For about 18 months I’ve been a very happy user of VAServ’s cheap and cheerful VPS platform. The control panel was called LXAdmin (later renamed to Kloxo). A major series of security bugs was found a few weeks ago, and last Sunday the security company that identified the bugs decided in their wisdom to publish the bug list online because they had not had a response to their emails to LXLabs.

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?

Philip de Lisle :

A new directory enquiries service has recently launched here in the UK called 118 800. It will allow you to ask for someone’s mobile number.

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!

Last night I took my wife and our 2 small boys to Lord’s to watch Middlesex play Kent in a Twenty20 Cup thrash – and Middlesex did indeed get thrashed by 60 odd runs.

But the floodlights, being used for the first time if I heard the announcer correctly, were fantastic and watching them rise slowly before play kept my boys amused for ages.

Great work MCC – now I can’t wait for the Twenty20 World Cup to begin in a few weeks time!

I’ve joined the Netbook Revolution and become a network road warrier in the process!

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!

Philip de Lisle :

I just updated 2 plugins to their latest version on 2 of my websites – this one and Enhancing Clarity. When I went back to check them later, I saw, to my horror, that they were no longer centered on the screen.

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!!

Philip de Lisle :

I wrote an article for the American Chronicle (”Where Did Customer Service Go?“) back in June 2008 which is even more topical today in these harsh economic times.

I was thrilled, and not a little surprised, to discover that it was #1 on Google!

But then disaster struck! The American Chronical “back end” truncated my article to less than one sentence so my Google ranking dropped to #4 – which is astonishing in itself and just goes to show how powerful the correct web page title can be. The problem with the back end was quickly corrected but sadly Google hasn’t been back to reindex my article since the 1st week in January.

So any suggestions how I get the Google bot to return?

Philip de Lisle :

While searching for an extension or utility to manage vCard files and/or attachments in Thunderbird, I stumbled across the Kaosmos website.

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!

Philip de Lisle :

For several years now I have been a Core Process practitioner. This is one of the most satisfying and profound “jobs” that I have ever had.

Unfortunately it is one of the more “challenging” sells into the corporate world. For some reason, many senior corporates shy away from learning about themselves, particularly at this deep level where they get to understand, literally, why they are on the planet.

So what to do?

I was mucking around online a few weeks ago and discovered by chance that core-process.com had become available. So this was quickly acquired and a new website created; The Core Process Experience was born.

I was really fortunate that a number of my clients, including Prof. Chris Bones, Dean of Henley Business School and a major fan of Core Process, agreed to “seed” the site with their experiences. I am very grateful to them all.

Anyway now we have to see whether this “corporate” website with comments from high ranking corporate players (amongst many) will have the desired effect. I certainly hope so as I know from personal experience and from talking with clients just how powerful knowing your Core Process is.

Philip de Lisle :

In my last post, I discussed the merits of the Flock browser versus the WizzRSS plugin for Firefox.

Well the jury is in. I have deleted Flock from my desktop and laptop PCs.

Enough said!

Philip de Lisle :

Connected, one of the companies I chair, has recently decided to use cloud computing very heavily. The need to collaborate with clients and other suppliers lead them to Basecamp (and a whole bunch of other apps).

This has all sorts of advantages for them, but caused problems for me because I don’t work full time in the company, and the use of Basecamp seems to have really improved productivity – so much so that I was in real danger of unable to keep a general eye on things (one of my briefs being to ask awkward questions). The MD suggested that I look at setting up an RSS feed to monitor things. I must confess that I’ve never used RSS before to monitor news etc. as to me it has always seemed like extra noise – and noise is something I can do without!

Which leads me to Flock, the browser based on Firefox designed for heavy users of social media. I can’t (so far) use this on my Linux desktop PC but it works on my Linux laptop, both running Gentoo Linux which is seriously weird. My initial view of flock is that it is not as good as the WizzRSS plugin for Firefox I installed on my desktop but I’ll persevere to see which I like better over the next few weeks.

But the use RSS for this is a brilliant idea/solution. Maybe I should use it more …