Technology

A few years ago, I posted about the anti-virus software provided by AVG. At the time, their free version was very popular, and maybe still is. My post was about them earning extra money from their free users by changing their privacy policy in a somewhat unsavoury direction.

Here's a problem with Microsoft Word that's bugged me for ages.

Quotation marks in Word

Sometimes I write a document in which I quote either another document (a book, for example), or report direct speech. I might do this with single-quotation marks (') or with double-quotation marks ("). It's useful to have the choice here, because you sometimes quote a document in which something else is also quoted. Having single and double quotation marks allows or this to be made clear.

"She said, 'What's that you're eating?'"

as opposed to

I'm a big fan of Piwik, an open source analytics suite. Think Google Analytics, StatCounter, Sitemeter, etc. … only self-hosted an open source. There are many benefits of using it:

Yesterday, the Drupal Security team issued a Security Advisory for the Mollom module, SA-CONTRIB-2018-038. The module is now marked as "unsupported".

The security team is marking this project unsupported. There is a known security issue with the project that has not been fixed by the maintainer.

Here's a technical problem I encountered a while back.

Someone wrote a blogpost using the Wordpress platform. I wanted to post a comment. I wrote my comment, and entered (as requested) my name and email address.

I then received a message that I have to log into my Wordpress account:

"You are being asked to login because {my email} is used by an account you are not logged into now."

So I enter what I thought was my Wordpress password, and I discover that I have remembered wrongly.

Drupal 8 and 9 use Composer for package management, but Composer requires more memory than is available on most shared hosting environments. This post discusses the problem, and explores a way of working around it to get things working.

Yesterday, at 7.13pm, the Drupal Security Team issued a public service announcement: Drupal 7 and 8 core highly critical release on March 28th, 2018 PSA-2018-001.

This needs a bit of background to understand.

How Drupal Core Updates Normally Work

Updates to Drupal Core fall into one of new kinds.

There are many scams doing the rounds. People must fall for them often enough to make it worth the criminals' time to keep trying. Here's one which you'll likely meet if you ever register a domain name. If you've just registered your first domain name, there's a risk that your lack of experience will make you vulnerable to panic and respond. So I'll post this to unpick how this works, and to put your mind at ease that you can safely ignore these emails.

I run various websites, and I keep a distant eye on which bits of them are popular and things like that. I'm always on the look out for anything that's not right, or any errors. I'd want to fix them; if you're going to have a website it needs to work properly so that people can use it, otherwise why bother?

For years, I've been a fan of the internet filtering software Net Nanny. I'll explain why in a moment.

However I've just had to uninstall it, and I'm now looking for an alternative. (If you, personally, use something similar, please comment below with any recommendations of products to try or to avoid).