www.cardus.com

I’ve finally found a new Wordpress theme that I like – So out with the old fixed-width(ish) browns & greens, and in are the new dynamic-width whites & blacks of the Atahualpa Theme.

I’ve also replaced the default banner images of fruit & trees with some banners snipped from my photo collection.  They’ve turned out much better than I thought they would – Not bad for 5 mins work with Paint.NET

Looks like Google have cocked things up BIG TIME for a lot of people.  Every search result is tagged as “harmful” so you can’t click through to your destination…

Update: Looks like someone at Google noticed.  Everything’s back to normal for me now…

Over the past couple of days I’ve been battling away trying to get the Win32 Bacula agent to back up my Windows Server 2008 System State  and Exchange Server 2007 Information Store Databases.

Bacula currently doesn’t support VSS backups of a 64-Bit version of Windows Server 2008, so there’s a number of hoops you have to jump through to get even a semi-reliable System State & Exchange backup.  For an Exchange backup we use the NTBACKUP binaries from Windows Server 2003 64-bit and for the System State we use the Windows Server 2008 wbadmin tools.

For both jobs we’ll use a couple of “Client Run Before Job” commands to trigger client-side scripts to run the client-side backup jobs…

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I’ve just made a few back-end changes to my blog:

• Upgraded to WordPress 1.7
• Updated all plugins
• Installed new Facebook integration plugin
• Upgraded to latest version of Windows Live Writer

So this post is just to test all that lot is working correctly

Argh!… We turned on the Xbox 360 earlier, and what happened?…

THIS:

So after approx 30 mins on hold to Xbox support, I finally get put through to a call centre where a helpful man takes down my details and registers a free repair.  Whilst looking at the serial number label I took note of the manufacture date…  3rd December 2005!  Today was my Xbox’s 3rd birthday!

*sniff* :’(

UPDATE 15th Dec: A brand new healthy Xbox landed on my doorstep this afternoon!

Yes!…  At Last!…

Clicky here and here!

Andy Quested has just posted an interesting entry on the BBC Internet blog called “How to start an HD channel from scratch“:

I can only image the conversations John Zubrzycki (BBC Research) had with set top box manufactures in late December:

John:

“We are going to do a trial of HD on digital terrestrial and need to develop a set top box”

Manufacturer:

“Great, we can get our development team across it. What’s your timescale and how many units do you need?”

John:

“Well it would be good to have say 500 for a trial in June”

Manufacturer:

“June, that’s June 2008?”

John:

“No, this June – in time for the World Cup.”

That was probably followed by the sound of the phone going down!

Head over and read the full article if this kind of thing tickles your fancy…

There’s an annoying bug in Google Reader that causes the unread article count to increment before you’re actually able to view the article.

Eg:

The problem first reared its ugly head a few months back, with it happening more frequently over the past week or so.

Is it just me, or is it annoying the hell out of anyone else too?

After asking for more info regarding the warning from Google, Stopbadware.org sent me a review of my website. It looks like I’d been hit by a WordPress xmlrpc exploit before I’d had chance to patch for it. Oops!

My transparent bridging post had been altered to include a bit of HTML code to call an external URL in an IFRAME. I’ve no idea what was on that page, but no doubt it was malicious content targeting unpatched web browsers.

This Stopbadware blog post has more info…

All clear now!…

I just performed a quick search on Google for a couple of keywords I knew appeared on my website and discovered the following:

Apparently, the information about building a traffic shaper may harm your computer if you view it!  Err, I think not!  I’ve submitted a review request to Google and StopBadware.org to figure out WTFs happening here.