Not sure how I came across this site, but there are loads of good pictures at Intuitivmedia
October 2002 Archives
Hooray - the brotherinlaw rang to say the PS2 has arrived. CHRISTMAS TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I won tickets to go see 1984 at the local theatre - closing date Saturday so I need to know when Kristen is free in the evenings this week! AND i hope to go see TheBandWithNoName on Friday night as I enjoyed the last gig I went to...I think they are a bit like a christian version of the Beastie Boys, so that should be quite interesting.
Solved my problem with TableEditor last night. I decided to load the database into Access and then went through the "Tools/Database Options/Convert/Save as old format" (or words to that affect) menu options and then loaded the subsequent access database onto the web. Hey Presto - it worked! Hope this helps anyone else who is getting the "database is read only" when trying to edit the main database.
Posting and publishing via bloggar is now working again. Nice to see that at last! AND they hope to have version 3 out in a week or so. This will support Title and Category options for Moveable Typers too. Interestingly its a brazilian author and the first version out will be in English and not his native language (which is a relief for me!)
HOORAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have *finally* got proof that I successfully completed my Java course last year (Jul 2001) They sent me the certificate today after I complained again on Friday that I had still not got my results of the course work. This morning I received the certificate, nice and soggy from the rain that says I passed two credits on a level 3 Open College Network course on Technical Computing, subject Java - and it was dated August 2002.. I think the college put their clocks back just a little too much!
For the past couple of weeks, every second time I run something from the start/run button such as "c:\temp" I get the message "Explorer has generated errors and will be closed by windows. You will need to restart the program. An error log has been generated." Any one had anything similar (note that this always happens every other time I run the command, usually resulting in explorer bombing out and recreating the shell again. I also need to find this log file it is generating.
A southern girl babbled that her boyfriend took their dog for a walk yesterday (with photo). I was amazed at the number of people who were walking their dogs and jogging yesterday in the absolutely disgusting weather we were having. It was chucking it down with rain, bits of trees were being blown down or bowling along the road, and there were these people jogging (and getting soaked by the rain and from the spray the cars were throwing up). Before you ask, we were in the car, and I decided to turn round and go home as it was far too horrible to be outside. I spent the day doing a Terry Pratchett jigsaw. It's only a thousand pieces, but its REALLY difficult.
Interesting! The chat that the Pipex bloke had with ASDL Guide mentions that they are going to provide free dynamic dns services to its broadband customers (ie me!) in November. That is very handy as the one that I previously had has expired and they wanted paying for it (and it was not worth the money). Nice one Pipex!
Tried to install and use the new version of TableEditor. This gives you the ability to edit an access database such as my comments database, from a web page. Unfortunately the system insists that the database is readonly, which it isn't. Have logged a call on the developers site, so we'll see what happens.
A new web greeting card scam has been found out. Apparently when you try to install the card it installs two activex components. The small print says that by installing this app you agree to let them send emails to everyone in your address book - nice! Thanks Mike
UpdateDon't bother sending me a card from this site as the email will be blocked (use "*you have an E-Card from* " in your subject filter) but I will probably be changing the rule slightly to catch any change in subject to bypass this sort of filtering..
Seeing as though Blogger was hacked yesterday, I've changed all my ftp passwords on various machines that I post to AND changed my blogger password. If you haven't already done so, then I'd advise you do the same. To change your blogger password, sign in - select My Team, click on yourself, edit profile and change the password. This took me some time to find as the help index pages were broken! From the sounds of it, passwords were changed to a 1 so I don't think they got the original password but you never know!
Ever been tempted to apply for a free Whiskas KittenCare pack? (for some reason they sent me two). You will also find they sell on your email address to spammers as I've just received a spam from mars.com to the email address I signed up with and I NEVER tick the "yes we can pass your details on to as many lowlife spammers we can find" box
Blogger got hacked early today/yesterday - looks like even more reason to get Moveable Type installed and working!
Got Visual Basic .net standard edition through the post this morning. It took a lot less time to arrive from the supplier than it did to instal the thing (which has an estimated 2 hours and 20 minutes to go) and I started this at 9am this morning - 5 hours ago! I am not impressed with the installation routine, which decided that I must have frontpage extensions loaded on my webserver (so that took some time to install off another cd) and then I needed to install all the critical updates. Once this had been done, I got to the "yes i agree to your lousy eula notice". Underneath that was a box to type in the serial number. Whoever designed this box was not thinking of laptop screens as the background of the form was almost the same colour as the spaces to fill in the details. As a result I wasn't sure where to start entering the data and I actually started in the wrong field...and I'm sure you all know how annoying those 20 digit serial numbers are to type in. VB then decides it needs 500MB on my system drive (why???) and another 1.7GB on a data partition, so i had to install Partition magic to change the size of my drives, reboot and start the install again ARGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH
Sneak preview of new logo format
If you use MoveableType on your website and use the RSS feeds, then you need to update the templates as they are not quite correct
Got home this afternoon with a stonking headache and cold. Engineer has replaced the psu and alls well with the mail server (apart from bounced mail!). The grounds all white due to a hailstorm we had this morning and the Mobile Phone reckons it has an area code of "TEST"
Alls well with the world !
The good news about the works email server is that it looks like the emails are not bouncing, but just stacking up on the isp, as I've received some "Your email has been delayed" messages back to my home account. At least I won't have people worrying about emails they should have received. It seems a suprise to some people that they could use the phone instead!
Oops! someone skimped on the price of our mail server and now the psu has gone we have to wait until tomorrow (sometime) before an engineer can come out and bring the spare part. Hopefully that is all that has gone wrong with it and its not blown the motherboard or anything. There were a couple of nasty pops and flashes this morning in the computer room!
I'm staying at Jamie Oliver's parents pub this weekend. When I found that out I knew the food was going to be delicious. The first night I had swordfish steak - and that was massive! Really tasty too. Last night I decided to try ostrich as i've heard a lot about it, but never had a chance to eat it. It doesn't taste like chicken though! It is a very dark meat, hard to describe. The taste is very powerful though. Although I enjoyed the steak I don't think i'd have it again though. Tonight is the Sunday roast - mmmmmmm!
I went into Cambridge yesterday and did a bit of walking around the city. One of the colleges was graduating, so there were loads of people in gowns, and some in tophats! I just wish I had brought the camera with me, but I was expecting to be working the whole weekend so hadn't bothered :-( The college buildings are really impressive and looked really good, although I don't think I'd want to study there - too posh for me. The daft thing is that the Park and Ride that I took into the city centre stops at 6pm so I wasn't able to go to the cinema as the bus would have stopped before I got out the cinema :-(
Some neat nature photos taken for the BG Wildlife Photographer Of The Year
Hate telemarketers? Well this script may help get your own back and give them a taste of their own medicine. Thankfully I dont get any telemarketing calls!
Wallace and Gromit have a new film out courtesy of the BBC - a two minute football cartoon. Be sure to watch through the credits!
The Stella Awards tells a story of a woman who is suing anyone and everyone after her son got run over by a trailer truck when he climbed underneath it to sleep whilst drunk. The trailer drove off, over him and he died. She is suing the trailer company for not looking under the trailer and the pub for continuing to serve her son. Why she doesn't sue herself for failing to look after her son and make sure he was home before 10pm with a nice hot cup of cocoa in bed I don't know!
I still have a clara.net account that I use occasionally - some of the albums are still hosted on it. I got an email from them today to say that the global mail filtering is going to be disabled and that its down to us users to configure it. As far as I'm concerned, thats great news as I can configure MY mail filtering the way I want to. I reckon this is being done due to the number of faked email headers that now appear on virus laden emails and that their servers are getting swamped with the number of warning/bounce emails they send out. Its bad news for the less technical or internet savvy user as they are now going to get even more viruss into their mailbox and judging from the success of the recent ones, the problem will multiply even more. I can't believe that certain technical companys that should know better are still getting infected. You would have thought that after they got hit with lovebug, klez etc they would have invested in anti-virus software! Sure, AV software doesn't detect brand new virus's unless you have heuristic scanning turned on, but it would detect virus that come in a week after they first hit the news and even the tv! There really is no excuse to get infected more than a week after the virus goes global..and as to the nameless people who get hit with the same virus TWICE - come on!!!!! What is even more annoying is that most of these virus's wouldnt get anywhere if people ran windows update and patched their systems and didn't open attachments they were not expecting.
I tried the google search on helsby.net for the word virus, but it didn't come up with the old posts that I used. Thats a bit annoying - will have to work out how to get google to crawl those pages too :-(
A technician boasted on a Mustang BBS that he had taken a customers car out for a 140mph joyride. Eventually the posting gets seen by the owner, tv, press and probably every car website out on the net! Needless to say, the technician is fired!
I've changed my blogrolling preferences so that blogs that were updated less than 12 hours ago are marked as new. The reason for this is that I normally check at least every 12 hours, but not necessarily 3 hours, which meant that some blogs were getting missed when they were updated! (does that make sense?)
hmmmm - my Musicmatch Jukebox now seems to insist on playing audio cd's when ripping them to mp3's. If thats an "update" i'm going back to the original version I downloaded. Anyone else had this problem?Update The online help says to delete mmcd.ini and the drives will reconfigure. I've done that, but it still records in real time....more hunting needed I think.More Updates Found the solution - tick the box which says "Mute whilst recording". Pretty obvious really. I am sure that was turned on with a new upgrade or something.
PGP8a is now available in beta format, but the beta expires 6th december and after that you won't be able to access the encrypted data - what is the point in that? There is no incentive to put this on the pc if I can only send test files - this is no real test of the software in a live environment!
Google have 189 pages from this domain in their cache and can therefore search it by using the following information. Do you think this is any good? (it doesn't link to pages on my other websites, but I really must get them linked into this domain one day!
Went round a friends house tonight to try and get a 13mb Publisher file onto someone else's computer with no modem or network card. My first thought was to use my URDisk in the USB port. Unfortunately they are running 95 which I don't think supports USB and they also don't have any usb ports! It should be illegal to run pc's like that nowadays :-) Still they'll never have a virus on the pc! They had tried to winzip span information across multiple disks but had had problems extracting it at the other end. In the end I extracted it onto their pc so they could print it out and I took a copy home to stick on a web site so the final recipient can download it off the net!
Gio Internet have made a big mistake in that they (allegedly) copied Pipex's Terms and Conditions to use on their own site and forgot to remove some references to Pipex (which is how they were spotted - after all, how many people actually read the small print?). Pipex are saying that they are going to talk to their lawyers....shame their lawyers cant talk to Pipex when there has been pretty bad connections at weekends for the past few weeks and remind them of their terms and conditions. From my past experience when someone nicked my website, its easier just to contact the host/upstream provider and get the site pulled :-)
Arggghhhhhh - the jdbgmg.exe hoax virus is going around again - I've had two "warnings" from well meaning friends in the past couple of days and I know that at least one of them deleted the exe file :-( For more information go to my past article
I was looking to buy a book from Amazon in the uk on web security. The american price is 35dollars, amazon in the uk has it for 38pounds (what sort of currency conversion are they on????) and (Books On Line) in the uk have it for 28 pounds - a much more realistic price conversion. The only drawback with is that you have to buy another book in the next six months, but I think that is very likely to happen AND they only charge one pound postage per book. They do not have as big a range as amazon though. Sorry for not purchasing through Blackwells though Kelly!
I have been using the XP system a fair amount the last week or so and had installed the web accessories that enables you to do various right click functions such as view all images linked in a page. However, when I tried this particular function it never worked. Apparently there is a bug in this, and you need to press F5 to refresh and all the images appear. I tried it and it worked! There is also a bug in the zoom functions too!
Thanks mvps via Brad
Tried to use 192.com this morning to search for someone, and it is no longer possible to get access without either paying, or signing up for loads of junk email - NOT impressed :-(
After the major accident on the M6 yesterday I discovered that the RAC have a website which tell you delays on the road network. I was not aware of this, and had previously used Vauxhalls java application but this takes a while to load.
An early bedtime tonight as I was up late last night. I dug out the old Technics KN1000 keyboard, took it round a friends house and messed around for a couple of hours. Had a good laugh, but couldnt tune the keyboard into the piano, so if you have a manual for this then please let me know!
This is what happens in our household when you leave a full, unopened packet of felix cat treats in our house. Note the precision opening of the back of the pack - its almost as if they were cutting out a coupon on the back of the packet! Needless to say it was empty this morning. The sad thing is that the pack was on buy two, get one free, but Kristen didn't bother as she thought one pack would last them ages - how wrong can you get!
After looking in my referral logs, I've found MetaEureka which submits your query to multiple search engines, bundles the pages up (so you don't get duplicates) and then tells you which ones the page ends up in. Unfortunately this page doesn't come top of the list for helsby....need to rectify that!
Would you believe it - the day after I install Moveable Type (after waiting 3 weeks and then deciding to go ahead anyway) they bring out the new version
As an update to my previous post, my nyt autologin page doesnt work anymore unfortunately, so use the logons provided
the New York Times reports on an interesting story about a guy who is using laser pointer pens to blind security cameras as they broach on his security. The article raises several points, one of which is "Is this legal to do so and if so, will it soon be illegal?". Its illegal to jam police radio frequencies, and this could be used in similar ways but with police (and other) cameras. (asdfg116/asdfg to logon)
The YFriday gig on Saturday night at Burton was excellent. The whole evening was a good laugh including the drive to the concert. I was following "U-Turn" Pete who although he knew the way made at least 4 turns on the way to the concert and even tried to shake me off by driving down the M6 around Stoke instead of going straight through the middle down the A500. We eventually arrived there and got a bonus parking ticket when I put 20p in the parking meter and two tickets popped out instead of one - Bargain!
The concert had two support bands, but I can't remember their names - if you are reading this and were the band members, then get in touch and I'll put a link in to your website :-) - personally I think it was the loudness of the speakers that has made me forget everything but other people may have different opinions. When yFriday came on the atmosphere really improved and a neat evening carried on. I started off taking some photo's but soon decided to just enjoy the concert. For those of you who dont know, yFriday are geordies and have a great accent and the lead singer writes all their music and he has some excellent songs. Mind you, it was one of the first concerts i've been too where I have come away with an album from a band that didn't play (I got the latest Audio Adrenaline album). The only reason is that I wasn't sure which album to get and that I was going to see them again on Sunday!
I didn't get home until midnight on Saturday night and then we had to get up early as we were driving over to Pete's house again and then off to Burton to see yFriday lead some worship at a church in Stretton. This was a really good service, where yFriday managed to be part of the congregation for a while - a unique experience for them I think - but then they led a 20-30 minute slot. I (and Kristen) were once more really impressed with the style and song writing talents and we ended up getting both the cd's (autographed) but I've not had a chance to listen to them yet - they are on WinAmp now though.
The rest of the day was spent eating a Roast Lamb dinner and singing along with Pete's playing on the piano - a really neat weekend.
Finally got Moveable Type working on my other host now. Took some doing I tell you. It was pretty complicated ensuring that the permissions are all correct and the files are going into the right place. Now all I have to do is work out what I am going to put where - do I keep this blog here on this server or on the other one? I'm probably going to split the blog into a techie blog and a family related blog, so the two kinds of people who read this blog wont get bored with the other type of postings...Although with Moveable type I could post by category :-) We'll see.
I now know why Kelly's counter gives me an error and tries to load Acrobat Reader. The java routine tries to detect if I have acrobat reader installed (and other programs) presumably, to put in the stats of the web page. Somehow this is broken on my pc, and instead of just checking for the plugin, it launches it! Now to work out how to fix it on the pc, or disable the routine altogether...I might just put jellycounter in my etc/hosts file and point it to 127.0.0.1 ;-)
The wireless mouse worked really well on the home pc using WindowsXP - I'm not as impressed with it on the office pc, using Windows 2000 on a wood grain effect wooden desk. The mouse constantly jitters around all the time - I guess the grain is effecting the mouse. I don't think I have the shakes! Put the mouse on a mousemat, and it works really well though - but I thought the point of an optical mouse was that you didn't need a mousemat!
7 months after my birthday and it looks like I might actually get to have my birthday present. For the long term readers of this website I am hoping to go flying. Spoke to the pilot today to try and book some time in the near future. Can't wait!
Norton AntiVirus has decided to uninstall itself on my home pc without telling me - hope thats not a virus doing it!
Is it just me or does everyone have a messy (aka busy) desk? As I have a laptop and a desktop computer, a headset for the phone and am invariably working on someone elses laptop, the number of cables that are running across the desk make life a nightmare - just where can you put a cup of coffee without running the risk of spilling it over something? Decided that enough was enough today, and I asked for a cordless, optical mouse that is rechargeable and does not need a mousemat. Suprisingly they said yes, so I went and got one from Currys tonight. They reckon that the mouse is half price at thirtyfive quid - but who in their right mind would pay 70 pounds for a mouse??? I'll probably give it a trial run on the pc at home over the weekend and report back on it over the weekend.
Matadors mail filtering program looks good - though you must be using outlook which is annoying as I don't at home anymore :-( It uses white/black lists, content filtering and challenge responses to ensure you don't get spam..
Encryption may not be safe afterall (if you have 5 years and hundreds of computers working together that is). A 64bit encrypted message has finaly been cracked
Catch-Up (the useful service that I could never remember to run) has been suspended by C-Net. No suprise there as its yet another free thing on the internet gone away :-(
Shame really as it was quite a good service, checking to see if there was any updated software on your pc. I also used it to audit all our computers in the office once, running a scan and then printing the list off.
Happy Birthday Kelly!!!!
Not sure if you have ginger hair but I used to so the picture is almost right :-)Image thanks to DesignedToAT
O'Reilly have an interesting (read geeky) page for writing your own RSS feed. I reckon I could write asp to do that and then RSS various sections of the site - such as the blogroll or even my comments.....just need some spare time alone to sit down and play
And another thing - why does my screen in WindowsME turn off when it should, but it doesn't in 98? And before you get worried I am only running ME to backup 3.5GB onto cd, spanning across multiple disks (slowly!). I didn't have enough space in my 98 partition to be able to do the burning. I'm using Handy Backup to do the work. I guess I'll need to put the software on floppy so that I can do a restore at a later date. I'll let you know how I get on - I'm on disk 3 at the moment.
Neil sent me an email the other day but he uses myrealbox as his email account. The interesting thing is that in the past I must have had tons of spam from this domain as they are in *my* blacklist (sorry Neil I thought it was an external one!) and therefore any email from that domain is ignored! Neil reckons that they are very strict with their no-spam policy so either they have toughened up or they are just pretending to be serious about it. I'll look through my email logs to see what spam has been trapped by them - or at least that I still have a log of.
The isp that hosts my other site did some work for me to upload some modules that MoveableType needs in order to run. Problem is the files they uploaded I can't change and they seem to be corrupt, having been truncated in the upload :-( AND they say that I cant use the Perl module to access the MYSQL Database as they reckon the performance would be too slow, so i have to use the DBFile version instead. Shame as I was looking forward to using it. Now just watch - as soon as I get it working, version 2.5 of MT will be released (slated for end of last month so it really is any day soon!
Anyone else using one of those USB Hard Disks that fit on a keyring? If I dont have mine installed in the usb and boot xp up, it doesn't auto detect it has been plugged in. I have to run Add New Hardware wizard - very annoying!
FINALLY managed to crack the reason my laptop was taking 15 minutes to log onto our corporate lan when attached to the network! The DNS settings were set to be our firewall and not our windows 2000 server! I thought I had checked that but obviously not. It now takes about 2 seconds to log on!
We've had three reports of the new Bugbear virus (link points to Sophos' website) in the office this morning. Looks like there are a lot of people without patched internet explorer versions!
Ananova reports that Saudi Arabia have banned the sale of these new fangled camera/phones as men are using them to take undercover photo's of women - no not that sort of undercover! That leads to an interesting point that over here there are quite a few companies that dont allow you to take a camera on site, such as MOD sites. Would be interesting to note whether they realised your phone also had a camera in it - and if so would they ban phones too? We have a couple of sites where you are not allowed mobiles (and no they are not hospitals! - mind you, the doctors were using mobiles at Christies Hospital!)
If you also purchased a Celeron 900MHz x 100MHz FSB for 9.90 at Outpost and got turned down, then lodge a complaint with the Better Business Bureau for their area. According to Bens Bargains they were accepting orders and cancelling them on the 30th September (when they knew they were out of stock) but still allowing you to place orders. Thats false advertising for starters.
Got an email back from Outpost to say that due to the high demand they had sold out of the item I had purchased. They have not explained why their website does not explain that they had sold out of the item, or why they accepted the order for something not in stock, or why 2 hours later the goods were still available for purchase but out of stock. I strongly recommend you dont buy anything from outpost.com
Tried to order an upgrade to my pc to a 1ghz processor from outpost.com for 10 bucks. However, after accepting my order, they cancelled it 45 minutes later with no reason. The offer is still available on their website. I'm waiting for a response back from them
Just received some excellent support service! I am looking into getting Moveable Type working on my other webspace provider and sent them an email after I discovered that a lot of the required modules were either not installed or out of date. Less than an hour later, I had received a reply saying that although they can't put it in the entire server, they had checked the MT website, and downloaded and installed the required modules into my own site. Now that is what I call service. Thanks Inigo!
Courtesy of Tara Calishain I can proudly report that 24 .com, 2 .fr, 4.net, 10 .nz, 30.org, 10.uk and 20.us web sites point to this site!
It was a sad day for my inbox yesterday as Randy Cassingham announced that he was closing his RandysRandom mailing list - but he still has his excellent publications This is True (short weird-but-true stories with off-the-wall commentary), Stella Awards (astounding cases of real-life lawsuits that makes the "McDonald's Coffee Lady" look like the most reasonable person on the planet), Heroic Stories (short, inspiring, true stories of people going out of their ways to create profound positive impacts on others -- without being sappy, to sentimental, or religious)
All three are free, worth signing up for, you won't get spam or pressurised to buy anything (although you can sign up for a premium sub to This Is True and get a Premium Readers only special edition in between the standard issues)
I'm off to see yFriday on Saturday!
How shortsighted is this? UCSB (some American university) has banned windows2000 from their college network due to the problems they had last term with security. Instead they recommend replacing it with XP home....talk about crippling your pc! Why they don't just get a proper policy set up which insists that all pc's attached to the network are uptodate with patches and kill the net connection for those pc's which aren't. Not sure how you'd physically do that seeing as though the pc's are the students own (I presume) but then again, how are they going to detect what OS they are running? If they can detect that, then i'd expect them to detect the patch level. Alternatively they could do some port filtering - but that could cause more problems....I guess if people use linux, then they are going to have even more problems with misconfigured servers with major security holes in it as its a lot harder to naildown a linux box if you dont know what you are doing....
Ironically the site that hosts the information is running Windows 2000 according to Netcraft
