John M. Ryan

Here are the poll results for my post on boards.ie are the moderators fair?  The poll has now closed, and I thought it only fair the share the final results. (Click to enlarge it)

boards.ie

If like me and most web surfers, you have membership to a rather large number of websites which require a password, you probably have a common password you use for them.

I like to keep a common password for sites I don’t mind if someone finds out the password and unique passwords for the important ones. This may not work for you, but each to their own, but even if you do this and someone gets access to data on a website you use, you will need to change it.

Boards.ie was hacked yesterday, boards.ie “as of April 2009 the site has over 1,000,000 visitors a month, 220,000 registered accounts, more than 1,000,000 threads and more than 15 million posts.” (source: wikipedia)

Imagine being a hacker and having access to everyone’s password! While boards.ie do say on their website “While our investigations indicate that individual user accounts are not in danger we have taken the step of changing all user passwords. “, it is a warning to all surfers, mix it up a bit when it comes to passwords.

I find using symbols and numbers and ‘non words’ is a good idea. But at the end of they day you need to use something that you can REMEMBER, but is hard for others to guess.

I was not a Hamster person, but this little guy had something special. This was taken a week before he died. Not sure what happened to him,but in the space of one day sick, he just passed away a few hours ago. RIP

Patirck

Special guest post from Rachel McMahon

Doo-Lally

Calling all recessionistas and fashionistas – who fancies some new clothes and accessories without taking out a bank loan? If you want to be in with a chance of winning a €250 voucher for new fashion retail website Doo-Lally.com to spend with us when we launch March 1st, all you have to do is register with Doo-Lally and recommend a friend who you think will like the site too before the end of January and you could have a whole new wardrobe for the spring! Not bad right? Get registering

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Grilled lemon & herb chicken with mash

One of my plans for this year is to create some interesting meals. Interesting, for me that is you might find many of them a little ordinary. And I love nothing better than to integrate technology into my passions.

I downloaded ‘Jamie Oliver 20 Minute Meals’ for my iPhone, which as the name would indicate suits me down to the ground, simple yet a little interesting . Jamie (and the designers) have  put a lot of love into this little application, it is very easy to use.  Yesterday I cooked up the above. And yes the above image is from the application mine did not looks as delectable, it it tasted pretty damn good if I may say so myself!

By the way, you may have noticed my avoidance of the words – new year resolutions,  I am calling these new year plans, it seems resolutions never pan out. EVER!

There was something odd about Dublin this morning. Everyone was operating in slow motion. People who walked to work, started out at their usual rushed pace, but quickly realised speed is not the way this morning, and reduced to a cautious ice-avoidance dance.

I figured out fast it is safer -  for where I live, to walk on the road and avoid the footpath completely. It was the first day back at work for a lot of people. Very few were without gloves, many had a hot coffee with both hands clasped around the paper cup. Of course it has been like this for the past while, but I had the joy of not stepping out in it.

Happy New Year.

By the way, if we have had a very cold and icy winter does that mean we can have a wonderful warm summer also? I tweeted the above pictures this morning. Dublin looks great in white, but it is a very cautious white indeed!

I don’t watch most reality TV, it annoys me for the most part. I particularly detest celebrity reality shows, usually featuring forgotten, famous for being famous, or ‘remember him/her’ (no not really…) celebrities. So my question to you?

[polldaddy poll=2461487]

There is a lot of under the hood changes, but some interesting changes to the media components, such as an build in image editor!

Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.

Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.

Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.

Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).

Video