You may have noticed that the ‘Cats’ section is now named ‘Pets’. That’s because we have a new arrival, Becky - a 2 year old black Labrador who came to us by way of the Oregon Humane Society. We are currently hunting around for good walking trails in the area, Portland Pooch has some good information on Portland, but is a little scarce on Hillsboro, so we’ll keep on looking.

Well, we finally found the car we wanted at Weston Kia - the 2006 Kia Sportage in Jade Green, so we are picking it up tomorrow. I can’t wait :-)

[ ](http://www.kia.com/sportage/) Currently we are in the market for a new car. The model we are looking at is the [2006 Kia Sportage](http://www.kia.com/sportage/), which looks nice but we are having real problems finding one in a nice color (so far, the only model we have found is Smokey Brown!). Honestly, it always amazes me how difficult it is to buy a new car :-(

Tonight is the final evening in my ‘Portland After Dark’ course, and here are the photographs from last weeks course in Downtown Portland. One of the hardest pieces of these courses is selecting which photographs to present for review, I find that my judgement of whether a shot is good comes as much from what I intended as how the shot worked out. Using the other photographers as a touch stone really helps.

  I've been a fan of John Le Carré ever since watching Sir Alec Guinness's superlative performance as George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Solder, Spy. So when [The Constant Gardener](http://www.theconstantgardener.com) was released, I just had to go. Set in modern day Kenya, Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) is a middle-aged British diplomat and avid gardener married to Tessa (Rachel Weisz), a human rights activist. When Tessa is found brutally murdered, Justin’s investigations lead to a web of intrigue and deceit centered on the drug trials of an international pharmaceutical company.

No posts for the last few days, everything I’m doing seems so insignificant compared to those poor souls down south who are suffering through the aftermath of Katrina. My thoughts are with all of you. Behind the scenes, I’ve been busy migrating the photo gallery from a home grown solution to Gallery 2. This is still beta software, and has a few rough edges, but already captures the majority features of Gallery 1.

I shot some photos at the Portland Japanese Garden and it really does live up to it’s reputation as a haven of tranquil beauty. The five gardens were peaceful and serene, and relatively uncrowded given that I was visiting on a Sunday afternoon. Well worth a visit! Entrance to the garden is via a traditional low wooden gateway reminding visitors of their stature compared to the grand space they are about to enter.

WordPress versions < 1.5.2 running on servers with register_globals turned on are subject to a PHP data injection exploit.

Just upgrade my desktop (play) box at home, and I got caught out badly by a new ‘feature’ in Fedora Core 4. Now if you read the installation instructions for FC4, it has an explicit section for installing the NVidia drivers, just login as root and install the replace the standard drivers. Simple, right? Alas no, at least not if you are doing an upgrade. The problem is that you cannot get to a login screen because the riva frame buffer is trying to load (and yes I did remove Redhat Graphical Boot).

I read this article on Slashdot over the weekend and it got me thinking about the deluge of hacking attempts that I see in my server logs everyday. The tattle program looks to be a reasonale solution, but having tried it for the last couple of days, it really is not very good at finding the right domains to complain to.