All posts by Ryan Cullen

Nintendo Wii for £1000?

Nintendo Wii The press seem to think that Nintendo Wii’s are going for over £1000 at the moment with the Christmas rush, yet a quick look at eBays recently sold items show that most Wii’s are going for less than £300. So where are the journlists going wrong? It’s the usuall eBay scam, the Nigerians. People are selling their consoles and not restricting sales abroad, and then amazingly a small bidding war ensures and the goods are won by a hijacked account and if the seller is rather greedy and unlucky the Wii will be shipped off without any payment. Just take a look at the feedback of the winners.
It’s the same for mobile phones, and I’m still not sure why eBay try to suggest that I would be better off allowing people abroad to buy my goods.

Should I bother to vote?

Ballot PapperI’m still one of the undecideds. I really have no idea who I should vote for. But the question I’m asking myself is, should I bother to vote?

Last time around I voted for Ming, then when I went to conference I got evil stares from my Huhne friends and I have the feeling that whoever I vote for this time, the campaign team of the other will be making remarks about why we would have been better off with theirs and the stares will return.

But if I don’t vote neither side can blame me (unless it turns out to be a draw) and I keep all my mates happy.

Shared servers

There is a problem having your website hosted on a shared server, which is that you really need to trust your webhost. So I was rather shocked today when installing phpMyAdmin that without configuring the config.inc.php file I was able to login to the mySQL database.
Not only that but I could see the names of every table on my server. Now this has happened before, but any attempts to view these tables resulted in errors, but this time I was able to view any table, read all the content and even edit a random persons blog post (don’t worry, I undid the changes).
Of any security issue this was a big one, I could have gained access to a large number of wordpress blogs, and if I looked I’m sure I could have found a forum with usernames, emails and md5 hashes of passwords.
However I’m not out for “hacking”, so I contacted my webhost and shortly after as password was added to the mysql root.

New Gmail Problems

Gmail LogoIt’s seems that Gmail has gone through some small changes, extra divs showing background ajax commands, my email address inside the <title> tags, whilst writing emails the Firefox status/loading bar flashes like a disco and some other stuff.
I know it’s changed as I’ve got an Older Version link, however on the What’s New page I can’t see anything and the same goes for the blog.
The problem, I’ve now had Firefox crash on my three times (over two machines) when I’ve clicked on the Spam link (not everytime), and for some reason it doesn’t want to remember that I don’t want this new version. I can’t see anything great about it, and whilst they don’t want to tell me whats new why would I.
Maybe it’s time to downgrade to a UK version?

Hide from all except admin

I wanted to put a WP-Admin link on my blog, but one which only showed to me whilst I was logged in.
So hunting through the WordPress Codex I tried to find something like is_admin(), but couldn’t find it. Then going through all the PHP files I found this function current_user_can(capability) which returns true or false if the logged in user can do that capability. Next I had to work out a capability which only admin could do, but a quick look at the source code showed that it should be possible to enter an integer which related to a level.
So finally I have this on my blog:
<?php if(current_user_can(10)) { ?><a href="/wp-admin/">WP-Admin</a><?php } ?>