Yup, the whole world probably knows by now too, but I could resist posting this topical cartoon I found today whilst browsing.  If you’d like a laugh at Adobe’s expense go take a look, but remember; “Many a True Word is Spoken in Jest“
Every now and then the urge takes me to enter a photo into a competition (or in this case submission to a mag). That’s exactly what I did today. So don’t hang around, head on over to jpgmag and vote for it (or not) or even better… just click the link below 
You may have read a little while back me talking about one of my photography heroes Marc Adamus. Since he tends to pick up and head off in to the wilderness in order to gain his shots, often far from the beaten path, and seems to spend a long time doing so, for me it’s a big deal when he adds new images to his site. Looks like he recently returned from a trip in the wilds of Southern California, and his new gallery of images can be seen here. I understand that landscape photography may not be everyone’s bag, but just take a look at these, and appreciate the thought, patience and understanding of light that goes into each of his shots. My favourite is Lord of the Valley. Enjoy!
Was reading Rob Galbraith’s feed today and there’s a story about Sigma releasing a new 200-500 f2.8, no specs yet, and no prices, but I’m unaware of anything else out there like this that I can use at this time. I’m keen to see the pricing, I probably can’t justify it, but you never know 
Professional Photographer Magazine this month have announced their ever popular PPOTY Competition which is sure to draw entries from all over the UK and beyond. I’ve submitted some images to a category or two already, I’m quite pleased with the images I’ve submitted, to win something would be an uber cool accolade, well see how that goes. Winners aren’t announced until after the competition closes on August 31st, until then we’ll wait and see what happens. If you’re entering, good luck!!
So here are some of the commissions I have upcoming for April, it’s gonna be a busy month that’s for sure. Firstly going back to a local venue, to shoot one of the favourite Blues Guitarists, Mr Danny Bryant and the RedEye Band, if you haven’t heard him and you love Rocky Blues, you should go to the bands MySpace page and have a listen. Actually I must admit it’s more self indulgence than it is commissioned, although photo’s of Danny are always in demand from the Blues press.
Secondly, is the new Blues sensation Seasick Steve. Steve has a Wikipedia page if you want to know more about him, but he’s the real deal, a hobo traveling the USA for years, plays a three string guitar. Those in the UK may have seen him on Jools Holland’s New Years Hootenanny, where he stole the show. If you’ve not heard him you can find his MySpace page here.
Still waiting for final confirmation on passes, but perhaps the biggest (most well known) band coming up in April is the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, who are due to launch a new album on 1st May 2007. I’m looking forward to this one, should be really good, again a certain amount of self indulgence on all these gigs.
Last but not least are The Lazy Jumpers, which are cross between good old Chicago Style Blues combined with Jump Jive/Rock n Roll. I’m fully expecting this to be a lively gig, I expect these guys have the ability to really get the place jumpin! Find the MySpace page here!
Obviously images will be posted in the appropriate place as always. Take it easy.
Apologies to the photographic crowd that follow this, but I needed to take a geeky sidetrack for this post. I’ve been helping a few friends with websites clean up the remnants of various crackers that have been by their website in the past. To be honest, the hack is quite unsophisticated but the results are quite impressive. I’m not going to go in to details here, but suffice to say that by exploiting an old hole (probably in XML RPC or similar) the abusers are adding various .php files which blend in with the applications surrounding it, files are often named in such a way that people that are less technical tend to be reluctant to delete them (messages.php, includes.php, time.php, date.php, etc). Again I’m not going to go into the details of what the files contain but they are quite short, just a few lines of code. Additionally there are .htaccess files that are planted for various redirect and rewrite services.
So to what end? Well basically these guys all run search pages with “clickthru” value links and drive traffic to the their sites by bouncing traffic thru your webpages. In other words; they will submit a page to google for example, the link they submit will be full of the most heavily searched terms (usually warez, porn and cracks) but because they can only submit their site to Google a single time, they have to use pages externally. So they compromise (break into illegally) servers and infect them. So the result that comes up in Google when someone searches for a porn phrase for instance will look like this http://www.yourwebsite.com/mambo/time.php/porn+search+here where that last part is the search the user put into Google, the first part is your website, and as mentioned earlier the time.php is an infected file placed on your website by the crackers. The infected file rewrites the URL and redirects it to their income generating website in the hope that someone clicks the links (which they often do).
Have any of these people been caught yet? I have no idea, but surely if they do at the very least it’s obtaining money by deception (fraud) in any country aside from any computer violation and misuse laws that may be in place.
There are ways to avoid this happening, mostly revolves around vigilance and being aware of the files in your website (be aware of new files recently added when you’ve not updated your site in a while). There are software programs like Tripwire, that can alert you when stuff like this happens, but are beyond the average user. A more detailed explanation is beyond the scope of this weblog, but if you’ve been cracked, your circumstances may differ greatly and any cracked server requires proper forensic examination to check if anything else has been compromised. The guys that do this, thrive on complacence, try to be aware of what’s happening on your website. Good Luck.
Just finished editing the images from my most recent gig assignment, Steven Seagal. Now I know the first time people hear about the Martial Artist/Actor playing the Blues they raise an eyebrow, but if you take a look at his Bio, he’s actually been at this longer than he’s been acting. Along with Steven on stage was his great band, and singers Jaki Graham and Jermaine Paul both are consummate artists. I came away from the gig after an evening of great blues and the impression that Seagal really is a fantastic entertainer. Opening for Steven was a guy who is a complete character on his own, Mr. James “Super Chikan” Johnson. With his catch phrase “Somebody Shoot That Thang” and his collection of home made guitars, he really entertained everyone, and with his fantastic feel for the blues, gave everyone a really great night.
