kaerast's blog

The government are keen to see every child in the UK have access to the internet at home, and with this in mind they have created a scheme to provide a grant for a computer and 12 months internet access. Children need to be aged between 7 and 14 and parents need to be on some form of benefits, but if you qualify then it is really worth applying for.

Windows 7 SP1 is expected to be released late 2010/early 2011. We're not expecting any new features, and so whilst we ordinarily recommend waiting until the first service pack before starting to use any Microsoft product we strongly believe that Windows 7 is ready for use now. It's certainly a lot nicer than Vista and has similar performance to XP but with lots of extra features. To gain the full featureset you need at least professional and a Windows 2008R2 server, but even without it's still well worth the upgrade.

Quick.Cart and Quick.CMS CSRF Vulnerabilities

Name: Multiple CSRF vulnerabilities
Systems Affected: Quick.Cart 3.4 (other versions untested), Quick.CMS 2.4 (other versions untested)
Severity: Medium
Vendor: http://opensolution.org/
Author: Alice

0. Timeline
25-10-2009 Vulnerability discovered
26-10-2009 Vendor contacted
23-11-2009 No response from vendor, report published

1. Background

Last night we hosted the first Yorkshire Drupal Users Group. It was wonderful to have such a good turnout this evening after hastily organising it a couple of weeks ago.

We have created an email list for us all to discuss and network on, and I have created a g.d.o group which is pending moderator aproval.

For those of you who didn't manage to make the meeting, we spent a lot of time networking and talking about problems and possible solutions to

Computer Gentle are running a meetup for Drupal developers, users and pottential users from the Yorkshire area. The event will be an
informal chance to meet with other Drupal geeks, share some of the work you've been doing and see what other people are producing with Drupal.

The event will take place in our training facilities in Mantra House, South Street, Keighley, BD21 1SX on Wednesday 18th November from 7pm until around 9pm. Car parking is available round the back of the building.

I've been using Windows 7 on one of my machines for a while now, and I'm still finding nice new features which make the Windows experience more enjoyable. I am definitely sold on it. As the Linux zealots are keen to point out, it isn't perfect, but then neither will the new Ubuntu be. I use and develop both open and closed source software and believe in using the right tool for the right job. The Vista experience is sufficiently different to XP (and there is no upgrade path) that the choice between replacing your OS with Ubuntu or Windows 7 becomes very real.

Drupal 6 has a problem with running a site on multiple domains. The files directory is typically set to /sites/$domain, which is fine until you start accessing a site using a different domain. The resulting mess depends upon which modules you are using to serve your images, but an example url that might be generated is /sites/example.org.uk/files/sites/example.com/files/1.jpg and this obviously does not exist in the file system.

If you've moved the site rather than want both domain names to be valid then it's easy to fix

The Worth Way in Yorkshire is absolutely terribly managed. There I've said it. It's not properly mapped, it's been moved and even blocked off by farmers, signposts are missing and it uses the same colour signs as the Millenium Way which merges with it. The publicity for it dates back to 2005, and it feels somewhat abandoned. This is a real shame because it takes in some rather nice countryside and villages, and should be enjoyed by a lot more people (I met two other hikers on the entire route last week).

Any worthwhile software is not just developed, it is also used and should have at least some level of governance. The application lifecycle involves all three of these areas, and they all need to be considered when managing the software. This post will mostly discuss processes rather than software.

There are a number of documented processes that can be used in software development such as Agile, Scrum, Kanban and Continuous Integration. We won't go into these in any detail as they are documented elsewhere and most opensource development teams just build their own processes.

We've all heard about there being money to be made in the underbelly of the internet, about all the money people are making through harvesting emails, sending out spam and link building but most of us aren't aware of numbers and so I've spent the past week or two investigating blackhat marketing techniques and some average prices for decidedly dodgy behaviour. So here are some numbers for you