This is my first test of posting a photo gallery from Facebook into my own site. Hope it works! Click the more link for the pics… (more…)

What is it?!

I was in B&Q a few weeks ago and this LED panel caught my eye.  It’s not the type of thing I’d normally buy but I fancied its hacking potential as an ambient device of some sort.

Taking the back off revealed a set of nine mini circuit boards, each with a red, green and blue LED plus a simple circuit to cycle through those colours.  The wiring couldn’t have been simpler – the 5V DC power supply ran to a switch with each of the LED boards wired in parallel from that.

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This is a test of posting to WordPress from Flickr.

Great news today from ABCe… year-on-year we’ve increased traffic to heraldscotland.com by over 60%.  That’s a massive boost, especially for a site that was already attracting over 550,000 unique users per month.  The new figure of 893,000 puts us second top of all UK regional newspapers in terms of growth.

I’m particularly pleased with the result since the single biggest change between the 2009 and 2010 audits was the introduction of our all-new site, based on the Polopoly publishing system.  I was involved in the spec, design and build of that new site – plus the mamoth task of importing nearly 1m archive articles.  A lot of effort was put into both the SEO of the site and the opportunities for social media through Facebook and Twitter.

It all appears to have been worth it though – traffic moved onto a steady positive incline throughout 2010 and had nearly doubled between the start and end of the year.

It will be interesting to see what 2011 brings, especially as much of the responsibility for the site moves to the s1 team.

Link: Big boost for heraldscotland website

If you do any programming on shared hosting environments – like MediaTemple, Go Daddy or whatever – you’ll be familiar with the problem of timezones.  While it’s easy to set the correct timezone on a server you have full control over, things get much trickier on a shared server.

However, if you’re working on PHP and MySQL there is a quick, neat fix you can apply to any scripts that rely on the system clock.

// The PHP fix…
date_default_timezone_set(‘Europe/London’);
// The MySQL fix…
mysql_query(“SET `time_zone` = ‘”.date(‘P’).”‘”);

This works because PHP understands the correct offset for named timezones (master list here) and can then pass the timezone offset (in the correct “+02:00” format) to MySQL via the ‘P’ date parameter.

So, in summary… once you’ve opened the mysql connection in your PHP script, just add these two lines:

date_default_timezone_set(‘Europe/London’);
mysql_query(“SET `time_zone` = ‘”.date(‘P’).”‘”);

And that’s about it.

Ok, so I’ve been a part-time technology writer for The Herald for all of three weeks. It’s going pretty well so far with positive reader feedback and even a couple of responses from companies who’s products I’ve reviewed. But last night I made the jump to mainstream news…

At around 3pm on Monday, a colleague mentioned that the Strathclyde Police site was running slowly. I had a look at their source code and noticed multiple rogue javascript tags that were sliently redirecting users to a website called robint.us. A bit more digging revealed that site was registered to an individual in China and had a history of distributing nasty viruses.

At first Strathclyde Police were dismissive, but after some persuasion regarding the seriousness of the threat, especially to any visitors running older browsers (the site robint.us has a history of distributing IE Buffer Overflow attacks) they decided to take the site down at 6pm.

At the time of writing – nearly 24 hours later – the police site is still offline.

I did most of the background research for the story in today’s Herald (which you can read here) and the story has since been picked up by a number of news sites:

• The Herald
• Evening Times
• The Register
• The Drum
• eWorldPost
• Hack in the box

I’ve also been quoted in the article.  From The Herald:

Grant Gibson, digital innovation manager at the Herald and Times Group, which publishes The Herald, warned that the police should not be complacent about the potential threat.

He said: “Regardless of whether the site is active or dormant at this precise moment, the hackers have a window into the Strathclyde Police page from a location outwith their control. This ‘window’ is registered to an individual in China, which could be reactivated at any time.”