I have finally updated to the latest version of Wordpress and detected several different spam attempts in my blog. The index.php and wp-content/index.php files contained a couple of unwanted links (their size should be less than 100 bytes). One of my posts had some invisible links added at its end. One to a chinese site, disguised with the unescape Javascript function and others hidden by setting the style to display: none. Read More ...

Thomas Goetschi of team schlau.ch presented today the Plone solution for www.bern.ch at the Day 1 of the Plone Conference in Vienna.

Triggered by a Slashdot Story I tried to find the best aerial photo of my home town Berne. Here is what I’ve found so far: Google Maps, not very detailed (linked from the Brad’s UNESCO World Heritage map links page map.search.ch, much more detailed, showing the “Bundeshaus” The most detailed photos I found at the official town map site. When you choose “Orthofoto” from the “Darstellung” selection and go to the coordinates 600 420/199 550 you can see the fancy new plaza in front of the Bundeshaus at almost any scale (1:1000 works fine) If you know of other photograph sources, please leave a comment. Read More ...

For some time now I wanted to change my weblog to a server based one. I did no extensive research, but what I read about WordPress made my try it first locally and then for good. So far I’m happy with it. To get the nice permanent links (like http://pesche.schlau.ch/2005/04/14/wordpress-and-new-hosting-provider/), the web server (if it is an Apache httpd) has to support mod_rewrite. After some failed tries I mailed my hosting provider (hosttech. Read More ...

Ever since I started my blog, I was looking for a neat solution to upload my internet pages whenever Nanoblogger updates the local copy. I didn’t want just a recursive upload, because some directories (e.g. data) shouldn’t be publicly accessible. My first attempt was a script using ncftpput, but it always uploads the whole site. I wanted a more intelligent solution that copies only new and changed files. This is presumably a very common tasks, there should be plenty of ways to achieve it. Read More ...

The Firefox New York Times Ad is finally out (PDF or a smaller PNG); it took much longer than the German ad in the FAZ ;)

While reading an interview with Tim Berners-Lee concerning the Semantic Web, I stumbled for the second time in a couple of days over the friend of a friend project FOAF. I don’t know if FOAF has a future or if it is just another geek thing – but I couldn’t resist and generated my own FOAF description.

Peter Steiner

Software Developer and Opinionated Citizen

Switzerland