March 2005 Archives

My London Zoo photos are up, later than I'd hoped thanks to NTL and their wonderful network which was randomly losing around 30% of packets this evening. Unfortunately I had another case of Huge Memory Card Syndrome which meant I took far more photos than I really should have done. There's 60 there, whittled down from around 90 or so. The weather wasn't great today - on the one hand a good thing because it kept the crowds away, but it meant that the pictures are quite dull and many of the animals were staying inside where it was warmer. London Zoo is well worth a visit, though you do need the full day for it - we arrived not long after 10am and it was nearly half past 3 by the time we'd left.

Anyhow, it's the end of the month so my Flickr upload limits will be reset in a few hours' time - I managed 16% this time. That's over 160MB of photos uploaded. In one month. Hmmm.

Tomorrow there'll be yet more fish as I go to The Deep in Hull, although I might try to show a little more restraint. Might nab a few of Hull City Centre though.

Finally as I'm rather busy at the moment there won't be an April Fool's Day joke or theme this year, I'm afraid. Sorry.

The next couple of days will see me going into tourist mode again. Tomorrow I'll be in London for the third time in 5 weeks to visit London Zoo - last time I went there it was the mid-80s and I was in a pushchair, and it's been a long time since I've been to a zoo of any description.

Then on Friday I'm off to The Deep in Hull, one of the largest indoor aquariums (aquaria?) in the country. It opened a few years ago but I haven't yet had chance to visit.

In both cases, I'll be armed with a camera and not afraid to use it, and the results should make their way to Flickr soon afterwards.

Please look at the image below and tell me which font you think would look the best as the header font for this site.

I'm currently using Georgia Italic but Palatino Linotype looks nice - it looks a bit more 'handwritten' than Georgia does. It comes as standard with Windows XP and Office 2003, although it's available to buy for those without it. That said, buying Windows XP might be cheaper than buying the font on its own...

In any case, if I did choose it, it would be preferred over Georgia, but if you didn't have the font Georgia would be used instead. Alternatively, if you have neither, Times or another serif font will be used at your browser's discretion, as happens now.

Tim Bray is considering moving away from his Mac. He's already switched away from using Safari to Firefox and is looking at moving from Mail.app to Thunderbird, but that might just be the start of it.

His reasoning focusses on the legal case involving Apple and the weblogs which posted information passed to them by an Apple employee, who in doing so was breaking his non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with Apple. Annoyingly the judge seems to have valued Apple's trade secrets as being more valuable than the free speech of the bloggers. But then the US is one of the few countries in the world where trade secrets have legal protection - so if an employee under an NDA revealed some secret information to a public source, that information would still be called as a trade secret, even if the information became common knowledge (i.e. not a secret) through this disclosure. But IANAL so that might be wrong.

This, coupled with Apple's involvement with spyware is making me think twice about whether I really want to buy a Mac Mini later this year. Apple's ethical record is starting to look very patchy indeed.

Dave's done it so I'm going to follow suit:

If I am in a permanent vegetative state, then please don't try to keep me alive forever. Pull the tube, let me die, and then salvage my organs for transplants. It's not like I'll need them anymore, yet it could be a matter of life or death for them.

There, I've said it. There's probably a more official way of doing that but this will do for now.

The original 'Crazy Frog' ringtone (a blatent rip-off of the insanity test) was annoying enough, and the insessant advertising made it even worse. My only relief was the 'death of crazy frog' video floating around on the internet.

But now, we have the Crazy Frog Version 2.0 Remix. Someone please kill me now.

Update: Please see The Origins of Crazy Frog.

ThisIsBroken is a weblog which details daily examples of poor user experiences, usually with web sites. Yesterday, it had a report from a US user wanting to get a quote for sending a package to a Scottish address using Fedex's web site. When she came to select the country however, Scotland wasn't on there - she had to guess that Scotland is located in the United Kingdom which was what was on Fedex's list.

This is a long and slightly boring essay on the use of uppercase text in web pages and how best to apply semantics to it to convey the reason why the text was made uppercase. It was mostly inspired by the fact that I've added a selection of new abbreviations and acronyms to the database file, which means that a few old posts might show as unread in your newsreaders.

If you were quick to jump on the Google Desktop Search bandwagon like I was, you may be unaware of some cool new plugins that have surfaced since its release.

The OpenOffice.org plugin now supports OpenDocument, the new file format that will be introduced in OOo 2.0. If you regularly use audio formats other than MP3, such as AAC in iTunes or Ogg Vorbis, then there's an audio metadata plugin which lets you search the artist and title information of a wide variety of audio formats, including AAC, M4A, FLAC and OGG. You can even search filenames inside zip files.

I'm sure that like a number of people I'm following the news of an earthquake off the coast of Indonesia that measured 8.2 on the Richter scale. There's a real risk that this could trigger a second tsunami in areas that are only just recovering from the first one on Boxing Day.

You can view the details of it at the US Geological Survey. (thanks to Kottke). There's also a Wikipedia article which is aggregating the news stories coming through.

Be rest assured that if the worst does happen, I will be donating some of the Google AdSense revenue from this site to a tsunami relief charity if an appeal for money goes out.

Recently several people have reported problems with sending trackback pings to this site. It's evidently not affecting everyone as pings from other blogs are getting through.

Dave Shea is having a spot of bother with Canadian mobile networks. He wants a PalmOne Treo, but a complicated mess of contract periods, mobile standards and network policies seem to be getting in his way.

Having read that, I am very glad that the mobile system in the UK is much, much simpler, and has fewer lock-ins than Canada. Here's a table I've concocted to show the differences:

CDMA is slightly faster than GSM but doesn't make use of SIM cards so it's almost impossible to move an account between phones anyway. While locking of phones to a particular network's SIM card is common in the UK, there's a buzzing grey market in unlocking phones to work on all networks (although some legilation from the government or Europe banning locking on competition grounds would be nice). Although I've had 3 different phones in the past year (Nokia 3410, Sony Ericcson T300 and now Nokia 7250) moving between handsets has been a simple case of taking the SIM card out of one and putting it in the other. While unlocking does make the situation more difficult, on the whole, the user is the one who is in control.

Frank, over at Funtime Franky, had a similar experience when he emigrated to Canada last year. Phones were expensive to buy and there were lots of silly extra charges too.

My grandfather is now able to surferise the intahweb, as of yesterday. He has my parents' old computer (a 1999 AMD K6-2 400Mhz box with 128MB RAM and a 10GB HD), along with an internal 56k V.92 modem and a Virgin.Net account. For web browsing he's been set up with IE (the machine has XP SP2 so it's got the popup blocker) and Google is his homepage since it loads quicker than Virgin's home page - which, considering he's on 56k is probably a good thing. For the amount he's likely to use it, broadband isn't worth the investment. He also has McAfee VirusScan (updated yesterday) and various antispyware tools installed, including SpywareBlaster and Spybot S&D with immunisation enabled, so hopefully the machine will stay fresh.

Email, however, is through Thunderbird 1.0.2. I wouldn't let a member of my family use Outlook Express.

As he is the ripe old age of 83 he's having a little trouble understanding the concept of the internet but as the day went on he seemed to pick up the general idea, and he was able to email other members of the family to announce his presence.

Today's FridayQ is all about birthdays.

FQ1: When is your birthday?

May 25th, so exactly 2 months time. I'll be 21...

FQ2: Anything interesting happen on your birthday in history?

According to The History Channel, 25th May 1660 was the day of The English Restoration after Charles II assumed the throne as King of England, after 11 years of military rule following the English Civil War. And we've had a monarchy ever since.

And in 1979 it was also the date of the worst air crash in US history when 271 people were killed on a plane crashed shortly after takeoff. 2 people on the ground also died. I'm guessing 9/11 doesn't count as an 'air crash' then.

FQ3: Anybody famous share your birthday? Do you have anything in common with them?

I share my birthday with:

• Jonny Wilkinson, the English rugby player who won the Rugby World Cup for England in 2003 with a drop-goal at the end of extra time. Don't know what I have in common with him other than that he's English...
• Mike Myers, star of Austin Powers and Shrek, amongst others. I'm guessing we both have a sense of humour.
• Anthea Turner, former Blue Peter presenter and all-round celebrity. We have the same surname, and both like Cadbury's Snowflake, although she's more than twice my age.
• Paul Weller, musician. Not a lot in common, I'm not really into his music.
• Alistair Campbell, former Labour spin doctor. I'm guessing we both have a dislike of the Conservative Party.
• Eve Ensler, playwright and author of the Vagina Monologues. We both want an end to violence against women.
• Dave Lee Travis, legendary DJ. We both like music?
• Sir Ian McKellen, aka Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings films. We both believe in gay rights.
• Richard Dimbleby, news presenter (died in 1965). Most famous for a report on the Spaghetti Harvest on April 1st, 1957. Probably sense of humour again.
• Billy Murray, musician (died 1954).

I knew about sharing a birthday with Anthea Turner but I was surprised at some of the others.

FQ FUTURE: On your 100th birthday, what year will it be and what do you think you'll be wanting as a present then?

It'll be 2084, and I'll probably be wanting a hip replacement.

My York photos are up - 76 of them, in total. They start from near my home, then progress past York College, onto the Trans Pennine Trail, across the racecourse and then alongside the River Ouse before ending up in the city centre. I've tried to include both the more common attractions (The Minster, Clifford's Tower, The Shambles) alongside some of York's lesser known amenities like Rowntrees Park.

There's some photos that I didn't get that I would have taken had I had more time, such as the newly re-opened York Art Gallery. But 76 is still enough to be getting on with :) .

It recently dawned on me that while I grew up in York, photograph-wise I don't actually have a lot to show for it. I have plenty of my adopted city of Bradford, but barely any for the city where I was born and spent the first 18 years of my life living in.

So, since it was a nice day - one of the nicest of the year so far - I decided to go out and take some photos. However, over the course of the afternoon "some" became "a lot" and the end result is that I have 87 photos to sort and tag at some point.

Furthermore, rather than taking the bus into town, I decided to walk in, and decided to take the slower scenic route by the river instead, which means that I've walked around 7 miles today. Most of the lower half of my body is aching right now.

There are plans to show Jerry Springer: The Opera in Bradford. And naturally, even before it has been confirmed someone from an evangelical Christian church in the city has thrown his hands in the air and said it shouldn't be shown. The opera is controversial because of the high amount of swearing and its depictions of God and Jesus in the second act, which could be seen as blasphemous.

Earlier this year, when it was broadcast on BBC2, there were protests and a campaign to prevent the programme being broadcast. It drew thousands of complaints (most of which were made using a template provided by a group called Christian Voice).

I watched the show when it was broadcast, and have to say I really enjoyed it. There is a lot of swearing but it's actually pretty hilarious in the opera context. I'm not a Christian so I was arguably less likely to be offended by the really controversial bits but I still think that the claims of these groups are misguided at best.

Yet, the guy making the compliant in Bradford has not seen it:

He said: "I've never seen it and I don't think it is necessary to see it as I've read sufficient information about it to see what kind of production it is.

Personally, I'd suggest that he does watch it, and then make up his own mind, rather than be dictated by what others have said. A number of Christian leaders have come out as saying that the performance was very amusing and only a little controversial if at all. And by letting the performance take place, he will be letting others make up their minds too.

While Bradford is home to the Abundant Life Centre, part of the Abundant Life Church, only around 60% of its population describe themselves as Christian, and of those I'm sure a number will have no or few objections to the content of the play.

Symantec have announced that the UK has the highest proportion of zombie computers in the world. 25.2% of compromised machines are here, ahead of the US with 24.6% and China with 7.8%.

These machines are used for sending out spam, hosting phishing web sites, launching denial of service attacks and other kinds of malice, almost always without the knowledge or consent of the computers' owners. As more people get always-on broadband connections, the problem will only get worse, unless something is done about it. Here's my suggestions:

A couple of years ago I came across a tool that let you create your own South Park character, which you could use in avatars and stuff. Fast forward to now and there's a better tool (found by the way of Colin) that gives you more control over your character. The image is supposed to be a rough estimate of what I'd look like should I ever make a cameo appearance in the series, and reflects the fact that I seem to have acquired several red t-shirts lately.

Camino, the native Mac OS X browser that uses Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine, now has its own web site at CaminoBrowser.org. With much of the Mozilla Foundation's marketing efforts being aimed at Firefox, which is arguably a rival browser, it's good to see a separate effort being made for this browser.

I also really like the site design. It manages to combine the standard layouts of both mozilla.org and apple.com while still looking attractive. The blue heading is typically Mozilla but the actual structure of the page is more like Apple's site. This represents the goal of Camino - taking Mozilla technology and putting a Mac twist on it - very well.

My only criticisms would be of the underlying code. While most of the formatting is controlled by CSS, the layout is done using a table in HTML, which is now outdated practice. There's also 10 validation errors, mostly pertaining to the use of uppercase characters in the attribute names for the meta tags, which isn't permitted in XHTML.

Still, it looks like a very nice site and hopefully it will encourage more people to use the browser.

I'm now back at my parent's house in York for Easter, and on 300Kbps NTL cable connection. While it's fine for them, being used to 1Mbps broadband I'm finding it a little slow.

Now NTL will let you upgrade to 1Mbps for the same price that my parents are paying now. But there's a catch - instead of the 30GB monthly download limit you get on the 300Kbps service, you'll only have a 3GB limit. It's higher than some rival services which offer a measily 1GB limit but still very much on the low side and a definite step down.

The next package up, which is 2MB, does offer the 30GB limit, as does the 3MB package, but at £25 and £38 (!) respectively they're a lot of money.

But then, to be honest I don't think my parents will have a problem with a 3GB monthtly limit - it's not like they're heavy users. The upgrade thankfully isn't automatic but it does mean calling up NTL's notorious customer service line to request it.

Readers of the RSS and Atom feeds will now have any acronyms represented properly with definitions, like on the main site. I'm posting this here mostly because it's likely that a few previous entries will show up as unread for no apparent reason in Bloglines.

Also, if you're one of the 200-or-so people who are reading this in your aggregators, you may not have realised that the site is now back to its old blue self again. Albeit with a few easter eggs dotted about.

The rumours have bee flying for a while but it's now been confirmed: Yahoo has bought Flickr and its parent company Ludicorp.

Jeremy Zawodny, who works at Yahoo and who has been on my reading list for a while, chimes in with his view.

It shall be interesting to see what happens, though I imagine there'll be the usual migration by a vocal minority to another service in disgust, like there was when Ask Jeeves bought Bloglines and Six Apart bought LiveJournal. If Yahoo have any sense, they will do what Google have done with Blogger - not try and assimilate it too much, but give it the resources to grow and improve. Yahoo already have Yahoo Photos, and while it looks like you'll be able to log into Flickr with your Yahoo account soon, no merging of the two services is on the cards.

Neil McIntosh has more (and seems to agree with me), as I'm sure many, many more will do over the next few days.

Found Sharp ideas through someone's linklog. The design looks rather like my Bluefade Remix template, however the attribution required by the Creative Commons license is missing and I couldn't find anyone with the name Abe Usher in my PayPal notifications, since a commercial license lets you remove the attribution.

The stylesheet has been reformatted (and in a way that makes it much bigger too) but still declares the #searchbox ID which he doesn't use but exists in Bluefade Remix. The filename for the fade effect is the same ('title-july-2003.jpg'). The HTML templates however appear to be the default ones from MT 2.x, albeit with extra invalid code.

I doubt that this is a co-incidence, but I'm not sure if it is a misunderstanding or a deliberate violation of the Creative Commons license. What do you guys think?

Update (Monday): The site now seems to be using a different stylesheet based on one of the MT defaults.

The photos from yesterday are up - 53 in total (some 40-odd megabytes). Feel free to use them in in any non-commercial way you see fit, as long as you retain the attribution. If you're one of my contacts over at Flickr you can also add notes and tags to the photos - most of them are tagged up but some may be a bit overgeneral.

There's also plenty in this set from 'londonprotests' and some from 'krypton' and 'grimsb'.

Just got back from the anti-war march in London - we had around 50,000 people (at a conservative estimate) out there, which isn't too bad. I have around 50 photos to sort through and upload so they may take a day or two to appear, but in the meantime here's some from the Beeb.

Overall I think it went well and I had an enjoyable day - met some cool new people and caught up with a few people from Unite. It was also good to be on the first demonstration to pass the American Embassy in London since the Vietnam war.

Anyway, having had minimal sleep these past few nights and a 6:30am start, I really, really need to go to bed now :) . I'm off back to York for a couple of weeks tomorrow so I need to be awake in good time to do some packing - it's the first time I've been home in 2 1/2 months.

The IDMb meme is where you post a copy of the top 250 films on IMDb and then highlight the ones you have seen. It made the rounds some time ago but Richard has just done it again so I've followed suit. I've also italicised those films that I own on DVD or video.

Thanks to Steve I came across AmazType. Type in a phrase, say 'harry potter', and it'll use Amazon Web Services to display that text using the covers of books, music or videos related to the phrase.

The above text was created using titles from the Euphoria series of trance and hard house albums, but you could also use something like 'family guy' or 'futurama'. Very cool.

My photos from St. Patrick's Day are up. The last one is taken with my cameraphone, hence the different size and lower quality. All in all it was a good night and despite drinking quite a lot of Jameson's whisky and cola I'm not too badly hungover this morning.

Today's the last day of term before Easter, so I'll probably be out again tonight too. Unfortunately there's the small matter of being up for 7:30am to go down to London tomorrow, which might restrict my drinking somewhat.

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something... err... green, this week. Maybe I should keep the green them up another couple of days then? :)

FQ1: Something green you like to eat...

Cucumber. I eat lots of the stuff. I also eat lots of lettuce too, which is usually green.

FQ2: Something green you like to wear...

Not really got many green clothes, bar a pair of green socks which I suppose I like to wear. Got plenty of red t-shirts now though.

FQ3: Something green you like to look at...

My green iPod Mini. Well, not sure if I specifically like looking at it but I do have to look at it from time to time to see what it's doing. It does look nice though.

FQ GALLERY: Post a photo you took (or an illustration you made) of something green...

Here's a photo of the ampitheatre at the university, taken in June 2003 on my old camera. It's pretty green.

Another recent change to Google Adsense is payment options. Originally, once a month, you would get a cheque in US dollars sent to you by post. Now, you can have the funds transferred electronically directly into your account, and, perhaps more importantly, have it paid in your local currency. This means that you can get around the extortionate conversion charges that banks charge - typically I lose about 15% of the value of any payment from Google when cashing in a cheque in US dollars at the moment.

The electronic funds transfer scheme is in beta - if it fails, Google will send you a cheque in your currency - but it does mean that I'll get a greater percentage of my earnings and won't have to make monthly trips to the bank to put the money in. Nice one Google.

We had some release candidates for Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.1 recently, but no news of the final 1.0.1 release. Now we know why: there won't be a 1.0.1.

Instead, both Firefox and Thunderbird will be bumped up to 1.0.2 to fix some issues that have cropped up. Asa has the details, though there's no word on whether they're security fixes or just bug fixes. Either way, they must be serious if a new release is warranted. There will also be an update to Mozilla 1.7.x - a 1.7.6 release has been on the cards for a while now.

Asa says that candidates for the new releases are on their way in the next few days or so.

Just like to wish everyone a Happy St Patrick's Day. On the right is a silly little remix of the Firefox logo I did in MS Paint especially for today - not quite sure why I did it but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I'm not totally sure what I'll be doing tonight but I'm sure it'll involve Teenage Kicks and a pint of Guinness.

Here's an interesting quote from an old episode of the Friday Night Armistice, which I've been enjoying thanks to the wonders of BitTorrent. This was from summer 1996, when the UK still had John Major as its Prime Minister and the Conservative party running its government - Labour, Tony Blair and 'Cool Britannia' wouldn't come until 1997.

The problem with the Tories though is that they've been in Government for like 17 years, and after 17 years in a relationship, things go a bit stale, don't they? We all know that, I mean, the first few years it's electric, you stay up all night making policies - it's just policies, policies - and then you can't keep your hands off their legislation, and then, you know, you start to cool off, you run out of ideas, you find yourself looking at other countries and wonder what it would be like to run them... it's sad, but it happens, doesn't it?

I think that sums up Labour's situation right now almost perfectly. :)

Google has updated their terms of service for their AdSense programme, and have, it seems, made the terms less strict than before. The big change is that Google will now allow users to state their gross earnings from the service, although it is still against the ToS to state your clickthrough rates or earnings per click.

So, without further a do, here's what I've been earning of late:

* = Calculated from the current exchange rate of £1 = $1.92644
** = Earnings are from the 9th November
*** = Earnings are up to 17:00 GMT on 16th March

So as you can see I'm getting enough money to pay for hosting this site and quite a bit more, most of which has been set aside for my master's degree next year.

A week on Friday I will be 250 months old, according to Redate which tells you when various obscure anniversaries are approaching and how old you are in seconds, minutes etc. For example, I'm 0.08 plutonian years old. Glad I don't live on Pluto.

This is from NRT who is 400 months old today, and probably feeling very old after reading this.

Okay, can we please just accept the fact that the Save Toby web site is a hoax? Snopes lists several reasons why the site is a fake, including a message on the site saying that it was a hoax that has since been removed. No rabbits were harmed, nor will be harmed in the future, in the making of the site. Move along now, nothing to see here...

Last night I threw myself into my copy of CGI Programming With Perl and hashed away at getting the Perl version of my project moving in some sort of positive direction (instead of it going nowhere slowly like it has been of late). At first I was getting nowhere, spending half an hour swapping code in and out before remembering that you can't run a Perl script when the file permissions are only 644 (doh!), but after another hour or so I had a public frontend that was almost functionally equivalent to the PHP version. The changes I need to make now are something which mimics PHP's nl2br() function (converts newlines in a piece of text to HTML line breaks, i.e. <br />), which will probably require a regular expression, and the replacing of a few constants with variables.

But at least now I don't hate Perl as much as I did, though I can say that Perl is much, much slower at generating pages than PHP is.

I have a love-hate relationship with the British royal family. At the moment, I'm tending towards the latter.

Today the Queen shook hands with Gianfranco Fini, the Italian Foreign Minister. Normally that wouldn't be a problem - but Fini is the leader of Italy's National Alliance party, a far right party not dissimilar to our own British National Party who ultimately want rid of all non-white, non-heterosexual or disabled people from this country. (At the moment the BNP are just targeting a particular group - recently migrated muslims - but believe me, that's just the tip of the iceberg. They're far more than an anti-immigration party.)

I appreciate that he's an Italian minister and we should try to retain diplomatic links with other countries where possible, but I really don't think it was appropriate for our official head of state to greet him in such a manner. By shaking his hand, the Queen is, to some extent, endorsing his views; views which I'd like to think are only common to a few evil individuals (and some misguided members of the public) and not the British people at large.

I really regret not being able to attend the picket on The Mall by Unite today.

You may be interested to know that last week a new version of Java 5 was released. It fixes some bugs and security issues with prior Java versions, so it's probably a good idea to upgrade at the next available opportunity. If you're an end user you only need the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), not NetBeans or the JDK.

I installed it this morning and it appears to be much faster than previous Java 5 releases, but I'll reserve full judgement for a while in case this is just a post-install fluke.

These screenshots are of BradLog, the weblogging system that I'm developing as part of my final year project. We have a major milestone to achieve by Wednesday so I've spent some time today moving the project on. The point of the project is to develop the application in both PHP and Perl, and then compare the development of the two, in areas like ease of development, speed, performance, code size, availability of reference materials and so on. Currently PHP is winning by a long way as I'm having some real problems with the Perl version and it's nowhere near as advanced as the PHP version, which is what is shown above. Both use the same MySQL database.

At the moment, both versions have a functioning public interface (screenshot 1), with the PHP version also having a backend (screenshots 2 and 3) which currently allows entries to be created and edited. The ability to delete entries, as well as edit the list of categories and display RSS feeds, has yet to be implemented but that shouldn't take too long. I also need to do quite a bit of work on the stylesheets and the general look and feel of the application.

The name 'BradLog' comes from the fact that it's a weblog system developed at the University of Bradford. And it has a nice ring to it. I'd let you browse the test site but there's no security on the admin section yet and the web server is inaccessible to the outside world anyway.

And before you ask, no, I'm not porting this blog to it :) . While I'm impressed with what the system can do so far, I appreciate the reliability and robustness of MT.

Yorkshire Water sent us a water bill this morning. Which would be fine if this bill wasn't for the next 12 months - it's quite likely that we'll all be moving out come June and therefore don't want to be paying for 8 1/2 months water that we won't be using. So I phoned their customer service line, expecting to be on hold for hours and then have a blazing row with someone with broken English and coming away fuming.

In fact, after phoning their billing line I was told I could be rung back at my own convinience, only needed to press one button on the menu and was through to a human almost immediately, who sorted everything out incredibly quickly. It was so quick that I was actually disappointed that I couldn't get on my high horse and rant at them.

But at least it means we'll be paying £32.70 and not £131.14, which is good.

Ben Edelman dedicates quite a bit of his time to investigating spyware - recently Limewire comissioned him to research into what spyware was installed by its competitors programs (Limewire is now spyware-free).

His latest study looks into the advertisers whose adverts are shown in the spyware application eXact. The advertisers are either directly or indirectly supporting the spyware revenue model - if there were no advertisers willing to use spyware then the problem would go away; the same with popup advertising, although part of that also falls on content producers.

What is worrying is the number of big, reputable companies whose adverts appear in eXact. These include:

• Air France
• Apple Computer
• Cingular
• Dell
• Expedia
• Netflix

It is possible that these companies are not dealing with eXact directly, but that affiliates, who receive comission from each sale, are. Either way, these companies should not be funding malicious software which damages consumer's machines, and if the problem does lie with their affiliates then their affiliate accounts should be terminated. I'm particularly ashamed that Apple is in on this.

Ben also points out that Thomas Cook recently started advertising with Claria, the company formally known as Gator. Which therefore means that Thomas Cook won't be getting my custom.

A week on Thursday (March 24th, day before Good Friday) is Blogs in Action, a blogging conference in London hosted by Six Apart. It's at the Polish Club, 55 Exhibition Road, London SW7 2PN, a stone's throw from South Kensington tube. Speakers include Dominique Busso, the CEO of VNU, and Neil McIntosh from The Guardian.

Sounds interesting, but I'm not sure if I'd be able to go due its proximity to the Easter weekend.

The fight against software patents in Europe is starting to get rather intense. While there's still a good chance that they can be stopped, time is increasingly running out and something needs to done. John Naughton's Observer column is a good starting point - from there, find out who your local MEPs are and fire off an email to them. There will be several for your region but they are all there to represent you, so you might want to email all of them. Yorkshire people can find theirs here.

While you're doing that, have a read of this entry on Richard Corbett's blog. Corbett is a Labour MEP based in Leeds, and here he debunks 10 common myths about the proposed European Constitution.

With St Patrick's Day coming this week, I decided to use the 'earthy' stylesheet that I've been offering with my templates and adapt it slightly to make it a little more Irish. Hope you like the new look.

Obviously this means that come Friday I'll have to change it again but I'm sure I can think of something.

I have to apologise for being very vague in my posts about the elections, and making one of my posts disappear altogether (the first time that's happened in a ver long time). Unfortunately the election regulations are very strict, especially in the realm of electronic communication - I couldn't post any publicity to sites not hosted by the university, nor could I use email lists. Furthermore any web pages I did post had to be approved by the assistant returning officer and the content must not allude to any other candidate running in the election.

I originally posted something which encouraged people to check out my election web site and vote for me, but having done so I realised that would probably be against the regulations and would have seen me reprimanded (since this site isn't hosted by the university and doesn't have a university domain suffix), so I removed it a couple of hours later. However, with Bloglines crawling this site hourly it meant that it indexed the post and at least a couple of you enquired as to the whereabouts of the post.

If it interests you, I got 23.2% of the vote, with the other two candidates tied on 35.2% and the RON - Re-Open Nominations - candidate on 6.4%. We use ATV - Alternative Transferrable Voting system - so RON was elminated and counting went to a second round. After the second round one of the other two candidates pulled ahead, I was eliminated and then the count went to a third round, after which a result was announced. All in all, about 1000 people voted, a turnout of around 10%. It might not seem a lot but that's up on last year's 7%.

Being a candidate has been a very interesting - and enjoyable - experience, though I'm not sure whether I'd do it again next year since it is a lot of extra stress on top of project work, which has suffered in the past 3 weeks. Thankfully Easter is nearly here (one more week of lectures to go) so I'll have time to catch up then.

On a not-so-related note, I received my semester 1 marks today. Or rather, most of them. The two that I did get were very good - 67% and 70.7% (equivalent to 2:1 and First Class honours), but the third wasn't yet available. And yet the module consisted of two 50% courseworks, one handed in in November and the other December. I think you'll agree that 3 months is a ridiculously long time.

And finally, here's another photo from last night.

I've just come back from a friend's birthday party where we were all dressed up as chavs. This was my effort, using mainly items bought from charity shops. Said items may well end back in the charity shops pretty soon, too...

(side note: I realise it's now no longer Red Nose Day so I'll be concocting another colour scheme shortly)

Just to want to thank all the Bradford students reading this for voting for me - I got a total of 192 votes (plus 4 transferred votes) in the election today. Unfortunately, this wasn't enough to get me elected.

The result was a bit of an inevitability as I was against two very strong candidates, however it was a good, clean contest with a higher turnout than previous years. I'm not bitter about it, though naturally I'm a little disappointed.

So, next year, it looks like I'll be a student again. Bring it on. :)

Today is National No Smoking Day in the UK - an annual event to encourage people to give up smoking. There's not much going on campus for it - the open day today and the elections tomorrow mean that it would probably be inappropriate - but I gather there's a number of events going on across the country.

If you're a smoker reading this, then please consider giving up. You'll be doing your health a favour, and helping your friends, family and the public at large too. You'll also cease to line the pockets of various corporations like Altria who try to suppress research into smoking-related illnesses.

I know it's not easy - not from personal experience, since I've never smoked and vowed never to start - but I do have a number of friends who have eventually managed to give up smoking for good. Indeed my father did 18 years ago and he hasn't looked back.

Today was one of Bradford's three open days so I had a look at my options for postgraduate study. While I'll hopefully be treasurer of the student union next day (I'll find out late tomorrow night if that is the case), I'd also like to carry on my studies beyond undergraduate level, so this is, if you like, plan B.

The course I'm most interested in is MSc Forensic Computing, which combines computing and forensic sciences for investigation of computer crime. It's quite a new course - should I start this in September I'd be in only the second year of students taking it. But it does sound really interesting and it's a bit different to what I'm doing right now.

As for my application, I've been assured that unless I make a right royal mess of my final year I can be largely assured of a place on the course, which is a relief. The academic staff, of whom I'm already on first name terms with anyway, seemed pretty keen to take me on. It's nice to feel wanted.

I'll let you know on Friday what the result was on Thursday. All I can say is that if you're a Bradford student, please get out there and use your vote tomorrow.

incidentally, today I saw an advert for the University of Central Lancashire in a postgraduate funding guide. Here's a quote from it (emphasis mine):

You'll also find you're studying in Preston, the city rated second most affordable for students by the Sunday Times HE Guide

Guess which city was rated the most affordable? :)

It doesn't inspire a huge amount of confidence when the download page for Netscape 7.2 doesn't render properly in Netscape 4.7. Much of the text is so small it's unreadable, and the menu options to increase the text size are greyed out.

The Firefox download page is only slightly better - the text is readable but the layout is horribly messed up.

incidentally the reason why I'm using Netscape 4.7 is because it's the only web browser available on our Sun Solaris machines which I need to use to run an obscure database system called O2 (it's an object database as opposed to a relational database like MySQL). We really, really need to get Firefox on those machines, NS4 drives me insane.

I've been using Google Desktop Search for a day now, and have a couple of observations to make:

• Integration with the browser is seamless; when you do a search from the quicksearch box in Firefox, it will also show results from your computer in the results. All Google pages also gain a 'Desktop' tab to run the same search on your own computer.
• It's very fast, although the index of my HD is around 120MB. Each user has a separate index.
• There is a slight incompatibility with internationalised builds of Firefox. Every time the search app starts, it checks for a file called google.src in the searchplugins subfolder of the Firefox application folder, and if it doesn't exist, it is recreated. This file exists by default in the en-us builds, but not necessarily in others; in the en-gb build there's a google-uk.src file instead which means Google searches are sent to google.co.uk instaed of google.com. This means that you end up with two Google entries on the quicksearch menu in the browser.
• The Trillian Pro plugin only indexes conversations made from when the plugin was installed - old conversations are not explicitly indexed. They do, however, appear as the contents of text files and may be included in search result pages but their display isn't as intuitive as it could be.
• Viewing cached copies of files strips out all formatting.

When people make decisions based on FUD instead of facts, you end up with situations like this one.

There will be no red noses in three Catholic schools in south Wales on Friday because church leaders claim money raised by Comic Relief will be used to fund abortions.

Right. Scroll down further:

A spokesman for Comic Relief said: "In 2000 we opened dialogue with the Catholic bishops of England and Wales to help communicate the facts. They issued a statement confirming that after careful examination of our records, they were satisfied with Comic Relief's assurance that we do not fund and have never funded abortion services or the promotion of abortions."

Even if Comic Relief did fund abortions, I'd still be happy to donate money to them, but then I believe that maybe women should be allowed to decide what happens to their own bodies.

Endsleigh Insurance have released a league table of cities with high burglary rates. Leeds came out top, with 99% more burglaries than the average, followed by Hull (84%) and Nottingham (72%). York, my home town, came in at a surprisingly high 6th at 45%, yet Liverpool, with its 'theiving scousers' image, didn't make the top 10. Edinburgh was apparently the safest place with 56% below the average.

And Bradford? Not in the top 10 either :) . Bradford does have an image problem because of the race riots of summer 2001, but in actual fact crime has been falling recently.

After consulting the full results, Bradford is nowhere to be seen. Maybe we got lumped in with Leeds. Meh.

That said, arguably the statistics may be somewhat biased. Endsleigh are part-owned by the NUS and insure a lot of students, so their figures are likely to be biased towards the big university towns. While Bradford does have a university (obviously), it's pretty small when compared to the institutions in the other towns in the league table. It may be that the burglary rate in Bradford is much higher, but that the majority of people being burgled are insured with someone else.

Google Desktop Search is now out of beta. It allows you to use Google technology to search files on your hard disk.

Originally I wasn't that impressed when I first tried it, but this new version is much better. Previously, if you used Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office and AOL Instant Messenger almost exclusively, you'd be fine - anything else and you'd be stuck. This was the situation I was in - I didn't use IE, nor Outlook Express or Outlook.

But now, there's native support for Mozilla programs, including the standard Mozilla Suite as well as Firefox and Thunderbird, which means it can search your browser's cache and history, as well as all of your emails. It can also now index PDF files, music, video and images. But that's not the best bit.

There are now plugins which mean you can hook in even more applications. Some are already available now, including Trillian Pro, OpenOffice.org and Microsoft HTML Help, all of which are programs I use.

John Battelle has more on this, including Google's APIs which now mean that application developers can add Google into their applications.

Engadget has news today that Apple is allegedly infringing not one but two patents with it iPods and iTunes software.

The second one I'm mostly going to skip over since I don't know so much about it, but basically a company in Hong Kong seems to own a patent with something to do with verification for DRM. This quote sums it up well:

"...Apple is getting sued because the tools they've been using to protect other people's intellectual property (namely that of the record industry) supposedly violate some other person's intellectual property."

But the first one is just plain silly. A company called Advanced Audio Devices was granted a patent in July 2003 for:

a "music jukebox which is configured for storing a music library therein" that "includes a housing, audio input structure on the housing for receiving audio signals, audio output structure on the housing for outputting audio signals, and a data storage structure in the housing for storing audio signals."

Right. As I said, this patent was granted a stroke over 18 months ago, by which time almost all portable media players on the market were capable of doing what the patent describes. In fact, many of them had been doing this for quite some time - my first MP3 player - a Samsung Yepp YP-E64 - bought way, way back in summer 2000, had a microphone on the housing, a headphone socket and built-in flash memory. That predates the patent by 3 years, and there were other models older than that. Suffice to say there was a fair bit of prior art that would invalidate that patent.

If someone can find out what the guys over at USPTO are smoking, please let me know so I can get some myself.

I was up in Keighley today and took a few photos of Keighley Station. As well as being on the main Airedale Line between Leeds/Bradford and Skipton (where it leads on to the very scenic Settle and Carlisle Line) it's served by the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, a privately-owned heritage railway that runs to Howarth and Oxenhope. It has a number of steam locomotives and old diesel railcars in use and a couple were out today.

Just want to say thanks for your headphone recommendations.

I went with the Sennheiser PMX60s that someone recommended - they were £12+£2 postage from some dude on eBay. Not bad when most places were asking about £25 for them and the price I paid was well within my budget.

I should get them within the next week or so - the seller didn't accept PayPal so I've had to post a cheque which will take a couple of days to arrive (what with it being a weekend) and a further few days to clear. eBay people: please enable PayPal or an equivalent system like Nochex on your auctions - it makes for less effort on both sides, since I don't have to write a check and post it, and you don't have to cash it in. It's also instantaneous - no postal delays, no clearance periods. Of course there's the PayPal fees, but the customer does save a few pennies on postage.

I also found a cable that'll let me use my big Sennheiser headphones that have been out of action for some time now. The cables are almost impossible to get hold of since they have a 3.5mm stereo jack at one end and a 2.5mm at the other, and most 2.5-3.5mm converters don't work because they don't fit in properly. If this cable does work then I'll have a very good pair for home use and a good pair for mobile iPod use.

I did come across an American eBay user selling Griffin's EarJams - attachments to your existing white iPod earphones to improve the bass and make them fit better in your ears - but at around £12 including international postage they were not much cheaper than the Sennheisers. And I'd be less of a target for muggers.

Ed Bott has done the Music Shuffle Meme again, this time with 20 songs. Basically, you put your music player on 'random' or 'shuffle' mode and write down the first 20 songs that are played. You can skip if the same artist comes on twice but otherwise you have to spill the beans, no matter how embarassing. Here's mine:

1. Ultrabeat - Feelin' Fine
2. K. O. T. A. - Waiting
3. Electric Six - Gay Bar
4. Kontakt - Show Me A Sign
5. Blank and Jones - DJs, Fans and Freaks
6. Madonna - Frozen
7. DJ Lee's Apollo - Dance
8. The Ataris - The Boys of Summer
9. Madonna - Beautiful Stranger
10. Ian van Dahl - Castles in the Sky
11. Dario G - Dream to Me
12. Progress presents The Boy Wunda - Everybody
13. Sylver - Skin
14. Armin - Communication
15. Energy 52 - Cafe del Mar 2002
16. Milk Inc - Livin a Lie
17. Evanescence - Bring Me To Life
18. Less Than Jake - The Science of Selling Yourself Short
19. Chakra - Home
20. The Rasmus - In The Shadows

I had Madonna in there twice but in fact she came on three times - I don't have that much Madonna but I did like her Ray of Light album. The rest is just a mix of dance, rock and punk/ska. Compare this to last time.

Posting has been a little light here of late for reasons that I'll have difficulty telling you, short of pointing you here. But anyway, here's roughly what's happening in my life right now:

Yesterday I saw Super Size Me, and today I watched the second episode of Jamie's School Dinners. Both have a common theme - the problem with junk foods and the companies behind them.

This has been a very long week, and next week promises to be very hard too...

FQ1: Who is an actor or director you trust to always make a good film? What is it about their previous works that make you trust them?

I'm not really into films that much. I like the work of Mel Brooks (I recently bought Robin Hood - Men In Tights on DVD), along with the Pixar films. I like them because they're consistently good - Mel Brooks' films are hilarious, Pixar's have good storylines.

FQ2: Where is a place you trust to always make a good food? What is it about their previous culinary creations that make you trust them?

I don't have a huge amount of loyalty to any one food outlet - being a student I don't really have enough money to eat out regularly. That said, Bibi's in Leeds is well worth going to for very nice food.

FQ3: What's a company you trust to always make a good product? What is it about their previous stuff that make you trust them?

I have a feeling that Dave will give the same answer as me, but it probably would be Apple. Having actually owned a piece of Apple hardware I've become to respct their products more and am really keen to get my hands on Mac at some point in the near future (probably this summer).

FQ YOU: What is something you do so well that people can absolutely trust you with it? What's something that people should never trust you with?

I seem to be trusted with my photography quite a bit, which is good because I enjoy doing it. But you should never trust me with boring tasks that require lots of effort as I'll probably never get around to them...

I took the Commonly Confused Words Test, having seen Meredith and Tom take it. Here are my results:

Advanced

You scored 93% Beginner, 93% Intermediate, 93% Advanced, and 66% Expert!

You have an extremely good understanding of beginner, intermediate, and advanced level commonly confused English words, getting at least 75% of each of these three levels' questions correct. This is an exceptional score. Remember, these are commonly confused English words, which means most people don't use them properly. You got an extremely respectable score.

Not bad for someone who only got a 'B' in GCSE English :) .

Bill Gates is to receive an honourary knighthood by the Queen. At risk of opening a huge can of worms, I have to say that I think this is a good thing.

Think about it. Bill Gates isn't the most popular man around, nor is Microsoft the most popular company around. We all deride Windows, but if it really was as rubbish as some people make it out to be Microsoft wouldn't command so much of the market. MS got to where it was today largely by having a good product at a good price. It wasn't the best product, but it worked for most people and was cheaper than other alternatives. Sure, some of MS's business practices haven't been entirely kosher but even if it had played by the rules I still think it would be a major driving force in the world of IT today.

What Bill Gates has achieved with Microsoft in such a short space of time is pretty amazing. Think where computers would be today if it weren't for Microsoft. Think how many times you use a Microsoft product in your day - for some, that might be 0 but for many that will be several times.

I'm not a member of the Microsoft fan club by any means, and I'm glad to see that better alternatives are becoming more and more available, in the form of cheaper Macs and easier-to-use Linux distros. But I don't think you can deny that Gates is deserving of this kind of recognition. He's also donated huge sums of money to charity, including $750million to providing vaccines for children in developing countries.

Note: Although Gates will be receiving an honourary knighthood, as he is not a citizen of a British Commonwealth country he won't be able to call himself Sir Bill Gates. So the title of this post is probably innacurate, but, heh.

One of the jobs I do at work is to process requests for information from propective students - prospectuses (prospecti?), course booklets, that kind of thing. We often get requests from overseas where students have do not speak English as their first langauge but have been taught to communicate in a very polite and formal manner, which in itself is odd since most of the information requests come via email which is largely an informal communications medium.

Sometimes the politeness goes a little too far. I can't remember the exact contents of the email, but one I had to process today went something like this:

Sir, In the name of God I declare that I am [name], a boy of 21 years of age and a Nigerian citizen. I have heard many great testemonials about your exquisite school. I wish that you and your colleagues are in good health and that your elbows are well-greased.

I wouldn't exactly call the university 'exquisite', unless you're referring to the sandwiches in the student union bar, but I had to hold in the laughter when I read the elbows comment. I've never, ever heard that comment be made before as a compliment. Whoever taught English to this person is either very misguided or in a on a very cruel joke.

My cheap framed headphones that I've been using since last summer packed in on Sunday (or rather stopped working on one side) so I'm on the lookout for a new pair. I'm looking for something that roughly matches the following:

• Costs no more than £20 (and preferably under £15)
• Must be available from a reputable UK retailer (i.e. not eBuyer)
• Has resonable/good sound quality
• Has a frame of some sort

The last point is key, since bud earphones like those that came with my iPod Mini don't work with my ears. They only just stay in when I'm sat down - if I'm walking around, they constantly fall out. This has been a problem for me with any bud earphones and isn't specific to the iPod ones. Therefore, I need a frame to hold the speakers in place.

Headphones with earclips are another option but in the past I've found these to be uncomfortable and require more effort to put on.

I've never been a fan of my ears - compared with the rest of my head they're pretty large, and at school I occasionally got teased for it. If it were possible, and if I had more money than sense, I'd possibly consider having them re-shaped, but it's not something I'm too bothered with right now.

So yeah, headphones recommendations please :) .