Ask Felgall

Since I started selling PHP scripts from my site I have had three copies of one or other of my scripts stolen. I know this because right from when I first started selling the scripts I have had code in place to at least track when a copy of one of the scripts I have for sale has been downloaded.

The first occasion when I had a script stolen was before I implemented the IPN script that automatically emails the purchased script to the buyer after Paypal clears their payment. Back then I had a link from the page that you get to after making the purchase that allowed the buyer to download the script. In this particular instance the thief simply looked up the destination page in the source code of the page that linked to Paypal and went there directly without actually going via Paypal. Paypal has since introduced a way to encrypt the form to prevent this from being able to be done. What this thief didn’t know was that the page with the download link was set up to email me whenever a copy of the script was downloaded and since the download was actually done by emailing the script to the buyer, the thief had to give me their email address in order to steal the script. Due to the time that they picked to steal my form2mail advanced script I was able to watch them install the script on their site and soon after they finished installing the script I used their new contact form to contact them to advise them that I knew they had stolen the script and would take further action if it was not removed immediately. Since their site was actually part of a school web site competition it would have been very easy for me to advise the competition organiser if they hadn’t complied and removed the script. I am still not sure why they stole my advanced script since the free version would have been quite adequate for what they needed.

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I have decided to spend part of the long weekend setting up and configuring a new computer. At some point in the next few weeks I should have some comments on how it is all proceeding. So far I have purchased the new parts I needed, installed some other parts that I already had installed the operating system and configured it to work with my network.

I recently had someone from Kontera contact me about adding their advertising to my web pages. They had previously contacted me a couple of years ago and I had investigated their advertising and written a review of it but they had obviously forgotten about that.

Since they had invited me to join (for a second time) I decided to take another look at their setup to see what had changed. The two things i was able to find out were that:

1. They still don’t support Opera and still have their script set up so that Opera users end up downloading it even though it doesn’t work for them.
2. Instead of the huge 18k script that they were using when I first looked at their setup they now have a 39k script.

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I have been using the free antivirus from AVG on my computers for a while now. Just recently they started displaying nag screens about buying their new version 8 security suite. A couple of days ago I found out that the paid version 8 wasn’t the only new release and decided to download the free version 8 to take a look.

All I can say is what a terrible job that they have done as I ended up wasting about 10 hours attempting to install this new program only to end up having trouble finding a copy of the old program (the one that actually works) to reinstall in place of the new mess.

I guess part of the problem is the range of operating systems that I run with some older versions as well as newer ones.

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I finally got around to installing the latest upgrades to Spybot last weekend and immediately had problems with Firefox loading extremely slowly (including slow script popups). Even switching between pages was slow.

Knowing that this sort of problem is usually caused by a plugin, I disabled all the plugins and the problem disappeared. That confirmed that the issue is definitely a plugin problem. I tried re-enabling the plugins until the problem came back and identified the Cookie Safe plugin as the problem one. Re-enabling all the other plugins except for that one meant that Firefox was functioning properly again and all my desired plugins were operational except for the Cookie one.

A quick Google search showed that this was a well known problem and also provided a solution - a CS Lite plugin that can substitute for the problem one providing the desired functionality without clashing with Spybot.

A couple of months ago my ISP did something really strange. They took a perfectly good working home page for their site and replaced it with Flash. Fortunately they left one ordinary web link on their page that takes you to a copy of their old home page or I would have been forced to look for a new host. Certainly this stupidity on their part means that I would no longer consider recommending them to anyone else.As I have a Flash blocker installed in my browser, all I see when I visit their home page now is a big F in the middle of the screen and the single link is concealed at the bottom of the page. That F obviously stands for a four letter word followed by another three letter word which is what most people used to do when confronted with Flash intro pages on the front of sites.

I guess using Flash as a home page to drive people away has become so rare lately because people stopped doing such stupid things that some people have now forgotten how stupid it is. Now I don’t know if their home page is just a fancy intro/go away page or actually contains an interactive page that just happens to be written in Flash.

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I needed to reinstall one of my printers a few days ago. The reason I needed to do this was that I wanted to shift the printer from being connected to a specific computer to using a print server to connect it directly to the network. This would allow the printer to be available to print to from any of the computers without requiring a specific computer to be turned on in order to access it.

The actual install of the print server onto the network and enabling each of the computers to see the printer again after the move went through without any problem. Where the problem came was when actually trying to print to the printer from certain programs. For some stupid reason the printer insisted in installing itself with a configuration to use some obscure paper size that the printer itself doesn’t even have a paper tray for instead f configuring itself to work with the standard paper size that it does support. Every attempt to print to selected programs would just hang the printer since it knoew that it couldn’t print to that size.

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I just came across an absolutely horrible blog. I don’t know exactly what wwas on the page because I gave up on waiting for the page to load after waiting several minutes. I had scrolled down around four or five times while waiting and the scrollbar was still nearly at the very top.

Obviously the owner of the blog had inserted the entire content of each page for their blog in such a way that it would appear in its entirety in each page that referenced it rather than just displaying an introductory paragraph or two and then using the <!-­-more-­-> tag to provide a link to a separate page to display the entire article like this:

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