January « 2008 « dougandrews.co.uk

January 29, 2008

Spam email follow up

Filed under: Spam — admin @ 5:15 pm

my blog is pretty new and I have not really made any efforts to make it rank well, as a result traffic is not that great.

This made the impact of my post on a domain name scam all the more pronounced, as my blog came up for all sorts of variations on the scammers’ theme. I’m pleased that my post proved useful

Because this traffic to my post dwarfs the little other traffic I get I got a good insight into when and where these emails must have gone. My first traffic hit came on the 18th Jan, followed by subsequent spikes on the 21st and 24th. Visits died a death on the 26th and 27th and were on the increase again yesterday.

The US seems to have been the biggest recipient of the Spam emails, with 27.5% of the resulting traffic. The UK came next with 13%. After that it was Australia, Germany, Spain, Canada, China (maybe they were checking up on progress!!), the Netherlands, Japan and finally Italy.

I’ll make sure I post any other such emails when they come in, not for the traffic but because it seems a great way to notify people to watch out.

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January 21, 2008

Spam count

Filed under: Selfcateringhols,Spam,comment — Tags: Spam — admin @ 10:25 am

This morning I had 2337 emails in my spam folder, this is after the bulk auto-deleting of any emails sent to all non-registered SCH addresses, and not one false positive amongst them. This also doesn’t count the Spam emails that get through the filter and which arrive in my inbox. What a waste of my time.

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January 16, 2008

Storing arrays in a database

Filed under: Resources/Tools,Techie stuff — Tags: array, implode, serialize, unimplode, unserialize — admin @ 9:33 am

This is a good resource on how to do it and also the pro’s and con’s of using serialize/unserialize versus implode/unimplode versus the use of separate tables – each has it’s own place it seems.

Storing arrays in a database

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January 15, 2008

Spam: Asia Domain Name Registration Limited

Filed under: Spam — admin @ 10:09 am

I received the following email:

Dear CEO,

We are Asia Domain Name Registration Limited, which is the Internet Registration Center (Asia DNR) in Asia. We have something important need to confirm with your company.On the Jan 15, 2008, we received an application formally. One company named “MieDac Holdings Limited” applied for the internet trademark keyword?Selfcateringhols ?and the domain names?selfcateringhols.cn,selfcateringhols.com.cn,selfcateringhols.hk,selfcateringhols.asia etc.?.
These days we are dealing with it, After our initial examination, we found that the internet trademark keyword and domain names applied for registration are as same as your company’s name and trademark. hope to get the affirmation of your company because that may relate to your intellectual property on internet. Now we have not finished the registration of MieDac company yet, in order to deal with this issue better, please let someone who is responsible for trademark or domain name contact me as soon as possible.

Best Regards,

Alvin.Yang

Sponsoring Registrar:
Asia Domain Name Registration Limited
Tel: 00852-3075 9838
Fax: 00852-3177 1520 00852-3177 1510
Email: alvin.yang@asiadnregistry.com
Website: www.asiadnregistry.com

This bears a remarkable similarity to this one. The names may be different but the format (and telephone numbers, interestingly) are the same. The domain name is a variation on a theme. Don’t get sucked in..

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January 8, 2008

Holiday Which? & RyanAir

Filed under: comment — admin @ 2:03 pm

Holiday Which? have today released a report saying that customers are paying more than the headline price for budget flights – no great surprise there, I think everyone pretty much knows or expects it, despite seemingly ineffective laws to stop the practice.

RyanAir come out top of the list as worst offenders, again, no great surprise to anyone who has tried to book through their site – it’s bloody awful, at every step of the way they try and make you pay for things that you don’t want by selecting them by default.

I recently booked flights for my family through RyanAir and painstakingly went through each page, unticking the insurance that I didn’t want, the priority boarding that I didn’t want etc etc until I got to the payment page where I was presented with a total amount payable.

Having paid the ‘total payable’ I then received the bill:

You’ll see that the price paid is almost 10% higher than the ‘total payable’ amount. It transpired that this was a credit card fee: this is charged on a per person, per flight basis.

This is in my view a disgusting and ill conceived misrepresentation:

credit card companies charge a % of the total amount paid, usually 3% or less
there is no relation between the number of persons traveling, nor the number of flights booked, and the charge made by the credit card companies
the amount charged by RyanAir for using a credit card was in this instance up to or more than 3 times higher than the amount the credit card companies will have charged them*
finally, and possibly most importantly, they did not display the charge in the amount payable. There is no technical reason why they cannot do that – why would RyanAir do that, could it be that rather than simply passing on the charge they get from the credit card companies, they’re actually making a hefty profit?? You’ll see that in the middle ‘total payable’ figure it does say ‘excluding handling fees’, which no-doubt RyanAir would say is sufficient notification but personally I think it woefully insufficient.

The ridiculous thing is that 274 euros for a family to fly to the UK is a good price, if they had told me up front I would have been happy with it, but instead feel deliberately fleeced. It’s worth noting that the flights were advertised at 5 cents each way.

The only reason for flying with RyanAir is that parking it Reus airport is currently free, which makes quite a difference if you’re leaving your car. I notice they’re developing the ‘terminal’ (currently little more than a shack) which will likely result in paid car parking, after which I’ll never chose RyanAir again if I can help it.

* I don’t have the figures that RyanAir are charged by credit card companies but I know that our small company pays less than 3% so anticipate that a large aggressively profit hungry company such as RyanAir will have whittled this figure down to considerably less.

At www.selfcateringhols.com we often have people going through the entire reservation process looking for hidden charges, but we believe that the price advertised should be the price paid – the sooner they bring the budget airlines into line the better.

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January 2, 2008

Creating a dynamic, database driven form

Filed under: Techie stuff — admin @ 3:06 pm

Creating a dynamic, database driven form using mysql and php.

In principal this doesn’t sound too difficult: call the database, check how many fields are required and loop through printing each required field. The complication comes when receiving the data, because you need to know what information to expect and the relevant field names.

Printing your form fields.
Assuming you have called a list of records from a mysql database ($formfields in my code below), simply loop through each relevant row printing a new field with [] after the field name:

do {

html.= “<INPUT TYPE=TEXT NAME=’input[]‘>”;

} while ($formfields = mysql_fetch_assoc($fields));

</FORM>

Receiving your data.
You need to count how many records there are:

for ($i=0;$i<count($_POST['input']);$i++) {

}

Within the loop pull the posted data and assign it to a variable:

for ($i=0;$i<count($_POST['input']);$i++) {

$data = ($_POST['input'][$i]);

}

Once the variable is assigned the value, do what you need to do, still within the loop. i.e. to add a new row to a database:

for ($i=0;$i<count($_POST['input']);$i++) {

$data = ($_POST['input'][$i]);

$insert_newdata = “INSERT INTO TableName “;
$insert_newdata.= “(MyData) “;
$insert_newdata.= “VALUES ($data) “;
$newdataitem = mysql_query($insert_newdata, $yourdatabase) or die(mysql_error());

}

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