Went to see Signs tonight - most boring film i've seen in a long time - actually fell asleep during it. The only interesting bit was the last twenty minutes or so. Kristen thought it was excellent so don't just go by my opinion :-)
September 2002 Archives
Congratulations to Tim and Ruth who have just won a PS2 each - how lucky is that?
Thanks to There is now a long awaited utility that checks to see if Lavasoft's Ad-aware signature file has been updated, and if so it downloads it. For those who are not aware, this utility checks to see if there are any spyware (software that reports on your surfing habits etc) installed on your computer.
Finally - I've worked out what is wrong with Kelly's website in that it keeps making adobe acrobat launch in the background. She has a counter at the bottom of the page and that is what is loading acrobat for some reason......It is the bit which loads the graphic up (the javascript) that does it although I don't know why - all I know is that the counter does not load on the screen. Incidentally it also occurs when I visit the counters homepage.
Spent the best part of a couple of hours messing around with the comments. I can either give people the choice to allow comments or not, but no search facility - OR I can have search facilities but no comment switching (at least in the archives - it works on the main page for some reason at the moment....but I think that may be ie caching the main page.
Assuming the website stays up, Virgin are taking part in the opportunity to download from 10000 mp3 free on the third oct, but you need to register on the 2nd.
My wife got an SMS message on her mobile last night to say that as a loyal vodaphone customer she had won 400 pounds. The first message just gives a phone number (premium rate) to ring to claim. The second sms gives details of who is running it. Checking their website at http://www.4tc.biz its just a con to get your name and address and you get some travel vouchers for Airtours etc. So it is too good to be true. For the benefit of googlers, then the phone number was 09061744130
Just caught up on my lockergnome emails and I made it into their GnomeReport for the 25.9.02! They must have been busy as I sent it on the third September!
Sometime overnight our Caller ID and callsign were switched on. The daft thing is that they said it would be available today and to ring back to get the callsign number today. But they neglected to tell me that the department which would tell me my call sign number is not actually open on a Saturday. Fortunately I realised and checked yesterday in case they could tell me. There is not a lot of difference between the call sign rings to tell, the second number has one long burst rather than a brrr brrr thing.
A funny parady of hotornot is Am I an otter or not courtesy of the "Best British Blog" (bar mine of course) according to the guardian.
I found out the reason the hard disk was "full" with 1.7gb - it needed a scandisk and the results were several lost files (not 1gigs worth) and a wrongly calculated disk free. Space now goes down to 4mb - time to start pruning I think :-)
Dont try and win something from Luckysurf as the only thing you are likely to get from joining up with them is spam. I (stupidly) joined up a long time ago using a unique email address so that I could track it, and have now started getting spam to that address - 5 in the last couple of days, so they are giving email address's out to third partys and I *NEVER* tick the box to let them do that!
Any ideas why my 98 box keeps insisting that I am out of disk spac when I have 1.3GB left on my C: (windows boot and temp drive) location? Update Hopefully this little tinker, disabling the disk space cleaning program on all drives will do the trick.
Happy birthday Google - what did we do without you 4 years and 1 day ago????
Wow - noone complained that the comments were causing a javascript error. I think this is because everytime I change the template slightly in the blogger webpage, it changes the ampersand into the letters amp and puts it in twice. This then creates the javascript error. Now fixed :-)
Register.com, the sneaky domain register has been caught out! They had made a "auto-renew" option for domain names and then signed people up to use it, apparently without them agreeing to it. This meant that people were getting their domains renewed, often at a higher price than somewhere else. They've had to stop now though as the amount of chargebacks that have occured due to people disputing the charges have meant its getting expensive for them :-)
Oops! Virgin's Winathon website is down
Was sent this Optical Illusion this afternoon and I have checked it out and they are the same colours!
I've used Newzcrawler enough to know that I need to register. The forms have been filled in and I'm now eagerly awaiting my registration information. :-)
Thanks to DiveIntoMark if you are using an RSS reader such as Newzcrawler or Aggie then this page can be auto added to your news feeds.
Mandrake 9.0 is out now...I think i'll wait a week or so until the bugs come out :-)
Ack - the signature is annoying - hope that is turned off when I register :-(
The new version of Newzcrawler now has a built in Blog posting capabilities (yes I know the old version did - but the new version looks a lot better!). I really do think I'll be registering this software at the end of the trial period. I will have to test it to ensure it works at work through the firewall though :-)
--
Composed with Newz Crawler 1.3 http://www.newzcrawler.com/
Newzcrawler
have released version 1.3.0 - looks good - I'm downloading it now. The cool thing is that I was informed about it using their rss feed :-)
A couple of people have obviously found the positions of the comment links confusing as they've clicked the wrong ones, so I've changed the layout slightly to put the comments inline with the main part of the text. I still need to get some time to work on having the comments as an option....possibly this weekend. The hardest bit is getting it to work with the archives.
Had a fun day out of the office today. Went to a large IT support company for a large car company. I had to wait 30 minutes to use their computer as they had a security alert when one of their personnel accounts was logged onto even though the person was somewhere on the motorway network at the time....Anyway, as you can tell they are pretty security conscious. Everytime I needed to logon to our server, I had to get them to type the username and password in. This is at a telnet prompt (which is insecure to start with) on a localhost but using Microsoft's SMS as the server is about 100 miles away. Anyway, the screen refresh is very slow and the guy types in his username, he *thinks* he has hit return and then he types his password in...unfortunately he did not type return and his password was displayed in full view of me and the rest of the office who also did not know the password - until then..It was very hard not to spill my coffee with laughter....
Reminds me of the time I did something similar when I thought I had pressed tab after logging onto a NT server. Instead I was still in the username prompt and I proceeded to type in my password whilst my manager was sitting next to me. The password was move2usa Needless to say he was not amused as it gave away my intentions of leaving - oops!
Lesson learned - never use the same password in the office that you use elsewhere and do not make it embaressing or personnal in case you display it by accident/the sysadmin guys crack your password/you are forced to hand it over to fix a computer problem.
An amusing post about figure blogging!
The Parking Clowns site has been shutdown reports The Register due to claims of police intimidation as they didn't like people reporting on their dirty tactics.
Realised this morning that I hadn't checked the 300 exposures project for a while. Some of the pictures are amazing. They really know how to frame a view well!
I've sorted out my RSS feed now so that the title is displayed correctly, so if you have this page shown via RSS you may want to change the URL. Incidentally, how many of you use RSS to read this page?
Marketing to morons have a great idea - send spam mail only to those people who are stupid enough to respond to previous adverts - like " get a gallon of goop out of your colon!"
Pst - can you tell I've got an rss aggregator working????
Slashdot reports that the SysAdmin guy could be redundant if the software gets its way. However, *someone* has to install the software in the first place and patch and test it so I think my jobs safe just yet....AND most of my customers are not running Sun, but Microsoft software *evil grin*
Rumours abound that the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy is to be made a film - cant wait!
Got a letter today saying that my NTL (formerly Cable & Wireless 132) phone service had been moved across to NPower. I checked the rates of calls on NPower vs what I thought were good value Onetel and were suprised to see Npower cheaper apart from the calls to the USA. So guess which one's I'll be using from now on! (and I won't even talk about BT's prices!)
Downloaded Newzcrawler last night and had a look at the XML output from the blog. Two things I noticed - it doesn't have a title, and relative links don't work - they need the full path as the downloaded news gets stored on the c drive of the local computer and therefore the relative links then become links on the c drive :-( Still apart from that (the first isn't newzcrawlers fault anyway) its a good app.
I guess I need to tidy up my start menu. I installed another app this evening on the 98 computer and went to find it on the start bar. however, I have the start menu cascading across the screen, 4 levels wide but there are too many apps to fit that the new ones do not appear on the menu! It *really* is time that the software is tidied up. BUT a lot could be said for making the installation of start menu's in setup programs a lot better.Most of them do not allow you to nest your applications inside existing groups. Sure you can move them afterwards, but then the uninstall programs do not find the moved icons and you end up with a situation like mine!
This is NOT what I call customer service. Streets Online are not going to sell books anymore - fair enough - but to cancel orders that are outstanding seems a bit draconian and certainly not a customer satisfaction move - "Should you have any outstanding orders for books on your account, we will not be able to fulfil them. These orders will be cancelled and you will, of course, not be charged for these books. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause "
I checked my XP installation last night and was safe (which I should be as I had installed service pack1). However, if you only have a dial up modem and can't wait for the service pack to come out, then Steve Gibson has a small 30k utility that will replace the affected file with the fixed version.
The register has a link about the security hole in XP which also gives details on how to exploit it. If I were you i'd check your system before someone sends you the url which you don't realise wipes your hard disk. I'm going to try it on the xp box at home tonight......
Wow - Google must like me - i'm fourth on the list for the search phrase ie6 sp1 me from my post yesterday. I didn't think Google was that upto date on blogs - at least it wasn't when I was attempting the Google Challenge :-)
Kelly writes "the last few weeks i've been just completely ripped on any message board i've posted on. it's like everyone takes every word i say as offensive or mean. ugh, what's the point of sharing your opinion if it means people are just going to take turns beating you up for it?". It does seem to me that there have been a lot of people, certainly on blogs, who have taken to trolling - going around just being obnoxious on other people's webpages. I know that on the TampaTantrum web site, they have made a logo for blogroach killer or something along those names - quite apt really! Thankfully I've not had to deal with any of that sort of thing on this website, and when i've had abusive responses back on the internet newsgroups or similar places, then the killfile is useful, as is remembering that it's only a webpage and that I can make the choice to go somewhere else and not answer back. Still I do feel for you Kelly as I know its tough!
Since I posted about the freedial site, I have had three visits from them but unfortunately you need a username and password for this website. If anyone knows whats behind this link then let me know please!
use Blogspot plus (I don't as I have my own server space) then you now have access to a good looking stats package. At the moment no one else has access to it, but they reckon that it will be available to other people later. Looks similar to my own stats package, so I may be able to code my own version to look at something similar :-)
Our Anti-Virus software picked up on a script that is included with 1st Page 2000 that launches loads of internet windows called JS.WindowBomb. Its been on our server for yonks and it's only just decided to call this a virus (technically it isn't - its just malicious code). An online version of this script is available which will do the same thing - if you go to this web page, your anti-virus software will probably complain!
Freedial reckon they can give you asdl for 12.99 a month.......I am sure that is not financially viable....would like to see how long they are going to last and what the catch is (there is no information on the website and another "home" package priced at 30 so whats the difference between the two?)
I'm getting 55K/sec on the xp1 service pack download :-) Update40 mins to download 130mb! - nice
I just hope it is installable on the evaluation edition of xp! So far the only tweaking that I have done so far is to turn off the annoying tick that occurs every time you click on a hyperlink
Didn't do as good a job on the car with priceline - but we still got about $150-$200 off the list price - about 20% I think which is what their main web site said they offered.
AND they accepted - in the Hyatt Regency :-) - thats one night free :-)
I'll let you know in ten minutes how we do on the car rental!
hehehehe - we are being cheeky and asking for a four star hotel for 40 quid a night in chicago now :-)
Woohoo - the holiday is on! We get a decent holiday flight to Chicago, and by using priceline we saved 118 pounds on two tickets so we got quite a bargain. The funny thing is that the site reckoned we would not get the tickets when i put the original price in. It recommended putting in a price that was only 10 pounds cheaper than the list price! I ignored the advice but upped the offer by 10pounds and it was accepted. AND it is a direct flight (When I checked the internet there were three cheapish flights, two direct and one with a change, so I just hoped that we got the direct flight.) Thats twice Priceline has come up trumps! Cracking!
Kristen's car has been officially been declared a writeoff and they are giving us 1600 quid for it :-( However we have sourced a Fiesta for 1000 so we end up better off AND we get 30quid back from the insurance as the fiesta is cheaper to insure! I had delayed putting the car pictures online due to the number plate and things, but it doesnt matter now!
Oh - and the Audi that Kristen drove into is also a writeoff - oops!
Xp seems to be running really well on the old machine - I must say that I am impressed with the speed of it so far.....mind you, this is a fresh installation with no bloat in Windows at the moment. It's been activated with MS and I just need to download the service pack for it now.
Why does XP take so long to install????? (Don't answer that!) I mucked up my mandrake installation so thought i'd repartition the disk and put xp on it. I have a 120 day eval from MS so I'll see how good it is at home with all my hardware and stuff. It's not on the main pc as I value that just a little bit! That is running 98 at the moment but needs to be updated. Norton Anti-Virus uses memory and then it complains that my drive C is full, with 1.5GB of disk space on it. A quick reboot later and its all hunky dory again...but its a pain to do that every other day.
I never really understood the difference between passive and active mode on ftp. I do now!
Fired up the Linux box this evening, and for the first time the update routine worked and downloaded all the patches (of which there were several) AND I didn't need to reboot :-)
Update I actually did this last night as I was again posting to the wrong blog - oops!
The first ever smiley, but according to discussions on the register, other people have claimed to use it in punch cards before this...so it may not be :-)
Neat Boulderdash game.
Some people are concerned about the fact that Trillian now charges for instant messaging facilites and reckon this could be illegal as its charging for access to closed networks. Although i'm not a lawyer, I don't think it matters if its free or not...if you are accessing someones network without their consent, then thats hacking and illegal regardless of the cost you are paying....The other thing is that the paid version of Trillian does not have any difference in the chat side of things to the free version. The paid version only includes things such as the RSS syndication and stock information etc which has nothing to do with the chat side of things...so why the fuss?
The BBC are reporting about a guy who made a film where he asked his girlfriend to marry him, and then managed to get it shown at his local cinema just before the main feature.....How romantic is that?
Looks like MoveableType version 2.5 is out later this month. I will probably hold off until it's released and then move this blog onto this engine. I really like the facilities that are being programmed for this excellent piece of software. It should also give me the ability to play with some php programming too.
There seems to be a growing backlash against Anti-Spam services out on the internet, the most recent that I've seen (from Blogger) is the Developer Dispatch. Personally I think the anti-spam filters are great but only if you get the option to unquarantine incorrectly blocked email, or even know that the isp is running a spam checker for you. I have run foul of this on my current hosting provider (who also handles my incoming email) in that it blocks all email from yahoogroups as it considers it all spam, and also uses spamcop. The YahooGroups is obviously a draconian overkill process, but what annoyed me is that there is no text to inform their customers that this happens. I only discovered it when emails I send out to a group were not being received by my own account and checking on the Yahoo page I discovered that the emails had been bounced back by the isp.....they were not interested in removing this block.
Another isp that I also use for another domain uses various blacklists, and several times I've found myself not being able to send emails to this account as either Pipex or demon have been blacklisted - this is one big blacklisting, stopping almost the two biggest isps in britain from sending email!
Personally, I think the best solution is to run your own spamkiller in house that can decide what is spam or not. I run a filtering option on my incoming email via my own mail server and I reckon I get about one spam a week making it past the filters.....Probably about twenty or thirty a day are being blocked by the filter options.
Remember, you can see my latest anti-spam decoder on my website which allows you to get my email address but stops bots picking it up and spamming me.
At Kristen's party last night I was playing around with the camera and took a couple of macro photo's that can be seen either side of this post. Click on the pictures to see the bigger fullsize pic. Either of these photo's may be used as a background/theme in a webpage on this site in the near future....
Researchers reckon they have found the first ever smiley :-) that was posted almost 20 years ago. They will be 20 years old on the 19th September if that is the case :-)
Fantastic news - I don't have to go around nekkid anymore - I've found my wedding ring!!!!!!!
I was doing the washing up and as I went to move some cups on the draining board I saw the ring. It was such a relief to be able to put it back on again. It's been quite depressing the past couple of days thinking that I had lost it for good. It is amazing just how many times my fingers have gone to where the ring was and tried to move it - a subconsious twitch that I've had! Now I can twitch all I like :-)
hooray - my website is looking back to normal again on my pc. I used WinOptimizer to clear Internet Explorer's cache but that didn't seem to do any good, so I then went into control panel/add/remove components and went to remove ie6sp1 (which would have reverted me back to ie5!!!!). However I chose the option to repair, and it seems to have done so. AND i'm still running sp1. Phew!
Service Pack3 has been removed from my laptop and it still takes 10 minutes to connect to the network...I'll have to check my profile :-)
Also this webpage only seems to be mucked up on the pc at home and not the ie6,sp1 connections in the office so I've no idea whats causing that! (possibly the firewall or something!)
Gary Titley is the leader of the Labour group of UK euro MP's. Unfortunately he's clueless about the internet as his web site has been hacked. He knows about it but has done nothing about it, so the hacked page is still there....apparently he is "trying to sort it out with experts at the moment". What sort of expert takes a long time to change index.html and sort out permissions?
Argggh - something has gone wrong with the blog.....its lost all its formatting all of a sudden. If anyone has a clue why then i'd be grateful for the heads up.
Trillian Pro went through a proper test on the office lan today - the same pc that works on the home network will not connect through the office firewall which stinks....This makes is unusable for me, so its back to the plain free version on the one at home. Shame as I was really looking forward to using it.
Did my tax return on the internet yesterday. It was not as easy as last year and I'm not convinced the end total was correct, still I'll see what they have to say. I eventually got the new passwords to the system - two arrived on the same day, two weeks after I originally requested a password (the first and second one never turned up but they sent two different ones on the third request!). It is harder to do your tax return on the net when they dont give you any accompanying documentation which you got with the paper version. They only give you a month to download a pdf (or text) version of your completed form but i guess that is long enough. I am impressed at how the pdf is generated - its a smart use of technology. (just a shame that the backend office processes of getting the forms and documentation to me in the first place is flawed bigtime.)
Well i'm back off to bed to try and recover before work - goodnight.
A man in Sweden has locked himself in a cage as his son is being locked up without trial or normal human rights. He is hoping to raise awareness of his sons plight and get his government to do something about it.
I really think that the makers of Trillian should really let people try the pro version out for free for a trial period. There are significant changes with the addition of plugins and a totally new interface that the product is quite disimilar to the standard Trillian package and I would not really want to fork out for a licence for software that may not work and indeed a sneak look at Trillian Pro shows that the voidstar method of xml'ing my webpage (and Neil's) will not work with their RSS aggregator which is a bit disappointing as that was my major reason for wanting to get it. It insists that Yahoo has 35 emails waiting for me when I have none. The Winamp plugin which popups to tell you what mp3 you are playing is neat - although I would have thought its obvious when you hear it through the speakers! pop3 Mail checker doesn't seem to work either :-(
Actually I've just shutdown and relaunched trillian and it is checking my web site properly now...still not working well on mail, but the yahoo mailcount is now correct! (and yes I will be taking the pro version off)
What a day!
First the car, I then go downstairs and find Basil's decided to use Frankie's bed as a litter box (again!) AND I then find out I'm not wearing my wedding ring any longer......eeek!
What a nice birthday present my wife has given herself! She's run in the back of someone else's car, so I guess her b'day present will be a new bonnet and air-bag....it will be a bit hard to wrap though.
Fortunately she's ok and we'd just got her car insurance renewed two weeks ago AND went protected no claims so it shouldn't hit us next year (I hope!). Daft thing is that when I rang up the breakdown cover to get the car back home the national grid reference was no use to them (got from Multimap) . You would have thought that an accurate location reference such as that would be really useful!
Some sick $%£^£$ has created a virus purporting to be about Sept11. Called 11september.exe it promises photos of Osama Bin laden and the US Secretary of State in "friendly" dialogue! DON'T open it and make sure you av software is uptodate!
Another sp1 problem?????? Any link clicked from this webpage causes ie to close and offer to send a bug report to Microsoft. The funny thing is that the page has been written using Word by the looks of it so it should work. Anyone else get this?
Update The problem also occurs on ie6 without the service pack!
Now that I've installed ie6 service pack1, The Bat client comes up with "Access violation at address 004cf08c in module 'thebat.exe'. Read of address 02e4fffe" whenever I move my mouse onto the task bar....most annoying.
On a slightly related note, I got to use XPPro yesterday - I like the interface...I didn't previously, but there are a few nifty tricks like the hiding of unused desktop icons and the hiding of taskbar icons that I like (the first I reckon you could write a dos batch file to fix!)
Screenshot of IE6service pack1 download dialog box. Note the virus warning!
I meant to post this story about a wireless lan between two moving cars a while back after it was featured in Lockergnome but have only just now had the time to read it myself! They are nuts....now if I could persuade them to put an mp3 player in my car.........
IE6 Service Pack1 is also now available for download
If you are running Xp then you need to get service pack1 asap! Apparently there is a bug which lets a special url delete files on your pc!
Again, related to Google being banned in China, apparently you can test to see if your webpage is accessible in China.This page is!
Long blog entry as I've just realised I've been posting to the church web site and not this website - oops!
Some politician has decided that it is important for employees to not have their employers monitor their email so he's drafted a bill in parliament. I'm in two minds about this, one I appreciate the privacy this would give me, but on the other hand i've been asked to check other peoples email in the past and what does a politician know about this sort of thing anyway?
You can now top up your mobile at a cash machine -sounds a great idea to me....The only downside at the moment is that it costs money, you have to have an orange phone and you need an Abbey National account. they'll extend the scheme soon.....I guarantee it
Thanks to Neil for the heads up on the uk mirror site (see comments in previous post). Having problems getting the distro to work, when it tries to run the network config it fails to read the compressed data,and when I try to configure the display I get a black screen and a power down of the monitor....I think this is too high a refresh so I'm going to try again later.
There's a new security hole discussion doing the rounds at the moment. Apparently this one uses an
old trick of getting services to escalate the priveledges to give you admin access on the local laptop and from there onto the network......
Some politician has decided that it is important for employees to not have their employers monitor their email so he's drafted a bill in parliament. I'm in two minds about this, one I appreciate the privacy this would give me, but on the other hand i've been asked to check other peoples email in the past and what does a politician know about this sort of thing anyway?
After reporting a few days ago about Google being blocked in China, apparently there is a Google Mirror with a twist. This website requires you to enter terms in backward and the webpage is displayed backwards, in that you need a mirror to read it! It gets round the countrys blocking (for the time being) of Google! Now thats a use for technology! More information on this April Fool sounding technology is available on the New Scientists website.
I had a very interesting conversation with a new couple at church this morning. After introducing myself we got chatting and then I asked how they came to start coming to the church. I was very pleased to hear that they started coming to the church as they had found the website and were impressed! As I now maintain the website and have been pushing for its inception and growth I am very pleased. It's the first direct link that I know of from the website, but there may be more. Makes it all worth while :-)
The Virtual Linux download is taking ages (although at least it seems to be progressing!). IT reckons another 10 hours to download the other 66% - 416MB! And this is meant to be on an ASDL line!
The first picture on the Mirror project is up!
A fiver is the UK's £5 note. They withdrew the new issues after about two days because the serial numbers could be rubbed off. They've fixed the problem (hopefully) and the new ones are back in circulation again.
Got my first new fiver today. I've not tried to rub the serial number off just in case :-)
Went into Dixons this morning and discovered something interesting. They do a caller display unit which only displays the last number that called for £2.99, or they have another one for £6.99 which shows last 30 calls and tells you if you have a message waiting with call minder. However, both of these give you three months access to three Select services free! Seeing as though that is worth a lot more than £2.99 I bought one!
It also comes with a splitter so i thought I'd do some more tests on my asdl line and to work out whether I could have a splitter on the phone line to split one socket into two outlets, and then where I would need a filter installed. Putting the splitter into the phone socket, and then the ASDL router (standard phone plug with filter installed) into one of the splitter sockets, and a Filter into the other socket with a phone plugged in works. It didn't previously. Swapped out the filter and I have a duff filter which explains why it didn't work. This means I have bought a new Dect phone when I didn't really need to (as I thought I couldn't have a phone and asdl socket upstairs so the Dect was purchased as a cordless so the base station was downstairs but the phone kept upstairs). Still I've got used to the two mobiles - very handy.
Now just need to decide on the select services. Caller display will be very handy (the handsets include 10 numbers on caller display so i'm not going to actually use the new unit apart from as a splitter!) and I might use Call Sign which I can give to either people at work or job agencies!. However if I get used to having this I'd have to end up getting it permanently after 3 months so I'm not sure.
PS, The MirrorProject file has been uploaded - I'll post here if it gets accepted.
I was playing around with the digital camera this morning trying to get a macro shot for the photojunkies macro comp. Thought i'd take a picture of the mobile when I noticed my reflection in it...so I took a photo which I can use for this competition and also to enter into the mirror project! Click here to view the pic
What a nutter! This french bloke is going to do a powerchute jump 40000 metres high - thats almost 4 times higher than a 737 flies at!
Neil also posted a link to the Guardians website which gives an interesting commentary on how/why Google is blocked in China.
The fireworks have started - and its only two months until Guy Fawkes day. So I've had Basil and Frankie running around the room everytime one explodes. I think Basil is scared as he's now curled up on my wrists hovering over the laptop keyboard! Makes it pretty hard to type
Now that Neil has been reading my blog and says its cool *shucks* he's added it to his blogroll. Remember that if you have a blogroll you can add my site to yours by clicking here and your website will also have a note to say that its been updated, just like Neil's does now. And if you are reading this Neil, you need to comment on a post by clicking on the comment underneath the item :-)
have a good deal at the moment with a free Siemens C45, free connection and free 12 months connection to T-Mobiles 20 minutes per month free.....Apart from paying up front and getting the cash back after three months I'm not sure what the catch is! Sounds good....
Spamnet 6c is now available for installation. Probably has for some time, but the autoupdate facility in version 6b didn't seem to work :-(
A user of ebay in Germany was selling his motherboard. Instead of photographing the motherboard he was selling , he used links to pictures of the same motherboard from a review on a hardware review web site. They found out and decided to have their revenge :-)
Does anyone else who visits Kelly's page get Adobe Acrobat reader fire up automatically? I've no idea why it does it on my computer.
Microsoft now have a patch available to fix the secure sockets problem where a secure website could be spoofed.
I now have a Guestmap to the site - similar to a guestbook but which also shows locations around the world!
If you do a lot of work with style sheets (and if not why not?) then this browser add on may be of use to you. It allows you to right click on a web page and bring up a list of stylesheets and then edit them in your favourite css editor (ie topstyle!).
This will be installed on my pc at work tomorrow!
Heard on the news today that the government have finally backed down and are allowing non police checked people to teach in the schools due to the backlog of unchecked teachers. Some schools in our local area have had to close as they've not been able to get their staff checked before the school term started. Why on earth did the government decide to insist on this rule without having the staff available to run the checks? Now there are potentially teachers caring for the children who have not been vetted by the police...What i'd like to know, is why did they wait until now and not do this years ago?
First php script uploaded onto my new website (no I'm not going to tell you where just yet!). Doesn't do much apart from display the information that the php server understands. I'm quite pleased to see that it supports the latest version (4). The book that I'm learning from is Larry Ullman's PHP for the World Wide Web. This is a real bargain from Amazon at the moment as their list price is 7.50 instead of the rrp of 15quid. So far I'm really impressed with it...If its any good then I'll be buying my own copy rather than using the library one!
Received my first email from the Stella Awards email list. This is another email list from Randy Cassingham of This is True and Heroic Stories fame. This email list is a series of emails spotlighting the american infatuation with suing everyone for common sense practises. It is named after the woman who sued Mcdonalds for having Hot Coffee!!
The first edition contains a story about a woman who sued a medical company despite not having any problems with the medicine, A Hospital that no longer have their best doctors and nurses due to them leaving as they were sued that one more time and more....Well worth the free subscription AND you won't get spam
The only annoying thing with Dvd's on Tap is that they send you an email to let you know that the next disk is on its way. However, the Post Office then decide to take their time and the DVD does not turn up the next day (despite being sent First Class). So we now have to wait a whole day till we can watch disk 4 of 24
The Register reports about how Microsoft are closing down their Wallet facilities due to a court order. However, at the same time they are opening up MSN Wallet. Surely if they can't get their first wallet working correctly and securely enough for a judge, is anyone going to trust the next attempt especially with all of Microsoft's recent security problems?
oh - and by the way, "dumpster diving" has been reported in Eastbourne Sussex (an odd term considering dumpsters are not available in the uk) where people have gone through rubbish in order to get credit card details. Do you securely dispose of your credit card receipts? Have you noticed that many of them contain your full credit card number AND your signature?
Robbing a bank? Latest sources recommend that you don't take your family along with you whilst you do so. Your 3 year old son could slow you down. As for your getaway car, then its not a good idea to use a cab and have your wife and daughter in it!
CyberSquatter????? Hope you live in Virginia then! According to latest legal news, a domain name is a piece of property registered in Virginia (as that is where the .com registry company is) and therefore subject to Virginian law and their "absent property owner" clauses.
ewww! A student in Cardiff managed to overdose on Caffeine! Now thats scary
Thanks so
If you send dodgy emails or surf dodgy sites from your work pc, then beware. According to the latest survey, its the number 1 reason for being sacked incidentaly, if you have a story of naughty emails that you wish you hadn't sent, then check the web page as the BBC are looking for people to do a program on....Will - you might want to tell them about the time you decided to take that sicky!!
In the latest flaw in Internet Explorer that Microsoft are playing down, where Secure Web Sites can be spoofed, a variant has appeared where it is possible to spoof emails in Outlook to look like they have come from someone and "prove" it by signing the email ( a long recognised method of identification and security!). The guy who discovered it recommends everyone sends Bill Gates a signed email from Bill Gates in order to get microsoft to wake up and smell the coffee!
Google is still trying to get their site unblocked to Chinese users.....some web sites are reporting that the Chinese government are denying they blocked the site, but if they did do it, then they would say that wouldn't they! More information from the Register
Just finished watching disk2 of 24 - a brilliant series, although it does have several logical flaws in it. The funny thing is that it is meant to be filmed in "real time" but there are a lot of gaps where nothing seems to happen to anyone. That and a whole hours episode only takes 40 minutes as there are spaces for 20 minutes of commercials - that seems to be a lot of adverts for an hours tv programming. Still I'm not complaining as I don't get the ads on DVD :-) They are also starting to film a second series soon - should be good!
China are allegedly blocking access to Google! don't know how I'd survive without google :-). This is mainly to do with the fact that the Chinese goverment want to control the parts of the internet their citizens can access, and Google blasts a big hole in this control.
Basil wrote to Feeny yesterday - and got his question published!
300 photo's taken by 30 people over the space of September. The photos up for today are really neat!
Blogger is down tonight - and I've got 4 items I want to post! At
least bloggar allows you to save the text ready to post online when
the server gets back (someone has forgotten to check the log files
which have filled the hard disk! sounds like someone needs to attend
one of my sysadmin courses! (Doing 2 this week!)
Feeny has a whole bunch of cat like smiley icons available for use on web pages!
Coming from a friend Cheryl is a nature scene....or is it? Can you see the baby?
Can you buy DVD players in the States that are region free and play Region 2 dvd's?
Started reading (and finished) "A Planet called Treason@ by Orson Scott Card today. An excellent Sci-Fi book about a man usurped from his position of heir to the throne and his subsequent quest to fulfill his fathers wishes and gain his position as heir/king back again. Well worth the read - only about 5 hours or so (290odd pages).
Interesting thing that the Pan version is still 1.50 on Amazon although its out of stock/print but the Dell version of the book is 7.82 onAmazon and also out of stock/print. I'm not sure how you can have two books with wildly varying prices available but out of stock! (I think the prices refer to the list price of the book when it was published in 1979!
Found a good link with tools on blogging! Too many explorer windows to open and read tonight!
