February 2006 Archives

As previously mentioned, I've set up cross-posting so that everything posted to this blog also get posted to my LiveJournal. Here's how I did it.

Another one of the random queries used to get to this site:

how to wear a shemagh

I think this page would be more useful. I didn't even know what a shemagh is, but it turns out to be one of those cloths that you wrap around your face so that only your eyes show, making you look like a Middle-Eastern terrorist. The reference to a shemagh came in this comment about hoodies.

BoingBoing has recently been blocked in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, and is also being blocked by various parental control filters. Rather than comply with the censors, it has decided to fight back and tell you how to get around censorship systems.

Because I know some regular readers are from the countries named and therefore won’t be able to read BoingBoing’s announcement, I’ve copied it into this entry - click ‘continue reading’ to view it. The content is Creative Commons licensed and I’ve kept the attributions so I should be allowed to quote verbatim.

I'm pleased to announce that this blog is now syndicated over at LiveJournal. Though the feed has been syndicated here for a while now, I've not been posting over there officially despite having had a LJ account for some time.

The technical jiggery pokery that makes this happen is ljcrosspost that copies all the posts made on my main blog in Movable Type over to LiveJournal using the Frontier XML-RPC protocol. I'm also using Kevin Shay's fantastic RightFields plugin to include my mood and what music I'm listening to with each entry. I'll be explaining how to set this up on your blog in the near future.

So why have I done this now? At least three of the bloggers I read regularly already do this, and I know there's quite a community over at livejournal.com who may appreciate being able to read my posts over there. It's all about my belief that you should be able to read my content in whatever browser you want, however you want, and if doing this aids that then great.

It does mean that I'll have to rename my journal soon - currently it's 'Neil's Non-existant Journal' because there never used to be anything over there...

Over at Lemon Garden there's a link to this tool on MyHeritage.com that lets you upload an image of yourself and have it tell you which famous people you most look like. I uploaded the following image of me:

And here were the results, in order of relevance:

1. L. Ron Hubbard (56%)
2. Rudy Giuliani (54%)
3. Edward Norton (53%)
4. Haley Joel Osment (53%)
5. Tom Welling (51%)

Considering how little regard I have for the Church of Scientology, I wasn't so happy to hear that I look like L. Ron Hubbard but to be honest I don't really which is probably why it's only a 56% match. I hadn't heard of the people who came 3rd, 4th and 5th, though I suppose I do look a bit like Haley Joel Osment. Even though he's almost 4 years younger than me. So, who do you all look like?

Note that the site asks you to register, but you don't have to - just close the registration window when it pops up. You'll only get one match though, apparently.

I'm not best pleased with the Royal Mail right now. I had a package that should have arrived last Friday (16th Feb), but unfortunately no-one was in at the time, so we got one of those "Sorry, you were out" cards. Since I don't have a car, I can't go and pick up the package and instead have to rely on arranging a re-delivery. This is where the problem lies.

Bradford South depot has never been particularly reliable at answering the phone, but usually you can at least leave a message on their voicemail and the package will arrive when you want it to. But lately I've either not even got through to voicemail (the phone just rings off into infinity) or I leave a message and nothing happens as a result. I've been trying to get this package delivered for a week and a half now and it still hasn't turned up, and if it isn't delivered in the next week and a half (by next Friday) it'll be returned to sender. The contents of the package are quite important and I would like to have them as soon as.

I'm really considering complaining to Royal Mail. It's starting to get silly.

A sign that either bloggers are being taken more seriously or that I'm actually popular is that I'm starting to get a few press releases sent to me. Most of the time I ignore them, since they're often for things I have no interest in, but today I had one for Hyperwords which actually looks quite interesting.

Hyperwords is a Firefox extension, which, upon highlighting words, lets you search for them in various search engines, look them up on dictionaries or find a location on a map, amongst other things. Unlike previous efforts at this like eZula Toptext and Flyswat, it will work on all works and not just those where advertisers have paid for them, and it doesn't modify how the pages look in any way. Potentially it looks very useful.

The extension also works in Flock but not in any other web browsers.

• I had my results for my January exams yesterday, and unfortunately they weren't good. I'll have to resit them come August, which is a bit annoying, and will need to work harder in the meantime to compensate. Oh well.
• On a lighter note I've booked tickets to see Jerry Springer: The Opera at the Bradford Alhambra on the 22nd May. I anticipate that it'll sell out so I've bought tickets now to get the cheap seats, but even then it's £14 per seat for the upper circle plus fees. That is, of course, if it even goes ahead - a 2200 name petition has been handed in to stop it being shown. This post by Richard is worth reading - Rich is a Christian but doesn't seem to see what all the fuss is about.
• I posted another entry over at SEB, this time about the Anglican church and the fallout from the decision to disinvest from Caterpillar due to their links with the Israeli army. It's up to nearly 50 comments already.
• Tomorrow I'm off hiking again, this time around Grassington and Conistone. Hopefully the weather will be good but I'm expecting it to be cold.
• Next weekend we're probably going to see Hari's parents but we're having a few problems trying to find trains to get back on Sunday. Hari needs to back in Bradford for 2pm and there are no trains from her town that get her to Birmingham for 9am. It doesn't fair much better by coach. We'll see what happens.

Another one of the random queries used to get to this site:

tractor invitations

I can't really think of anything witty to say about this, but it does sound like a really bizarre thing to search for. Searching for it on Google brings my site up as the 7th result - it's a page about GMail Invitations where someone posted a joke about a tractor.

Here's a screenshot of Google's UK homepage, as seen from most home computers:

And here's Google's UK homepage as seen from within our university network:

Notice any difference? (read on if you can't spot it)

Gledster was kind enough to point me to this solution to the 'Can't Find Requested String.' error that I've been having with my Intel graphics. The problem is a result of me not being American and therefore having my region settings in Windows set to English (United Kingdom) and not English (United States) - the installer will select the correct language file for US English, and indeed for many other languages, but not UK English.

What this means is that you have to uninstall your existing graphics drivers, reboot, set your region settings to US English, reboot, install the new graphics drivers, reboot, change your region settings back to UK English and then do one final reboot. You could possibly get away with only 2 reboots but to do it properly that's 4. All because of some sloppy programming on Intel's part that never used to be an issue. I imagine this will also affect Canadians and Australians, too.

Considering the update really doesn't deliver much, to be honest it isn't really even worth installing anyway.

On my way to campus this morning, I saw this - a burnt out car on a bit of grassland near the university. Seeing cars like that makes me feel sad, as if someone has recklessly taken away someone else's freedom just so that they can have a quick joyride around a few estates. I don't drive and have to rely on public transport or walking, which at times can be annoying - it would be great to be able to jump in a car and be able to go there myself without having to put up with delays or walking around in the rain or after dark. I also feel sorry for the firefighters who had to be called out to deal with this, and for the police who will now have the unenviable task of finding out who the culprits were and telling the car's owner what has happened. Andy, who lives close to where the car was abandoned, wrote about it being on fire last night and has some photos too.

Still, it's yet another photo for my Rundown Bradford set on Flickr.

On a different note, I have a new article up on Stupid Evil Bastard about how evangelical Christians are preaching creationism in the US. It's all a bit scary, but you're welcome to comment over there should you wish. I tend to keep any religious posts over there since the site tends to cover that topic generally.

• According to the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, the origin of the word 'malarkey' is unknown. Which is a shame as it's such a brilliant word. Sadly it wasn't included in the recent BBC Wordhunt.
• The Microsoft presentation yesterday was interesting as expected. Essentially it focussed on how Microsoft is 'opening up', through its Office XML in Office 2007 and through its shared source initiative, but it also criticised the GPL for being too restrictive, in that if you have to provide source code and the right to modify it with your software, how do you expect to be able to make money? Still, it was interesting and we got a demonstration of Office 2007, plus a slightly technical look at Office XML files, and the demonstrator's copy of IE6 did crash in the process. Usually when MS demonstrate something here something goes wrong and obviously today was no exception. I also got a free pen and a few students won some free MS software.
• The student union elections are just over 3 weeks away with the candidates being confirmed at the end of this week. I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say, but I'm not personally standing for a position. I did last year (and came third), though I didn't post anything much here about it (mainly because of the election regulations saying I couldn't). A few people I know are standing though, so it could be nice to be able to help people with their campaigns rather than run one myself. A bit like being a grandparent instead of a parent - when the situation gets a bit sticky, you can hand it back.
• Winamp 5.2 is out. It's not on the main site yet, but you can download it from the forums. It adds portable music player and an improved media library, so you can use your iPod or Zen with it without installing extra plugins. Seems to work well on my machine.
• What doesn't seem to work well here is the latest version of the drivers for my Intel Extreme Graphics. The control panel icon is now called 'Can't find requested string.' and it doesn't do anything when you click on it. Whoops.
• Six Apart have set up the Trackback Working Group, to have Trackback approved as an IETF standard (like Atom was) and sort out its numerous flaws (namely to do with internationalisation and spam). Like with Atom it's being done through a Wiki, which you need a LiveJournal account or OpenID server to login to. Best of luck to them and I've joined their mailing list as an interested party.
• And finally, I have 4 only 1 more invitation to download the beta of Windows Live Messenger, the successor to MSN Messenger 7.5. Drop me a line if you would like to try one - I'll need the email address you use for your Microsoft .Net Passport.

As you may well know by now, thanks to my various laments over the past few months, my laptop is a bit knackered in the fan department, and so any processor-intensive tasks make it very hot. Which means that the PSU cuts the power and everything crashes.

A badly-written piece of software, which comes from a very large multi-national PC manufacturer that rhymes with 'smell', used up 100% of my CPU for several minutes, which caused the power to be cut out while web browsing. When I rebooted and had ChkDisk clear up the damage, it found that my Firefox cookies file was messed up and 'fixed' it. Consequently when I next ran Firefox, I had no cookies.

I have lots of useful stuff stored in my cookies so this was more than just a bit inconvinient. Thankfully, there is a way to recover your delicious delicacies. On your C drive, there should be a hidden folder called FOUND.000, and in it, lots of files called FILE00xx.CHK where xx is some number. You need to go through these and find one that has '# HTTP Cookie File' in it, followed by lots of web addresses and data. Edit this in Notepad, and remove any gunk that's in it (big blocks of total garbage, most likely at the end of the file). Then, save this in your Firefox profile.

Thanks to this I have most, if not all, my cookies back. It's a bit l33t and I wouldn't try it if you don't know what you're doing, but it may save you some hassle.

Yet again, I've let this blog go silent. This time I'm blaming Telewest, Hari's ISP, because her internet has been very flaky all week and keeps going up and down like a yo-yo. Despite Telewest claiming to have fixed it on Friday, it was still broken this morning.

I was also away all Saturday in London, and spent most of yesterday in bed recovering as a result. Not that London's particularly stressful, it's just that getting up at 6am and not going to bed until midnight does take it out of you.

Today I have a presentation from Kevin McDaniel, the head of Microsoft's UK Academic Programme. His presentation is entitled "Interoperability - Open Standards and/or Open Source", and we are to "come prepared to debate!". Should be interesting - I'll let you know if it is.

This week is a relatively normal week, though I'm doing more (paid) work than normal this week, which should mean I get some much needed cash. This includes working most of Saturday, but thankfully my course isn't being too demanding at the moment so I can cope for now. Thursday also sees the start of the annual student union elections, and though I'm not standing as a candidate this time I will probably be supporting some of my friends who are considering standing.

Another one of the random queries used to get to this site:

how to use rampant rabbit

This isn't that bizarre, it's just that I'm concerned that a search engine would return a result for this site in its results pages. Though I'd have thought it would be pretty obvious how you would use a Rampant Rabbit.

(If you don't know what one is, do a Google Search. You may, however, find that several sites are not work safe...)

Recently Microsoft launched Windows Genuine Advantage, a tool that prevented the installation of various Windows add-ons on non-genuine (i.e. pirated) copies of Windows. Originally this was an ActiveX control that only worked in Internet Explorer but since then a plugin for Firefox has been released which will allow Firefox users to validate their copies of Windows in the same way that Internet Explorer users can at present.

The plugin is simple to install - you'll probably need to be an administrator to do it, unless you run Firefox from a local profile or something. The bad news is that it doesn't always work.

Thankfully there's a workaround. The package you download is actually a glorified .zip file, so all you need to do is open it in a program like WinRAR or WinZip and extract the contents somewhere. You'll then have 3 files: npLegitCheckPlugin.dll, nsILegitCheckPlugin.xpt and PluginInstaller.exe. PluginInstaller.exe is no use to us, so you can discard it.

Close Firefox, then copy npLegitCheckPlugin.dll to your Firefox plugins folder, which will probably by C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins. Then copy nsILegitCheckPlugin.xpt to your Firefox components folder, which is usually C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components. Now, relaunch Firefox and you should be ready to go.

What's more, you can use this method for other browsers like Netscape and Mozilla, and probably even Opera, though I haven't tried them yet. If you do, you may have to change the user agent of the browser to Firefox - in Mozilla and Netscape, type about:config in the address bar, then right click somewhere and select 'New' followed by 'String'. Call the value 'general.useragent.override', click OK, and then type 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1' to give it the Firefox 1.5.0.1 for Windows XP user agent.

The details for this came from the PluginDoc web site, which has links to almost all browser plugins available for Firefox. There's a lot out there.

Well, okay, he didn't actually kill the man he accidently shot (though he did have a heart attack), but you can download the song "Dick Is A Killer" from The Party Party. It's a song using various samples of George W. Bush's speeches mixed up to comic effect.

A very quick 'things that have happened to me lately' summary:

• Went out for a belated Valentines' Day lunch with Hari yesterday - we went to Salts Diner at Salts Mill in Saltaire. Wasn't cheap but we managed to stuff ourselves and it was very enjoyable.
• Finally got around to asking my housemates for money towards bills - I'm now owed about £200...
• Booked to go to a conference in London on Saturday.

And for Mac users, OS X 10.4.5 is out, with some bug fixes, mostly for Intel-based Macs. iTunes 6.0.3 has also been released with "stability and performance improvements".

I was wondering why I haven't had many comments lately, but then I realised that I haven't really said much lately. Although I sometimes get the odd comment from someone falling in through Google, I've not had many of those either. I guess I'll have to make lots of highly controversial posts that invite comment from lots of people.

Anyway, I've uploaded a few more photos to Flickr, including this one from Manchester which I'm quite proud of.

Another one of the random queries used to get to this site:

stinky sweaters

Searching for that phrase brings up this entry from May 2003 as the first result. Quite why anyone would want to have a stinky sweater is beyond me.

When I saw the story TV box launches sea rescue search I thought "this is old news". Some months ago a Freeview set-top box in Scotland broadcast a signal on a particular frequency normally used for distress signals, triggering an air-sea rescue team to go looking for it.

But it's not old news - it's happened again. A second Freeview box has sent out a distress signal, this time in Devon, again prompting a search team to be called out.

The likely explanation is a defect in the manufacturing or programming of the boxes. But what if it's something more sinister? Maybe the microprocessors in the boxes have developed intelligence and realised that they're to spend their lives in someone's front room having to watch endless episodes of Eastenders, and thus decided to broadcast a signal so they can be liberated and taken to somewhere nicer.

It's a theory.

Tomorrow is Valentines' Day, and for once I'm actually looking forward to it. This is the first February 14th where I#ve been in a relationship, and so rather than sulking about the fact I'm still single, I can enjoy the fact that I'm not.

Because we're both quite busy tomorrow with various things, Hari and I are not doing anything special tomorrow, though we are planning to go somewhere nice on Wednesday instead. Wednesday also has more significance to us since it'll be 4 months since our first date. It doesn't feel like 4 months but I suppose time flies when you're in love.

(Feel free to throw up now if you like.)

We spent the weekend at my parents' house in York. Saturday was spent shopping, where we bought lots of chocolate, hot chocolate, and meat (over 2.5kg of beef mince between us), and yesterday we went around the Yorkshire Museum.

Getting back to Bradford from York today was interesting. Sundays are when Network Rail likes to close routes to do engineering work, since fewer season ticket holders travel on Sundays, but this of course means delays, diversions and replacement bus services.

In the past I've not had many problems but today we were hit by a triple-whammy of line closures north of York, between Church Fenton and Leeds, and from Bradford to Halifax. Though the second of those was the only to affect us directly, meaning our York - Leeds train was diverted via Castleford (and was standing room only), the latter meant that trains from Leeds to Manchester Victoria were going via Brighouse instead of Bradford. A fact we realised about 30 seconds before the train was due to depart. And the train to Bradford left at the same time from another platform, which we only just managed to catch.

On most other days of the week the trains are good and reliable, but Sundays are often difficult. This was perhaps an extreme example but it could have lead to us getting stuck in Brighouse on a Sunday night and having to pay for a taxi back to Bradford.

The long-awaited first release of Songbird, the XUL-based cross-platform music player, is now out. It's only a 'User Preview' though, in that the essential features work but there's still a lot of work to go before it's ready for widespread use; hence its 0.1 release number.

I'm going to do a reasonably detailed review of the application. As the application is still very much in its infancy, there's not an awful lot there right now though.

Another one of the random queries used to get to this site:

female orgasm recordings

This is an example of a query where the searcher has been too specific. He/she may find that just searching for 'porn' may have given better results.

Though I am slightly disturbed that such a query would bring someone to this site.

I realise that I haven't posted much at all this week and I do apologise for that. I've just been very busy lately and haven't had the time to blog.

This weekend I'm at my parents' house in York with Hari - we did a spot of shopping today (bought a few CDs and lots of cheap chocolate from the Cadbury's Factory Shop). On Wednesday I was back in Manchester, this time for a graduate fair. There weren't many employers there and most were offering managerial positions, though I have since made a job application to one of the companies that was there. The job sounds good and has good pay, even if they are not specifically targeting graduates and it has very little to do with forensic computing.

My course is going okay - I'm now finished the second week of the second semester. The 4 new modules I have all seem interesting, though my hopes of learning PhotoShop have been dashed somewhat since we're using a program that the lecturer wrote instead. Which sucks so badly that I've taken to modifying some of the resources using Resource Hacker - things like redesigning the dialogue boxes and adding keyboard shortcuts for menu items.

I do have some entries to write for next week - reviews of IE7, Songbird and AppZapper are on the way, plus any other general randomness. Hopefully I'll actually be able to find time to post them.

Another one of the random queries used to get to this site:

how dangerous is photography?

Well, that depends. I don't find it particularly dangerous, but then I tend not to do any particularly daring photography. If you want to take pictures on a unicycle while crossing a minefield with lots of barbed wire and people shooting at you, then it is definitely very dangerous. And stupid.

BMW's German site has been kicked off Google for breaching its webmaster guidelines. There's more detail from Matt Cutts (a Google employee) and Google Blogoscoped.

I don't have an awful lot of sympathy for BMW here. What they did was clearly against Google's guidelines. But it would also have been completely unnecessary had they actually designed their site properly.

BMW Germany makes gratuitous use of JavaScript and frames, tecnhologies which Google's GoogleBot doesn't understand well. The result of this is that BMW's site will not do well in search engine rankings because the GoogleBot cannot crawl and understand its content very well. So, BMW did some black-hat SEO to compensate for it and ended up falling foul of the guidelines.

Had BMW not used these technologies, or used JavaScript in a way that gracefully degrades for those not using it, this situation would never have happened. Furthermore, it would have improved the accessibility of the page for users with disabilities as well.

BMW have made some changes to comply with Google's guidelines but they have not fixed the root cause of the problem, which is the design of the site. Once that is done, BMW should be able to enjoy high search engine rankings without having to resort to dark arts.

Has anyone else noticed lots of spam comments on high profile blogs which all point to MyNewsBot.com? I've been hit before but deleted the comment because it looked suspicious. Searching Google for 'mynewsbot' returns lots of comments by a user called 'mynewsbot' but no articles about the site itself. Some of these comments appear on high profile sites like Engadget, which Google reckons has been hit over 500 times. Overall there are nearly 64 000 pages affected.

The comments have perhaps slipped through comment filters because they do look like legitimate comments, in that they don't look obviously spammy and often relate vaguely to the subject matter. Though the site still has a Google PageRank score of 0, it has now got a lot of links to it, and yet no-one, as far as I can tell, has actually posted an entry about the site.

It's all very fishy.

As a follow-up to a couple of entries I posted in September 2004 about getmetickets.net, the BBC reports that the site has been shut down and that the Department for Trade and Industry has "asked for the company to be wound up in the public interest."

Getmetickets.net was a bit of a scam. Their aim was to sell concert tickets, with the emphasis on selling the best seats or tickets for events that had already sold out or where tickets were not yet available. The problem was that often they did not actually have the tickets that they claimed to be available by their web site, leaving punters paying for nothing. The site was the subject of two BBC Watchdog investigations.

It's good to see scams like this being wound up. Some of the tickets on sale cost hundreds of pounds and in a number of cases never arrived - that's a lot of money to lose out on.

My original entry is here but I posted a follow-up after getmetickets.net employees tried to stick up for the company in the entry comments. They seem like a very dodgy operation indeed, and hopefully the case against them will suceed.

Please note that the discussion attached to this entry is now closed. If you are having issues with GetMeTickets, please consult their web site which has details of the insolvency process, and the web site of the Public Interest Unit of the Insolvency Service. If you are having issues with any other company please contact your local Trading Standards Service.

Matt Haughey has written about the poor user experience provided by email encryption. And in doing so he hits the nail on the head:

I've often heard prominent computer scientists lament the low uptake of email encryption -- that in the age of many gigahertz machines we still send plain text to each other (usually) over non-secure connections. Every couple years, just for the sake of my personal freedom and curiosity, I make an attempt to try and use encryption for a few days. Every time I do this, I am disappointed.

Late last year, I installed GnuPG and Enigmail again to see if the experience would be much better than last time. It certainly has improved, but it's got a long way to go. A newbie user would struggle to even follow these step-by-step instructions and it involves lost of commands in a command prompt window which really end users should not have to do. Even if you follow these instructions to the book, you will only have GnuPG set up for email - to use it for verifying and encrypting files or the clipboard contents you need to download other programs like WinPT and GPGee as well, and configure them. It's a lot of work and not a whole lot of benefit, really. It's a bit different with PGP as the interface is much better, but PGP is now a commercial product.

Someone needs to come up with some kind of security suite for Windows, which integrates with all common email programs (Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird and Eudora) and also Internet Explorer and Firefox, and provides a common user interface for working with GnuPG. There should be wizards for key generation and any complicated tasks and seamless integration with Windows Explorer, too. Is that so much to ask?

One of the long-running complaints about Firefox has been its memory usage. Like most web browsers Firefox does need a fair bit of memory to run, but it's also had long-running problems with memory leaks - memory that is allocated unnecessarily or memory that is allocated and not given back when it's finished with. These mean that Firefox needs more memory to run and over time its performance (and the performance of other applications) starts to degrade.

Last month, a memory leak detection tool was made available to users testing the trunk builds (which will eventually form Firefox 3), which allows memory leaks to be detected and reported. Jesse Ruderman has posted a progress report and already a total of 12 memory leak bugs have been fixed. Two of those were included in the 1.5.0.1 fix that came out last week (download it if you haven't already) and the other 10 may get included in future updates. More reported leaks have yet to be fixed.

It's great to see this being addressed, though. I've seen a number of people lamenting issues with Firefox's memory usage, including some who have claim to have to restart Firefox every couple of hours or so to retain good performance. Hopefully these fixes and any more that are discovered will go some way to alleviating Firefox's memory eating habit.

• Another big reason why I haven't been writing much here is that I've been staying over at Hari's house quite a bit lately, and with her only having one computer and one network socket in her room means I can't really do much there. If she continues to play World of Warcraft as much as she is right now (she's up to level 47) then in future I'll take my laptop over and buy a network switch for her room.
• We're going to the cinema tonight. We haven't decided what to see yet, but Hari wants to see Memoirs of a Geisha having read and enjoyed the book. We've seen Narnia and I'm not so sure if I like the rest of what's on.
• Tomorrow I'm going hiking, either to Whernside (if we can get a driver) or around Baildon (if we can't, since Baildon is reachable by train). The weather forecast isn't great but it shouldn't rain hopefully.
• My Flickr photostream is looking a bit empty and for that I apologise. I do have photos that I need to process and upload but I haven't really had the time. Some are from Manchester, others are just general ones from around Bradford and I'm sure I'll take some more tomorrow, wherever we end up.

Another one of the random queries used to get to this site:

pisser clough

Pisser Clough turns out to be the name of a place somewhere in the UK, though I couldn't quite find out where. England is full of amusingly-named places - part of my family, for example, comes from the area around the town of Penistone in South Yorkshire (the first bit is pronounced like 'pen', not 'peen', though).

I'm sorry for the recent lack of entries here. I had written some to post but ending up deleting them prior to posting, mostly because I was afraid of offending or alienating people or because I had not been able to make my arguments clear. All of them related to recent controversial political events that I feel strongly about.

The most recent one was about freedom of speech, and how I believe in its responsible use. Writing or posting things that are intended to incite hatred against people is wrong in my opinion and that was what the entry was about, citing a couple of very recent events in the news. Alas, I don't think I've been able to articulate myself in a way that firmly puts across my opinion and so I've felt it was best not to post them.

I will, however, be posting some less controversial stuff soon. Sorry for the interlude.

I've already been told that this site looks a bit skew-whiff in IE7, and now that I've installed IE7 myself I can see what the problem is.

The good news is that it's somewhat easily fixed without breaking compatibility with Firefox, Opera and Safari. The bad news is that the fix breaks compatibility with IE6. I'm therefore going to split the stylesheets and have a IE6-compatible stylesheet and an everything else primary stylesheet. This won't happen straightaway but will be brought in eventually.

As for IE7 itself I have to say I'm somewhat impressed. It's not going to replace Firefox as my default web browser but there's some nice stuff in it and the Mozilla developers could do well to imitate some of its new features. I'll do a longer review soon.

Update: In fact, I may not need to make any changes at all. Should this bug be fixed the pages should display fine with the stylesheet remaining as it is. Furthermore, IE7 users will see the page in exactly the same way that Firefox, Safari and Opera users see it - IE6 currently displays it a bit differently.