October 2003 Archives

Call me sad, but I do like to give my computers names. They're usually female (I swear computers suffer from PMS) and usually slightly exotic but not stupid. So, when I was running my new Toshiba A10 for the first time this afternoon, 'Annabella' was the name I chose when asked for one by the setup utility, to go along with her sisters Marissa (my old laptop) and Marianna (my parents' computer).

So yes, it has arrived, and what a fine beast it is. The only noise it makes is when there is intense disk activity, since the fan is completely silent. It can be booted up and ready to use in less than 30 seconds - Marissa wasn't bad at getting up quickly but this one is so much quicker. And unlike Samsung, Toshiba actually give you a full printed manual - a bit daunting at around 150 pages but very welcome nonetheless. Certainly it's better than the 10 page Windows XP quick start guide that Microsoft expects you to use.

The only annoyance so far is the keyboard. While I'm pleased that the Windows key got booted off to the top right (so I don't hit it every time I miss the space bar like before), there's no Del key; rather it's the second function of the . key (requiring you to hold down Fn while you press .). And I still haven't found NUM lock, but no doubt it's in the manual somewhere.

No wait, NUM lock is Fn+F11. Naturally, instead of being labelled 'NUM lock' it's got a picture of a keypad on it, so I had no idea what it did.

I'm currently on my second stint at Windows Update; having downloaded all the critical updates, I'm now on the non-critical ones. The third (and hopefully final) stint will get me equipped with the latest DirectX. Fortunately the machine was pre-installed win XP Home SP1 and a couple of updates were already there so that's saved some time.

Another nice thing is that it defaults to FAT32, with a 'Convert to NTFS' option on the desktop. This is good because once the ISOs for Mandrake 9.2 come out, I'll be slapping that on here so having the main partition as FAT32 means Linux can read and write to it. Samsung make their laptops default to NTFS, which requires a reformat to go back to FAT32.

All in all, I'm very happy with this little baby, and I'm glad I could get it so soon - it'll make doing my coursework next week so much easier. Or at least it will once I've downloaded OpenOffice...

Since it's Halloween today the Friday Five has a spooky feel to it:

1. What was your first Halloween costume?

Probably a ghost, since all you needed was a white sheet and a few slits so that you could see out of it.

2. What was your best costume and why?

The costume I'm wearing tonight :).

3. Did you ever play a trick on someone who didn't give you a treat?

Nope. The locals are all too generous :).

4. Do you have any Halloween traditions? (ie: Family pumpkin carving, special dinner before trick or treating, etc.)

Do halloween pub crawls count?

5. Share your favorite scary story...real or legend!

I know plenty, but my favourite is probably the ghost of the Roman Army that occasionally appears in the cellars of the Treasurer's House in York. Many moons ago I went on a ghost tour (since that place has a ghost in just about every room) and this was the one I was most interested in hearing about.

[19:43:27] Neil: what's spooky about an ovum?

This made perfect sense when put in context, but just looks odd when posted on its own. I'll let you guess what I was on about.

The good news: My Toshiba Satellite Pro A10 arrives tomorrow! All in, it was £655.06 - standard next day delivery was only £8.50.

The bad news: As a security precaution, the laptop has to be delivered to the billing address of the card used - which, in this case, was my Dad's. Therefore, it has to go to my parents' house. Which would be fine if either of them are in on Fridays, but they aren't.

Of course, by the time I'd remembered this it was too late to cancel the order, so I had to leap on a train home and will be spending tomorrow waiting for it to arrive. Fortunately due to a couple of lecture cancellations I'm only missing one lecture - it's one that I would have liked to have attended, but, heh. And at least I have my parents' computer to play with this evening >:-) .

You know, considering it's gone quarter past nine in the evening, the computer labs are surprisingly busy. I'm spending my time here because there's nothing interesting on TV and I'm lacking a good book to read. Remind me to buy a set of playing cards so I can play Solitaire again, albeit manually.

Seriously, I'm really worried about how much I'm missing the computer already. Admittedly today was (one of) my afternoon(s) off so I had a bit more time - normally I'd spend the afternoon and much of the evening doing something on the computer, but obviously that's not on the cards now. It's frustrating that as soon as I hit boredom, I turn to the computer for potential enlightenment, only to find it's not there. And I already have a list of stuff to do once it gets back.

I guess you don't know what you've got, until it's gone.

Here's some news on the laptop. I'll order the Toshiba one tomorrow on my father's credit card (I don't have a credit card myself and since it'll be more than £100 it will qualify for protection), and so hopefully that will be here next week.

My current one is now away in its laptop bag. For the time being I will hang on to it, and then debate sending it off to Dublin for repairs - yes, Samsung's nearest service centre is in Ireland. Because it's likely it'll take a while, and because I was due to get a laptop in 6 months time anyway, I may as well get a new one now. Assuming that the old one can be repaired for something reasonable, I can then sell it - it's unlikely I'll get much for a broken laptop, whereas one that works of its age could fetch £100-200 on eBay. With a bit of luck, the repairs will be less than £100.

On the plus side, not having a computer to play with did give me motivation to do a few things that I've been putting off for a while now - tidying and vacuuming my room (which now looks so much cleaner), sending off parcels to people who won my eBay auctions at the weekend (so I am around £4 richer), and reading bits of the Guardian I'd left aside from earlier in the week.

I also watched Art Attack on ITV, seeing as I had nothing much better to do - I used to watch the programme as a child and was pleased to see that in 10+ years it has barely changed. Same presenter, same format and only a few subtle changes - the addition of a web site for example. Sometimes a little consitency in life is good.

Hopefully everything will be back on track soon - in the meantime I'll be logging in from the computer labs and the library - the latter is open until midnight so it's convinient for the evenings. I really have the urge to play Worms and relieve a bit of stress, but, as you can imagine, that's not exactly possible. Ah well.

Great. It appears my fan has pretty much given up the ghost, so after using the computer for around half an hour it shuts down to prevent itself overheating. Just what I need.

And, naturally, none of the computer places I tried would fix it - either because they 'don't do laptops' or because the parts are too difficult to get hold of (apparently I need a whole new PSU or something). So it looks like I'll be needing a new laptop.

While this could have come at worse times, it's still pretty bad timing - I have two pieces of coursework in for either side of next weekend which need to be typed up, so it looks like I'll have to resort to using the university's facilities in the meantime. While the laptop still works (kinda), I don't want to push my luck so I'm not going to use it until I have a replacement, just in case it goes completely and I have retrieve everything off the HD somehow.

As for the replacement, I've decided I will get another laptop - I do move around quite a bit and a desktop would be too bulky. I decided against going for an Apple - although PC World have a few G3 iBooks at around £700 they are, after all, only G3s, so they're pretty old, and only come with OS X 10.1 thus requiring a costly update to Panther. The cheapest iBook G4 I've seen is £849 - way out of my/my parents' budget, even if it does include Panther pre-installed.

The best I've seen is £549+VAT (adding VAT brings it to around £650) - it's a Toshiba, which I gather is a good make, and has the following spec:

• Mobile Intel Celeron 2.2Ghz processor - better than the 'immobile' 900Mhz Celeron I have at present
• 256MB of RAM - again, double what I have now, and it's upgradable to 1GB
• 20GB HD - not huge, but still twice what I have now
• 8-speed DVD-ROM drive - my present effort only does CDs
• External USB floppy drive included - not ideal but I rarely use floppies anyway
• 14.1" display - same as what I have at present which is fine. Resolution up to 1024x768 - not brilliant but adequate
• 16-64MB graphics
• Li-ion battery lasting nearly 3 hours - better than my old Ni-MH effort which lost its ability to charge fully very quickly
• 2 USB 2.0, parallel, 56k modem, ethernet, external monitor and headphone ports - same as before but USB 2.0 rather than 1.1.
• 2x PCMCIA slots and 802.11b Wifi support
• XP Home and WinDVD 2000

View the full spec here. If I can convince my parents to contribute some money I hope to get it.

The lack of a (working) computer in my room means that blog activity will be reduced for the next few days. I hope this will get sorted soon but I can't promise anything. Blarg :-( .

Get your budgeting right, or else.

(Yes, I did make that myself, and no, I didn't edit the photos in any way)

If this kind of thing tickles your fancy, then if you aren't already reading Chasing Daisy then you are committing a very grave mistake.

Someone I emailed a week or two back seems to have got himself infected with a virus, since I'm getting messages with trojan horse viruses attached disguised as MS security patches with the exact same headers as his legitimate reply to my orginal email. I'm glad I have message truncation turned on as each message comes with a 140k attachment - not fun when you're on dial-up.

Here's a story to warm the cockles of your hearts. If it's as cold where you are as it is in Bradford, then anything to warm you up will probably be welcome.

Students at the University of Cambridge are fighting the closure of a local kebab shop, regarding it as a travesty of the highest order. Apparently, The food at Gardies is way more than a cut above the rest, the fare it dishes up wouldn't look out of place in a restaurant and it does it all for a reasonable price., according to the editor of Cambridge's student magazine.

In Bradford, we have no such problem. We have plenty of kebab shops within easy reach of the university. Although, like Cambridge, a property developer does want to build some student flats nearby and is having problems doing so - except they've annoyed English Heritage rather than the students. Apparently this is a conservation area. News to me, that's for sure...

Another two comment spams. The first one looked innocent enough, but the name was something like 'real estate in florida' and the URL was to an estage agent. Having analysed access_log, it looks like however posted that was looking for a recent entry where they could post a comment and still look slightly conspicious. The referral was from movabletype.org - probably a good place to start because all the blogs that feature on the home page there are likely to have high pageranks on Google.

The other was posted to my Safari entry, which seems to be a bit of a magnet for spam. No referrer this time, and again, the comment would look alright if it weren't for the URL put in at the end. Amusingly the spammer refreshed the page twice to see if it had posted, which, since I hadn't approved it, it didn't.

You can probably guess that I'm back from the march - turnout was somewhere between 10 000 (police estimate) and 31 000 (NUS estimate). Supposedly it was the biggest demonstration by students in this country ever, which, when you consider that the vast majority of people who turned out yesterday will never be affected by top-up fees (the reason for the demonstration) is pretty good going. Had they been introduced for all students in September 2004, and not just for new students in 2006, I'm sure the turnout would have been higher.

A scan of the news web sites this morning suggests that it was a peaceful march and no arrests were made. That said, the police in London are pretty used to this kind of thing and the vast majority of marches go ahead with little or no trouble at all. This was despite the fact I spent much of my time walking behind some anarchist group.

Overall, I had a really good day - it was the first march of its kind I'd been on and I thoroughly enjoyed it despite having to walk for over two hours before arriving at the rally in Trafalgar Square. Amusingly, one of the speakers was Labour MP and former government minister Frank Dobson, alongside Mandy Telford, the president of the NUS. Probably the only thing I didn't like was the feeling that the march had been hijacked by those pushing their own left-wing agendas - there were plenty of people selling Socialist Worker and related publications, along with people with petitions against George W. Bush's visit in November or for freedom in Palestine. I have no problem with them organising their own march but I'd have preferred if they didn't hijack ours.

And besides, I'd already signed all of their petitions anyway... ;-)

I didn't get interviewed by anyone while there although I did wave as I passed a camera recording an interview for Sky News - whether that bit got in I have no idea. Media coverage is a little slack due to various other issues that the newspapers deem more important, but the Nuardiag does have a good article.

Amusingly, on the way down it seems like at least 4 student coach parties all stopped off at Watford Gap services on the M1 at the same time. We could have almost staged our own mini-protest there, I suppose.

If you want, you can see a gallery of the photos I took. Obviously in some cases I had to juggle a placard and a banner while still marching when trying to take some of the photos, so if they're not brilliant that's probably why.

Yesterday, Firebird 0.7.1 was released. It's only for Mac OS X - not Windows or Linux - but fixes some key bugs with that platform. Those who subscribe to The Burning Edge will know that Mac nightly builds have only just become available again very recently, and past Mac builds of Firebird have apparently sucked somewhat.

Hopefully this should change. Version 0.8 will use the Pinstripe theme as standard, which will make Firebird look and feel a lot more like an OS X application. This is key - Apple computers are, to some extent, a fashion statement, and you can make the fastest and most easy to use browser in the world but if it looks ugly then Mac users are less likely to want it. It's probably why many still use Camino despite the lack of updates recently. The Qute theme is fine in Windows, particularly in XP, but it just doesn't work with Aqua.

MozillaZine has a whole variety of other Mozilla-related news from yesterday, including updates to three other Gecko browsers, so you may like to have a gander at that.

I'm about to head off to the demo. I'll let you know how it was later.

Not bad, but could do better

You are mid-way between slack and active, which we suppose means you're just a bit better than average. A kind of B+, could-do-better grade of activist. But no-one likes being middle-of-the-road, do they? Unless we're talking standing in the middle of the road, shouting and waving placards! Like the sort of bring-down-top-up-fees activist you're on the verge of becoming...

Diagnosis: you're not so much political agitator as someone who's agitated by politicans. But you could get a serious kick out of helping destroy the government's plans to plunge tomorrow's children (your children!) into huge amounts of debt.

Take the quiz. I'm still very much intent on going to the demonstration tomorrow, if only because we have a banner saying "Blair - I piss in your general direction" and "Charles Clarke - the traitor of Norwich (NCFC rule)" on it. You can't accuse us of being unoriginal with our protest slogans, can you?

While Telewest is now starting to offer a 2Mbps broadband service, which lets you download files at 240KB/sec, it pales in comparison with the ~8Mbps connection speed I was getting yesterday in one of the computing suites. I was helping a coursemate download and burn a Knoppix CD to use at home - she wants to be able to use Linux at home so that she can build up experience with it but is too afraid to repartition her hard drive in case something bad happens.

Seriously, the download speed was amazing - around 1.02MB/sec - which meant that the entire 700MB CD downloaded within around 10 minutes. Compare that to over 6 hours on my parents' 256Kbps connection and well over a day on this pathetic little 56k attempt. I have a feeling I may be around there with a few blank CD-Rs when Mandrake 9.2 ISOs are released to non-subscribers.

The only annoyance is that while the CD writers are 12-speed, which isn't bad, they don't support Smart-BURN, as we found out when she accidently hit a button on the scanner during the burning process, causing the scanner application to start and inducing a buffer underrun error. Still, I was running out of drinks coasters anyway.

With hindsight, I probably shouldn't have said that I only get about 1 spammy comment a week, because I've had three so far this week, all in a similar style, but from different IP addresses.

Analysis of my Apache files lead me to believe that the "Blogroll Me!" text on the front page is to blame for one of the cases, since the referer contained a Google search for that phrase. The others had the referer blocked :(.

The NUS has a promotional Flash animation called Night of the Living Debt, which includes Charles Clarke, minister for education, as a bogeyman wanting to extract money from poor, innocent students.

The ironic thing is that in the past Charles Clarke was a president of the NUS, and now the very same organisation that he lead is rebelling against him.

If you're going to the protest on Sunday, I might see you there. In the meantime, I'm off to spend my student loan at the bowling alley...

This was last week's Monday Mission, which in the end was published last Friday, so doing it the Wednesday afterwards is probably fitting. While I don't normally do the MM, I got pinged by PromoGuy earlier in the week so I'll do this in return. It's an interesting subject too.

Which Dr. Seuss character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

I never took Dr Seuss' advice. I hopped on Pop. [Courtesy of Les]

Even though the trunk has just frozen for Mozilla 1.6 Alpha, I finally got around to updating my copy of classic Mozilla to 1.5 final. Since switching full-time to Firebird and Thunderbird, I've hardly used their big brother, so I felt a little play around this morning was called for.

I now know why I switched: Firebird and Thunderbird are so much nicer to use. Mozilla's default theme is ugly, the preferences dialog is confusing (or at least it is after a few months with FB), and the 'tab loading' animation looks really jerky compared to the smooth transitions usually shown on. What's worse is that my favourite Orbit 3+1 theme hasn't been updated for it :'-( .

One new thing that did make me chuckle was on the help menu - there's now a special page in the help file to help Internet Explorer users get used to the different layout :). Of course, FB and TB work in a way that is closer to IE anyway, but it seems like more of an attempt at revenge at the Help menu item for Netscape users in IE.

I really hope that 1.6 finally sees Seamonkey (the old browser suite) replaced by the *Bird applications - it will do wonders for Mozilla's image.

Fellow bloggers, I'd like some feedback. How often do you guys get comment spam?

After making various changes that I've posted about in the past (see this Spam category for an archive of postings on the subject), I'm now getting perhaps 1 item of comment spam per week. Is that high, low or normal?

I'm guessing that many other bloggers get hit more than I do, but it would be nice to see what the average is.

While waiting for one of the lab machines to boot to XP Pro, a thought came into my head: if this is what XP Professional is like, what would XP Unprofessional be like?

This was useful to me, so I thought I'd share. I've been trying to assign all my entries to categories - while all new entries since May (or thereabouts) were assigned categories when they were published, older entries were not. Over the past few months, when I've had the inclination, I've been trying to add categories, to posts, but I'm finding it increasingly hard to find entries lacking a category, and there seems to be no way in the MT interface to just show category-less entries.

Anyone interested in a brand new, unopened Gillette Mach 3 Turbo razor? If you are, it's up for auction from me on eBay right now, starting at just 20p, plus 80p postage. That's a total of £1 as opposed to the £5.49 that Boots currently charge. Go on, you know you want to. Help out a poor student by buying his unwanted stuff.

Which reminds me. It's free listing day on Thursday, and I have a CD that I really want to get rid of. I reviewed it for Scrapie but wasn't that impressed with it, so I see no reason to keep it. And there's another CD that I acquired via the same means but don't feel any real attachment to, so that may be up too.

Oh yeah, and while I'm on the subject of Scrapie, we've been nominated for an award from the NUS (scroll down to category 4). Yay for us! :-D

The bad news: OpenOffice.org has a security flaw, which means that it can be crashed remotely. It can affect all versions, including the new 1.1 release.

The good news: It will only happen if you have OpenOffice.org running with Remote Access enabled (it's disabled by default) and a well-configured firewall should prevent it from being expolited. A fix is apparently on its way too.

[Via Gemal.dk]

For the first time in over four weeks, I'm not ill. The colds and 'flu have finally decided to leave me alone for the time being, so now my nose is not a gushing stream of gunk, my throat does not feel like it has been rubbed with sandpaper and my head doesn't feel like it has been filled with polystyrene.

On the other hand, I seem to have regained my appetite. As a result, I've had serious munchies all evening. Looks like I'll be shopping again on Wednesday. :-/

Something dawned on me today. The design I'm currently using now isn't a million miles away from the design I was for my personal homepage three years ago. Certainly the general colour scheme has remained, although I'm no longer writing pages in tag soup, nor am I using frames. That word makes me shiver.

That design, incidentally, took inspiration from Jordan Russell's site - Jordan was the creator of the very cool Inno Setup install packager, although unlike me the design has remained largely the same over the past 3 years. However, the page is now a valid XHTML 1.0 document, so he's probably made some changes since.

One of my iTunes gripes was the lack of support for the Ogg Vorbis format - with it being open and free, including support for it is a no-brainer. Well, trust the open source community to come up with a (partial) solution.

Enter the Quicktime Components Project, which has released an audio codec that adds Ogg Vorbis to QuickTime. And, since iTunes inherits its audio support from QuickTime, it means that, with this codec installed, iTunes can play Ogg Vorbis files! At least, that's the plan.

The reality is somewhat less than utopian - while it does indeed work as advertised, be prepared for iTunes to hang for 10-15 seconds before playing each Ogg Vorbis file, during which time the program is completely unresponsive and CPU usage shoots up to 100%. You also cannot get tag data for an Ogg file while it is playing, unless you want to endure that pause.

So, it's a start, but sadly falls short of the 'useful' grade. Downloads are available for Windows as well as Mac OS 9 and OS X, so it will also spruce up the original Mac-based iTunes too. Windows users should extract the file to their C:\Windows\System32\QuickTime folder (swap 'system32' for 'system' if you're not running XP, NT or 2000). It will work with any version of QuickTime above 6.0.2.

I really hope that someone helps this project move forward - it hasn't been updated since 19th December last year and evidently needs work on it. However, despite the fact that all my music will now play in iTunes, I'm still not convinced that it's the program for me. Although it loads up quicker than Winamp3, dBpowerAMP still wins hands down for resource usage and format support.

I don't mind watching short Flash films, just as long as they don't take 15 minutes to download on 56k modem, only to last a mere 2-3 minutes.

Link courtesy of Ken.

Ars Technica has a good article summing up the pros and cons of iTunes for Windows, and I agree with almost everything it has to say.

What annoys me is that Apple decided to effectively reinvent the wheel when it came to supporting CD-RWs and the iPod. Windows has built-in support for many CD burners, and most people with burners will have Nero, Easy CD Creator or some other ASPI-compatible CD writing program - why couldn't it use that? It's already there, it works, and doesn't crash Windows 2000 when you try to boot up.

Similarly, the iPod. Why couldn't it be treated as a normal removable storage device, in the way that XPlay allows you to do? That way, an iPod user wouldn't be tied to using iTunes, and iTunes could in turn support many other players, including my Duex.

(By the way, a quick plug for XPlay - unlike iTunes, it works on Windows Me and 98SE. It's $30 to buy)

It also mentions the need for iTunes and the iPod to support Windows Media Audio, and in particular protected files downloaded from other pay-for-music services. Now while this doesn't affect me, since I tend to buy the majority of my music on shiny discs and then rip it myself, it's a valid point. My little Duex, despite only have 128MB of onboard memory, can play back WMAs - why can't the iPod?

Finally, in his post on iTunes, Chris mentions that Apple fixed the ClearType rendering issue in QT6.4, and indeed they have, which is some consolation.

An item I submitted for inclusion on MozillaZine got published :). Wee!

There's a saying that if you're the sort of person who picks up a TV guide for Saturday night and decides that there's nothing good to watch, then you are getting old. For me, this has been the case for some time. Should I have already ordered my tweed slippers, pipe and hearing aid?

That said, there is the The Big Read on at the moment but my brain is having trouble functioning this evening so it may be a little too high-brow for me to handle on this occasion. I imagine a combination of going to bed at 3am, having to get up at 8:30am and then spending the day back home in York had something to do with it.

Fortunately I have no specific plans for tomorrow so I have the perfect excuse for denying the existence of Sunday morning.

Latest estimate from Redmond is that Windows XP SP2 will arrive in mid-2004, according to ZDNet. So that's probably a 9-month wait, then.

By the time it arrives, it will have been almost two years since SP1. You'd be forgiven that thinking MS's OS division died, or something.

It's been a while since I did a silly and pointless Quizilla poll. Blame Richard for this one.

You are Form 0, Phoenix: The Eternal.

"And The Phoenix's cycle had reached zenith, so he consumed himself in fire. He emerged from his own ashes, to be forever immortal."

Some examples of the Phoenix Form are Quetzalcoatl (Aztec), Shiva (Indian), and Ra-Atum (Egyptian). The Phoenix is associated with the concept of life, the number 0, and the element of fire. His sign is the eclipsed sun.

As a member of Form 0, you are a determined individual. You tend to keep your sense of optomism [sic], even through tough times and have a positive outlook on most situations. You have a way of looking at going through life as a journey that you can constantly learn from. Phoenixes are the best friends to have because they cheer people up easily.

Which Mythological Form Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Oh great, now some corporation is going to say my name is trademarked and then a long bitchslapping session goes on before I become a Firebird. At which point I will be bombarded with emails from a database working group...

I've tinkered with the way comments and trackbacks are displayed, and would like some feedback on whether you like it or not. This entry probably shows the changes off best. Please let me know if it's an improvement, or if you have any issues with it.

I think it looks cool, but if you beg to differ, speak up!

Update: Thanks for the comments so far. I've adjusted the spacing so it isn't quite so spread out (although I prefer the 'uncluttered' look personally). Please let me know if this is an improvement.

Also, you may notice that I've provided permalinks to all posted comments and received trackback pings. They've been there all along but you had to scurry around in the page source to find out what they were. Additionally the number of words in an entry is included in the grey text on the entry page, along with the date and time that the entry was posted at. I have no idea whether it's useful to anyone but I thought I'd include it anyway...

Oh, and as it is, most browsers will print the page out without any styling anyway, so deforestation due to excess paper being used as a result of my sparse design shouldn't be an issue :).

If you were wondering, I wasn't offered an interview for the placement I applied for. Looks like I won't be working for IBM next year, then. Still, plenty more fish in the sea :).

The film I saw last night was Ali G Indahouse, which came out last year. It was worth waiting a bit to see it - having spent a year living in Bradford I understand more of the visual gags than I would have done in my somewhat more protected life back in York. It wasn't a bad film, even if some moments did make me cringe and that the ending wasn't that great. But I did enjoy it, and it was worth spending £2 to go and see it. Next week is Final Destination 2 - I'm not really into horror films so I may or may not go to it. The films in the following weeks are both ones I've seen already (28 Days Later and LOTR: The Two Towers).

Tomorrow I'm (probably) meeting up with some friends back in York, so although I'm almost certainly going out tonight I'll try to take it relatively easy.

You probably know by now that Apple iTunes is now available for Windows. Admittedly, only XP and 2000 users get to join in the fun - if you use 95, 98, Me, NT or Server 2003, then you're seemingly out of luck. But I'm an XP user so I'm okay.

To sum up, here are the pros and cons of the program:

Pros

• Looks gorgeous - the main window is only slightly different from the Mac version and with ClearType font smoothing enabled it looks like a dream. Dialogs use proper XP visual styles too, so they look nice.
• Quite intuitive to use
• Built-in crossfader (although longer fade times would be nice - I usually have mine set to 30 seconds whereas iTunes only allows up to 14 secs)
• Will attempt to play all music at the same volume. A very nice touch.
• Sound enhancer looks interesting
• Doesn't occupy that much disk space.

Cons

• CPU and memory usage - while playing in the background it can sometimes demand as much as 33% of the CPU on my machine (which meets the minimum requirements for the application). Constantly needs at least 6MB of memory and typically more like 10MB. Peak memory usage was not far off 40MB.
• Also, it seems to leak memory quite badly.
• No support for Ogg Vorbis. Why not? It's a free, open, cross-platform format.
• 20MB download - takes at least an hour for us poor souls on dial-up. That could easily be reduced if BloatShield InstallShield wasn't used as the installer and if QuickTime 6.4 wasn't included - a lot of people already have QuickTime and it could easily be downloaded separately. Without those two it could have been a mere 10MB, if that, by my reckoning.
• Installs a variety of services for CD-RW and iPod support. Great, but I have neither, and they're only using up memory. What's worse is that they have to be disabled manually. Also, both iTunes and QuickTime install background helper apps without asking whether I wanted them, and QuickTime magically forgets that I don't want its helper app whenever I update it.
• Help could be made a bit more accessible, like providing context-sensitive help in dialogs and putting a link on the Start Menu.
• Added: Thanks to Dave's comment I remembered another few gripes. The first is that you can only resize the window using the handle in the bottom right - you can't drag any edge of the window like, well, any other Windows program.
• The maximise button doesn't maximise, it only switches it between 'full' and 'compact' - if you want to maximise it you have to enlarge it using that annoying handle...
• Macs may only have one button-mice (a silly thing in my mind) but most PCs have at least two buttons, usually three and perhaps more. Introducing a context menu would make the program so much more useful.It does have a context menu, my mistake. But it could be made much more useful.

I am quite impressed at iTunes but I think it has some way to go before I'll use it in favour of dBpowerAMP, my current favourite. Support for Ogg seems to be quite a glaring omission in both the PC and Mac versions, considering that almost all players now either support it natively or through a plugin.

It's all about five things you have lying around this week.

1. Name five things in your refrigerator.

Tins of tuna, tomato ketchup, jar of pasta sauce, jar of korma sauce, butter.

2. Name five things in your freezer.

Turkey breasts, oven chips, chicken kievs, chicken portions, minced beef.

3. Name five things under your kitchen sink.

Washing up liquid, pan scourers, cloths, brush, pans. (okay, they are actually around the sink, not under it)

4. Name five things around your computer.

Headphones, cables, CDs, razor, floppy disks.

5. Name five things in your medicine cabinet.

Glycerin (cough syrup), Paracetamol, Salbutamol, Becotide and Rhinocort. (again, no medecine cabinet but I do have those 5 medecines lying around)

Thursday is the one day when I'm in lectures pretty much 9-5. Admittedly I managed to escape at 4pm today but it's a real drag since the subjects I have today aren't exactly riveting.

Today is especially hard because there's a rather spontaneous general meeting of the student union at 6pm (which I'm attending to oppose a motion that I don't agree with), and then a film at 8pm which I want to see. And then it's a 9am start tomorrow morning :-/ .

Still... at least I have something to do :).

Paul Thurrott, columnist and the brains behind SuperSite for Windows, has written an article about what to expect in Windows XP Service Pack 2. It's been over a year since SP1 came out, and it's likely that SP2 won't ship until early next year.

That said, according to the article you can expect the following changes:

• An improved firewall, which is turned on by default and now includes outbound protection (like just about every other personal firewall already out there has for ages). A welcome improvement as this should stifle annoyances like the Blaster worm and its descendents.
• A new version of Windows Update
• New memory management code for defeating common buffer overrun attacks. Again, this is a welcome improvement from a security point of view.

The first service pack for Windows Server 2003 will be released around the same time. Meanwhile the big BG has admitted that Longhorn will be delayed and may or may not be out in 2005. Reports on the web suggest 2006 is more likely. Longhorn, for those who are unfamiliar with it, is the next major release of Windows (after XP). SuperSite for Windows has some screenshots of some of the recent alpha builds, including the new 'Aero' look.

I've just filled out and submitted my first job application for my placement year next year. I won't tell you who I applied for but you will have heard of them since they're one of the world's biggest IT companies. I'll let you know how I get on.

This isn't the last application that I'll make - although this is the job that I want the most, it's also probably the one I'm least likely to get, largely due to the potential competition I'm facing. But it's a start.

You may have noticed I occasionally end sentences with 'Ugh.' when I'm particularly frustrated (for example 'Tomorrow I have to be awake for 9am for a lecture. Ugh.' ). I've now learnt that 'Ugh' is a racist term, used against native American Indians, and so as a result I have modified any past references on this weblog to 'Eugh.', in the hope that people will realise that this is an expression and not a racist taunt.

I apologise to anyone who has been offended by my use of this word.

Today's the day - Mozilla 1.5, Firebird 0.7 and Thunderbird 0.3 are all finally released, along with a new version of the mozilla.org website, designed by the guy behind Mezzoblue. Phew!

At the moment ftp.mozilla.org is being hammered, so I'm downloading Firebird from the UK Mirror Service - if you're having trouble, try this URL for it. It doesn't yet have Mozilla or Thunderbird up, only Firebird, but I guess they'll arrive soon, probably later today or tomorrow.

Yesterday, LG Windows Daily featured NameStatistics.com which tells you how popular your name is. While it's a little US-centric, here are my results:

Neil is the #234 most common male name.
0.066% of men in the US are named Neil.
Around 80850 US men are named Neil!
source namestatistics.com

Turner is the #44 most common last name.
0.152% of last names in the US are Turner.
Around 380000 US last names are Turner!
source namestatistics.com

I knew that 'Turner' was very common, but I'm surprised that 'Neil' is so rare. While I know that it isn't common in mainland Europe (since it's Gaelic in origin, and not Germanic or Latin), I'd have thought an English-speaking country like the US would have more people with my name. Interesting.

From Monday's LG Tech Specialist:

Microsoft is not only preparing what it refers to as a "patent-safe" version of Internet Explorer 6.0, but it also has what it hopes is a trump card. That trump card is the Viola web browser from 1991-1992, which contains plug-in capabilities that Microsoft hopes will be proven as prior art. If this claim is validated, it would reverse Eolas's claim to its existing patent license and end all of this ridiculous wrangling.

Indeed it would, and I think the internet would be better for it if this were the case. As much as I hate MS, this Eolas patent really is stupid, and so I hope that this prior art claim can be used as evidence against Eolas.

You know, considering the BCS is supposed to be the UK's only professional society for people involved in IT, you'd expect it to have a better site.

Firstly, you'd expect it to validate, which it doesn't. Admittedly there are only a few minor errors when put through the W3C's validator but then it's only using HTML 4.01 and not in a way that would cause Gecko browsers to render it in Standards-compliance mode.

You may also expect it to be accessible. It's not. Okay, so it isn't bad (tables have summaries and all images have alt text) but it would never make the WCAG priority 1.

Then there's the use of frames... frames! How outdated are they? Not to mention an accessibility nightmare.

The code itself is tag soup. There are stylesheets included, but it's a mess of tables and font tags.

Finally, not all pages work in all browsers. I wanted to update my email address, but because the link to update your email address requires some obscure JavaScript function which Mozilla doesn't support, I had to resort to using IE. Since their journal has, in the past, featured articles about how good Linux is, you'd have thought they would have tested the site out in a Linux browser. But no, obviously not.

If this was any other site I wouldn't be so annoyed, but an organisation like this really could be setting a better example.

Looks like I've been blocking the Archive.org crawler since July at the earliest - which I'd never intended. I guess it shows what happens when you steal other people's robots.txt and .htaccess files.

Since Kim is showing off her chest I thought I'd show off mine. No, I don't get paid to wear it. Yes, I did pay for it. And yes, Kim's is better. And her rack is more interesting anyway, what with her being female and everything. Man-boobs just aren't so nice to look at.

Yes, I have been to the pub today. Initially only for an hour... which turned into three...

According to someone who just commented on a really old entry:

i dont understand how a person cannot believe in god. because if one doesnt believe that their is a god, than that means their is no right or wrong

Could someone explain to me the rationale behind that? Since when did I have to resort to a divine being who allegedly exists to know what is right or wrong?

You can probably tell that I'm a law-abiding citizen, so I must be getting my sense of morality from somewhere. Just because I choose not to follow the teachings of the bible, that doesn't mean I'm some immoral prat.

Here is the comment as posted.

Here is a list of unique words. They are all words that have only appeared once on the blog (as of before this entry), generated using the MTWordStats plugin. I won't be generating this file very often as it takes well over a minute to build.

It is quite interesting though. Some words are so common, you wonder why they only appeared once (unless they weren't spelled correctly...). Some are so obscure, you wonder why you mentioned them. And some are just plain peculiar.

It's not an original idea - I've seen another blog with it, but I can't remember the URL.

Since I've been getting quite fanatical about it lately, there's now a "Spam" category - you can read post excerpts as HTML or subscribe to the RSS feed. All my recent entries about comment spam will be in there but the aim of the category is to cover spam in general and not just spam on blogs. That said, most of the recent stuff is about comment spam so you may find it useful.

While I'm on the subject, Feedster have launched an IP-blacklisting service for comment spammers - you can provide them with the IP and URL used and it will be added to an OPML file. Now all we need is a plugin for MT that adds these IPs automatically, although I fear that this will be futile because by the time an IP has been reported the spammer will have probably spammed a great many blogs. And there's the potential for abuse.

If you've ever wondered what Sun's Unix variant looked like, here's your chance. I took a few screenshots in the lab today and uploaded them. I mainly did this for someone I chat to who has never seen Solaris before, but you guys might also be interested.

All shots are 640x480 pixels, resized down from 1280x1024 which is what the terminals operate at.

• Login screen
• Splash screen shown whilst the system logs you in
• CDE desktop
• CDE with Netscape running

With my Vodafone contract due to run out in January, and suddenly turn expensive (since I'm on a ridiculously good introductory offer), I've been on the look out for better deals. Armed with a pen and paper, I visted the sites for O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, Virgin, OneTel and Tesco Mobile to see who could offer me the best deal.

Although I'm on a contract at present having looked at the offers available it's likely that I'll be going back to Pay-as-you-Go - most of these contracts start at £15/month and don't really give you much for that. Tesco's Pay as you Go seems about the best, and certainly the simplest - 20p/min to all phones and 10p to text, however it's only 10p and 5p respectively to your three favourite phone numbers. There's no monthly fee, you can top-up anywhere (and get clubcard points), and the SIM card costs £10. You can even keep your existing number for free. Looks like Tesco have me sold on that.

Which reminds me - T-Mobile's site annoyed the heck out of me. Too many unavoidable flash intros that took an age to download. Not good.

If you have a Nokia mobile phone, don't keep it in your trouser pocket, just it case it explodes. Apparently two phones have exploded recently, although the article doesn't mention which models are affected.

The other reason why you wouldn't want to put your phone in your trouser pocket is because apparently it may increase rates of prostate cancer and lower sperm counts in men. I haven't heard any proof of this, but if you're a guy, be on the watch out. No idea what it does to women... probably gives them thigh cancer or something.

Great Site Folks! I have another big **** site for you which is really the #1 big **** site - check it out, its full of big **** !! here's the link: Big ****

You can guess the word I censored out. It wasn't a swear word (rather a slang term for 'mammarial glands' ) but I'm worried that if I left it as it was, comment spammers would search for it and I'd continue to be hit (since they assume that because it appears on the blog I won't remove spam and therefore I'll offer valid contributions to their pageranks).

Analysis of this latest comment spammer suggests that they are going after entries in the format http://[domain]/archives/######.html - the default for MT. Now while my more recent entries are immune, since I use /entries/ rather than /archives/ , I spent a lot of time getting the first 350 entries to redirect to their new locations. That said, they've been 302 (temporary) redirects since March, and 301 (permanent) since 31st August, and it may well be that in a couple of weeks they become 410 (gone), since I think two months is an acceptable timeframe for any search engine crawlers to fix the URLs in their databases.

So, what's my latest comment spam prevention tip? Don't use /archives/ . Use /entries/ , /posts/ or have a custom setup that doesn't involve the entry ID. That goes in hand with renaming the mt-comments.cgi file and removing common terms like "Remember Personal Info?" from entry pages and comment listings, which are my other tips.

As it is, the same guy has been hitting various guestbooks too - Google has over 1000 results for his name.

In the days of plastic money, it can be easy to forget just how large certain sums of money are, so this page will help you get a feel for just how big $87 billion is. $87 billion is the amount of money that Dubya wants to the US taxpayers to pay towards rebuilding Iraq.

It goes on to show you how big $166 billion is, which is the total amount of money spent in Iraq and Afghanistan by this time next year. That's $568 for every man, woman and child in the US, or nearly $28 (£17) for every person in the world as a whole.

With the whole pullava about the lack of WMDs (other than that vial of Botox, nothing), the number of troops and civilians killed and now this, I'm really starting to think that this war was a very, very bad idea. Think what kind of state-run healthcare system you could set up in America with that kind of money.

While I've yet to work out quite how it calculates its rankings, apparently, this site is 35% evil. Still, it's also 65% good at the same time.

How evil is your site?

A couple of days back I decided to see if I was capable of getting Freeview, so I could watch 30 TV channels in high quality reception rather than 5 in mediocre-to-poor quality. Tesco are now selling Daewoo boxes for a mere £80 which don't rely on having a SCART socket on your TV, so I figured it was worth a try. And did it work?

Of course it didn't. Bradford has atrociously bad TV reception, which means analogue TV doesn't come out very well but digital cannot work at all - the digital signal is compressed so it needs a full stream to be able to decompress it, therefore partial reception is not good enough. As it is, I bought it from Tesco, who took the box back with no questions asked and gave me a full refund, so I've not lost anything financially.

With hindsight, I'd have checked the Freeview website which has a reception checker that works by postcode - and my postcode naturally says that I'm not in a Freeview area. Oh well, I tried. If it helps my postcode for last year also turned up blank.

Interestingly it also doesn't like my grandparents' postcode, which is a pity because they're the sort of people who might be interested in Freeview (as opposed to Sky which is the only other option for digital TV in their area, and that requires a contract). That said, their Channel 5 reception isn't good anyway so it's probably related to a problem with the local transmitters.

Again not terribly great but I haven't got much to write about at present.

1. Do you watch sports? If so, which ones?

On the rare occasions that Football (that's soccer you to yanks) actually makes it on to terrestrial TV, I watch that, and if there's a big game on satellite I may get myself down the pub to watch it. Rugby and Formula 1 are occasionally interesting too - I may watch the odd game in the Rugby World Cup now that it has started although the games may be a bit early in the morning.

2. What/who are your favorite sports teams and/or favorite athletes?

I've supported Liverpool FC for 12 years, although I feel a little partial towards York City since they're my local team. Hopefully they'll get promoted from Division 3 this season. As an LFC supporter I obviously like Michael Owen, although I admire David Beckham - no matter what everyone says about him and his intelligence, he's one of the best homegrown footballers we've ever had.

I don't own any Liverpool merchandise though, nor any football merchandise, come to think of it.

3. Are there any sports you hate?

'Professional' wrestling, since it's hardly a sport. I found golf rather boring, as with just about any sports on the Eurosport channel.

4. Have you ever been to a sports event?

Unless you cound school sports days, no. I'm an armchair supporter.

5. Do/did you play any sports (in school or other)? How long did you play?

Without counting PE (which was compuslory), no, I never played in any teams. I was never any good at actually playing sport. Although I nearly joined the Archery team at Uni this year, if that counts.

Around about 6 hours ago, Release Candidate 3 of Mozilla Thunderbird was released. This includes some minor bug fixes and a a fix for a security issue inherited from the main Mozilla tree.

Currently only a Windows build is available but presuambly builds for Linux and Mac OS X are on their way. The final release of 0.3 should co-incide with the releases of Mozilla 1.5 and, presumably, Firebird 0.7.

Looks like my comment spam fix isn't foolproof, since I have just got some pharmaceutical spam posted to one entry. But a quick analysis of my Apache server log revealed some interesting trends...

The IP address was 66.119.33.171, so I searched the file for this address. 5 lines came up, the first of which was most telling:

66.119.33.171 - - [08/Oct/2003:17:30:19 +0000] "GET /entries/000234.html HTTP/1.1" 200 - "http://www.alltheweb.com/search?_sb_lang=pref&cs=utf-8 &cat=web&q=%22Remember+personal+info%3F%22&avkw=fogg&o=20" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Q312461; Rogers Hi-Speed Internet)"

This shows that someone is scouring for sites with this string: "Remember Personal Info?" - many of which will be blogs. It would seem, therefore, that you could prevent this by merely changing the text to something else (ie something that not everyone else is using). It's worth a try, anyway but don't expect immediate results because the search engines will need to recrawl your site first.

While I'm on the subject, Jay Allen has another good stab at blocking the spam - might be worth keeping an eye on it.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced it would change its browser to cope with patents conditions from another company. Now it's possible that other companies will have to change their products because MS have been granted a patent.

According to CNet (via Chris), Microsoft now own a patent "for an instant messaging feature that notifies users when the person they are communicating with is typing a message." While this functionality has been in MSN since the client was first released over 4 years ago (IIRC), Yahoo added support for it not long afterwards, and programs like Trillian also feature it on networks where it is supported.

There's still no word on whether MS will do anything with this patent yet, but we shall see. You have to remember that AOL owns a patent on the whole concept of instant messaging yet they haven't used that to shut down rival services.

In other news, California shoots itself in the foot by electing a womanising aging movie-star to run the world's fifth largest economy, and that Typepad has been officially launched with a few new features. There's a 3-minute clip on an interview with Ben and Mena on CNN to download too.

Hi,

I visited http://www.newrecruit.org, and noticed that you're not listed on some search engines!

Sorry Stephen, it looks like I run your web site now >:-). (I'm joking of course)

Of course this email is a con - even Google gets them - and even if there are 300 000 search engines and directories out there, I wonder how many are:

• Actually relevant to the site's focus? (no point in submitting this weblog to a web directory for cheese collecting sites)
• Share their data - there are over 360 sites that we know of using ODP Data legally (and other 700 who may be using illegally).
• Actually worth submitting to? (no point in submitting to a search engine no-one has heard of nor uses)

Google's SEO page offers some very good advice, in my opinion - if you're looking for someone to do your web marketing for you, consult that first before you start making inquiries.

As part of its Stop Fees NOW! campaign, the NUS has set up a campaign blog with updates from party conferences and the like. It's done in Blogger Pro and they're working on an RSS feed.

The national demonstration against topup fees is two weeks on Saturday down in London - I'm debating whether to go or not. It's apparently only £1 to go so I may consider it :).

You know that IE patent that Eolas sued MS for? Well, if you have Windows XP SP1 installed, you can go to the IE Update site, scroll down, and test drive a version of IE6 which has been modified to satisfy the conditions of the patent.

According to MozillaZine, the change will "essentially amount to forcing the user to press an OK button before loading each ActiveX control". The Mozilla Foundation have issued a press release on the issue - as yet there will be no changes to any Mozilla-based products since Eolas haven't approached them. It's unlikely too - after all, MS is a huge corporation worth billions of dollars, whereas the Mozilla Foundation doesn't make a profit and any sizable legal bill will probably make it bankrupt, so it's probably not a worthy target.

The MozillaZine article also has some other useful links on the subject.

One of the AdSense adverts on Google Weblog when I last looked was for Looksmart, offering pay-per-click results on MSN Search. This comes a day after Microsoft drops Looksmart results from its search tool (or rather, MS won't renew its contract with Looksmart when it runs out). How ironic.

Never really liked Looksmart anyway. I did sign up for Zeal and passed the test first time, but never did anything much after that.

By the way, on the subject of MS is The Old New Thing, found via Joel on Software (aka the guy who saved Firebird). It's a blog that answers many of those odd questions you had about Windows development but could never find the answers for. Check out the 'History' category for some very interesting and occasionally amusing articles about how the UI for Windows 95 was developed and why things are the way they are.

Which remains me, I must stop referring to the System Tray...

You have to worry when people find your web site by searching for 'Rugby man 2 restaurant Brussels'.

I apologise for making the title so long that it was unreadable yesterday. I'll try not to do it again.

I'll also apologise for the downtime earlier this morning, even though it wasn't my fault - for some reason the domain was suspended for about 1 1/2 hours, during which time I had no web site, no FTP and no email. Seems top be working now anyway.

Update: The downtime seems intermittent and seems to depend on which computer I use - I originally wrote this entry on one of the computing lab computers and it was fine, yet my own dial-up connection was having no luck. Then, suddenly it worked. How bizarre.

Oh yeah, and the 'flu is all but cleared now. I haven't had any paracetamol since last night and my head is fine. Still got the stuffy nose and chesty cough though.

In the end, I did make it to lectures today, and seemed to survive them okay. I even managed a trip into town, to buy various odds and ends, namely three birthday cards, a box of tissues (you can probably guess why) and a two-pin AC adaptor so that I can actually have a shave.

Two of the cards are for an acquaintance in lectures who turns 21 tomorrow - one is from me and the other will be from someone else. Of course, I hadn't realised just how difficult it was to find a 21st birthday card that didn't mention alcohol, but in the end I managed to find something a little more subdued. The other is for my grandma who turns 81 next Tuesday.

The adaptor is down to the fact that, unlike last year, I don't have a separate razor socket, although I didn't actually realise this until I tried to have a shave today, realised the battery was flat and then realised there was nothing I could plug it in to.

I reckon I should be back to my usual self tomorrow but I'll take it easy over the next few days just in case.

An interesting, but perhaps not so surprising story on eWeek suggests that a security flaw in IE was to blame for the Half Life II code being stolen. The vunerability is quite a serious one, yet no patch has been made available as yet, despite there being code apparently available which exploits it.

The 'flu still persists although it doesn't seem to be as bad today as it has been over the weekend. That said, I don't think I'll be going in for lectures today, although I should be okay tomorrow hopefully.

I did get around to tidying my desk, so that I can now actually see wood in some places. I also need to get a new timetable printed off, now that it seems to have settled down - which means I'll be able to ditch the various other copies that I've accumulated since. I've still got a pile of postcards which need putting on the wall at some point, though.

Kev has some more photos of Eve, who is now 2 1/2 weeks old but still immensely cute.

This is a note to anyone who has the email address neilturner[at]myrealbox[dot]com in their address books - can you please change it to neil[at]neilturner[dot]me[dot]uk. I'm phasing out the MyRealBox address and intend to stop using it by the time 2004 rolls around. I've got almost all of my newsletter subscriptions switched over and I think most people in my address book now know where to point any mail for me.

Still suffering from the dreaded 'flu although I'm feeling somewhat better today than I did yesterday. That said, I've barely left my room at all today - the only excursion outside was to the shops to buy lunch and a paper. I did at least manage to eat something today and thus break my involuntary 40-hour fast, although my stomach is still feeling a little off at the moment. Thankfully having a laptop means I can sit it on my bedside table and browse under the warmth of my rather fetching purple fleece blanket.

Whether I go in tomorrow for lectures remains to be seen - I don't start until the afternoon. That said most of the material is on the university intranet so I can easily download it and do it in the relative comfort of my own bed.

Just when my cold was finally easing off, along came the 'flu. I've spent the past 12 hours cooped up in bed with a headache, sore throat, random fluctuations in body temperature, aching joints and a waterfall of snot coming out of my nose.

That said, thanks to a paracetamol tablet my aches have eased somewhat, so I've actually been able to get out of bed and tidy the mess of clothes, blanket and duvet on the floor. Half past midnight does seem an odd time to do it but then I have been asleep for the best part of 12 hours already.

The most annoying thing was that I had to clock out of helping out on the open day a good 3 1/2 hours early because of this - I basically made it midday before deciding that really this wasn't such a good idea. I will earn some money but not as much I'd hoped :( .

Hopefully I'll be feeling much better by Monday afternoon, when I'm back in lectures. The most annoying thing was that I was due to have a 'flu injection next week, which would have stopped this from happening in the first place. Ah well.

This was just posted as a comment to my review of MSN 6.0:

I think the review was done on a leaked copy because I haven't seen any MSN available from www.msn.com with built-in message logging. [url=**removed***]This is an exceptional webpage for MSN addons etc[/url]

Not only is it factually inaccurate (I'm pretty sure there is message logging in it), but the URL went to a web site for an American group that stands for the rights of 'white people' (ie they're a load of racist biggots), hence the reason why the URL was removed.

Remember, I know your IP address. Within 30 seconds of receiving the comment I knew that this idiot was posting from Auckland, New Zealand, and the name of his ISP. Please, don't post a load of trash on people's sites.

Thanks to Miranda IM, which has improved considerably since I last tried it, I'm now contactable via AOL (totalxsiva) and Jabber (totalxsive [at] jabber.org) again, along with MSN. As I've said before, I can only use IRC and Jabber with Trillian on this connection (probably due to firewalling by the university), so I gave up and went back to the official MSN 6.0 client. I'm still using that for MSN connectivity since it won't work through Miranda, and ICQ seems to fail too, however a new MSN plugin was released yesterday so I'll have a play with it. There's no Yahoo support as yet, it seems, due to Yahoo changing their system a few days ago.

Considering that Miranda only needs around 1.5MB of memory to run idle, I'm happy to have it running since it won't impact performance.

Update: Still no-go with the new MSN plugin but I got ICQ to work by setting it to connect to the ICQ servers using a random port number. Now I just have to work out who everyone is - in Trillian it uses the nickname specified by the user and can be manually customised, whereas Miranda just seems to use the number. All I know is that Chris (Pirillo) has the really short one...

It's been a couple of days since I last briefed you on how my life is progressing so for those of you who don't visit just for the technical hoo-ha and are actually interested in what I do with my spare time, here's one for you.

Oooh... Bill Bailey has a blog. He's the slightly odd comedian who is a panellist Never Mind The Buzzcocks and occasionally appears on Just A Minute on Radio 4.

Only one entry there so far, but, heh. Credit goes to Chasing Daisy, who also links to FlashBlogging, an idea based on the Flash Mobs concept. Interesting.

Another somewhat sucky one that I've had to change slightly to fit my circumstances.

1. What vehicle do you your parents drive?

A metallic silver Ford Focus Zetec 1.6. The one shown in the image is almost like ours except we have 4 doors rather than 2.

2. How long have you your parents had it?

Since December 2002. It replaced a red Renault Megane Scenic RT 1.6 which we'd had for four years, however it basically died on us so we needed a new car :).

3. What is the coolest feature on your your parents' vehicle?

The engine. Being a Zetec it accelerates pretty quickly and can cruise well at 70mph. Fuel economy isn't bad either - it's not a particularly thirsty car.

4. What is the most annoying thing about your your parents' vehicle?

No sunroof.

5. If money were no object, what vehicle would you be driving right now?

Although I don't personally own a car, don't hold a license to drive one nor have ever attempted to learn, I really like the Smart car. Okay, so it's only a two-seater and isn't practical for long distance driving, but it's cheap to buy, cheap to run, easy to park and you get really nasty looks when you overtake BMWs on the M62 :-D.

As for my parents, my dad probably wouldn't mind a Jaguar or an Aston Martin. As far as I know my mum is fine with the Focus.

I'm afraid I'll have to rant about Black Bull Web Design and their web site, since it's so inaccessable it's almost amusing.

Now, last time I checked, to create a link to a page, you would use the following code:

<a href="newpage1.html" style="color:red">New Page 1</a>

I've spiced it up slightly with some CSS to give the red colour as used on the site. However, Black Bull beg to differ. There, they acheive the effect with the following code:

<td class="welcome" onmouseover="this.style.color='red'" onmouseout="this.style.color='006600'"><span id="newpage" onmouseover="this.style.cursor='hand'" title="available options">New Page 1</span></td> <script language="VBScript" type="text/vbscript"> Dim objNewWindow sub newpage_onClick Set objNewWindow = Window.Open("newpage1.html","myWindowOne", "width=560,height=300,toolbar=no, menubar=no, location=no,directories=no,resizable=no,scrollbars=yes,top=120,left=15" ) end sub </script>

Now excuse my ignorance, but I really cannot see why all that is really necessary. Firstly, since it uses VBScript and not the more open JavaScript, any non-IE browser won't have a clue what to do, including screen readers - all they see is plain text. I don't quite understand the need to force the links to open in new windows either - if I wanted the link to open in a new window I'd open one. And I wouldn't mind having my status bar and my toolbar as well, and being able to resize it would be nice.

Furthermore, the code bulks out the page terribly. You could shave at least a kilobyte out of it if you stuck to simple text links like everyone else, and on a site which generates a lot of bandwidth that could be a very useful saving.

Sometimes I dispair at so-called web designers.

If there is at least 1 comment and 1 trackback to this post, then it means that my 'solution' to the comment spam worked. I won't tell you how I did it just yet, although you can probably get an idea by looking at the source code for the individual archive page for this entry.

Note that comments and trackback pings may not work on over entries in the meantime. (should be fixed now)

Update: Okay, it works, so here's how to do it:

I had this comment left today:

We live in strange times, but someday I think we will look back on all of this and marvel at how crazy it was. God, I hope so. I sure wouldn't want this insanity to become the norm.

The comment was posted to an article about Apple's Safari web browser and the initial reaction it had in the web community. It looked legitimate, if a little odd, until I noticed that the author was called 'Buy Viagra' and his URL went to a site selling that famous anti-impotence drug. The email address of 'dave@dave.net' was also somewhat suspicious.

Of course, spamming this blog is totally futile since the comments have to be approved, but try telling an automated script that. I believe, however, that there may well be a partial solution to the problem - hang in there and I'll see what I can do.

Yesterday's LG Tech Specialist had a link to BeOS 5 PE Max Edition v3, which is the third major revision of a reworked version of BeOS 5 Personal Edition.

Be Inc ceased development of BeOS, a free Unix-based operating system, some time ago, which is a shame because I remember it being quite good when I tried it a couple of years ago. However, as you can see, there is a group who are keeping it up-to-date with new drivers, new software and updates to existing applets where appropriate. This latest version includes a variety of games and programs, including a BeOS version of Mozilla 1.5 beta.

I'd try it again, but I still don't think BeOS will ever get taken seriously. That, and I'd rather donate that space to Linux, which is being taken increasingly seriously.

While we're on the subject of Unix-derivates, I got to play with Solaris yesterday in labs. Admittedly through Exceed (which basically opens a graphical telnet session with the machine), but it was interesting nonetheless. That said, it looked very retro.

Research by Amazon.co.uk shows that British students spend their book money on beer and kebabs. 43% of the money set aside for buying textbooks is used "to fund drinking sessions and other extra curricular activities", according to the article.

Of course, at least I can take some glee in the knowledge that London students come bottom, but then with a night out costing so much down there it's less surprising.

I can't remember hiw much money I set aside for books this year but today I spent £65.98 on three books. I may need to get more if need be but I'll stick to these three unless I absolutely have to.

Probably the most interesting bit of the article is this:

Of those who took part in the poll, just 9% disagreed with the suggestion that the cost of textbooks should be subsidised by the government.

When you consider how big the latest Harry Potter is and how cheap it is, you wonder why you have pay £40 for a 400-page textbook on TCP/IP. Either the government needs to get arsy at publishers over their ridiculously high charges, or offer students complementary book tokens, or something. Oh yeah, and they can ditch their ideas about top-up fees while they're at it...

I seem to be having bandwidth issues at the moment, apparently. I will get them sorted, don't you worry.

There isn't a huge amount of juicy gossip to report here, since I haven't done much lately that isn't general run-of-the-mill stuff. That said, now that it's October, I can actually spend money since I don't have to wait for the interest on my current account to accumulate, and, as such, I have around £1800 to spend this week - tuition fees, rent, books and food. The books alone are going to cost in the region of £65, and that's by shopping around. A bulk order from Amazon would have cost a further £35 :(

Today is my day off and tonight I'm going on my third train journey of the week, back to Manchester again. I'm meeting up with some friends there and going to 5th Avenue, which apparently is mostly frequented by students and plays mostly chart and indie music, which sounds alright to me. Again, since I have money, I can actually buy drinks this time, although I'm aiming to back in lectures at 1pm tomorrow so I don't want to get completely trolleyed.

Finally, Mozilla news - there's been a security bug fixed in the code. I have no idea what the issue is because my Bugzilla account is not authorised to view the bug (presumably for safety reasons) but hopefully, if this bug is in any other variants of the Mozilla clan it'll be fixed in those too. Good thing it was discovered now though - another week and it might have been too late because the various programs would have been released already.