July 2005 Archives

My two housemates this year have two very different computers. One has a rather nice Carrera machine, custom-specified, with 5.1 sound card, good graphics card and all that jazz. The other has a 300Mhz Pentium II with a 6.4GB HD, which I reckon is now about 7 years old and is still on Windows 98. (See this rant from last week).

The latter of these two machines now won't turn on. I'm pretty sure the problem lies with the power supply (it has, to used the politically correct term, "deferred success"), which is good in one sense because it means the disk and all the data on it is fine, but means the computer isn't exactly usable. And that disk contains a dissertation which needs finalising and printing. By Tuesday.

So I did a brain transplant - opened up the two computers and put the hard disk of the old computer into to the new one. It took a couple of attempts to get the jumper settings right, since they weren't labelled and I don't have a huge amount of experience in that area, but eventually the computer booted and the drive appeared in Windows Explorer. It was then just a case of copying the all important word file onto a flash drive and we were done.

If you're using an old computer - or any computer, really - it pays to ensure that you save multiple copies of anything important, so that if one location becomes inaccessable then you at least have one or more backups. My dissertation was always saved 3 times - on my hard disk, on my flash drive and on the university system via FTP, plus an occasional fourth backup on my parents' machine in York. That way I wouldn't fail my degree if my computer packed itself in days before the deadline.

When I went to the London Summer Graduate Fair back in June I signed up to a couple of graduate job websites, on the off chance that either some brilliant job would come up or that I didn't manage to get onto the master course. Since then, graduate jobs have been trickling into my inbox, which is all well and good but they've all been very general because I never had chance to upload my CV or give any specifics.

One of them, gradplus.com, sends me lots of emails, however I haven't been able to log in because it was saying my email address didn't exist in the database. I was about to write a snotty posting on here about how I couldn't stop the emails blah blah blah but then it occurred to me to check the message headers just to make sure I was actually typing in the right email address. Turns out I'd signed up with one of the shorter forms of my university email address - we can use brad.ac.uk and bradford.ac.uk interchangeably - and I'd been expecting the longer form. Once I used the shorter one, I was in, and have been able to upload a CV and edit my general preferences.

That said, I'm still a little cheesed off that its form doesn't accept AS levels, only full A levels. It means employers will think I only had 200 points and not the 250 I achieved - crucial, because many stripulate a minimum of 240 points in addition to a degree (240 being the equivalent of 3 Cs at A level). Admittedly I'm among the first lot of graduates to have been through Curriculum 2000 and therefore the first to be graduates with AS levels, but still...

It might seem like I go on about Crazy Frog incessantly, but here's another post :) .

The single was released in the US this week, however, the single cover does not show Crazy Frog was infamous dangling phallus. In the UK there were complaints that the frogs, erm, 'ding ding' was shown during the day when children were watching. Later on, it was blacked out.

So now that the frog has had an extreme circumcision, does that mean his voice will get even higher?

Filed well and truly under the 'things-that-would-have-been-useful-on-Saturday" department, the university have now given me a foldout Bluetooth mini-keyboard to play with. It's for use with the PDA that I'm also (still) borrowing from them, and it does make writing much easier than tapping letters on the screen or using its handwriting recognition. If I'd had this on Saturday composing these two entries would have taken much less time.

My only complaint so far is that it's a little flimsy and I'm worried about breaking it, but it does fold down into a very small package and would be useful for note-taking in lectures, for example. Which is the intention.

Over the years I have bought a number of things from CD WOW, and they've always been delivered within their quoted timescale (5-7 working days) without fail. It's their consistently good service and low prices that keep me coming back.

But now they've set a new record: a CD I ordered shortly before 10pm on Monday arrived this morning. And this is despite the fact that they are based in Hong Kong and me in the UK - i.e. pretty much the other side of the world.

They lasted a lot longer than several manufacturers, but the parent company of Time and Tiny Computers has gone into administration. It is looking likely that many people who have ordered computers from Time and Tiny now won't get the products they paid for. I just hope that many of them paid by credit card - UK consumer credit legislation makes credit card issuers jointly liable for purchases over £100 that fall through or that turn out to be faulty or unsatisfactory (or something to that effect, IANAL), hence the reason I ordered a credit card prior to ordering my Mac Mini. Of course, my experience with Apple has been much better but I'd rather not take the risk.

I always avoided Time machines because I didn't think they were built well and I know several people who have bought them and then had major problems just after the end of the warranty period. Their recent tactic of bundling software dial-up modems that were tied to their own ISP's phone number (meaning you couldn't use it with another ISP) did nothing to raise my confidence with them.

Talk about teaching an old dog new tricks: despite having played Solitaire for, oooh, about 10 years now, I never knew that you could automatically send up cards by right-clicking them. Solitaire games suddenly got so much faster.

In fact, I'd dread to think how much time I could have saved if I'd known this right from the start. Probably several hours at least...

Just got this email from Apple:

Today Apple announced a new Mac Mini. Accordingly, we are pleased to revise your recent order by substituting the original product you ordered with the new Mac Mini at no extra cost to you. The new configuration either matches or exceeds that of the original product. In fact, depending on the configuration you ordered, you may be entitled to a partial refund. If you are paying by Credit Card, Loan, or Leasing, the price will be adjusted automatically.

The new Mac Mini is basically the same as the old one but includes 512MB of RAM as standard instead of 256MB, and the 1.42GHz model includes Aiport Extreme and Bluetooth as standard. I'd gone for all these options which means that Apple should hopefully be refunding me £46 very soon.

• Been a generally normal day at work today, except...
• There was a bomb scare, apparently. I say apparently because I was in the affected building and knew nothing about it until after the event.
• I'm currently in the library downloading stuff for my new flash drive - currently I've got Portable Firefox and Thunderbird, plus the installers for Firefox 1.0.6 and Thunderbird 1.0.6; Spybot S&D (and the latest Includes installer), Ad-Aware, Microsoft AntiSpyware, SpywareBlaster; McAfee Stinger, the university licensed copy of VirusScan Enterprise 8 and the latest SuperDAT engine. Should be useful for fixing broken computers and with it being larger than my previous drive it'll mean I have more space for me-stuff.
• I might also try Konfabulator now that it's owned by Yahoo and free, but then I'll also be getting a Mac in a few days with Dashboard.
• Windows Vista isn't the best name ever but I'm having difficulty thinking of anything better, and they could have chosen something much worse. Like Windows Poo, or something.
• I finally got around to testing out the DivX support on my Skyworth DVD player last night, and a downloaded copy of a well-known adult-orientated American animated comedy series that I had burnt to CD-R played back fine. It also supports Kodak Picture CDs but I've not tried one of those yet. Not bad for the £30 that I paid for it back in December.
• On a related note, someone leaked the forthcoming Family Guy movie "Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story" onto Usenet a whole 2 months prior to its release. It's now available from various BitTorrent trackers, either as a DVD-quality ISO or an XVid AVI. [via Waxy's Links]
• Compressing the Microsoft AntiSpyware setup file again using 7-Zip and saving it as a SFX archive makes it 13% smaller and shaves off 869KB. That's probably why an increasing number of installer packages like Inno Setup and NSIS use 7-Zip's LZMA compression.

One of the sessions I missed at Open Tech (since Ben promised me a beer if I went to his concurrent session) was one about creating a British version of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an American organisation that lobbies for civil rights with regards to technology. They have done some excellent work over the years, but as yet there is no British equivalent.

There is now a pledge over at PledgeBank that says I will create a standing order of 5 pounds per month to support an organisation that will campaign for digital rights in the UK but only if 1000 other people will too. At time of writing, 146 people have signed up, which is good for a 2-day-old pledge but still 844 short of the 1000 needed. If you're a Brit who values digital freedoms and is willing to give around £60 per year to ensure those freedoms remain, then I'd urge you to get involved. You'll be in good company; the likes of Cory Doctorow, Simon Willison, Ben Hammersley, Yoz Grahame and Bobbie Johnson amongst others have already signed the pledge.

Update: Today's Guardian Online has a piece by Danny O'Brien on the importance of such an organisation. The pledge has now been signed by nearly 500 people - almost halfway there :) .

The latest update to my Mac Mini's order status suggests it will be ready by Friday, so hopefully delivery will be either then or the beginning of next week. I don't yet know if it'll be one of the "new" models or a standard one, but seeing as it has taken some time for it to be ready I'm hoping it's the latter (I ordered it 9 days ago). We'll see, anyway.

This week is somewhat less interesting than last week was, though I am going home to York this weekend for a friend's 21st birthday.

Update: As you may have guessed, it didn't come on Friday. Apple's current estimate is on or before next Tuesday (9th August). I'm guessing the launch of the new model is the cause of the delay, but considering that it's going to be considerably cheaper and that I still have no proper internet at home I'm not too bothered about the wait.

I have uploaded two sets of photos to Flickr today: those taken at Open Tech and those from my graduation on Wednesday. They would have come sooner but I'm still without broadband at home.

Lots more Open Tech photos here and here. Flickr really need to do an "I'm Flickring this" t-shirt for events like these.

Gah. Windows 98 and its criminal lack of built-in drivers is really starting to annoy me. If anyone can find a Windows 98 driver for a 128MB red shiny Lenovo USB flash drive I'd be very grateful.

I've also heard of an unofficial generic mass storage device for Windows 98 that works with most brands - anyone tried it and got it to work? And does anyone have the URL for it?

I'm sat on the train back to Bradford (another direct one with wifi, woohoo!), ready to leave King's Cross. The verdict on Open Tech 2005? Possibly the best £5 I've spent in a very long time.

There was wifi at the event (and indeed lots of geeks with Powerbooks reading their Bloglines subscriptions) however for some reason I couldn't get it to work with this PDA. Damn Windows Mobile...

Anyway, what follows is my take on the days events.

I'm now on my way to London for Open Tech 2005. It's been an early start - up at 6am to catch a 7:35am train.

The train is one of the direct Bradford to London services that GNER run early in the morning, and it has on-board Wifi so that I can periodically check emails. And blog, obviously.

Because of recent events I decided not to take my laptop, since it would mean taking a big rucksack on the tube. Lately Transport for London have had problems with young men with big rucksacks so I thought it was best not to bother. So instead I'm using my PDA and blogging using Pocket SharpMT
. It means that writing entries takes quite a bit longer and web browsing is a little more difficult but then apparently the on-train wifi isn't up to a lot anyway.

To give you some idea about how slow it is to write on this, I started this entry as we passed through Frizinghall station and we're now at Leeds. And that included a stop at Shipley. It is helped a bit by the predictive writing feature, but as I've not used it a lot its vocabulary is quite small.

Anyway, I'm rambling. I shall update you later on.

Update: For some reason I couldn't get SharpMT to post so this is coming via normal MT. Unfortunately the MT admin interface doesn't work so well on small screens so it's not quite so straight-forward to use. Progress report: just passed through South Emsall after stopping at Wakefield.

9:50am Not far from Stevenage now. The GNER wifi start page has a map showing the train's current location, which is nice. Typing on the on-screen keyboard is really starting to get annoying now; because the ride is a bit bumpy I keep hitting the wrong letters. I also keep hitting the Home button instead of the spacebar and so I've had to write this again.

Due into King's Cross in a little under half an hour.

When Asa Dotzler first posted an article criticising Linux over its non-readiness for desktop computing, there was quite a bit of hoo-hah, with a lot of defensive comments from the Linux community along with the usual flamers. The thing is, Asa was totally spot on.

He's now writing a series of follow-ups, this being the first, which explain in more detail his four core criticisms of Linux. A lot of the points relate to things that Mozilla has done in Firefox which make the migration path from Internet Explorer much easier, and this first part suggests creating an import wizard, like in Firefox, that can copy over a user's settings and documents from Windows. So your MS Office settings would be imported into OpenOffice, IE into Firefox, MSN Messenger into Gaim and so on, along with explanations about what program does what in the new environment (for example, instead of Outlook you would use Evolution, which would have all of your emails and account settings imported over).

It's actually quite surprising that no Linux distribution has done anything like this yet. Sure, in the bigger distros with lots of packages it would be a huge task, but in more streamlined distros like Ubuntu it shouldn't be too difficult.

The Linux community need to pay attention to what Asa has been saying. If Firefox can go from less than 1% of web users to almost 10% in a year then surely Mozilla are doing something right.

Great. Two days before I decide to head to London some idiots try to blow up the tube, again. I'm still intending to go to Open Tech 2005 but will leave the final decision until either tomorrow or early Saturday morning. I really don't want to let a collection of mindless pillocks with detonators dictate what I want to do with my time.

(If like me you'll be going to OT05 from King's Cross, I think the best route is to take a northbound Northern Line train to Euston, then a southbound to Embankment and then pick up the District Line; at time of writing this was possible)

Anyway, graduation yesterday was excellent, bar the boring and overlong speeches. I'll put some more photos up in due course. Still no internet at home but Bulldog have replied to my email and said that there is a "particular problem" with my order and they "will be in touch shortly". They also "apologise in advance for this delay".

You may have heard about the "ICE" - In Case of Emergency - email that's been going around and has been posted on a few blogs (Webdiva and Ministry of Information being two of those on my blogroll). The basic idea is that you create a contact in your phone book with the name 'ICE' and the number of an emergency contact, so that if you are found in an unconcious state after an accident by a member of the emergency services then a close friend or relative can be contacted more easily.

The idea does have a couple of flaws - you may have used a PIN to lock your phone or address book, and some phones get confused when two contacts have the same number; my Nokia 7250i suffers from this. But on the whole it's a good idea and one you should consider taking up.

Today, however, hoax emails have been appearing about the idea. The premise is that a mobile phone virus may use these enties to spread, costing you money.

This virus does not exist. By adding an ICE contact to your phone book you are not likely to make that contact recieve a virus. (And in any case, my ICE contact is a landline)

Something terrible has happened.

The terribly inconsiderate people behind Crazy Frog have decided to build on the success of the Axel F single (recent number 1 in the UK) and release a full 16 track album of Crazy Frog songs. It's out on Monday.

Someone kill me now.

This week looks interesting. Wednesday is the day of my graduation ceremony, where I get to pay £30 to dress up in a silly gown and mortarboad, listen to a speech by an honorary graduate I've never heard of, shake hands with Baroness Lockwood of Dewsbury who is the (outgoing) chancellor of the university, and get a little piece of paper. Oh, and meet up with people I haven't seen for in a few weeks and have a free buffet lunch.

Saturday is Open Tech 2005 and so yet another day trip to London is in order. I think I've pretty much decided which sessions to go to, although there is a clash at 3pm - do I want to listen to Ben Hammersley and Jeremy Zawodny, or Danny O'Brien, Cory Doctorow, Ian Brown and Rufus Pollock? Decisions, decisions...

incidentally, if like me you'll be taking the tube from King's Cross, you'll need to take the Victoria line to Victoria and the change onto the District Line - the Picadilly Line is still closed for obvious reasons.

And during the week, with a bit of luck, I'll have internet access restored, along with the arrival of my graduation present to myself. No prizes for guessing what it is :) .

It's been a while since I did one of my product tours, and since I have a free afternoon I thought I'd do one for you. Six Apart are already doing a very good job of introducing the new features in Movable Type 3.2, so instead, here's a guide to the new features in Thunderbird 1.1. The review is being done in 1.1 Alpha 2 so it's possible that the final version will be different, but there's some nice changes.

Although I've been posting here more often lately, the posts have all been coming to you via the university and not from home - we still haven't got broadband. Basically, the problem was that we didn't have the full details to be able to use Tiscali, with whom the connection was set up with, and since the account holder is currently on holiday (and will be for another couple of weeks) we've been unable to use it and their call centre hasn't exactly been helpful.

So, last Tuesday, I phoned up Bulldog, since their packages seem to be good value and I'd heard of a few people with good experiences of them. And since then I've heard nothing. No emails, no phone calls. They say it can take 10 working days for the service to be set up and it's only been 8, but I'd expect an email with user account details, or a phone call saying when the service will be ready.

I've dropped them an email today; hopefully there'll be some response soon. But when you read articles like this and this you do become concerned. PlusNet may have been more expensive but they never messed me around last year and I may go running back to them if Bulldog don't get their act together.

Update: I've had a response, of sorts. Well, okay, an autoreply saying that my email has been received by our Customer Service team and will be attended to as soon as possible by one of our customer service agents. Still, if it takes 6 hours for an autoresponse to reach me then I'm not too hopeful.

Meanwhile, Bulldog's parent company Cable & Wireless, is considering a merger with Energis. Apologies for the choice of source, by the way - I don't normally link to anything by Associated Newspapers.

If you don't mind being on the bleeding edge, you may like to try Mozilla Thunderbird Alpha 2. Alpha 1 introduced inline spellchecking, phishing protection, being able to remove attachments from emails, podcasting support, a new options dialog, access to the advanced configuration editor (aka about:config) and redesigned SMTP options, amongst other improvements.

Alpha 2 adds to the mix even more:

• You can now create email filters that automatically forward or reply to emails, so autoresponders are now possible
• The junk mail controls now respect server-side junk mail protection like SpamAssassin
• RSS subscriptions can be exported as OPML
• Better handling of .eml files - so that when you save an email and have Thunderbird as the default mail application, the email will open in Thunderbird and not Outlook Express. This annoyed me yesterday so I'm glad it's fixed.
• Automatically delete email if it's beyond a certain age. So far only been possible with junk and trash mail.

Alpha 1, despite being an alpha, was actually pretty stable (and the same can be said for Deer Park Alphas 1 and 2 as well). If you want to check out the cool new features, give it a whirl.

Still, I wish they would redesign the Account Settings dialog... :)

Update: On a related note, it looks like Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0.6 releases could be on the way due to bugs in 1.0.5 which broke the APIs used by some extensions.

I wish that Flickr would have a way of mass deleting comments on your photos (or if it does, one that was more obvious). I've just had some American right-wing religious nutjob post comments on around 16 posts, accusing us euros of being crack-addicted HIV-positive communists and that we should instead follow the example of America which is by far the most charitable and giving people on the planet".

And here's his parting comment:

You are eliteist, racist anti-Semites, and you will be codemned to cleaning Porta-potties by the River Styx for all eternity? God Bless America !

You can ban commenters but any comments they have already posted have to be deleted one by one. incidentally the user has not uploaded any photos and just lists me as his only contact.

I now have MT 3.2 beta running, but as a separate install and a separate database. I've imported most of the entries into it and will gradually migrate over as time goes on. It certainly looks better and feels more powerful, but I've yet to really sink my teeth into the new system. Even Matt Mullenweg sounds impressed. :)

Although it's still awaiting the final go-ahead, Atom 1.0 is essentially ready. The Atom Syndication Format, to give its full name, is essentially a competitor to RSS 2.0, but developed by a larger working group and with more rigid definitions of what each element can do. It's also in the process of becoming an official standard as approved by the IETF, whereas RSS has not yet been approved by any standards body (AFAIK). In addition, it supports things like encryption and a greater depth of metadata.

I imagine that MT 3.2 will support this new version upon final release (to quote Anil: We'll be announcing more details of our coming support for the Atom 1.0 format shortly) and presumably its other backers such as Google will also adopt it soon.

I'm also wondering whether to move all of my feeds to Atom, now that it's (nearly) a proper standard. Offering two sets of feeds is confusing and so just sticking with one should make subscription easier. The essential makeup of an Atom feed has not changed hugely since 0.3 when the format became quite widely adopted and most aggregators support it natively.

Update: A comparison between RSS and Atom. It's written by Tim Bray who is part of the Atom working group, so it's likely to be biased towards Atom, but still interesting.

Yesterday I took part in the 2 minutes silence for the victims of the London terror bombings at 12pm along with many other staff at the university. At the same time it was becoming increasingly apparent that the 4 suspects were all from Leeds, which is only a few miles from here. One, Shehzad Tanweer, who was the suspect for the bomb at Aldgate tube system, was born at St. Luke's Hopsital which is about 10 minutes walk away from the university and was friends with one of our students (see this Guardian article).

Yesterday in our region the BBC showed a special programme about the bombing suspects, interviewing local people and a panel of guests, including Professor Paul Rogers who is the university's resident expert on terrorism and the Labour MP for Dewsbury Shahid Malik, bith of whom I have met previously.

It's all getting a little bit too close to home for my liking.

I'm back to running MT 3.17 after a failed upgrade to MT 3.2 Beta. Although Six Apart do not recommend installing 3.2b over your production blog because it's, err, a beta, I did anyway. Unfortunately it froze while modifying the database tables to enable 3.2's new features and so I ended up with a part-upgraded database that made MT throw wobblies (that being the technical term).

Thankfully I'd done a dump of the tables beforehand so I just had to restore them, and then reinstall 3.17 over 3.2. This underlines why making backups is such a good thing, especially when doing silly things like this. I might try 3.2 beta again but I'll create a separate installation instead of upgrading.

I did, however, file a bug report with Six Apart as hopefully this will be fixed for the final version of 3.2 and so someone else in the same situation as me won't have to suffer from this.

The release candidate for OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 is out. 1.1.5 will be primarily a bug fix release, hence the unimportnant-sounding number, but it does include one new feature: support for OpenDocument. This is the open file format recently approved by OASIS that OpenOffice.org 2.0 will use natively, though it will still open "legacy" OpenOffice.org 1.x documents as well as a greater range of other file formats.

On a slightly related note, Movable Type 3.2 Beta is now available for download. The page also includes information about filing bugs, some basic guidelines for beta testing (which is common sense for anyone used to testing software) and the issues that the MT team at Six Apart are already aware of. Although they do not recommend upgrading your main blog, in case something terrible happens, I'll probably upgrade anyway at some point.

One final announcement: from 7pm UK time, this site will be down for up to 4 hours while my host fixes a "potential hardware issue affecting the SCSI system".

It's taken me almost two weeks but my photos from Edinburgh are finally up. Not all of them are very well annotated or tagged though since I've not really had an awful lot of time lately nor been near enough to an internet connection.

I also have photos taken at Diggerland from last Saturday as well as some from central Durham which we popped into on the way back since we had some time and it was a nice day.

A few weekends ago I also went out and took some photos around Little Horton Green, a road in Bradford that seems to have got stuck in an 18th century timewarp. It's really nice down there, actually.

I'm now only 155 images away from my 1000th photo on Flickr - not bad for less than a year.

You probably know that Movable Type 3.2 is on its way (especially since I blogged about it earlier). The final release is likely to be a few weeks away, but the good news is that beta test starts tomorrow. The better news is that, unlike previous beta tests, this one is public and not limited to a small set of beta testers picked out at random. This is arguably a good move - in the past, many of the beta testers have been running MT on LAMP servers which has meant it hasn't had enough testing in other environments and so not all of the bugs have been ironed out in those cases.

Although this is only a point release, from the looks of things this could easily be seen as MT 4.0 because of the range of new features - better comment and trackback administration, trackback moderation built-in, better tools for administrators, a plugin manager that lets you disable unwanted plugins and better documentation. And that's just what has been announced already.

I'm strongly considering dumping the copy of BlogTorrent that I have running on my ISP's web space, now that I've realised that most of the settings are viewable by anyone who can guess the URL of the file. The installation does warn about this but doesn't really offer a solution, and setting the config files so that they don't have read permissions for all users stops the program from working.

I can probably fix it with a .htaccess file to prevent any IP address that isn't the server from accessing the files but it's not ideal. If you have BlogTorrent set up, you may want to bear this in mind. I appreciate that BlogTorrent was designed to be easier to set up than other torrent trackers but this one presents an unacceptably high security risk if not checked out.

By the way, this month's Windows security updates are out (I had 3) and Mozilla Firefox 1.0.5 is out, fixing 12 security flaws, 2 of which involved arbitrary code execution. Deer Park Alpha 2 is also out.

Songs that have been stuck in my head today:

• Spoiled & Zigo - More and More
• Suggs - Cecilia
• Stereogram - Walkie Talkie Man
• The Bullseye Themetune

Just thought I'd share that with you. Thanks for all of your messages on the previous entry, by the way.

My degree results have (finally) been made available today - I've got a 2:2, which, while I was hoping for a 2:1, is enough to get me onto the MSc course for next year. So, yay! :)

I'm still awaiting the Cpanel update that will fix the Internal Server Error messages that keep popping up, hopefully it'll be here in the next couple of days. I'm also still waiting for news about our internet connection in Bradford - I've not heard anything yet.

In the meantime, Jeremy has a rant about link exchange spam which I'd echo. I do get a fair amount of spam messages asking for link exhange - at least 2-3 a week - and most are for sites not in any way related with this one with a Google PageRank score of 0. The sites themselves tend to be lacking in content - usually stuff stolen from other sites or just links - so I'd rather not associate myself with them.

That doesn't mean to say I have rejected all requests for link exchanges, just that out of the 50+ I've had I've only ever agreed to 3.

I may have to drop by Newshounds more often. It's a blog about just how ridiculous some of the items on Fox News, the heavily-biased right-wing loony American TV news channel, are. It's updated several times a day, showing just how much stupid material Fox is broadcasting.

With the hoo-hah about John Gibson and his claims that Paris deserved the terrorist bomb attacks and not London, I've been coming across it more recently. It almost makes me sick to think that it's possible to get away with broadcasting stuff like this.

Microsoft Update is a new variation on Windows Update that also updates Microsoft Office at the same time, meaning that the Automatic Updates system built-in to Windows will download patches for bothe the OS and for Office similtaneously. I've installed it on my own laptop and also on a friend's computer and had no problems.

Unfortunately my parents' computer didn't take so kindly. It was fine at first, but then some updates wouldn't install. Then Microsoft Update itself wouldn't work - apparently it needed to re-register its libraries, but when it did and restarted it would come up with the same error.

Eventually I fixed it by doing a System Restore back to before I installed anything and this seems to have worked - the 'old' Windows Update is now working again. Unfortunately this means that I'll have to reinstall all of June's Windows patches again, plus the Office 2003 patches and all the other software I updated at the time. Oh well...

Ed Bott has an interesting comparison between US and UK media coverage of the London attacks yesterday. While CNN over in the US was hyping up the blasts - speculating about further attacks and retaliation - the BBC was much calmer, suggesting that the situation was under control.

Certainly there's been a difference in how UK and US blogs have covered this which follows how the respective media outlets in the two countries have reacted. The Brits have been quite chilled out and defiant about the whole thing, whereas there has been an outpouring of emotion and sympathy from those in the US as if this was some major catastrophe.

Sure, our own commercial media have been a little more sensationalist, but then sensationalism sells. The BBC don't have to line the pockets of any shareholders but as a public service broadcaster they do have a duty to offer fair and unbiased reporting of the events, which from what I can tell they have mostly achieved.

I've had the 'I Believe in the BBC' badge on this site for a long time now and see no reason to remove it. The Beeb is a real asset to this country and the events of yesterday gave more proof, if ever it were needed, of why it is so important to us.

This week it's all about Reality TV...

Your thoughts on TV reaity shows... love them or loathe them?

Can't say I'm a big fan - Big Brother is about the only one I've ever watched and even then I really haven't been following this series at all.

Your favorite TV reality show (or the one you are able to tolerate the most).

The aforementioned Big Brother.

Your least favorite TV reality show (or the one you find the stranegst/stupidest).

Difficult, but probably Celebrity Love Island. Having said that though I never watched any of it but the concept just sounds silly.

FQ TV: Invent your own TV reality show. Would you appear on it?

How about Celebrity Bush Poking, where we follow 12 celebrities attempting to poke George W. Bush? Of course, not being a celebrity would make me a little redundant in that sense though...

Some say that there is no such thing as a free lunch. There is. I had two of them today - one was part of my expenses at work and the other was due to a nearby department having spare food.

Of course it would have been better if one of those had been yesterday so that I wouldn't have had to buy lunch then, instead of having two lunches today. Combining that with a big dinner at my parents house this evening and I'm utterly stuffed.

And yes, I have gone back to York again for the weekend, and yes, it was mostly to use their internet connection seeing as we're still without one in Bradford. Thankfully the university is being increasingly endowed with Wifi hotspots, including some with plug sockets, so I haven't been totally disconnected from the 'Information Superhighway'. Bet that's a term you've not heard in ages.

Tomorrow we're going to Diggerland near Durham; one of my father's 60th birthday presents was a free day out there and tomorrow looks like a nice day. I'll be taking photos, as you'd expect, and I will eventually get around to uploading the photos I took last week in Edinburgh.

It's the morning after the day before, and London is already on its way back to normality. The buses and underground are both running again. albeit on a limited service, and many people returned to work today.

As I noted yesterday, the mood is less of sadness and sorrow, but of anger at those responsible, and disbelief at the general futility of it all. It's obviously been a major talking point here of late, and most of those I have spoken too are more peeved about it than anything else - plans for the weekend disrupted, unwanted changes to TV schedules and so on. Many also feel that the terrorists wasted their time - all they did was to kill a few innocent people and injure others. While that doesn't distract from the fact that this is a tragedy for the family and friends of the victims, this isn't some kind of major wound in our side - 'tis but a scratch. We've had the IRA cut holes in our town centres. We've had the Blitz during WW2, which was like the events of yesterday but every day for several weeks. All that the terrorists have done is made more people hate them, and, if they are indeed suicide bomb attacks, lost some of their ranks. I dare say that they may even have alienated some of the more extreme members of the Islamic faith, as a number of muslims were among the victims yesterday. And notice how many muslim organisations denounced the attacks - surely if the terrorists felt they were representing the Islamic viewpoint there would not have been the widespread condemnation that we have seen.

All in all, it was a waste of everyone's time - both the terrorists and those of the general public and emergency services, who were both utterly brilliant yesterday and played no small part in keeping the death toll as low as it was. Considering three of these bombs went off underground in train tunnels it is almost a miracle that there weren't more deaths than the quoted figures.

Life for Londoners - and indeed the rest of the country - will undoubtedly continue as normal. We survived the Blitz so there's no question that we can make it through this.

Rich sums up my feelings very well.

Since I'm still rather internetless (and likely to be so into next week :( ), this is what I would have posted about over the past few days but condensed into bullet points:

• The big news of the day is the London Terrorist Attacks, allegedly caused by Al-Quaida. So far there have been over 30 deaths and many more injured. Not good timing, considering that London won the Olympic bid yesterday, but thankfully the death toll hasn't (so far) been as high as other attacks. The Guardian is logging events as they happen.
• The general reaction from most people I know has been more of annoyance than fear. It's not sent people into panic, it's just disrupted a few meetings. But then we've had the IRA bombing our town centres for years and all we've done is used it as an excuse for regeneration (taking Manchester as an example).
• And for the 4 people who have already emailed me: yes, I'm fine, as are my friends and family. My thoughts are with those that have not been so lucky today.
• Anil Dash: Don't Be A Bad Pitcher! I'm starting to get a few emails like this and Anil took the words out of my mouth. Also see this hilarious follow-up.
• In Europe, The European Parliament have rejected the Software Patents Bill by a landslide. Here's some interesting analysis of it.
• Gizmo looks interesting - it's very much like Skype but uses the open SIP standard instead of Skype's proprietary protocols, so that other applications can work with it (like Trillian). For Windows, Mac and Linux, but no Pocket PC version yet.
• President Bush's comments about corrupt African leaders amused me - "We'll give aid, absolutely; we'll cancel debt, you bet -- but we want to make sure that the governments invest in their people; invest in the health of their people, the education of their people; and fight corruption,". Yes, Mr Bush.
• Movable Type 3.2 is coming and Six Apart are writing about a new feature each day until the release. Looks like a very worthwhile upgrade already.
• Test builds of Firefox 1.0.5 are out; 1.0.5 will be a minor release to correct some security problems. There's also news on the IDN front; Mozilla seems to be following Opera's lead here.
• The problems my parents were having with their NTL internet connection last week seem to have been caused by the set-top box and weren't the fault of NTL itself. But then we've had the same set-top box since 1999 (and it's been turned on constantly for most of the past 6 years) so it's probably no wonder; in any case, it's now been replaced with a newer model that works. Meanwhile it's likely that NTL and Telewest will announce a merger this month. About time.
• There's an update to XP's File and Settings Transfer Wizard to allow settings to be transferred from 32-bit to 64-bit versions of Windows XP. If you buy a new computer with Windows XP 64-bit then this may be useful; the wizard makes moving to a new computer much easier and is often overlooked.

That's all for now. See you soon.

Having a few internet access problems right now. With a bit of luck I'll be back soon, but in the meantime all comments not posted via TypeKey will be moderated.

I suffered quite a major spam attack last night, and although some comments made the moderation queue the combination of SpamLookup, MT-Blacklist and Real Comment Throttle stopped any of it making it onto the public site. That was probably the worst attack I've had since before Christmas.

Update (4th July): With a bit of luck, normal blogging service will be resumed tomorrow night. Unfortunately the person with the broadband account details has just gone on holiday for a month so we're having to piece together bits of info to be able to get the password. It wasn't helped that when I went back to York for the weekend my parents' NTL connection wasn't working either.

Edinburgh was great, by the way :) .

Update (5th July): Gaaagh. This may take longer than planned. If you're in need of a broadband ISP, avoid Tiscali like the plague. Hopefully we'll be able to move to another company soon.

There's some funkiness going on with the server - you may get the occasional HTTP 500 errors when commenting or doing searches. Not quite sure what's up but I don't think it is anything I can fix.

Update (4th July): The update is apparently caused by an issue with the latest version of the DBD::Mysql Perl module, used for allowing Perl applications like Movable Type to communicate with a MySQL database, and it particularly affects Cpanel installations like mine. Other MT blogs are having the same problems. As yet there's no word of a fix, though :( . If you get an internal server error, just go back and do what you did again, though please don't hammer the server.

Considering this also affects the MT backend interface, I guarantee you this is more annoying for me than it is for you.

Update (8th July): The problem should hopefully fix itself tonight when a fixed version of the Perl module is installed through cPanel's auto-update system. I've noticed that comments and trackbacks have been well down over the past couple of days despite the higher volume of posts and I'm guessing (hoping) that you're hitting the errors (and not just not bothering to comment).

The line-up for Open Tech 2005 on the 23rd July looks very good - Danny O'Brien, Ben Hammersley, Cory Doctorow, Gia Milinovich, Jeremy Zawodny - and they're just the ones whose blogs I read regularly. There's plenty more and it's only a fiver to get in too.

I think this will do as a good excuse for another day in London. I've only been there 4 times since January...

(Note to event organisers: Leeds and Manchester are both very good place to hold events, you know ;) )

Normally I'd welcome a site which has been redesigned to be standards compliant. But the Independent seems to have fouled theirs up big time.

• Firstly, all the article URLs have changed. And there are no redirects.
• If you want to find the article again then you're out of luck because there's no search facility.
• You might be able to find the article if you know when it was published using the 'Day in a Page' function, but at the time of writing it kept returning HTTP 400 (Bad Request) errors.
• The Javascript used for the menus is very slow in Internet Explorer. Yes, I know IE sucks but it's still used by the majority of web users
• Some of the links are barely indisguishable from text. This is very bad design; links should be distinguishable by colour and by some other means - preferably using the standard underline.
• The columns idea is a nice one but it's annoying having to scroll back up to the top of the page half-way through an article, and it breaks the semantics.
• It just generally looks dull - too much white.

Can't say I'm a big fan of the changes, I'm afraid. Apparently I'm not the only one. (Link via Simon Waldman of The Guardian)

I'm off up to Edinburgh tomorrow for the Make Poverty History march. The coach leaves at 6am, and I'm not due back until about 11pm so it's going to be a loooong day. As you can guess, I'll be taking my camera and wearing a white t-shirt - no prizes for guessing which one :) .

Hopefully I'll see some of you there. If not, I'll have the photos uploaded soon.

I also had a bit of very good news today. More next week when it's official, but in a nutshell it means my plans for next year are somewhat more concrete now.

This week's FridayQ is about things you've never done:

FQ1: Somewhere you'll probably never go, but would like to.

Australia. It's a heck of a long way from here (the other side of the world, almost) but it sounds like a really interesting place.

FQ2: Something you'll probably never do, but would like to.

Bungee jumping. Sounds like a really cool thing but I don't know if I'll ever get the chance.

FQ3: Someone you'll probably never meet, but would like to.

George W Bush. So that I could poke him. Nothing to violent, just a quick poke.

FQ REALITY CHECK: What would have to happen in order for you to actually accomplish those three things?

The first would require a lot of money, some free time and someone to travel with. The second would require less free time, less money but would require me to find somewhere where bunjee jumping took place (could be combined with the first). And for the last one, I'd probably have to become some kind of goverment official.

This actually reminds me of a drinking game you may or may not be familiar with called "I have never". You need to have a group of people - 4 or more is best - and then each take it turns to say something that you have never done, such as "I have never been bungee jumping". The rules are:

• If someone else in the group has done it, he/she must drink some of their drink.
• If no-one else has done it, then you must drink some of your drink.
• And if you say you have never done something but someone else in the group can prove that you have (i.e. that you were lying), then you have to finish your drink, or buy the next round if you have almost finished.

It's best to play with people who have done lots of things as then it's more interesting.