WordPress Upgrade Completed

As mentioned previously, the software which “backends” this site has been upgraded from 2.0.7 to 2.1. It has (so far) been as painless here as it was on the Compuskills Web Design Blog but there have been one or two odd effects. The main impact has been in how the visual editor works when it comes to writing posts. On this blog (maybe due to the theme) it is disabled by default, but can be turned on in the user profiles, but even when the visual editor is working it wont let you hyperlink any more.

This strikes me as very strange for blog software!

Other than that, the upgrade seems fine. If any one knows why Technorati wont index the previous post on this subject, please let me know! Strangely it refuses to acknowledge the updates to the Sci-Tech RSS feed as well. Well, just goes to show, Technorati is mad.

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WordPress 2.1 Now here

It seems about 21 hours ago, version 2.1 (Ella) of WordPress was released. We will look at installing it here in over the next day or two, so things may go a little odd for a while.

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Phone Virus

As previously mentioned, I am the “proud” owner of a Nokia N73 phone (which unfortunately suffers from a few “build quality issues”). As this is a phone with more functionality than a PC I bought ten years ago (512MB disk space for example), and it runs on the Symbian OS I am curious about its susceptibility to virus attacks.

Tropical Bird 1 - Just here to make the post pretty The Nokia N73 is used for mobile email (thanks to 3) and came with a free trial of F-Secure AntiVirus. This has now run out. The free trial was excellent, however given that it was for about six weeks duration and during that time, my phone was not set up for mobile mail it seems to have been a bit wasted.

Turning to the wonders of the Internet for inspiration, I thought it would be fairly easy to find a free Anti Virus package for the phone. A trip to AVG (Grisoft) was no use, as while they do many versions for Linux, BSD, Windows etc, there was nothing which would run on the phone.

So, off to the search engines. A quick run on Google found a post on Mobiledia.com which claimed Symantec had released a free AV package for Symbian phones. Looks good to me, so off to the URL in the article, I go. Sadly this simply redirected to the Vista PublicBETA page which needs Vista and a PC to work. Not much use for my Nokia N73. Searching the Symbian site finds an AV for Symbian but it is $44.95 rather than free – and a quick look at the Mobiledia.com site shows the post was made in March 05. Ah. Back to Google.

Tropical Bird 2 - Not related to content but there to brighten things up. Continued searches on a variety of engines seems to only throw up conflicting data. Some sites assert the S60 V3 operating system on the N73 doesn’t need AV yet (strikes me as madness, Nokias are popular phones and as such major targets for virus writers) and most of the others are posts by people looking for N73 AV software. I have found a few sites which offer it although none for free (lots free for V2 of the OS though). Just as despair was about to set in, I found the BullGuard Mobile Antivirus site. Could this be the answer? A download later, and I am pushing the .SIS file through the Nokia Application Installer. After a few seconds, the installer pops up “Please finish the install on the phone user interface” so I look at the phone.

Sadly the phone says “Installation of BullGuard_S60.sis not supported” and quits out.

Back to the drawing board. If you know of any free AV packages for N73 phones PLEASE let me know. Also if you know of any plugins which allow the N73 / Lifeblog software to talk to WordPress I will be your friend for life.

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New Humanist Magazine

Seem to have overlooked this in the past, so need to make amends now. The New Humanist Magazine seems very interesting, and certainly readable, if it’s website is anything to go by. On the forums for that site there are certainly some entertaining debates (“Atheism is a pretty pointless creed” is one example).

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World War III? I think not

This was an amusing post on The Register, if for nothing else than the volume of emails I have had over the weekend starting “Chinese missile shot down US satelite.” The Register post is titled Storm Trojan gang declare start of World War III and is certainly entertaining.

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