As recently announced on Egtvedt Web Design (my “company” site) the new version of WordPress is available and does not cause any conflicts and errors like version 2.5 did for a lot of people. Thus, I’ll be updating Blogvaria in a few minutes now.

In the meanwhile you could update your Firefox browser (or install the latest) to version 3.0.1, which includes several security fixes amongst others.

Update: Everything seams to work properly. If you notice anything out of the ordinary or have had problems with your update please leave a comment.

Olive Riley, of Woy Woy about 50 miles north of Sydney Australia, began blogging in February last year, sharing stories from her life during the two world wars, raising three children on her own, and working as a station cook in the outback.

Riley was said to be the world’s oldest blogger as she was 12 years older than the previous titleholder, Spain’s Maria Amelia. She was born in 1899 and would have turned 109 in October.

‘She enjoyed the notoriety - it kept her mind fresh,’ her great-grandson Darren Stone of Brisbane told local newspapers.

‘She had people communicating with her from as far away as Russia and America on a continual basis, not just once in a while.’

Riley had posted more than 70 entries on her blog - or ‘her blob’ as she jokingly called it - since February last year. She set up the site with the help of a friend who entered her posts for her.

In her posts Riley delved into her remarkable memory. In June she described washing days when she was a small girl, and recalls finding firewood to heat the large copper tub and having to turn the heavy mangle to squeeze the water out of the clothes.

‘That was my job - and it was real hard work for a small kid,’ she recalled.

Mrs Riley left her home of Broken Hill in the 1920s as a single mother with three children in tow. In 1932 she witnessed the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

In her last and 74th post on June 26 she spoke of moving into a nursing home and of her ill health, saying: ‘I still feel weak and can’t shake off that bad cough.’

But she added she sang  ‘a happy song’ with a visitor to the home as she did every day and said she had ‘read a whole swag of email messages and comments from my internet friends today, and I was so pleased to hear from you. Thank you, one and all.’

She died in the nursing home last Saturday. However, her blog, The Life of Riley, is still online and keeps inspiring people from all over the world.

While testing WordPress 2.6 on my other blog earlier today I found a small bug in the media uploader. While trying to submit a support request I came across this rather funny error message/page:

More on the error/bug is posted here. I’ll do a follow-up shortly when I get around to update this blog as well…

Feel free to share below if you’ve encountered anything out of the ordinary when updating to WordPress 2.6.

A screen name once connected to animated TV dad Homer Simpson is being used to spread malware.

In a 2003 episode of The Simpsons, writers revealed that Homer’s e-mail address was chunkylover53@aol.com. Prior to the episode’s airing, the address was registered by one of the show’s writers, who used it to answer hundreds of e-mails from Simpsons fans. Years later, the chunkylover53 screen name has resurfaced, and it’s now being used to distribute a trojan disguised as a Simpsons movie file.

According to FaceTime malware research director Chris Boyd, chunkylover53 is sending out auto-reply messages to users which promises a special exclusive episode of the show available for download. The link in the message leads to an executable file. Upon launching the trojan, the user is presented with a fake error message which is followed by several real error messages and, finally, a blank screen. Upon restarting, the system will run noticeable slower and be prone to crashes.

So again, it’s not a good idea to blindly click links in emails without verifying the authenticity of the sender. We should know better by now don’t you think?

Source: vnunet.com

The Linkscanner feature in Grisoft’s free anti virus solution, AVG 8, has been way too active for some. Linkscanner is meant to assist users to see whether their results in Google (among others) leads to safe or unsafe websites.

In order to do so the software scans the site before the user actually visits it. It’s done by a component called Search-Shield.

Until recently this feature was only available in the full (paid) version, but after being included in the free version as well several websites experienced a massive increase in traffic.

Smaller websites would be lead to believe that it was a DOS attack (Denial Of Service) as the traffic from AVG’s Search-Shield would exceed normal traffic. In some cases the servers were reported to go down. An in-depth analysis is available at AVG Linkscanner Watch.

The server logs clearly shows the massive increase in traffic is caused by Grisoft. Multiple complaints has been forwarded and a fix is now being “shipped” in order to solve the problem.

With 70 million potential users I’m glad I’m running this site off a powerful server with no bandwidth restrictions to worry about. What about you, have you been noticing any changes in traffic recently?