I got some weird stuff turned up in yesterdays Apache log.

x.x.x.x - www.circlesofhope [02/Nov/2002:20:43:07] "GET /b2/index.php?p=28...
x.x.x.x - www.madeleine.bunting [02/Nov/2002:20:52:53] "GET /b2/index.php?p=12...
x.x.x.x - www.circlesofhope [02/Nov/2002:20:53:46] "GET /b2/index.php?p=19...
x.x.x.x - www.circlesofhope [02/Nov/2002:20:54:45] "GET /b2/index.php?cat=2...
x.x.x.x - www.madeleine.bunting [02/Nov/2002:20:55:31] "GET /b2/index.php?p=31...

Note that there is what looks like (but isn’t) a hostname in the authorised user column.
A google search found me Valley Brook Botanicals and Design note the url on that actually does use a username of www.circlesofhope. I also found Circles of Hope a charity crochet page at the same domain.
There is also a Councilling Service, and St Camillus Catholic Center for Pastoral Care. None of which look like they could be referer spammers (and it’s not the referer field either). So what is that doing in my logs?

Meanwhile, Madeleine Bunting is a columnist at Guardian Unlimited.

Strange.

Here’s a very funny (if you’re geeky that way) Halloween Cartoon! 🙂

Thanks to Dom S for the link.

This is what the previous posts looks like rendered correctly in a decent browser; in this case Mozilla 1.2b.

Do you see what you’re missing out on? Upgrade now, you know it makes sense!

It turns out that people using IE 5.x or 6.0 couldn’t see my pumpkin image. I think I now know what the bug is in Internet Explorer.
There should be an image on the left of this text positioned using the align=”left” attribute. I think this makes IE render the image on the layer with z-index: 1, i.e the background, instead of the containing block which has z-index: 3. To prove it, I’m repeating the image below without the align attribute. So apologies to those with correctly behaving browsers for the double image. Of course Internet Explorer didn’t render the fixed ghosts correctly either!
I’ve not managed to find this documented anywhere!

Fix found!: A user of my theme found a cure for the problem. If you add the style attribute

position:relative

to the object (it also happens to divs) that is hidden, it will reappear in it’s correct location.

I’ve just released version 0.7 of the B2 Link Manager.
Changes are:
Added link owners. Added truncation of long urls.
Each link is owned by the user who created it. You can only edit or delete links created by you or someone with a lower b2 administration level than you.

You can find it at the usual place: http://zed1.com/b2links

Feedback, bug reports/fixes, and general comments are appreciated and should be posted on the forum.

Oops, blogger has been hacked!
By all accounts, potentially everyone’s password, email details, etc. has been compromised. This potentially includes ftp passwords into the sites hosting your blog!
The crackers managed to fill the SQL server transaction log, and then no one could make any more changes including themselves.
Thankfully the site as been taken down now, but it wasn’t until at least 1 hour after the attack.
I managed to check an old test account of mine before it went down and my password hadn’t been compromised.

Thanks to the wonderful B2 and Mark Pilgrim‘s RSS Validator, my rss feed validates!

Cool! 😎

NTL’s default transparent caching proxy server is still broken! Has been since midday yesterday.
Thanks to Robin Walker‘s excellent Cable Modem Troubleshooting Tips I’ve been able to adjust the browsers on all the machines to get round it.

I realise that what I should have done is changed my Squid proxy on the firewall to use one of the ones that’s still working. That way none of the browsers would have needed changing. Plus I’d still have local caching.

Update: For those looking for a proxy. I have set up an experimental proxy here