Is eBay encouraging Identification fraud

Other day I was on the train and there was this middle aged lady sitting besides me. She was talking to her friend (my assumption) on the phone and instructing her to logon to eBay. Well…she very LOUDLY (I am stressing on loudly) gave her username and password to her but that did not seem to work for some reason. Then she hung up and called back with the correct password.

I am sure now you would like to know what the fuss was about…well she bid for some item on eBay and forgot the time it was on for and under no circumstances was she willing to let this opportunity slip away. I found this hilarious when educated people give out their personal details “on a train” & “over the phone” & “out loud” (the worst possible combination you can think of) and then complain about Identification fraud. And give a brilliant opportunity to insurance companies to introduce new plans to cover one against identification frauds.

Well simple rule of thumb says “Be careful”….

Tryst with WordPress

It took me a long time to install my local copy of wordpress.

Problem: For some reason the PHP install failed to recognise the existence of mysql on my machine and gave the following error “Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL”.

Environment: Apache 2.2 on Windows XP, PHP 5, MySQL 5

Solution: Make sure the extension=php_mysql.dll is commented out in php.ini and that the extension dir variable in php.ini is amended from “./” to “C:/PHP/ext”. Also please ensure the php_mysql.dll is copied to system32 folder in windows and its location is explicitly added to the PATH environment variable. Then it should work straight away. I had few other trivial errors but I will let your ambitious self sort them out.