The more pingback addresses you have, the more chance you have of drawing traffic to your website – because more websites are being notified that you have updated your blog. So, here’s a nice big list of pingback addresses that you can add to your WordPress installation’s settings.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.co.jp/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://audiorpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://blogpeople.net/ping

http://blogsearch.google.ae/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.at/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.be/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.bg/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ca/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ch/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.cl/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.cr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.hu/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.id/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.il/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.in/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.it/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.jp/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.ma/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.nz/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.th/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.ve/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.za/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.ar/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.au/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.br/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.co/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.do/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.mx/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.my/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.pe/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.sa/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.sg/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.tr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.tw/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.ua/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.uy/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.vn/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.de/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.es/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.fi/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.fr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.gr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.hr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ie/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.in/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.it/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.jp/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.lt/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.nl/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.pl/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.pt/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ro/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ru/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.se/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.sk/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.tw/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.us/ping/RPC2

http://feedsky.com/api/RPC2

http://hamo-search.com/ping.php

http://holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/

http://ping.blogoon.net/

http://ping.blogs.yandex.ru/RPC2

http://ping.fc2.com/

http://ping.feedburner.com/

http://ping.kutsulog.net/

http://ping.myblog.jp/

http://ping.namaan.net/rpc

http://ping.snap.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.wordblog.de/

http://r.hatena.ne.jp/rpc

http://rpc.bloggerei.de/ping/

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://rpc.reader.livedoor.com/ping

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.technorati.jp/rpc/ping

http://rpc.twingly.com/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://wasalive.com/ping/

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

http://zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php

http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://www.azfeeds.com/

http://www.blogsearchengine.com/

http://www.blogtopsites.com/

http://www.feedbase.net/

http://www.feedsubmitter.com/

http://www.fybersearch.com/

http://www.plazoo.com/

http://www.readablog.com/

http://www.rssfeeds.com/

http://www.rssmad.com/

http://www.rss-spider.com/

http://blo.gs/ping.php

http://www.pingerati.net/

http://feedshark.brainbliss.com/

http://www.pingmyblog.com/

http://geourl.org/ping

http://ipings.com/

http://www.icerocket.com/

http://www.weblogalot.com/ping

http://rpc.wpkeys.com

http://rpc.britblog.com

http://cullect.com/feed/ping

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://www.wasalive.com/ping/

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

http://blogping.unidatum.com/RPC2/

Having the ability to edit the hosts file is vital to many website developers. Unfortunately Windows 7 locks down some permissions, preventing you from editing the file straight away, regardless of having an administrator account.

I have seen multiple ways of getting around this, but I found the easiest way to be the following:

1. Right click the hosts file
2. Click Properties
3. Click the Security tab
4. Highlight your user account in the list
5. Press the edit button
6. Select Full control
7. Press OK in the various dialogue boxes to confirm the changes

Now you should be able to open and save the hosts file in Notepad. Hurrah.

The new Dream Theater album “Black Clouds and Silver Linings” was released recently, and this evening I managed to get to listen to it.

I was quite surprised at how soon this album was released after Systematic Chaos. Perhaps Systematic Chaos was badly received or something (it certainly isn’t one of my favourite albums by them). Black Clouds and Silver Linings certainly isn’t Scenes from a Memory, but you can really hear a difference in the quality, tone and brutality of their sound now that they are signed by RoadRunner. As with all Dream Theater albums, you have to listen to it start to finish, and typically, there are a lot of > 10 minute tracks. It’s very interesting, though, how the sound of a band change when they are signed by a different record lable. Now that they are with RoadRunner, there are detectable elements of Fear Factory and Killswitch Engage, amongst many of the other fantastic bands that RoadRunner have signed.

Interestingly the last part of Portnoy’s 12-step suite is on this album, so I’m quite interested to make a playlist containing each of the songs back from Six Degrees up until now, and listen to them in order. There’s an interesting article on Wikipedia about the 12-step suite, which you can find here.

If you have a Creative X-Fi sound card, and are using the Windows 7 beta, but are having trouble installing the drivers – fear not! If you download the Vista driver for your card, and before installation, right click on the .exe file, click over to compatibility, and get Windows to run the application with Vista compatibility, your driver install should work fine.

Well, after some digging and dedication, I have resolved my computer issues, and I’m typing this post in Firefox, installed on Windows 7 (yum). It’s not as nice as OS X, but somehow it’s nice to get away from XP after all of those years.

Eventually I cleared the CMOS, managed to download a third party application from the MSI forums, which not only formatted a flash drive for me, but detected my system board, offered a range of available BIOS updates, download them, and did all of the necessary copying and configuring. All I had to do is press a couple of keys to confirm the set up, and then reboot my computer. Lo behold, my BIOS flashed in no time at all. After that, I ensured my HDD was connected to SATA port 1 on my motherboard and booted the Windows 7 installation disk. Windows 7 installed perfectly (or as perfectly as a Microsoft OS can), and has been running fine ever since.

It was such a relief, and I’m so glad I found that application before I went and bought a new system board and power supply. I love technical troubleshooting when there are grounds for progress.

I still plan on buying a Mac though – PCs just don’t do it for me anymore. I want to just leave this one in the corner and have it to play the occasional game on.

For some reason I want to upgrade the OS on my PC from XP to Vista/Windows 7. Possibly because I want to take advantage of DirectX 10 or something, I’m not sure. Anyway, I’ve been having some very bizarre issues with installing those operating systems.

Here’s some information:

• Runs XP SP3 with no issues.
• Reinstalls XP SP3 from retail DVD with no issues
• Runs Ubuntu Live disk with no issues
• Installs Ubuntu if I disable ACPI in BIOS with no issues
• Vista x86 (retail disk) and x64 (MSDN download) install, but hang at the loading screen when I reboot. Booting into safe mode first sometimes resolves this issue until the next reboot
• Windows 7 x86 and x64 (many different ISO burns from multiple download sources burnt on different computers) freeze at 1% expanding files
• BIOS update from CD, USB and Floppy stays at “Please wait!”

What I’ve done:

• Swapped SATA cables and used multiple HDDs
• Run chkdsk and written zeros to multiple HDDs
• Run a memtest – no errors
• Replaced optical disk drive (SATA)

Random information:

• Partition Magic is reporting my main C: drive (150GB raptor) as “bad”, yet it passes extensive tests in the Western Digital drive utility
• Vista runs perfectly in Virtual PC 2007

Rough system specs:

• MSI Platinum 7246 V2.1
• Core 2 duo 2.66
• 2GB DDR6400
• GeForce 8800GTX
• 150GB Raptor
• Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum fatality blah blah
• Akasa 650W PSU

I’m trying to avoid buying new components until the last minute, because I don’t want to spend a heap of money, only to realise something silly is causing the issue. Unfortunately I’m running out of options. I don’t know why I’m persisting with it. I like XP. I think it’s just because I know there’s a problem, and I want to resolve it. Any thoughts?

WordPress is being used more and more as a content management system. Its flexibility and customisability combined with its wide support base and easy-to-develop-on API makes it a fantastic choice for developers. However, some options aren’t available right in the admin interface, and whilst what you want to do is probably possible, it often requires a bit of rooting around.

If you want to use WordPress as a CMS for a client, one of the main things you want to do is strip out all of the things you don’t need, and prevent the client from accessing anything that might allow them to do crazy things to their installation. A lot of this can be controlled by defining the correct user role for their account, or using a plugin like User Access Manager. Other things are a little more difficult to get rid of.

Widgets, for example, are a great way to enable users to add little boxes of content to their themes. Because of the way they are handled, there is little chance that giving your clients access to the widgets section of the dashboard will enable them to wreck havoc on the template. However, that doesn’t mean you want to allow them to throw what ever they can on there. After all, your client doesn’t necessarily know what a tag cloud or an RSS feed is, and those widgets could easily be irrelevant to the website’s purpose.

After a bit of hunting around, and a helpful pointer on the WordPress support forum, I have found a way of disabling each of the default WordPress widgets, one-by-one. Simply place the following code in your themes functions.php file, enclosed in PHP tags:


add_action( 'widgets_init', 'my_unregister_widgets' );
function my_unregister_widgets() {
unregister_widget( 'WP_Widget_Pages' );
unregister_widget( 'WP_Widget_Calendar' );
unregister_widget( 'WP_Widget_Archives' );
unregister_widget( 'WP_Widget_Links' );
unregister_widget( 'WP_Widget_Categories' );
unregister_widget( 'WP_Widget_Recent_Posts' );
unregister_widget( 'WP_Widget_Search' );
unregister_widget( 'WP_Widget_Tag_Cloud' );
unregister_widget( 'WP_Widget_Meta' );
unregister_widget( 'WP_Widget_Recent_Comments' );
unregister_widget( 'WP_Widget_RSS' );
unregister_widget( 'WP_Widget_Text' );
}


As far as I am aware, due to the changes to widgets in WordPress 2.8, this will only work in 2.8 – but I’m sure there are methods for earlier versions if you are prolonging an update. This will unregister each of the default widgets.

If there are any widgets in that list that you don’t wish to disable, you can either comment out or remove the particular line that refers to the widget you wish to use.

This brings me one step closer to having a completely clean installation of WordPress that I can use as a CMS for all clients.

Since the OS 3.0 update, I accidentally restored my phone to factory settings – I don’t even know how I managed to do that! Unfortunately I had also recently reinstalled my operating system, so none of my applications were stored in iTunes. “No problem”, I thought, as I trawled through my purchase history and downloaded a bunch of applications in iTunes (and accidentally purchased a few I thought I had).

Once I had finished I turned on application synchronising in the iPhone settings, and hit the big “Sync” button. “That finished rather quickly”, I thought.

After fiddling with settings and restoring the firmware once again, I figured out how to sort it.

1. Click the store menu
2. Click “Deauthorise computer”
3. Enter your account credentials
4. Once finished, click the store menu
5. Click “Authorise computer”
6. Enter your account credentials again

After doing that I was able to synchronise my aplications from iTunes to my iPhone without any problems.

When you register for an account on a particular website, 9 times out of 10 (in fact, more than that), you will be asked to enter a secret question or two, in case you ever forget your credentials. The purpose of these secret questions is to be able to verify that you are you, even if you are entering the incorrect username/password details.

Now, in most cases, if you have forgotten your password, most websites will ask you the secret question you set up, and then send you an e-mail with a unique website address that allows you to reset your password. The security feature here being that even if somebody did answer your secret questions, they wouldn’t be able to change your password because they would have to know the login details for your e-mail account.

However, some services (none come to mind immediately) continue the process on-screen. Once you have entered the answer to your secret question you can carry on and reset your password without having to validate that you are you by clicking a link in your inbox.

The issue here is that, a lot of the typical surveys you see on social networking websites (the ones that ask you if you have any pets, what their names are, and if you’ve ever eaten pizza whilst covering your left eyebrow with a pink thong) ask questions (such as what is the name of your pet fish) that people use as the answers to their secret questions. Imagine the amount of people who use the name of their cat as one of the secret questions, and the amount of people who answer the question “what is the name of your pet?” in a survey. That’s a gold mine of compromised account details, right there.

My online banking service allows me to have a password and a secret key. If someone had my account details and my password, and my secret key was something as stupid as the name of my pet, that would be my bank account compromised just by answering a silly survey on Facebook.

Think about it next time, if you care.

After seeing Night at the Museum 2 at the Odeon last night (don’t see it, it was fairly diabolical), I was sat at the bus stop. A man and a lady pulled up in their car, obviously waiting to collect someone from the cinema. Soon enough, two young girls emerged and got into the car, but the parents continued to stay parked. Eventually another girl arrived. She was about 12 years old, and a couple of years older than the other two girls. Just as she was about to get into the car, the second oldest girl (who was about 10) jumped out of the car, ran to a near by bin to throw something away, and then ran back to the car. Upon attempting to make a speedy entrance into the car, she banged her head on the door frame and began to cry. The older girl stood there looking a bit shocked and worried – she didn’t quite understand what had happened. A few moments later both of the parents were nursing the younger girl’s lumpy head and shouting at the older girl, claiming it was her fault that her sister banged her head, because she was late.

Quite how the older daughter’s late arrival caused her sister to bang her head, I don’t know – but these parents were being unnecessarily horrible to the girl, really blaming her for it. Perhaps it was because the Dad had ludicrously hairless legs, and he had years of repressed anger that was suddenly triggered by the hollow sound of his daughter’s head connecting with the metal door frame.

When they eventually drove off, one of the last things the Elven-skinned man said was “good thing it’s fucking padded” – like his daughter might have crushed her skull had there not been a small amount of rubber in the way.

I honestly couldn’t believe how horrible they were being to their eldest daughter though, who clearly had nothing to do with the whole scene.