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While on my way back from Naas today I noticed a van for a company called ‘Doggie Style‘. The company actually provides mobile washing and grooming services for dogs, but the first thing that caught my attention was the large words ‘Doggie Style’ on the side of the van so initially I thought the company must be in a different industry altogether. Near the company name was more ‘word play’ with what I guess is the company’s attempt at a tag line… ‘good clean fun’. The company therefore has a lot of connotations associated with its name and branding but are these risque (some would say controversial) connotations good or bad?

Of course when people are trying to come up with company names, one of the requirements is for the name to be as memorable as possible for branding purposes. Company names such as ‘Amazon’, ‘Pink Elephant’, ’Pigs Back’ and ’Xtra Vision’ are unlikely to be forgotten too easiliy so in that respect a company name of ‘Doggie Style’ is right on the mark. I wonder though do the (perceived) negative connotations associated with this name outweigh the advantage of it being clever & very easy to remember, I mean I sure as hell wouldn’t want a van with ‘Doggie Style’ written in large lettering on its side pulling up outside my house… what would the neighbours say? Additionally does it make the company appear tacky or unprofessional?

I guess that’s only one example (send me any examples you know of) though, but I’m looking for your thoughts on the topic title, so what do you think?

I’m a laptop user these days, so to keep with the whole ‘work anywhere’ gig I’m trying to perfect I decided to invest in one of the mobile broadband offerings from 3G, O2 or Vodafone. Truth be told 3G were out before they were even in… I’ve heard a lot of negative things about their overall (speed, reliability & customer care) service, in both the online and offline worlds so I wasn’t going there. As for Vodafone well reliability is meant to be top notch, however it’s €30 a month and has a data cap is 5GB which 02 beats on both counts, so I said I’d look into 02 more…

While I was researching the mobile broadband offering from 02, one of the most important things for me was speed, reliability too of course… but that’s a given. I needed decent download speed but perhaps as important (well not quite) for me was upload speed as being a developer I’m uploading this, that and everything via FTP on a daily basis. 

Speed for the 02 mobile broadband service is currently listed as 7.2Mbps for download and 2.0Mbps for upload although they must have upgraded upload capabilities within the last few days because when I ordered last week upload speed was listed as 1.4Mbps, which is good in itself. Those speeds where more than adequate for my needs. I was aware however that these listed speeds are the theoretical max speeds one can achieve given absolutely perfect network conditions, so I wasn’t expecting to get anywhere near them in reality. The truth however is that higher theorectical speeds generally mean higher ‘in the wild’ speeds too so considering it has a 10GB data cap and after a little checking on it’s reliablity I said I’d give 02 mobile broadband a go.

I bought it online (by the way - no sim pin number is included when the modem is bought online for security reasons - you need to call, email or post in their support forum to get it) and it cost €49 for the E270 (the E220 is less powerful upload speed wise) modem and then €20 a month as part of a 12 month contract. I got it the other day and am very happy with it so far, below is some snapshots I got from Speedtest.net. The 1st one is the max I’ve achieved so far while the 2nd one is what I got earlier today.  

Both are decent results in terms of download and upload speed. I found 2.5-3.0MB is usually average territory for download speed, while upload average is about 800-900kbs mostly. Quality of service is good too - I’ve made about five long Skype calls since getting this lad in and no problems at all, call quality was as good as DSL based calls. By the way Blacknight have a nice VOIP simulation test at http://www.irishisptest.com/runmyspeed.php which you can use to check how your Internet connection will perform (roughly) using VOIP. As far as I’m aware VOIP call quality has a lot to do with Ping speed (as well as upload/download speed obviously), which above is 159ms and 162ms respectively from left & top which is good for mobile broadband. Call quality on Skype etc. may be a bit hairy on Ping speed of I’d say 270+.

Although I haven’t had it long I’m very happy with it to date, I’ve heard it can be very location dependant (I’m based in Santry, North Dublin) though so depending on where abouts in Ireland you are it might not work as well for you as it is doing for me. On that note check out the Speed Test Thread on the 02 support forum for a load of Speedtest.net result snapshots from various parts of the country. You’ll notice that some of them are not that flattering, but most are decent and considering that mobile broadband is still really new in this country ‘decent’ for five euro a week should be good enough for most people. Word on the wires is that they have plans to upgrade to 14.4Mbps sometime in the next year or so which when it happens should really stir things up.

I wonder though will us Irish ever have it as good as our UK counterparts, the variety of packages and special offers for home, mobile and other broadband services is massive, for instance (and since we’re talking about 02) check out this deal from 02 in the UK which offers free home broadband when you buy mobile broadband.

Resources:
Apparently the software that comes with the 02 modem does not accurately track data usage, I’ve yet to notice but Shane O’ Sullivan has written a tool which logs in to the 02 website and gets your 100% accurate figures.

Another recent review which includes figures from a couple of different locations around Ireland by Conor O’Neill.

Keith Bohanna’s review of 02 mobile broadband from September 07 includes more sample speeds from various different locations, notice the sometimes huge differences between location A and location B so do your research before investing.

I’m up to my eyes programming another adwords API system at the moment so when I discovered that my Wordpress installation had been hacked, I wanted to strangle someone (ideally the person responsible) because I really didn’t have time for this.

Wordpress hidden spam links hack
The hack didn’t shutdown my blog but it might as well have because it made all my posts unfindable on the major search engines for any of their related keywords (and exact string searches). The hack I fell victim to involves some waste of space making secret changes to Wordpress source files and the Wordpress database enabling him to output a tonne of hidden links on all blog pages via a hidden Wordpress plugin. The links were complete keyword stuffed spam with anchor texts such as ‘viagra’, ‘xanax’ and ‘teeth whitening’ common among them so needless to say the search engines don’t like my blog pages anymore.

What makes this hack hard to detect is that fact that the links only get outputted when a major search engine visits a page from an ‘infected’ Wordpress installation so blog readers will likely not notice until a lot of damage is already done to your Google, MSN and Yahoo rankings. I myself only stumbled upon it earlier today when I seen all the links near the bottom of Googles’s text only cache of my last post about converting to PDF from within PHP so it was by pure chance. The links where present on the regular cache too, however they where contained in a hidden div so could not be seen by anything except the search engines… unless you viewed the page source.

Want to see an example? Well right now there a lots of cached examples on Google of what this hack did to my pages, but I’m hoping they will be gone soon so here’s a copy of the text only cache of http://www.akamarketing.com/blog/109-php-to-pdf-conversion-with-tcpdf.html from today (31st July 2008).

How can I tell if my Wordpress blog has been hit with this?
Easiest thing to do is to just visit Googles text only cache page for a couple of your blog posts (and perhaps your main blog page) and keep an eye out for about 50 spam links towards the end of the page. If you have caching by search engines disabled you can use something like Curl and ‘fake’ your user agent string to appear as if your Google (and then check the page source). I’ve done it already for you though with a iamgoogle.php script, visit http://www.akamarketing.com/iamgoogle.php?url=http://www.akamarketing.com/blog/&google=1 while replacing my URL ‘http://www.akamarketing.com/blog/‘ to the URL of one of your blog pages. When the parameter google is equal to 1 the user agent is ‘Googlebot’, when it’s anything else a regular ‘human’ user agent is used. If your checking your blog main page be sure to add the trailing slash after your blog folder as Wordpress implements a redirect from the non slashed URL version to the slashed URL version so you’ll just get a ‘Moved Permanently’ message without the trailing slash. The code of iamgoogle.php is available for those of us that are ‘into’ PHP.

If I’ve been hit with this hidden link hack how to I get rid of it?
After discovering this hack my first port of call was Google to try and search for some good information. I found three particularly good articles about what this hack is and how to get rid of it so I’ll just point you in the direction of a couple of existing posts if you don’t mind (it’s been a long day) rather than go through how to remove this in detail. The posts below all helped me:

Wordpress exploit giving backlinks, redirects and headaches but no visitors

Wordpress exploit: we been hit by hidden spam link injection

Has Your WordPress Been Hacked Recently?

The above links will fill you in on the complete story but in essence fixing this hack for me involved doing a bit of fiddling with the Wordpress database, deleting some files with strange extensions and upgrading Wordpress from version 2.0.2 to 2.6. On that note I must say hats off to the Wordpress development team, it was pretty much the most pain free web application upgrade I’ve ever be done… (although I did backup everything twice just to be safe). If you already have the latest version of Wordpress I’d still recommend replacing your source code with ‘fresh’ code just in case it’s been edited (which is very likely for this hack).

How can I detect something like this in the future?
After I upgraded Wordpress I was pretty certain that my installation was now clean, however I asked myself how can I detect something like this more quickly (I have a hunch that this hack was ‘active’ since April) in the future if it happens again? I came to the conclusion that I needed some sort of file integrity checker similar to Tripwire to alert me when any of my www space files change. 

Tripwire and many other similiar systems are not usually available on shared hosts but they all essentially take a sha1 (or md5) hash of all watched files, store the hashes and then periodically compare the stored hashes against regenerated ones to check if any files have been edited so writing something custom specific to my needs wouldn’t be that hard to do.

OK that’s enough rambling for today, here’s hoping you have a had a better day than me.