CGarvey.ie - The personal website of Cathal Garvey

I use Google Reader to flick through headlines of various RSS feeds I’m interested in. With many thousands of articles in a given week, I really glance through the headlines before deciding to read any provided excerpt. Only if the excerpt tickles my fancy will I actually read the rest of the article.

I learnt of the news of Diego Maradona‘s end of tenure as Argentina’s national soccer team coach with 2 adjoining headlines from RTÉ and Breaking News.

Whilst both articles have the exact same wording for the first paragraph, both use wildly conflicting headlines to describe the news. Whilst RTÉ’s news editorial is generally superior to TCM/BreakingNews, they’ve really lost the battle on this one! Read RTÉ’s news report or TCM BreakingNews’ report.

For the record, Maradona wasn’t sacked. In fact to say he has “called it quits” is misleading as well (but nowhere near as misleading as RTÉ’s headline!). However, it was decided that his contract wouldn’t be renewed. Big difference, even if somewhat pedantic (moi?)!

If you use DropBox and, specifically, its iPhone client, then you need to be aware of how the URL feature works, or risk exposing your private files.

When you view a private file (i.e. a file not in your Public folder), you have the option to “Copy URL to Clipboard”. Normally, one would expect that to be the private URL for your private file. That is, the long URL that requires a DropBox login to view.

Not so in this case! What happens is, a short URL (using DropBox’s own URL shortening service, db.tt) is generated for the file. However, it’s a direct link to download the file. It’s not simply a shortened URL to point to the private URL for the file.

Big security risk? No, not a huge risk, but it does mean that there’s now a chance that your private file will be “brute forced”, or guessed, by someone. The private URL is as good as your password (which should be more than 6 characters! It is, right?!), but this short URL is only as good as the 6 alphanumeric characters.

Something to be aware of (particularly if you’re used to using DropBox outside of the iPhone client), rather than cause for panic!

Python users who use Django or Google App Engine on the Mac, will likely benefit from the python imaging library (PIL).

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If you, like me, are installing the dotMobi WordPress Mobile Pack on a server with PHP4 installed, and you enable the “Shrink images” feature under “Mobile Theme”, you will likely see just the header of a blog post being out put for mobile devices (and not the full content).

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If you need SMS delivery reports on your iPhone, you might have read that the iPhone doesn’t suport them. It doesn’t, unfortunately!

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