North of the Stupid Line

It’s quite bizarre to think that we’ve got a new Prime Minister in Gordon Brown. Be honest, who looks the more Prime Minister-ly?

Source: BBC News: Cabinet faces: old and new

When I think of Brown jetting off to the USA to meet George Bush at the White House, there’s something wrong with that image. The same is true of Brown jetting off to the Middle East, Africa, even Europe, to meet with other world leaders. It could simply be that Blair was PM for 10 years, and he had a high international profile, which Brown has yet to attain.

For the duration of Brown’s premiership, I have a feeling that he will be a domestic PM, in the sense that his policies will be UK-focused rather than international. To be fair, there is a great deal to do in the UK, and the BBC has provided a useful summary of the issues Brown faces: What’s in Brown’s in-tray?. In short, he has to sort out the NHS, education and security. It’s a well known fact that despite increased spending in the NHS and education, there has been little improvement. Why? I suspect it’s all been swallowed up in red tape, a common issue within British society.

This week, Brown announced his new Cabinet, and the one politician I’ve got my eye on is David Milliband, the new Foreign Secretary. He had a blog when he was in the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and if he has one as Foreign Secretary, I’ll definitely be subscribing to its feed. He’s also young, Jewish, and most importantly, not afraid to criticise the United States and Israel. There’s been enough pussyfooting around – time for some harsh words and more common sense on the international field.

These are interesting times for British politics.

I’m very pleased to announce that I have a new laptop, the Toshiba A100 Celeron M 1.86GHz 1GB 80GB DVD±RW XPPro.

Here’s a pic:

It’s SO nice to be back to normal!

… that I have to inform you that my laptop died on Wednesday and has gone to the place where dead laptops go to in the sky.

It was a work laptop, and I should hopefully have a new replacement this week. Until then, I’m relying on other people’s laptops and those laptops that wait around for some lovely new owner to pick them up, brush the dust off and give them a reason to live again!

I probably won’t post to North of the Stupid Line too much over the next week or so. If you’re going to miss my witticisms, comment and tell me/us!

BSL translation coming soon.

Following on from Dennis’ post on The Talkie (albeit focused on unity within the Deaf community in the USA), it would be interesting to see whether unity can be achieved within the Deaf (( Deaf, used in this context to cover Deaf, Deafblind, deaf, deafblind and hard of hearing people )) community in the UK. With this in mind, I’d like to ask each of these groups of Deaf people what they’d like to see happen in the UK, to establish whether the various groups have any common denominations with which to unite. Here are a few suggestions, based on my personal experience and observations.

Deaf

• Legal protection for BSL, in the form of a BSL Act;
• Improved access to mainstream services;
• Better subtitling and more BSL on TV channels and the web; and
• Education through BSL (for Deaf and hearing)

deaf

• Improved access to digital hearing aids;
• Inclusion in the Deaf community;
• Recognition of the right to use oral means of communication without criticism; and
• Better subtitling on TV channels and the web.

Hard of hearing

• Improved access to hearing aids; and
• Better subtitling on TV channels and the web

Quite surprising how many common aims these groups have.

What else do these groups of Deaf people want from society today? Discuss.

You may have noticed over the last week or so a rather annoying little denomination on nearly all my blogs or websites. As you attempted to load the index page, it would load very slowly, and show “m-gallery.org” in the status bar, as if the page was being redirected away from the blog or website to m-gallery.org. Eventually, the page would time out, you’d end up with a blank page, or your browser would crash.

This code was the culprit:

[html][/html]

Somehow, a hacker managed to access 3,500 FTP accounts on Dreamhost servers (including mine), and editing index.* pages to include the above code. When this started happening with the websites on my server, I googled “m-gallery.org”, which only found 3 results, none of which made sense. Now, there are 76 results, which illustrates how the problem spread quickly.

There’s a good summary of the whole shebang here that explains how the hack worked.

If you’ve been infected as a result of accessing one of my blogs or websites, then I do apologise. You will be pleased to know that I *think* I have now managed to obliterate this nasty little bastard from my server. If you spot it anywhere, give us a shout.

Oh, I suppose I should tell you how to get rid of it if you’ve been infected. Basically, if you’re running a WordPress installation you just need to replace the index.php in the root of the installation, wp-admin and in the theme folder that you’re using with either a fresh copy or a copy that you may have backed up on your system. If it’s a simple website with HTML pages, just replace index.html with a copy you may have backed up on your system.