There have been some rogue Facebook applications that are being used to gain access to information on individual’s profiles. The latest one has now been blocked, but I’m sure there will be more to follow: Security concerns over latest rogue Facebook app. The controls put in by Facebook to protect against these are that a […]

Sometimes you need to know your IP address. Sometimes it needs to be the real IP address that you appear as on the Internet and not just the fake one that your local router uses. An example is when I blocked access from visitors whilst upgrading my blog.

I’ve now completed a major reorganisation of the PenguinTutor web site. This is the most significant change to the site since it was launched in 2006. The first reason for the change is to reorganise the content. Although it appeared to make sense at the time some of the categories were not as logical as […]

This is the second “advanced” PHP book that I’ve reviewed. The first was Wicked Cool PHP Scripts. This is the advanced series relating to the Visual QuickStart Guides. Advanced PHP 5 covers a number of different topics designed to take the proficient PHP programmer a bit further. This provides a good founding into some additional […]

At work I use Microsoft Visio which I do like, but the file format is very temperamental. Recently we’ve had a few documents that have been unusable due to a corrupt .vsd file. Fortunately we had backups allowing us to recover from an older version (although difficult to reinstall), but this could have resulted in […]

Smartwater is a way of forensically marking all your property and valuables. It means that if your items are stolen and recovered then the police can track down the rightful owner. Just as important it also means that anyone found to be in possession of the stolen goods can be linked to the crime and […]

Cywin provides a Linux like environment for Windows. Basically it ports the command shell and some GUI and non-GUI applications to windows. It’s most useful for allowing shell scripts to run in a command line on windows, or running system services such as SSH.

The network time protocol is a means to synchronise time clocks of devices over the Internet. As well as being a convenient way to make sure your PC shows the correct time it is often used to ensure that the time of servers and routers are in synchronization. This is particularly important for database transaction logging, stock related transactions, security logging and analysis, network monitoring and other time critical applications.

Every now and again there is some new post via Facebook / Twitter / Email about the latest deadly virus which is threatening to attack your PC. Whilst some of these relate to real viruses, the vast majority are hoaxes. These are often started as a childish prank to see how far they can get […]

The latest version of Ubuntu version 9.04 has been released. This release has been given the codename Jaunty Jackalope. I’ve been anticipating this release of Ubuntu as there were some packages that were still on old version numbers on 8.10. For example OpenOffice.org version 3 missed the previous release. There are also some updated packages […]