Posts by happygeek

Can I just say, GO WALES!!!!!! What a cracking game of rugby, best of RWC 2011 so far.

Brilliant news. Methinks there is a news story in this about DaniWeb beating Google Panda for a second time. Just have to wait for Dani to wake up and get some exclusive quotes :)

Village Green Preservation Society - by Kate Rusby

Just how desperately are you looking for love? Unfortunately, for some the answer is all too often all too desperately; to the point where common sense leaps out of the window and is quickly followed by the bank balance. According to new research by the University of Leicester in the UK, hundreds of thousands of people have already fallen to what is being referred to as the online romance scam.

In what is thought to be the first formal academic study of its kind, researchers at Leicester University have attempted to measure the true scale of online dating danger from the fraud potential perspective. Although it has been difficult to get a true grasp on the scale of this type of scam, not least thanks to the embarrassment problem which often leads to such crimes not being reported to law enforcement agencies, the research did reveal that one in every 50 people questioned claim to know someone personally who has fallen victim to the online dating con artists.

Here's how it works:

1. The scammer creates a fake identity on a dating or social networking site. Photographs of attractive people, often female models and male army officers, are copied from elsewhere online and one will be attached to the fake profiles.

2. An online conversation will be initiated, and at some point further photographs from the 'stolen' portfolio of images are exchanged with the potential victim in order to further entice them …

And green is my favourite colour :)

Tutorials cannot simply be given 'official' DaniWeb tutorial status without first being peer reviewed to ensure they are accurate/error free, not to mention grammatically correct. While I can handle the spell checking and grammar side of a PHP tutorial I am not able to peer review them from the coding perspective. There is a discussion going on at the moment about who is best suited to do this.

Tutorials will never appear immediately with DaniWeb approved status for the reasons given above I'm afraid. Patience is, as they say, a virtue.

What a difference a year and four months makes? That news story was posted 16 months ago, Twitter has become more pervasive since then...

When it comes to robotic pets I still have my heart set on one day owning a Sony AIBO as I always wanted one when they arrived on the geek scene, but could never justify the cost. The Desk Pet TankBot is no AIBO; for a start it's a tank and not a dog, it's a lot smaller and far less intelligent no matter what the packaging blurb tells you. Oh, and it's nowhere near as cute either. But then again, a second hand AIBO (should you be able to find one for sale in good working condition) is going to set you back more than £1000 ($1500)whereas the TankBot is only £25 ($40). So what do you get for your money?

Available in a range of colours, I got hold of a dull grey TankBot for testing purposes which is the most boring of the options. Still, colour isn't everything, and considering the 'advanced optical sensing technology' combined with the 'autonomous obstacle avoidance and maze navigation' mode I was sure to be in for some fun. My TankBot came fully charged, although a quick top up can be obtained by simply flipping down the USB connector and plugging it into your laptop for a few minutes. I let the TankBot loose on my kitchen table in autonomous driving mode to start with, and while it did manage to avoid the large obstacles it detected (fruit bowl, candles, my hand) it was a case of …

Paradise by Coldplay

Really glad that the DaniWeb community have been of help.

Two Dead Boys by David Gibb

A group of social media experts meeting at Microsoft's London offices has warned that social media is more than just a numbers game and for marketing campaigns to succeed, business must understand how a blend of creativity and science drives it. The round robin event featuring social media experts from across the UK was held by hosting specialists UKFast at the London offices of Microsoft and debated how best to maximise the potency of social media campaigns.

Charlie Osmond, CEO Fresh Networks, spends a lot of time looking at statistics for his clients that cover areas such as what proportion of sales were brought through Facebook, for example, and obviously these are useful to a marketing campaign but Osmond warned that as clients demand more and more statistics, they are in danger of losing the real focus of a campaign. "We have had clients who come in and ask for us to get their business 10,000 fans on Facebook and we wonder why" Ronnie Brown, marketing manager at Outside Line, added "Would you start a television or traditional campaign saying that you want to reach a million viewers? We don't. We start by saying that we want people to act, feel or think differently."

Liz Backhouse, social media marketer for UKFast, went on to admit that MDs are naturally going to look for tangible evidence of success because that is how they have been conditioned to act. People expect to see numbers that show …

I was still working my way through them :)

I've moved three tutorials to the PHP forum so that the mods can peer review them and, if they are agreed to be of the right quality/accuracy etc, reclassified as 'official' tutorial postings.

The news one that you submitted I have just moved into the forum as an ordinary posting. It wasn't really news, nor a tutorial, and makes for a good normal posting.

I've only moved these posts to ensure they get reviewed as quickly as possible, seeing as you've put the work into them, while Dani is sorting out who gets what access and how to the contribute editorial forum. Currently the mods cannot see the posts there, so it seemed most efficient to move them to where the relevant mods with the relevant experience could see them and review them for now.

Indeed, it should be pointed out that thread/post deletion is the exception rather than the rule...

CodeToGo is, essentially, an API wrapper around the Ideone.com online compiler and debugger that enables you to use it to compile and run code in around 50 different programming languages on your iPhone or iPad. It has been around for a while but has always been somewhat tarnished with the 'toy' label courtesy of a total inability to load or save code snippets, requiring you to type them in manually. Actually that wasn't quite the case either, although many thought it to be, as you could always use the ideone.com site to email the code snippets. However, this latest app update pretty much resolves the load/save issue by adding the ability to import and export files using Dropbox to the existing functionality which automatically saves the current code you are working on for any given language. You can now also save and load different files for each language. The Dropbox solution works well in practise, simply touch "Save" whilst editing and then go for the pretty obvious "Save to Dropbox" option. To load then, as I'm sure you have worked out by now, you do the same thing but use the "Load from Dropbox" option instead. It's a much neater solution than importing and exporting files by syncing to iTunes from your computer using the file sharing option. Just as ideone.com describes itself as 'more than a pastebin' so the same is true of CodeToGo. You can write your code and …

I'm not sure how allowing tutorials to be posted there helps at all then, as the people with the skills to peer review them will not have access.

At the moment we ask for them to be posted in the relevant forum where the mods with the relevant skills can see them, flagged as a potential tutorial, and they can be peer reviewed and then their status changed to that of tutorial if they make the grade.

Removing them from the view of the very people who need to be able to see them would appear to be a huge retrograde step...

What part of "if the link just points to another site with a Torrent FAQ or similar, then why not precis that information in your own words" did you not understand? :(

Psycho Therapy - The Ramones

I don't disagree with you :)

Nellie the Elephant by Toy Dolls

And if the link just points to another site with a Torrent FAQ or similar, then why not precis that information in your own words and inform DaniWeb members here so they don't have to leave the site. You might even some positive rep as a result.

AFAIK regulars mods should be able to see this forum, that's certainly what Dani stated in her posting and it would make the placing of tutorials there somewhat impotent without this visibilty.

Am I right in thinking you cannot see any posts in there Nick?

I can see it. Not a PHP guru so cannot peer review it mind, but I can see it :)

Welcome aboard Justin, I moved the thread here for you. :)

FWIW I would be happy to have just the daily activity ranking and no weekly or cumulative totals.

I would also be very sad indeed to see the daily activity ranking vanish though, as I use this spot spammers and other rogue users. A new username that suddenly appears towards the top of the list is almost always a spammer, and it's a very quick way of catching the ones that post in less obvious forums or in more subtle ways (links in punctuation for example)

I refresh the stats page a couple of times every visit as a result of the above, so was probably me crashing the database :)

Samsung may not be one of the primary Apple hardware vendors for much longer though, the grapevine suggests that Apple is actively investigating alternative sources for the components currently supplied by Samsung. Of course, the grapevine is often wrong, but in this case, and given the bad blood that's developing, it would seem to be an obvious strategy.

Sorry, for any more than that, we cannot help with as it is against our rules.

There is one more thing we can suggest, which is filed under the obvious answer is often the best:

Contact the school from which you bought the laptop and tell them you either want your money back or a working laptop (assuming it was bought as such)

Currently, Susie and I have two dogs (a South African Ridgeback cross, and a Heinz 57 cross) and three cats. Khush, Teak, Pitch (a black cat), Mix and Lotty.

I cannot remember a time in my life when there were no animals in it.

@AndrewDJ Go start a girly soccer thread instead, there are plenty of female members of DaniWeb who I am sure would join you :)

I predicted 'at least 46-3' for the England/Romania game so was happy to see the 67-3 result. Mind you, against that team, anything much less would have been a disaster.

Welcome aboard. Until a month ago I lived just a short drive from Lincoln, funnily enough - now in the wilds of West Yorkshire.

Green Day - Jesus of Suburbia

@rj3005

When first saw the the registered design drawings at the heart of the Apple/Samsung dispute I have to admit I thought it almost inconceivable that such a generic and simple set of drawings could have been granted protected status in the first place. Then again I readily admit to being in a permanent state of disbelief when it comes to the whole technology patent arena, broadly speaking. Remember when Microsoft won a patent on what was, essentially, the PgUp/PgDn process?

Actually, as stated in the original article "The Dusseldorf District Court in Germany has awarded a preliminary injunction in favour of Apple which, get this, bans the sale of Samsung Galaxy Tabs throughout the European Union (with the strange exception of the Netherlands where a separate court action is underway). Customs officials have apparently been given orders to seize shipments of the tablet, and tens of thousands of them are understood to have been seized so far today".

To address the apps issue, as someone sent me a PM about this, I did mention in the cons section that Android still lags behind iOS when it comes to available apps. I didn't mention it in the review as that's hardly a secret - but it does not make the Galaxy Tab a 'dead duck' as I was informed, nor does it make the review 'null and void'. There are less apps for the Galaxy Tab than there are for the iPad 2, agreed. However, that is not the same as there are no apps for the Galaxy Tab, or even there are no decent apps for the Galaxy Tab.

DaniWeb recently reported how Apple had won a ban on the sale of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in Europe and even published the rather generic-looking design drawings at the heart of the case. Now a Düsseldorf regional court judge, Johanna Brueckner-Hoffmann, has heard the Samsung appeal against the ban and concluded that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 gives a "clear impression of similarity" to the iPad: the result being that the ban has been upheld, but only in Germany rather than being across the EU. If reports are to be believed, Samsung could fight back with an attempt to delay or block the sale of the new iPhone 5 in Europe (on the grounds that it infringes some basic technology patents held by Samsung) before it has even arrived.

DaniWeb has got hold of a Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet device to see what all the fuss was actually about. Our immediate impression after taking it out of the box was a simple 'wow' at just how thin and light the Galaxy Tab 10.1 actually was. At just 256.6 x 172.9 x 8.6mm it is slimmer than the iPad 2 an at 565g it is lighter as well, and this is crucial when it comes to a large tablet device such as this. Let us explain, although some users with arms like Popeye will doubtless disagree, when holding the iPad 2 for any great length of time there is …

Mobile phone security threats used to be mocked by everyone outside of vendors with mobile antivirus software to sell. That has changed, and how. The online media headlines have been full to bursting with reports that 'mobile malware' had grown by a staggering 273 percent in the first half of 2011 when compared to the same period for the year before. But can that be true? The answer, it would seem, is no. It's actually much, much worse. Maybe.

The news broke on the back of a report from German-based security software specialists G Data which issued a press release detailing that 273 percent figure. But according to a sharp-eyed reporter for Mobile Europe all is not quite as it seems. While the press release highlighted précis of the report, which is what most news outlets appear to have looked at and used to produce not only their headlines but also the meat of the story, states that mobile malware overall had risen by 273 percent the actual report shows that this figure relates to the share of the overall malware market represented by mobile platforms.

As the Mobile Europe reporter states, taking the sequential half year numbers quoted in the G Data report: "mobile malware has increased around 1,400 percent from 55 to 803 detected threats". So why the 'maybe' in my opening paragraph? Well, simply put, although the 1,400 percent rise figure looks really very scary indeed on …

Laura Marling - Sophia

Android phones :)

It's official: Android now has a greater market share than iPhone across the EU5 countries of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. According to newly published data from the comScore MobiLens service , nearly one in four smartphone users in the EU5 region were using smartphones running on a Google Android platform.

In the three months covered by the research, ending in July 2011, there were a total of 88.4 million smartphone users amongst mobile subscribers in the EU5 which represents a 44 percent increase from the year before. Of these, the undoubted winner was Android with an increase in market share from 16.2 percentage points to 22.3 percent. Indeed, Google's Android platform showed the fastest growth in market share of any of the smartphone platforms.

When it comes to the devices themselves, the clear winner was HTC which accounted for a staggering 34.6 percent of all Android smartphones across the EU5 region during this period. Samsung wasn't too far behind though, with an impressive 31.7 percent share. Talking in numbers of devices owned, the report reveals that there were some 19.7 million EU5 smartphone users adopting the Android platform, most of them in the UK where some 6.3 million were to be found.

Both Apple with it iOS and RIM with the BlackBerry platform could barely muster a single percentage point in terms of market share gains, which kind of puts the spectacular rise of the Android-powered smartphone …

Rolling Stones - Mothers Little Helper

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Mary Jane's Last Dance

I reckon the scammers actually deserve to do better out of the Rugby World Cup 2011 tournament than England after that truly dull and dire exhibition of unmotivated play by the English team today. Just saying...

England just scraped to a hard fought win against a physical and enthusiastic Argentina side in their opening match of the 2011 Rugby World Cup campaign in New Zealand. But while sports fans the world over get excited about how their country is performing in the initial pool group matches, some folk have other motives for clapping their hands with joy over the current wave of interest in Rugby Union: cyber-criminals are raking in the money with a whole host of Rugby World Cup 2011 scams.

Nick Johnston, a senior software engineer with Symantec, has warned that advance fee fraud scammers, also known as 419 fraudsters after the article of the Nigerian Criminal Code which deals with the crime in question, are ramping up their attack on Rugby World Cup fans with a new scam currently doing the rounds. This particular fraud starts with an email, which appears to be distributed on an entirely scattergun principle rather than any type of targeted spear phishing campaign, that informs the recipient he or she has won $2.5 million in a Rugby World Cup 2011 lottery. The target then has to pay a fee in advance of the non-existent money being released. Obviously the money never turns up, and enquiries are often met with ever increasingly unlikely excuses and demands for more money. Only the most greedy are really vulnerable to this kind of scam, but once duped into making a payment it can be very …

Good luck then :)

It's been suggested before, but as far as I am aware remains fairly low on the Big List of Dani Priority Projects.

Supporting England, watching when I can (it's got complicated since my marriage went tits up and I moved house) and expecting NZ to dominate the competition. :)

You may not be a big fan of Microsoft, but you wouldn't expect your computer to be held to ransom by the company would you?

In recent months it has become quite commonplace, at least across Europe, for scammers posing as Microsoft technical support staff to 'cold call' people on their landlines and warn them that their computers have become infected with some nasty malware and offer to walk them through the solution to rid them of this imaginary infection, for a fee of course. They get you to visit a link that gives them control over your computer, and an opportunity to install the scareware software that shows your computer is infected while at the same time, ironically, infecting your computer with more malware, Trojans etc.

DaniWeb has been warned about the existence of a new twist on the Microsoft malware theme in the form of a new ransomware Trojan which claims to be an official Microsoft alert. The Trojan, which has been named Ransom.AN, informs the user that their copy of Windows is unlicensed and therefore illegal before threatening not only prevent access to their computer, but also erase data and prosecute the user if a specific activation code is not entered within 48 hours. The Trojan threatens users that the relevant law enforcement agencies have been handed your IP address, and offers to withdraw the pending prosecution upon payment of 100 Euros.

Currently it would appear that Ransom.AN is …

Ever wondered just how many domain names there are on the Internet? DaniWeb has, and can reveal the answer as being an almost astonishing 215 million worldwide.

According to global Internet infrastructure provider and domain registrar Verisign, more than five million domain names were added to the total during the second quarter of this year alone, which represents a growth rate of 2.5 percent above the previous three months. To put that into some perspective, that's a year on year growth in the number of Internet domains of 8.6 percent or some 16.9 million domains.

If you were to look at just the number of .com and .net domains registered, then you are talking about a running total of more than 110 million by the end of that second quarter 2011 cut off point. New registrations within the two domain high flyers accounted for 8.1 million in the quarter. However, according to the DomainTools statistics site the Internet could have been be so much bigger if domains had not expired and been deleted over the years - or could it? The current numbers suggest that a staggering 328,456,608 .com domains have been deleted since the Top Level Domain was first created, and 36,196,098 .net domains for good measure. Actually, domains which expire are added to the deleted column and remove3d from the active, but are available for re-registration immediately. So the deleted column is a cumulative total over the decades.

Interestingly, China …

Glad you found the help you were looking for, and so quickly. DaniWeb really can be quite awesome :)

Some years ago it was fairly commonplace to find ATMs running on XP or Windows Pro 2000, and that had crashed and that were vulnerable to a number of hacking techniques. However, banks tend to be pretty on the ball these days when it comes to ATM security - although obviously not infallible as the news story itself proves.