Some time ago the captcha image would not show when you wanted to comment a post on my blog. When I found out I just disabeled captchas.

Today I found the same problem had occured again - so in to the admin I went, and captchas were enabeled - "Darn, how did that happen" I thought. So I disabeled them again. Then I went to check. Now the captcha image was there and working, but I just disabeled it???

Not sure what is going on here. I'm in the process of moving to another host (yet again) - I'll probably put a new version of BlogCFC on the new server, and just see what happens then.

I have 5 email accounts that I use(d) daily. trond[at]ulseth.no, studio[at]waterswing.com, trondulseth[at]gmail.com, waterswing[at]gmail.com and my work email trond[at]idl.no.

The two first ones I've had for ages - since the time when spam was almost no issue. So they were being bombed. The mailserver would categorize low, medium and high probability of spam - and I already had medium and high deleted. Still the amount of spam was pretty high. So now I've started to forward those two email addresses to the two gmail accounts - as it seems that gmails spam filtering is very, very accurate.

So from now on it's from the gmail addresses (mainly the first one) and my work email you will see me use.

Almost one week ago my blog went down. Replaced by an error telling me that "The requested template has been denied access to setprofilestring".

I posted a ticket with HostingAtoZ, where I have my sites hosted. The reply was that setProfileString is a restricted function and that I must have changed my code. I wrote them back telling that I've been running BlogCFC for a long time, and that they enabled setProfileString for my just for this purpose when I first installed BlogCFC. The answer was that they were wrong enabling it the first time and could not help.

Ok - I accept that it is a restricted tag, and I would have accepted getting a warning saying something like "we've discovered that by error...yadada.....could you make the necessary changes within a week." But that they suddenly just restrict it causing my blog to just go down like that - that is harder to accept.

For some days I've been considering moving over to another host, but dreaded the thought.

So instead I decided to see if I could get BlogCFC to work without using setProfileString and getProfileString. It took some trial and error, since I cant access robust error messages either, but here is what I came up with:

In the blog.cfc file in the org/camden/blog folder I just comented out the part with setProfileString so that line 2020 and 2021 was replaced with this:

The slightly (but not much) trickier part is in the utils.cfc file in the same folder. But what I did was to move the configuration info from the blog.ini.cfm file into the utils.cfc file. Now this is not good programing. I could have made a xml file or some other configuration file, and I might still do, but this was a shoot at getting the blog up and running as fast as possible.

Here's part of the code (starting on line 119 in the configParam() method:

As I said - not the best solution, but it's working (apparently).

Right now I "hate" IE7, after loosing several hours of worktime because of it.

Our company website looked good in FireFox, Opera and previous versions of IE. However in IE7 some things looked not like they should, making the whole site look very crapy - not good for a web development company.

However in my IE7 standalone it looked good, so in order to see the same as others, to be able to "debug" the site back in order I went on and downloaded the "real" IE7 update. I then had to restart the computer (after installing a web browser - sigh), opened up our site in it, and got the same mumbo-jumbo layout as others have reported.

Time to try and solve what is wrong. Open up my trusted old Dreamweaver 8, and.... "Error conecting to site". What is this? Hmmm, username and password seems to have gone awol in my Dreamweaver site setups. Hm - trying to put them in there, and get a different error. Restarts DW and username and password is yet again gone. A colleague tell me he has had the same problems with DW lately as well. I think for a second and ask if the problems came after installing IE7, he thought for a second and said that it could indeed be so. A little Googling and behold...

Installing IE7 can indeed mess up your Dreamweaver settings.

So, being a bit quicker than me, my colleague after a while reports that installing the DW 8.0.2 updater fixes the issue. For him that is. After a while I find out that while the username and password no longer disapears, I still get an error trying to connect. I try to remove and create the site again - still same error. I've always set up sites creating "FTP and RDS Server" connection, as this is what I have found is the most efficient way of working with stuff on the server. I then, after suggestion from my colleague try to set it up as a "site" with exact the same ftp information, and behold it works.

Well, now on to the task of getting our site to work in IE7 as well. I created a stylesheet for IE7 and included it like this:

Then it was just to try and find what could fix the problem. After a little while the following piece of code was all that was needed to fix everything:

So now I "hate" IE7, not so much for breaking a layout that was from before working in all browsers. That was kind of expected. But messing up my Dreamweaver settings - now that is unforgiveable.

Up until now sending an email to anything[at]ulseth.no would come to my trond[at]ulseth.no account as it was set up as a catch-all account. However, I'm sad to say, this is one more battle the spammers have won.

The problem was not spam sent to me (that usually comes to my trond address as I've used that for a zillion years - and not to careful about where I left it for the a good many of those years. Anyway the spam-filter on the server catches most of those).

The problem is spoofing. That means that the spammers use a fake email address to send their emails. And when a spammer sends out a billion emails from agfh[at]ulseth.no (or some such random ulseth.no address) a whole lot of those are bounced back, because the address is not valid or a spam filter bounces it back. So I'd get houndreds of "failed delivery" or similar messages each day.

On that note - I think spam filters that bounces the emails back are just adding to the problem they are trying to solve.

 A couple of months ago we bought a "new" car. Nothing overly fancy, a 2000 model Peugeot 406 station wagon. On Friday a lamp started glowing in the dashboard, and a quick look in the instruction manual told me that this is the self diagnosis lamp -  "contact sertified Peugeot repair shop"

So I made my self an apointment and was there today. After hooking up to the cars computer and doing whatever they do I got the message that nothing is wrong with the car. There was a list of 5 passing faults in the computer, like that there might have been some low voltage on the battery at some point. None of the faults was still present. But the list still triggered the lamp to glow.

So basically I had to pay about $130,- for them to delete the 5 faults from the car computer. Duh...