As some of you may have noticed, I’ve become a bit of a convert to the whole Twitter phenomenon – very late to the party I know but hey …! Anyway I’ve been trying to find a decent Twitter app for the Android which I liked as I have several accounts and I wasn’t thrilled with the default HTC Peep which is single account only.

So my criteria started as just “find a multi account app, preferably free so I can play” which led me to …

Seesmic

This is a great app with a very clean interface and very easy to read being black text on a white background – now that I require glasses this is important to me for obvious reasons.

Seesmic has been my default app from day one but I never felt truly happy with it. In all honesty it’s a bit boring to look at, but it gets the job done and that is really all that matters.

But like a magpie, I decided to look for something more shiny and so onto …

Tweetcaster

You may have seen a tweet from me recently  that I’d got a free copy of Tweetcaster for publishing the tweet saying I’d got the free copy (if you see what I mean). Actually I felt very cheated as all one gets is the free, adware supported version whereas I (and others from what I can see) believed that I would receive the paid for Pro version.

Anyway this is a very pretty app and works as it should. But I returned to Seesmic fairly quickly as a) you have to wait ages for the splash page to disappear so you can see the tweets and b) I could read more tweets per page  than Tweetcaster which puts an advert at the bottom of the screen blocking a tweet. Yes you can close it, but it annoyed me so I uninstalled it.

Swift

Next came Swift which is now owned by Hootsuite, the brilliant web based client that I use (you can schedule tweets which is incredibly useful). I’m sorry to say that I didn’t like this at all – for me even worse that HTC Peep. A small status bar at the top with icons which were too small for my not too fat fingers. Uninstalled rapidly. Oh and single client only, which had I realised initially meant that I probably wouldn’t have installed it to start with.

Twicca

I read a rave review about Twicca this morning and decided to give it a go despite the fact that it is only a single account app – and I wasn’t disappointed.

This is a super app with a very clever user interface. The black background can be a bit tiring to read but that won’t bother many people I’m sure. One thing I love is the ability to set Twicca up so that particular tweeters that you follow can be colour coded with a vertical bar beside their tweet. This is fantastically useful if, like me, you are waiting for a particular announcement for some such event/person to appear in the time line.

The downside is that this is a single account app and it feels a little rough around the edges still – hardly surprising as it is published as a beta version. But if it had been just a wee bit better, I’d have settled for this and used HTC Peep for my work a/c as that account isn’t used as much. I’m sure that development of Twicca will continue apace and if/when they go multi-account I’ll be back to do an extended test. This is staying on my phone so the Market can tell me when there is an update.

Touiteur

One of the comments in a story about Seesmic I recently read mentioned Touiteur. Having a French name, I almost felt honour bound to take a look. And I’m really glad I did. It has a great user interface and can be very colourful if you choose. I must confess I was almost 100% sure that this was going to be my app of choice (it came down to this and Twicca for me) but I was niggled by the fact that I could either have everyone’s tweets in graduated gray (not unattractive at all) or they could be colour coded automatically by the app so that each tweeter was allocated a colour which was used for all their tweets. To my eyes this looked garish, and I kept harking back to Twicca’s feature of choosing to colour an individual tweeter, i.e. I choose who I want coloured.

Then, miraculously, LevelUp Studio delivered an update to Touiteur a couple of hours ago and I went digging in the settings to see what had changed. And I stumbled across how to colour code a single tweeter. Yippee! It was almost certainly there in the original version I downloaded and I was being blind, but I don’t care as I have it working now

Conclusions

My first surprise was just how many good Twitter apps there are for the Android. I’m confident that anyone should be able to find an app that meets their needs.

My second surprise was how clever these apps are becoming with respect to the user interface. Twicca is leading the way here but Touiteur and Tweetcaster aren’t far behind.

But my keeper is Touiteur for the time being. But as I said, I’m still monitoring Twicca so Touiteur can’t afford to rest on it’s laurels.

So imagine my surprise and horror when I was checking all my blogs after updating to the latest version of WordPress to discover that this blog had been well and truly hacked. What was interesting was what the hack did which is why I’ve decided to share this with the world rather than bury my head in shame.

When you loaded this site, everything looked normal for about 5 seconds and then you were redirected to another site via what looked like a couple of intermediate/proxy servers. When I first spotted this, I was taken to the listing page for a Chinese TV company which rather shook me as it is not as if my blog is mega popular (I wish!).

Given that in a former life, I founded and ran a very large UK based ISP, I’m used to dealing with hacks such as this. So I fired up an FTP client and logged into my hosting account to see what I could see. I wasn’t expecting to find much in all honesty as I reckoned that any halfway decent hacker would make sure that the date and time stamp on any changed files was the same as the original so as not to arouse suspicion. Having said that, I have seen instances of what we called “script kiddies” who changed things for fun and didn’t care what traces they left behind. Anyway, as I suspected, nothing obvious.

So then I logged into WordPress and decided to change from the K2 theme (1.08 RC) I was running to the default to see whether the hack was theme related or WordPress core specific. And the site worked so the finger was pointing at the K2 theme.

Now that I knew I could stop the hack immediately, I put the K2 theme back and had a play with the site. That was when this hack became interesting. If I clicked on a link within a topic (I have Twitter Tools installed so this was easy to do), I was correctly taken to the linked page. I had just reloaded my blog when the phone rang, and when I looked back, I had been redirected to the link I had just chosen. Further testing showed that this hack always redirected the site to the last clicked link. I’ve not seen this before but I thought/think it was rather neat in a sick kind of way.

Anyway I’ve now upgraded to the latest version of K2 (which was long overdue) and changed the passwords on all my sites as a precaution.

You have been warned!

For many years now I have been re-flashing the ROM on this wonderful PDA/phone. People with iPhones and Androids etc look at my “brick” in astonishment whenever I bring it out to update my calendar or whatever but for me, it has been one of the best investments I’ve ever made. Indeed I have a brand new Orange SPV M2000, still boxed, sitting in a cupboard waiting to be fired up when this one finally breaks beyond repair. Sad I know but …

So why did it need resuscitating in the first place? Well the screen started to look as if it was cracked. I took it with me when the family went tobogganing in the big snow dump we had 2 weeks ago and when we got home I noticed that there was a patch of pixels in the middle of the screen which looked stuck. I ran a pixel unsticker utility overnight but this didn’t make a difference.  So new screen time. Fortunately a friend had given me his old i-mate PDA2K which was in a sorry state but which had a very clean screen. So following the instructions I found on the XDA Developers wiki, I proceeded to swap the screens over. Unfortunately it turns out that there are 2 different types of screens so the swap over didn’t work. Not a major problem – I just dropped the whole of the i-mate innards into my XDA case.

Brilliant yes/no? (Excuse the pun)

Yes and no as it happens. I managed to snap off the lug on the side of the phone to control the volume (not a major problem as this can all be handled by the ROM software anyway). The weirdest thing was that the ring tones were so quiet I couldn’t hear the phone when it was in it’s case.

So firing up my registry editor for Windows Mobile (the brilliant CeRegEditor) I went poking around and came across this registry setting:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\SoundCategories\Ring

The value of AttenuationCategory was set to 5. It should be set to 2. Now it’s back to it’s normal loud self.

So far so good. But there was one other thing that bugged me. I stopped having a pay monthly contract and went PAYG last year as 90% of my calls are incoming (I’ve just switched to giffgaff ). Several PAYG SIMs have settings in contacts to allow you to check on your balance etc. These kept showing up in my PDA address book which was annoying. So poking around again in the registry turned up

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Phone

and setting the value of ShowSim to 0 (zero) sorted that out.

In the words of that annoying meerkat, “simples”!

Most people, I suspect, feel that their mobile is their very private domain and don’t want it invaded by cold callers. It’s bad enough when that happens on one’s home telephone.

I’d heard about this service before but thanks to the weekly email I receive from Money Saving Expert (an excellent service for finding the best deals on insurance, utilities), I learnt just how insidious this service is. If you’ve ever forgotten to opt out when signing up for an online service (or offline come to that) and provided your mobile number, the chances are that this service will have bought your details and added you to their database.

But all is not lost! You can opt out! Don’t forget to do your partner’s phone and particularly those of any children you might have as many (most?) kids phones are registered to a parent and so outside the rules governing contacting minors. 118 800 have a removal page here.

I strongly recommend that you take action now!

Well the sky fell in, and the fall out has been very painful. VAServ lost just about everything: over 100,000 domains taken off line while they tried to fix the break-in/security breach(es). For this company the pain is awful as they have been forced to be acquired (as far as I understand the email I received) by their UK datacentre partner who supplied man power to help out. I doubt the owner, who spent years building his company up, received very much if anything for it.

I lost all my domains. The reason you are seeing this is because I was forced to move to Hostgator to try and get my domains back up and running – I’m one of the lucky ones in that I had full backups of all my sites, both SQL and themes/plugins etc. Not everyone will have been so lucky.

Which brings me to the unfortunate owner of LXLabs who sadly appears to have committed suicide on Monday.

Is a software flaw, no matter how serious, really worth a life?

I’ve bought an Advent 4211 from my local Currys electrical store. Linux was quickly installed using Fluxbox as my window manager – this was easy as the Advent is a rebadged MSI Wind so there are lots of helpful articles all over the ‘net.

It fits inside a canvas shoulder bag I bought years ago and never used, along with an A4 jotter pad and all the other paraphernalia I need for meetings so I’m recycling too. Talk about feeling smug as I set off each day!

So now instead of permanently being behind on email, I can stay on top of it on trains, buses, planes etc etc. And with a Huawei E220 bought on eBay (as I know it is Linux compatible) and a cheap-as-chips PAYG data card from T-Mobile, I’m truly a mobile warrier!

Despite deactivating both plugins, the problem refused to go away so I had to tweak my themed style sheet with the advice I found here.

And it worked!! Hurrah!!

This site is a treasure trove of extensions for both Thunderbird and Firefox which are real time savers. I installed 3 straight from the get go including MoreFunctionsForAddressBook which does exactly what I want (i.e. import and export vCards to the address book) and is absolutely brilliant. And the extensions are updated regularly which is a bonus.

I just don’t understand why the author hasn’t put these extensions in the Mozilla Add-Ons repository as there must be thousands of other users who could use a number of them.

Highly recommended!

She asked me what the orange square meant on her status bar.

I realised then that she’d been a Linux user (Ubuntu) for more than 14 months.

Which only goes to prove the old maxim that you are never too old to learn!

The first indication I had that there was a problem was when my server monitoring software started telling me that various services on that server were shutting down. Stupidly I didn’t react and pull a backup of a client’s blog which we’d lavished a lot of time and effort. But as this was not an unusual occurrence, I didn’t react as I have (had) root access to the box and can (could) reboot it any time I liked.

However …

About an hour after the warnings, the box failed to respond to a ping and has been dead ever since.

And the moral is? Never ignore warnings like this and always take regular backups.