This was what I was doing this weekend. If we look very wet and bedraggled, it's because we were - a combination of very dense fog, gale force winds and rain made it a rather extreme experience. Fun, but not something I'd want to attempt every day :) .
More photos to come soon but I'm about to go to see Tim Burton's Corpse Bride with the girlfriend.
Just got back home and now talking to my parents over Skype (since I have €9 of SkypeOut credit to use by December 16th April 28th - it got extended when I used it). Had a very good weekend away from computers and things and the scenery out there is wonderful - even when it's cold and raining. Managed to get very wet and muddy but took lots of nice photographs.
On the junk emails front, the numbers have tailed off to around 1600 over the two days but I've now disabled the catchall flag on my account so I shouldn't be getting any more for the time being.
I spent last night at the girlfriend's house. We had spaghetti bolognese for dinner, along with her housemates, however I couldn't finish mine so I put the leftovers in the bin. Doing so felt like an act of blasphemy, since you could argue that the spaghetti was a representation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and that by putting it in the bin I was offending his noodliness.
If by doing this I have offended any members of the pastafarian community, I send my apologies.
incidentally things are going well between me and the girl. I'm going to miss her this weekend.
On Wednesday night, a man died outside one of the clubs near the university here in Bradford. The details are sketchy but this Yorkshire Post article has the most information. The police are treating it as murder and have arrested three of the club's door staff.
What worries me is that many clubs in that area have their student night on Wednesdays, and it's quite conceivable that the person killed was a student. The identity of the man, and the door staff has yet to be made public.
It's all a bit too close to home for my liking.
If you received an email from this domain that was spam, please understand that it wasn't me who sent it - the from address has been forged. I am now dealing with close to 4000 bounced emails that have not been delivered but that have bounced back to me - good thing I have a lot of space for email on the server.
And just when I was about to go away for the weekend. Raaaaa.
Update (Friday): Had over 6000 now and they're still coming. I now have a message filter to dump them straight in the trash. I'm just glad I have a fast internet connection as to manage this on dial-up would be absolute hell. I also feel sorry for my host who is having to manage all of this mail - the headers of the original messages have been forged quite blatently so there's no reason that they should be bounced.
On the plus side, my new 5-port network switch has arrived :) .
Another update: They're still coming thick and fast - hundreds every hour. I'm now about to leave for the weekend and dread to think what it'll be like come Sunday when I'm back. The spam messages all seem to be advertising a canadian pharmacy or ("Canadilan Phamracy") pointing to a domain owned by some bloke in India. The domain has no active web site on it.
I've re-enabled moderation of non-authenticated comments as a temporary measure. This hasn't been triggered by any specific event - it's more to do with the fact that over the next few days I'm not going to be around much to clear up any damage that might get through. Though I do trust SpamLookup, I don't trust it completely.
This will mean that if you don't use TypeKey, OpenID or LiveJournal (or you've never used your account here before) then your comments won't be published immediately, and may take up to a couple of days before they appear. Sorry for the inconvinience that this will cause but I hope that you'll understand.
I'm aiming to disable the moderation on either Sunday or Monday, when I'm back from my weekend away in the Lake District. Just in case I have no time to blog between now and when I get back, I'll see you all later :) .
Via Les is How much is your blog worth?, which uses your Technorati ranking and the statistics from the Weblogs Inc./AOL deal to estimate how much your blog would be worth if you sold it. Here's my result:
My blog is worth $186,862.74.
How much is your blog worth?
Now that would do nicely. It would pay off all of my debts and provide a more than adequate deposit on a mortgage. And a dual-processor dual-core PowerMac G5 with a couple of 30" Apple Cinema Displays and a drool tray for when I'm using them.
incidentally I totted up how much I've earned in total from Google Adsense since signing up in November last year - I've just passed $1800 (about £1000). So my blog is allegedly worth about 100 times more than I've actually earned from it. Still, I'm not complaining about that extra grand in my bank account.
The hub in my room seems to have died on me. The house had Cat-5e cables wired in, but as I have two computers in my room and the cable isn't really long enough to reach either I've been using a hub - the same one that I used in my previous house. I bought it for £9 off eBay about a year ago to replace the rather slow 10-BaseT hub we had.
It's been having some problems for a while, in that it after a while it just 'stops' - any packets sent through it just disappear into the ether - but normally turning it off and on again is enough to fix it, and usually it only happens when there's heavy network activity such as when I'm using peer-to-peer software. But now even when I restart it, it won't come back up again.
Thankfully our modem/switch/firewall thingy downstairs is also a wireless network hub so I at least have some kind of network access in my room. Unfortunately being two floors up from the hub means that the signal is a little on the weak side (2 out of 5 bars) and there's the greater CPU overhead (since we're using WPA encryption) and latency. It's also only 54Mbps instead of 100Mbps. But it's better than dial-up, at least. :)
Still, I'll be investing in a new hub, or perhaps even a proper switch this time.
Apparently I may have been born lucky: those born in May tend to have better luck and be more optimistic about life. The finding is based on web survey of 30,000 people, asking a series of questions about how lucky people perceived themselves to be.
The scientists think the difference in outlook stems from the effect that daylight hours may have on dopamine, a brain signalling chemical, and early brain development of the foetus.
And according to the survey, those born in November tend to have the worst luck.
Um, Adium does actually support meta-contacts. Just drag the screen names on to each other. Damn me for not trying the seemingly obvious first...
I think I now know why Gerry recommends Proteus over Adium.
Adium is really nice but it doesn't support 'meta-contacts' - a single contact with several screen names. In one case, I have 6 screen names for one contact and in Adium they appear as 6 different buddies. Which means that when he signs on or off the computer sounds like a duck on speed and my contact list turns into a christmas tree, as well as becoming considerably more cluttered.
Proteus does support meta-contacts (as does Trillian Pro on Windows), so I may give it a try - at $15 it's not too much to pay if I decide to keep it. Still, I really want to like Adium, since it's open source and so very cute.
One of the downsides of Firefox on a Mac is that it doesn't yet use widgets (like buttons, text fields and drop down boxes) which fit in with the OS X theme. Although all the dialogs and window controls are themed to match in with the operating system, any widgets and input elements on web pages look really ugly.
So here's where Firefoxy comes in. Add it to your Applications folder, and then just drag the Firefox icon onto it. Re-launch Firefox and everything should look much prettier! :)
It would be nice if Firefox used native-looking widgets in future releases - I'm guessing this isn't on the cards for 1.5 but seeing as Safari, Camino and Opera do (I don't have IE Mac installed) it does make it stand out in a bad way.
I haven't uploaded a proper photo to Flickr for a while now, so hopefully you'll appreciate these pictures I took up on Ilkley Moor today. As you can tell the weather wasn't at its best - foggy, wet and cold - but it did at least make for some quite dramatic pictures.
Though after having walked nearly 10 miles today my legs are killing me.
Since I'll be on the internet a bit more I've disabled compulsory moderation of non-authenticated comments (i.e. those not posted through a trusted TypeKey or OpenID account). This means that those of you posting as unregistered users should find that your comments go through immediately instead of needing to be moderated.
Bear in mind, though, that I have made SpamLookup more aggressive in order to enable this, so there's still a possibility that your comment may get moderated. I'm performing more IP lookups and have expanded the keywords field somewhat.
The latest post on IEBlog details how secure sites will be handled. It's interesting stuff - here's a summary:
very few users (or web developers) fully understand the security risks of rendering HTTP-delivered content within a HTTPS page.
As much as I like to evangelise Firefox it's good to see IE7 making progress, and there have been some really good ideas going into the product. It will certainly make the browser wars more interesting, and hopefully drive innovation in the browsers further. I've been playing around with Flock over the weekend after a tip-off from Daisy and while it didn't win me over straightaway it looks like it has potential.
On the Firefox front, we can expect Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1 on Friday, from what I've heard. The final release really shouldn't be far away now - it would be nice if it was released on November 9th as that would be exactly one year since 1.0. But as OpenOffice.org didn't quite make its 5th birthday for the release of version 2.0, I'd rather that MoFo wait until after then if there are any lingering showstopping bugs, but if it's possible then it'd be cool :) .
And now I'm off to bed, since I'm going to be wandering around Ilkley Moor (possibly singing this song) tomorrow. In the rain... :-/
You can tell you're writing a lazy post when the first thing you type is <ul>.
That is so true. Hopefully now that I have an always-on internet connection that doesn't go slower than a quadriplegic tortoise I might be able to post more meaningful entries.
If you can read this, then we have Broadband :) .
I'm not a big fan of spyware tools that insist that tracking cookies are spyware. Sure, you probably don't want them, but they're not nearly as much of a threat as spyware. Webroot Software, makes of anti-spyware software, reckon that the average PC in the UK has 18 instances of spyware on it, and that 55% of all UK computers have a spyware infection. At least, that's the impression this BBC article gives.
But El Reg has another article which goes into the statistics in more detail. Counting all forms of spyware, including tracking cookies, would put each machine at 18 infections. Disregard cookies, and that figure is only 4.5. Still quite high, but not nearly as headline-grabbing.
Really, cookies are not spyware.
According to Molly's Web Design & Development Personality Indicators, I'm somehere between a TTLM and a SASS. SACE is close as well but I'm not quite sure I fit into it. What do you think you guys fit into?
Although it came out 5 years ago, I've decided to get myself a copy of Blur's Best of album. Normally I'd go straight to play.com or cd-wow.com to buy it, since those tend to be the cheapest. Play had it for £10 including delivery, and CD-Wow had it for £7, also including delivery. Not bad, but I thought I could do better.
Usually I also check Amazon and Tesco.com, but neither was significantly cheaper than CD-Wow and neither included the delivery cost. So I checked HMV's web site. Turns out they had a sale on and it was only £4 - or £3.59 if you have a NUS card - and that included delivery too.
While I've been very pleased with the service - and indeed the prices - offered by CD-Wow and Play, I'm also a sucker for low prices and so HMV wins here. I've ordered from HMV's online store before and had no problems so hopefully I've got myself a good deal.
incidentally, when the email arrived confirming my order, I saw this:
Please note we are in the process of relocating our Internet business to Guernsey, and as such you may experience a slight delay in the despatch of your order.
What with play.com, Tesco Jersey and Amazon Jersey, amongst others, the Channel Islands must be becoming a little crowded with all of those warehouses. Still, if tax loopholes mean cheaper stuff for me than I can't complain :) .
Over at Utterly Boring, Jake's published the 7000th comment. Over here I've had over 7000 comments (7015 to be exact) but only 6145 of those are published - the rest were deleted, most likely because they were spam. Indeed, the 7000th comment was spam. :(
As for trackback pings, I've had over 2500 pings, however only 738 of those were legitimate - the majority of comment spam I get here is through the trackback system. Note that these numbers only reflect this past two years (since December 2003) since that was the last time I did a full re-install of MT (whereby all of the entry, comment and trackback IDs were reset). Since then I've been doing database dumps so the IDs have been preserved.
This is Firefox software update in action. It's very quick, due to the update from beta 1 to beta 2 being only 782KB, and it handles the updating and installing of the browser for you through a wizard-style interface. It then updates your extensions if needed.
All in all I'm highly impressed. The feature seems very polished and is very welcome seeing as in the past we've had to download the whole thing again every time a security update is released.
Non-American-English users may also be pleased to know that Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 is available in localised form. Including British English. Yay.
Now I have 46MB of updates for Windows XP and Office 2003 to install...
While looking for phones on eBay I came across another 6230i up for sale, for what seemed like a good price. Then I read the description.
First of all, the auction was only for the phone and battery - no box, charger, hands-free kit, manual or any of the other bits that should have come with it. Then it said that the phone was "barred from all UK networks". In other words, it's been reported stolen.
If your phone is stolen and you know its IMEI (serial) number you can contact your network who will bar it from all the other UK networks for you - I did this when mine got stolen 3 years ago which basically renders it useless in the UK. It is, apparently, possible to reprogram IMEI numbers on some brands of phone but this is an offence under the Mobile Telephones (Re-Programming) Act 2002 and is punishable by a fine or custodial sentence. So it's easier to ship them abroad, where the bars have no effect.
Thinking about it, I probably should have reported the auction to eBay as I'm sure this would be against their terms and conditions (and probably against the law too). It's a pity that there isn't an international, or even a Europe-wide phone barring system - while a countrywide system makes it more difficult to sell the phones on afterwards if more countries joined up I'm sure it would reduce mobile theft.
incidentally, to complete the set, my mother has a new phone - a Motorola V171. Not sure if I like it - very small screen and somewhat confusing menu system - but she seems happy with it. I'm now using her old Nokia 3310 (an absolute classic, though a bit large and underpowered by today's standards) until my 6230i arrives - should be tomorrow or Wednesday hopefully.
Thanks to an update to the OpenID Comments plugin for MT, you can now post comments using your OpenID or LiveJournal accounts as well as TypeKey, or just as a boring old unregistered user. The feature has been there for a while but it's taken until now for it to actually work.
You also now don't need to provide your email address when commenting. This is mostly down to a side effect of the OpenID plugin - OpenID doesn't provide email addresses, so if I require them all OpenID comments will be rejected - but I've found that those who don't want to provide their email addresses will use a fake one anyway. I would still like you to provide your email address, however, as it means that I can email you replies to your comments. It also means you can optionally get email updates when new comments are posted to an entry.
By the way, all of you TypeKey users are also OpenID users. Log in to your TypeKey account and update your details (you don't have to make any changes but you will need to submit the form). This will OpenID-enable your TypeKey profile page at http://profile.typekey.com/[yourusername] .
I'm discovering the hard way that mobile phones and washing machines don't mix. I left my Nokia 7250i in my trouser pocket, and only realised it was still there when I heard it clunking in the drum, 15 minutes into the wash. Despite cancelling it and rescuing it, the phone appears to be dead.
Thankfully the SIM card is alright and I have a reasonably recent backup of contacts on my laptop so provided I get a new handset I should be okay. Presently I'm scouring eBay although Tesco have the Motorola RAZR V3 in silver for £170 which I'm tempted by - but really I don't want to be spending that kind of money.
I'd welcome any suggestions but I'm only after phones that are unlocked with SIM cards - I'm happy with my number and tariff and don't want to change.
Update: Just won an auction for a "virtually brand new" Nokia 6230i on eBay for £139, which I thought was a pretty good deal. Admittedly its predecessor, the 6230, is the ultimate chav phone but it's well-featured and quite small, and I think you can change the covers.
In the comments on This calls for a celebratory beer some of you asked what my 'secrets' are to getting lots of money through it. While they're not 'secrets' as such these are the things that I imagined contributed:
Most of the adverts, I imagine, are clicked on by people stumbling across internal pages as they're browsing, rather than regular readers. Most people will find these internal pages through search engines, so it's important that your site is well-ranked by the likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN. I have a PageRank of 6 for the main page. One good way of getting a high ranking is by having lots of inbound links, and way to get them is...
If people find what you have to say interesting, then they'll link to you. That will improve your search engine rankings. You can, of course, have lots of stolen content and then spam your way into the search engines but this the more ethical and fun way to do it. The more content you have, the more pages will be indexed and the more visitors you get. I have nearly 5000 pages on here - some with more content than others, but all are, in theory, indexed by Google.
Your pages won't appear in search engine results pages if the search engine spiders can't work out what's in them. Use clean, semantic markup, with proper logical headings. Stick the entry title in the page title, and in one of the header tags - meaningful titles also help. Use page filenames that make sense - 2005/10/my-first-entry/ is better than article.php?id=67. The latter is especially bad as Google tends to ignore pages with question marks in the URLs - look into URL rewriting to produce something more friendly; Apache users can start here. Also, in the case of Google AdSense, if the GoogleBot can understand your content it'll produce more relevant adverts which are more likely to be clicked upon.
Don't inundate your visitors with advertising, but make them prominent enough to be noticable. They should be in the first screenful of information on an average screen size. If you put too much advertising up then you'll look like a sell-out and it may alienate your regular readers who are the ones more likely to link to you (and therefore maintain that all-important PageRank score), so keep it to a sensible level and select colours that match in with your site design. Don't hide them away or make them difficult to read as otherwise no-one will click on them.
That's my advice. If you go with Google, you may also want to consider another additional advertiser - by default, when Google cannot show a revenue-making advert (because it can't find anything that complements your page content) it'll show a 'Public Service Ad' which will not make you any money. However, you can change this so that it shows other adverts which may make you more cash.
If you have anything more to add, please post away in the comments.
I've been tagged by Anthony to do this so here goes:
Well, okay - here's the fifth sentence of the 23rd post:
Handy eh?
Bit of an anti-climax, don't you think? That was written at the end of January 2002, when I was still in college and hadn't got my A-levels yet.
So, for the next 5 victims, I shall choose...
My Malham photos are up. This was the first real test of my camera during the day and I have to say I'm rather impressed as most of the photos have come out very well with minimal editing required.
My lecture this morning was interesting - it was entitled "How to be a hacker" and is the first lecture I've had where the first slide was a disclaimer, saying that the university "takes no responsibility for any malicious actions taken by individuals who may take inspiration from the contents.". Subsequent slides covered an overview of l33t$p33k and how to find known vunerabilities in software. (I suppose a better title would be "How to be a script kiddie" but this was supposed to be an introductory lecture). I think I'm going to like this course.
I'll email the lecturer to ask if I'm allowed to post the lecture slides online.
Last month I earned over US$300 in Google Adsense revenue - or just under £175. September has therefore been my best ever month, and if this trend continues I'll be earning over £2000 per year.
$40 of that has, however, been donated to the American Red Cross for their Katrina Relief Effort.
Just fixed a mismatched HTML tag that was stopping certain less liberal feed readers from parsing the Atom feed correctly (NetNewsWire seems to be one of the main culprits - it'll allow some errors in RSS but will refuse to parse any Atom feeds that aren't well-formed. So much for Postel's Law...). So apologies if you see lots of new entries appearing.
I've been up in the Dales on my first hike with the university hiking club. We went up to Malham and Gordale Scar - the weather was quite nice and I got some good photos that I'll upload at some point (maybe tomorrow). The walk is usually 7 miles, if you go up Gordale Scar, but as I didn't fancy climbing up a waterfall in my walking boots (my proper hiking boots are still in York) I took a detour which added on an extra mile. Still, after a summer of not doing a lot, the exercise is very much welcome, and like most hikes there was a good pub at the end in Malham village.
The plan for tonight is a curry, and indeed the plan for tomorrow is a curry from the same curry house since it's my housemate's birthday. I'll not be having curry on Tuesday, I imagine.
