (with three equal signs instead of two):

// Does the field default to null, a string, or nothing?
if ($row['Default'] === NULL)

Update 2: based on comment by banesto, I modified the script; now it does not require specifying the from_collation, it’s sufficient to specify to_collation (which will be used for all the fields and tables). The modified code is:

if ($row['Collation'] == ” || $row['Collation'] == $convert_to)
continue;

Here’s the script itself: (to copy-paste: first click the “Plain text” header)
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Found this one very informative: 6 steps to stop content theft.

Also: 5 content theft myths, and why they are false.

And more links:

• free internet fax
• anti-spam email 1 (recommended)
• anti-spam email 2
• create on-demand snapshot (archive) of the cited web-page

Today I moved my blog and gallery into MySQL5 databases from an elderly MySQL4. Also, both WP and gallery are now updated to the latest versions. Soon I’ll change the WP and G2 themes - for the lighter, less cluttered - and will remove some ads… and will also add some others instead

Update generally went well, except for the message I got on the main page:

Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.

It was quite easy to figure out that new WP conflicts with an elderly “Sideblog” plugin - so I had to deactivate that one, and will have to update all the active plugins to avoid some other less evident problems… (actually, just completed updating all the plugins… quite a time-eater, that was.)

Also, there will be a slight change to what and how I write. No other details for now - but stay tuned! All the changes with no exceptions are planned for the good of readers, and for the users’ benefits!