Recently in Internet Things Category

In the latest edition of 'send Neil cool stuff in return for a blog post', OpenDNS sent me some stickers, a bottle opener and some Reese's Peanut Butter Cups (which aren't normally sold in the UK) as a prize for following them on Twitter (@opendns).

I've been using OpenDNS almost since it started 4 years ago. For those unfamiliar, DNS is the system that translates address like www.example.com into numerical addresses that your computer understands; while all internet service providers will have their own DNS servers, OpenDNS has introduced various innovations to make using the internet a more pleasant experience.

OpenDNS aims to be faster than your ISP's own servers, and has phishing protection, a caching system to help you access web sites when their DNS systems are not working, and content filtering. Best of all, it's free and doesn't necessarily need any software installing.

While other competing services have launched since 2006, I personally believe that OpenDNS is still the best. No wonder, according to its statistics, it handles around 1% of all internet users in the world.

For the best part of four years I've been a member of last.fm, which is a sort-of social network based around the music that you listen to. In a way, last.fm is to music what Flickr is to photography.

It's hard to definitively describe last.fm in a sentence because it does a variety of things. Probably its most well-known feature is to list what songs you've recently listened to, which is done through a client program installed on your computer which uploads whatever track you've just listened to on your favourite media player (called 'scrobbling'). But last.fm is clever - it can use that data, and make recommendations to you. Over time, as you feed it more data, it'll notice trends and start to recommend other artists or bands that you don't listen to but it thinks you might like.

There's more than that though. There are groups you can join, like on Facebook, and the music you scrobble is aggregated in these groups - and you can discuss things in them. Each artist/band page and every track is also a Wiki, so you can find out information about the music you listen to. And it will show you events near you which feature bands or artists you like, and recommend which festivals to go to.

And then there's the radio stations. As the name 'last.fm' implies, this could be the last ever radio station you listen to, because last.fm will be able to create your own station playing the music you like, or that it recommends. Royalty reasons mean that this feature is somewhat limited to non-fee paying users, but it's still useful.

Finally, open APIs allow other applications to use this data - Tweekly.fm for example posts a weekly summary of the artists I've listened to the most to Twitter on a Friday. You can also create a tag cloud of your most listened-to artists.

Thanks to last.fm, I've discovered a range of bands that I wouldn't have known about otherwise, such as Delain, Epica, The Rifles, Nemesea, Boy Kill Boy, Son of Dork and SR-71. last.fm usually lets you listen to samples of songs, or offers links to Spotify should it be available in your country.

Over the past 4 years I've scrobbled over 20,000 song plays, mostly from either iTunes, Spotify or from my iPod. Almost all media players are supported in some way, either using last.fm's client, an alternative such as iScrobbler which I use or because the media player natively supports it (VLC, Spotify and Songbird all have native support or through an official plugin).

All in all, if you like music, last.fm is a great way to find new music or connect with people with similar tastes. Long may it continue.

As those who follow me on Twitter will know, I've removed myself from three social networks this week.

First of all, there was Orkut. Over two years ago I'd mentioned that I hadn't logged into to Orkut in months, and I've probably logged in maybe once or twice since then. None of the people I regularly communicate with use it anymore, having moved on to other places. So, that was the first profile I deleted.

Next was Naymz. Again, back in April I mentioned I wasn't really getting anywhere with it and to date I still only ever had two connections. Furthermore, not one person has ever visited my profile. I'm having much better luck on LinkedIn, where I've added my 50th connection this week and still get requests from people I know. Namyz also try to push their premium service at every opportunity, which is frankly annoying.

And most recently I deleted my Plaxo account. I've never really mentioned Plaxo on this blog much, which is a shame because it's quite useful - essentially it allows you to keep a central address book 'in the cloud' (i.e. on plaxo.com) and then have your email clients and address books synchronise with it. As well as supporting Outlook, Thunderbird and the Address Book app on Mac OS X, it also supports many popular webmail services like Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail.

That being said, I stopped using it September last year as their OS X client wasn't compatible with Snow Leopard, and I could achieve the same thing with Google Contacts. OS X has support for Google Contacts built-in, and the Zindus extension adds Thunderbird support. While it doesn't sync to Hotmail, that's no great loss as I only use my Hotmail account for Windows Live Messenger.

The main reason why I've deleted these accounts is because I don't want them to rot. Plaxo in particular had all my contacts and the others had a lot of personal information about me - if I don't bother to log in regularly and someone manages to gain access to my account, not only will they be able to gain information about me but I also probably won't be aware of it.

I'm seriously considering deleting my MySpace account next, as I haven't used it for months either. And I'll probably ditch Friends Reunited as well. And as for Bebo, I never registered for it in the first place.

Buying tickets for train travel in the UK is complicated. Despite some simplification introduced last year, it's still possible to buy a range of tickets at different prices that will get you on the same seat on the same train.

The fantastic Money Saving Expert has a very thorough guide and it's well worth a read, but here's my summarised advice:

• Buy your tickets in advance, and as early as possible - you can get them up to 3 months ahead.
• Tickets bought on the day (so-called 'walk on fares') offer lots of flexibility but are also usually the most expensive - you can book as little as 48 hours in advance and save a lot of money.
• Avoid thetrainline.com - it charges extra fees.
• You can usually book any ticket from any train company, even if your journey doesn't use their trains. So you could book with CrossCountry to travel on a First Transpennine Express (FTPE) train and get the same price as you would booking direct with FTPE.
• Rail Easy displays fares in a different way which can make it easier to find cheaper tickets. I also found that they are more likely to send tickets by first class post for free, rather than charge £6 for next-day delivery. They do charge a booking fee though.
• If you spend more than £76 per year (or £6 per month) on train trickets, get a railcard. If you are between the ages of 16 and 25 you can get a 16-25 railcard. You can order a new one right up until the day before your 26th birthday too. Family railcards and senior railcards are also available. They give you 34% off the price of almost all train tickets, including those booked in advance.
• Sometimes two single tickets are cheaper than a return - always check both. This is especially true if you book in advance.
• Megatrain is worth a look as its fares start from £1 (plus 50p booking fee). Trains run from Sheffield, Derby and Portsmouth into London, but there are connecting coaches from cities like York and Bradford (I travelled from York to London for a total of £3.50 last year). There's also additional discounts for NUS Extra card holders.

There are many more tips out there, which shows how confusing the system is. Ultimately, the best way to get the cheapest fare is to book as far in advance as possible, use a railcard and shop around a bit.

You may have heard that Facebook is in a bit of hot water over its privacy settings. New information entered into Facebook is being defaulted to 'public' rather than only available to existing contacts. This means that things you thought were only available to friends may be available to their friends as well, or, perhaps, the whole internet. And means that a whole load of data is available if someone wanted to steal your identity.

Sites like Openbook give an indication of what is made available - people's real names, their pictures and potentially embarrassing status updates. Try searching for things like 'flunked school', 'control urges' and 'rectal exam' to see what people are sharing with the entire internet.

By this point you may be worried how much of your own profile information is out there for everyone to see. Fear not, dear reader, for I shall be your saviour, of sorts.

Probably the simplest way to lock your profile down quickly is using ReclaimPrivacy.org's bookmarklet. You just drag the 'Scan for Privacy' link to your bookmarks toolbar, log into Facebook and then click the link on your bookmarks toolbar to allow it to do its magic. It'll then tell you what aspects of your profile are made visible and buttons to fix them.

I'd also suggest going through the list of applications that are authorised to access information in your profile and deleting any that you no longer use.

Facebook has said that it may simplify its privacy settings in future, which would be most welcome as relying on third-party tools shows that its own tools are broken. It also needs to make it more clear when any information shared on the site will be viewable by anyone.

Until then, whenever you post something on Facebook, just remember there's a chance anyone could read it.

You would think that buying a 2004 single from one of America's biggest selling Christian rock bands would be simple. In this case, you'd be wrong.

I came across this video yesterday via wow.com and after liking the music used I wanted to buy the track to be able to listen to it on my iPod. The problem is that the album it's taken from was apparently never released in the UK and the only way to buy it would be to purchase the whole album on CD from Amazon, for £15. Not one music download store has the song for download. Spotify firmly tells me that the album isn't available in this country.

Of course, it's widely available on file sharing networks which tend to disregard international borders. But downloading an unauthorised copy is illegal and doesn't result in any royalties being paid to the artist.

I'm happy to pay money for this song. Why can't I download it legally?

No wonder the music industry is screwed.

A friend recently invited me to join Naymz, a social network designed around professional relationships and recommendations. In other words, quite a lot like LinkedIn, which has been around for much longer. Until recently I've been looking for a new job and so I signed up in the hope that I may become visible and head-hunted.

That never happened. Right now I only have two contacts on the site and have only ever had a maximum of three. It may claim over a million members but apparently this does not include any of my friends or co-workers. In contrast, I have over 30 contacts on LinkedIn.

One big mistake Naymz makes is asking for your login credentials for any webmail accounts you have, as well as Facebook and, without a hint of irony, LinkedIn. Admittedly many sites do this, but professionals (especially in IT) are very wary about giving their personal details away to a little-known third party. There's no way that I would trust Naymz with my Google password, even if they claim they won't do anything with it beyond a one-time search of my address book, as once they have my password they can do anything in my name - post YouTube videos, spam all my contacts from my Gmail account, change my AdSense settings etc.

This is why a number of sites support OAuth. With OAuth, I could give Naymz (or any other site) limited access to my account on, say, Google without them knowing my password. They'd be able to view my contacts but couldn't do anything else. And Google would let me revoke that access at any time. Facebook Connect works in a similar way.

As it happened, I ended up doing an export of my contacts in a CSV file and letting Naymz parse it. Even then, that only lead to me adding 1 more contact who was already on there. Judging by its lack of popularity, I won't bother inviting my other 500+ contacts and wasting their time.

And remember: Never give a password for one site to another, even if you trust them.

I've recently started posting links to del.icio.us again, which now also appear on the sideblog. Having seen @qwghlm set up auto-posting to Twitter, I had a look at doing the same.

bit.ly has instructions on its blog to do this, using its URL shortening service and TwitterFeed. I think you need a bit.ly account to do this as TwitterFeed asks you for a bit.ly API key, but this means you can track clicks on your links. I already have a bit.ly account so this wasn't a problem. I also told TwitterFeed to prefix all delicious tweets with [delicious].

It seems to work quite well, despite using 4 services.

If yesterday's post inspired you to write to your own MP regarding the Digital Economy Bill, you can do so at 38degrees. Just pop your postcode in, select your MP and then write your email. It will provide you with a template but you may want to change it - I did, as it's seemingly written for quite a low reading age.

You can also use mySociety's write to your local paper

The Guardian has an overview of the bill and why it's bad - if you don't agree with it, take action.

The Open Rights Group, a non-profit organisation which campaigns for digital rights in the UK, has been leading the charge against the bill. I was one of the founding donors and still give £5 per month to them - if you want to, you can join as well. You'll even get a signed copy of a book by Cory Doctorow, which Christine assures me is actually quite good.

This week's App of the Week post will follow shortly.

Last Thursday, on my way to work, I spotted a couple of mechanical diggers and a few workmen on the mothballed Westfield Bradford site. This is interesting because very little has happened to the site since 2004, when demolition of the previous buildings commenced. Eventually the plan is to build a new shopping centre but the current economic climate has meant that shop owners haven't been willing to invest in the scheme so it's on indefinite hold - something I touched on in The sad tale of the Bradford German Christmas Market last year.

As is usual when I notice something interesting while out and about, I texted Twitter. Obviously I was not the only one who found it interesting as my tweet was very quickly retweeted around various other Bradford Twitter users. This lead deadbloke to this picture as evidence. In all, I had 9 retweets and replies of my tweet, which is more than I normally get, many of which were by people I didn't know or follow. And this was all within an hour, on an otherwise mundane Thursday morning.

As for why the workmen were there; it's possibly part of plans to turn the site into a temporary park. It seems the start of work on the shopping centre is so far off that the developers are willing to hand part of it over to community groups for landscaping until more tenants sign up.

ma.tt linked to Jeff Bezos' Amazon reviews, bearing in mind that Jeff Bezos is the CEO and founder of Amazon.

Probably one of the best is for 1 Gallon of Tuscan Whole Milk. Not for his review, but for the first comment, which is hidden by default:

Dana Gilbert says:
this guy is simply being sarcastic, mocking the purpose of Amazon. Go somewhere else please, low life.

Irony is lost on some people...

(Incidentally, it would appear that either Jeff doesn't own the Three Wolf Moon t-shirt or he hasn't got around to reviewing it yet. Or he's ordered a Three Keyboard Cat Moon t-shirt instead)

Though they seem to have died down recently, some months ago I started seeing spam emails sent from friend's email addresses advertising Chinese computer hardware wholesalers. Evidently the spammers had managed to gain access to the user's email account and had used their address book to send the messages - a good trick as many email clients make exceptions for people in address books. A variation is used by Nigerian 419 scammers who fake an email from the account's owner stating that they have been robbed/lost their luggage etc. and to send money to them by Western Union.

I emailed someone today who has a Hotmail address, and received an auto-respond email with a similar spam message. I'm guessing that the person had had their account compromised, and the spammers had set an auto-responder up with their spam message in it. Even though the owner of the address has presumably got control of their account back, they haven't changed the auto-responder.

Remember, never give your email password to anyone, even legitimate looking web sites that want to search your address book for friends. The sooner more sites adopt OAuth, the better.

Robert Llewellyn is probably best known for his acting role as Kryten in Red Dwarf, and as a TV presenter in Scrapheap Challenge. But Mr Llewellyn, or 'Bobby Llew' as he's also known (it's certainly easier to type, fewer double 'L's) is also down with the cool cats - he has a Twitter account and YouTube channel, featuring his show 'Wet Liberal Weekly'.

But his main project is called 'Carpool', viewable on his web site, where he takes various celebrities for a drive in his car. Obviously he's recording it, using a number of cameras, and there's a lot of chatting, but it's not a formal interview like you'd expect from Parky and the like - it's a more organic chat, and most of the guests don't necessarily have anything to plug, like a new TV show or book etc. Some of them are people that Bobby has worked with before, such as his Red Dwarf co-stars, but there are also people like Jonathan Ross, Arthur Smith, Dom Joly and Ruby Wax - all relatively big names for a simple, low budget video podcast.

It's worth a watch.

Via Waxy Links is a meme called Wikipedia Names Your Band. Here's how you do it:

1. Go to a random Wikipedia article - the name of the article becomes your band's name.
2. Go to Random Quotations - the last 4-5 words of the last quotation on the page are your the title of your first album.
3. Go to Flickr's "Explore the last 7 days" and choose the third picture - this will be your album cover.

Put them all together, and you get something like this:

The components for mine were:

• Artist: Vong Savang, who isn't a woman but was actually a Crown Prince of Laos.
• Album title: "wanting what you've got" is the last 4 words of a quote from Sheryl Crow's song 'Soak Up The Sun'. The full quote can be read here.
• Album cover: The picture I got was this one.

There are many other covers on the Buzzfeed page, some of which are very good.

Other the past few days I've found some interesting new fonts from various blogs that I've come across. Since I haven't got much else to blog about at present, I'm going to introduce them here:

• Inconsolata is a monospace font largely inspired by Consolas which is the fixed-width font used in Windows Vista (Windows XP users can download Consolas here). It's free, has a large selection of accented characters and is available under the SIL Open Font License.
• DejaVu is a series of fonts that can be seen as a continuation of the Bitstream Vera fonts, which are open source and common on Linux desktops. DejaVu has better support for eastern European characters and is included in more recent Linux distros, but can be downloaded for Macs and Windows too. They are free and released under the same open source license as the Bitstream Vera fonts.
• Museo and Museo Sans are very nice readable fonts which can be used for graphic design - I'm actually considering using it for a new logo for this site. The fonts are sold commercially but some weights are available for free.

The only other thing worth mentioning is that I am now rebuilding all of my pages after a configuration change by my hosting company meant I had to move MT's folder. Thankfully an entire site rebuild is much less painful in Movable Type 4 than in previous versions. I still use static publishing for most of my pages as most of them do not change regularly - having them dynamically rebuilt from the database every time they are visited seems an awful waste of system resources and is probably the main reason why I don't use Wordpress.

Heard via one of my friends who now works at Microsoft that it has enabled POP access for everyone with a Windows Live Hotmail account, not just those with Plus account. This means that it is no longer necessary to use products like Microsoft Outlook Connector or Windows Live Mail to access your account, although they do offer a greater depth of features than is available through basic POP access.

It also means there is no need to use third party tools like HotPOP3 or the Webmail extension for Thunderbird, which were prone to stop working if Microsoft made any major changes to the service.

The server details are located here and I've verified that they work with Thunderbird.

This is something that I have been waiting for since I first started using Hotmail in 1999, almost 10 years ago. That's one hell of a long time to wait for a feature.

It's roughly 4 years since Jason Kottke announced Dropcash, an "easy way to organise a fundraiser". 4 years later, and it's still 'in beta'.

It was one of the first non-Six Apart properties to use the then fledgling TypeKey service, which itself hasn't really blossomed much beyond Movable Type and TypePad (although OpenID has). And it doesn't really seem to have changed since launch. The official blog has been silent since Dec 2004.

Despite this, the service has raised over half a million US dollars in the 4 years it has been running. Maybe if some people link to it again, it might get some attention and lose the beta status it has held for so long.

Just had this email through, claiming to be from 'Abbey National':

Be on your guard - beware of fraudsters!

Dear Abbey National customer,

Like other UK banks, we are currently seeing very large numbers of "phishing emails" in circulation. Many of these look as if they are from Abbey National, typically encouraging you to click a link and type in your logon details. Such attempted frauds only work if you click that link, and you then type in your full security details & contact information.

Please remember: We never ask you to enter your Credit Card information & contact information on the Internet or over the phone. To learn how to protect yourself against "phishing" and other "identity theft" please spend a few minutes to upgrade to our latest security.

Click here to help us fight fraud!

Best regards.

NatWest Bank Security Department Team.

So, obvious problems?

1. Abbey has not traded as 'Abbey National' in some years - though many will still know it as 'Abbey National' it has traded as 'Abbey' for a while now.
2. It's signed off by the 'NatWest Bank Security Department Team' - but NatWest is a completely different company owned by Royal Bank of Scotland. Abbey is owned by Banco Santander.
3. It is asking you not to click links and enter your login details, but that's precisely what the web site asks you to when you click the link (web site address blanked out for obvious reasons).

It was also sent from an address @rbs.co.uk, which is the Royal Bank of Scotland again.

When you watch a British DVD, usually before the film starts, you'll have to watch this:

But now on TV, we have this:

The message it's trying to spread is that people who download films or buy counterfeit DVDs are sad, corner-cutting lowlifers - no 'cool' person would want to be like Nigel. While I like the less confrontational stance, I somehow doubt the effectiveness of the new ads.

Of course, the best one is the parody by the IT crowd:

We're having some email problems at work, which I feel are worthy of a blog entry. I normally don't talk about what goes on at work, partly through a matter of personal policy but also because I don't want to be seen as a spokesperson for my employer. So the entry comes with the usual disclaimer - nothing written here necessarily represents the view of the University of Bradford and it should not be treated as such.

Anyway, we have email problems. Essentially most of the big email providers - AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail and some others - now block all email sent from the university as of last week, which is obviously a big problem. From what I can gather, however, it came about through social engineering. Essentially blanket messages were sent to university accounts, asking users to 'verify their account details' - of course, these weren't sent by the university and allowed those outside the university to gain access to the university systems.

This is where I begin guessing, but I know for a fact that the university's mail servers are accessible off-campus (and outside the university subnet) with a username and password, and so I imagine that the stolen account details were then used for sending spam message by the virtual truckload, which then got the university banned.

It has come at what is possibly the worst time, because right now we are sending emails to new students starting in September with enrolment information. Any emails that come back undelivered will trigger a letter that is sent by post, but it's an additional expense for us. And next week is when most students get their results.

Apparently we can expect to be unblocked from most services if there is no spam from us for a week, so hopefully things will be back to normal soon.

Here's a short survey I have done on the levels of encryption employed by UK banks for their online banking systems, and whether they use EV (extended validation) security certificates.

Ideally, sites such as those that deal with money should be using the strongest encryption available (256-bit AES) and use an EV certificate (the green bar) to allow the user to verify that the site isn't a hoax.

All tests were carried out on Firefox 3 Beta 5 running on Windows, and data is from the login screens only, not actual online banking sessions.

The test results are slightly concerning. Though RC4 is largely safe, there are a growing number of attacks used against it, especially when used for securing WEP wireless networks. AES, on the other hand, has fewer known flaws, but it should be in wider use.

The lack of sites with EV certificates is also surprising, particularly as phishing is a growing problem and all of the sites listed here have been targeted in emails that I have seen. Only two sites have them and they are owned by the same parent company and use the same domain.

In the past I've tried to pull off an April Fool's joke on the 1st April, but I haven't been able to think of a good one for today. My best effort involved a Rickroll, but then I decided it would be too clichéd - even YouTube themselves got in on the act.

Here were my other ideas:

• Announcing I was quitting blogging - again, too clichéd.
• Announcing I had a job at Microsoft
• Announcing that I was going to move to Bodoni in San Serriffe.
• Re-design the site to make it look like it was from the mid-90s (done this year by Improv Everywhere)
• Announcing that I was going to sell my Macs and switch to an Amiga.

Anyway, enjoy the rest of internet prank day - as usual, Wikipedia has a good list of pranks.

Someone that I don't know today sent me a message on Orkut, the social network owned by Google. As it happens I responded - it wasn't spam and the person was quite polite and had a genuine question to ask. But this represents what must be the first time I have used Orkut this year.

Orkut was the first social network I ever joined, back in January 2004, when these sites were new-fangled; indeed Orkut was in invite-only beta at the time. Back then, quite a few of my online friends were there and so I was quite active, even setting up a group or two. But later on that year my usage of the site waned to the point where I go months between logins. None of my friends use Orkut anymore - my online friends are all on Twitter and everyone else is on Facebook. I'm a member of MySpace but, like my friends, I'm no longer active there anymore.

So why, 4 years on, are people still using Orkut? Certainly none of my friends are. But Orkut is big in some countries like Brazil and India, thus explaining why, when I logged in, I found lots of messages in Portuguese and spam offering matrimonial sites and jobs in New Delhi. I don't really have any Brazillian or Indian friends - most of mine are European or North American, and it's in these places that Facebook and Twitter are doing well.

Maybe Orkut will have a renaissance, but on my visit today it appears not a lot has changed in 4 years, bar a new design.

Anyone else still using Orkut regularly?

(Picture by Matt Haughey, hosted by Flickr, CC by-nc-sa licensed)

This is what happens when you list a real address on your domain's WHOIS record. Especially when it's a long-established and popular domain like metafilter.com.

Thankfully, Nominet, the non-profit organisation who operates publicly-registered domain names, lets domain owners opt out of providing contact details, provided they are individuals (businesses still have to divulge their addresses). This is what I have done with this and my other domains, and is the main reason why I prefer to use .uk domains instead of generic international domains. If someone was desperate to contact me then simply visiting the web site would allow them to find my email address and any legal matters can be pursued via my host who is listed on the record.

It's no surprise that Domain Privacy services are popular - I'm sure many that use these services actually have 'nothing to hide', as it were, but just don't want to get bombarded with junk mail.

(It's interesting to note that one of the letters in Matt Haughey's junk pile is from Capital One who send us lots of junk mail addressed 'To the householder'. This is precisely why I will never apply for a Capital One card)

On a related note, a couple of changes to my email mean that I should be getting less spam now. My old student email address has now been de-activated as I'm no longer a student, and I've finally closed an email alias that I was using a few years ago in the RSS feeds for this site. RSS 2.0 annoyingly requires an email address when listing the author of an item and so I set up a special alias for this - I'm not using RSS anymore (we're Atom Enabled, baby!) so I've closed the alias since it's not being used for anything useful.

Hi Flickr,

Last year you were really cool and enabled content filters on your site, so that registered users who were over 18 could view the more, shall we say, 'salacious' imagery that is posted there.

Now that's great, and I have no problem with the odd risqué image popping up while browsing at home, but when you're in a public place, or, say, looking at Flickr while on your lunch break at work, it could prove slightly embarrassing if you accidentally stumble across a bit of flesh. This is especially true when you have relatively innocent photos tagged with porn and fanny.

So it would be nice if there was some advanced feature where you could whitelist your home IP address, which would let you view potentially titillating images, and then have the filter kick in elsewhere. I know you probably have lots of better things today but this could save a lot of embarrassment and people getting fired.

Yours photographically,

Neil T.

There's been a bit of downtime here, which unfortunately was entirely my fault. My hosting plan was due for renewal yesterday and expired at 5pm last night, at which point this site went offline.

The reason why it went offline was because all of the emails that were sent to remind me that I needed to renew my hosting package got junked, both on my main email account (attached to the account) and on Gmail - it was only after I logged into the Gmail web site and trudged through the spam folder that I found the emails. As for my main email account, it was probably the settings that I have used which resulted in the emails being blocked - had it been left as default I would have received the warnings.

To make things worse, I had mistyped my mobile number on my contact details, so when my host tried to call me to advise me that my plan was about to expire they couldn't get through.

Anyhow, my account has been restored and everything is working again, however any emails that have been sent to this domain over the past 18 hours will have not got to me. If you sent me anything important, please send it again. Just got all of the missing email through, so no need to re-send anything.

And a quick thanks to the people at Easy Internet Solutions for getting me up and running and trying to warn me about the impending suspension.

As you probably know I'm on Facebook and I'm one of those people who uses it quite a lot. As in at least once a day. Usually quite a bit more.

So as you can imagine I've got into this whole installing applications onto your profile thing. I know that applications are a contentious issue - people say that it makes profiles look like MySpace pages and that the walled-garden approach is killing the web, and that some of them are really annoying - but I do find some of them fun and useful. So here's what I use:

• zuPort: Flickr - Not entirely sure why it's called zuPort but this allows you to display your latest photos from your Flickr photostream on your profile page. There are a number of other applications that do basically the same thing, but this also announces when you post a photo in your mini-feed, and doesn't have the downtime issues of some of the other Flickr applications.
• Last.fm Music - Shows your recently played songs, favourite artists and your Last.fm radio station on your profile.
• Twitter - Displays your latest tweets in your mini-feed, and lets you post to Twitter from within Facebook
• Cities I've Visited - Lets you show what cities you have visited on a world map on your profile. Except by 'cities' it means anything from small towns upwards, or so it seems. Also it announces when you've added new cities to it in your mini-feed, resulting in the rather bizarre announcement that I'd visited Dewsbury and Bathsheba (which are several thousand miles apart and not in any way alike).
• WoW Characters - Lets you display your World of Warcraft characters on your profile, with links to their armoury profiles. Again there's a few applications like this one but this seems to work the best.
• The Compass - An application from the Washington Post which shows your political views on a compass, and lets you view how your friends scored. A little US-centric but interesting nonetheless.
• The Sorting Hat - Asks you a few questions and then tells you which of the four houses of Hogwarts you would fit into, and lets you display this on your profile, and see where your friends would be. A bit pointless but fun.
• Flixster Movies - I'd actually not heard of Flixster before seeing this application but I'm now a regular user. It lets you rate and review films, but unlike, say, iMDB it lets you see what your friends thought of each film. There's also a movie quiz which passes the time.
• Rock Your Firefox - Lets you show what extensions you have installed on your copy of Firefox, and see what your friends have installed.
• My Profiles - Lets you add links to all the profiles you have on other social networking sites. I have about 12 at last count.

There are others but those are the most interesting. I tend to like applications which let you interact more with your friends, such as being able to compare musical tastes, share film reviews or rank political opinions, or those which bring in my data from other services like the Flickr and Last.fm applications. I've avoided the various 'superpoke' applications and improved wall variations, and refuse to install Top Friends on principle. And I also get annoyed when I'm asked to become a pirate or have been turned into a vampire, and so on. But on the whole I like the applications idea.

I know there's at least one other person here who uses OpenOffice.org as their office suite and Virgin Media as their ISP, so you may be pleased to know that Virgin mirrors OpenOffice downloads at openoffice.virginmedia.com. If you're a Virgin Media customer, then this is the fastest way of downloading it as it should require the least number of hops.

Virgin also mirror all downloads from Tucows and possibly some other sites so it may well be worth checking out before you download, especially if it's a big download and you're lucky enough to have Virgin's 20 MB broadband offering, as you'll be able to make the most of your bandwidth.

Anyone who was a child in Britain during the early 1990s will surely remember this advert being on TV:

Honestly, what was life like before YouTube?

Jeremy Zawodny has a quick guide to set expiry dates for images under Apache. It means that most browsers will know not to refresh any images on your site for a set amount of time (a month in Jeremy's example). It should therefore help improve performance and reduce bandwidth usage on sites, especially those with big images which do not change frequently.

And yes, I have just added this to this site at one o'clock in the morning, while under the influence of alcohol, so if you see anything bizarre happening on the site this may be why. However, everything seems to be working fine.

And for the record, where I'm living in Bradford, we're not flooded and have full electric and water supplies, though my thoughts are with those less fortunate right now.

Okay, now I'm not only on Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and Last.fm, but I'm now on Twitter too. I should really stop being a sucker for these things.

....Oh go on then, add me as a friend, you know you want to.

Since I'm usually fashionably late to these sorts of things, it's taken me until today to get myself a profile on Facebook. I've been on Myspace for a while but it seems to be stagnating; Facebook now seems to be 'where it's at', assuming people still use that phrase.

3 hours after joining and I have 23 friends (all people I know either from university, college or just on the internet generally), with many more requests. At this rate I'll easily beat the 60 or so friends I have on Myspace.

Also, this blog is now syndicated over there in my notes, so hello Facebook people. Please don't be scared by the overly technical stuff.

This is a screenshot of an attempt to view a suspected phishing site through OpenDNS's PhishTank service, so that I can vote on whether it is indeed a phish or not. Except OpenDNS is blocking the site, because it's a phishing site.

OpenDNS's phishing protection is one of the main reasons why I have installed it on my parents' internet connection. They do quite a bit of online banking and this, combined with up-to-date copies of Firefox and Internet Explorer 7, and McAfee's SiteAdvisor, should hopefully offer adequate protection against any dodgy sites. They're not the sorts of people to get caught out by these scams, since they do not check their personal email that often and tend to be quite cynical of any suspicious emails, but just in case they do stumble over a dodgy site, there should be adequate defences against it.

Still, this little incident amused me.

Last night me and Hari were out for the end of term Christmas FND, and we saw a guy who looked and danced like the Numa Numa Guy. Seemed funny at the time.

Incidently I'm back in York now, and about to go to sleep.

For all of you who sent me an email in the last 36 hours, please be aware that I exceeded the (admittedly self-imposed) disk quota for my email account and so any messages sent will have either been lost or rejected. So if it was an important email, you'll need to resend it.

As for the quota, I've increased it since I'm now primarily storing my email there as a backup method. Still, it's taken me 2 years to go over 100 MB, which isn't too bad going.

A funny thing happened yesterday - our connection suddenly boosted itself to 8 Mbps. It's spent a couple of weeks at around 5 Mbps, after we were upgraded to DSLMax which offers "up to" 8 Mbps speeds, but now the full speed upgrade has kicked in.

That said, I have done a couple of speed tests which peg us closer to the 4.5-5.0 Mbps range, so in actual fact things haven't got much faster. But 5 Mbps is still pretty quick, and more than adequate for what we need it for.

One annoyance is that about the same time that this 'upgrade' happened, our latency when playing World of Warcraft rocketed. Normally it's between 30ms and 40ms, but for large parts of yesterday it was over 1000ms which makes it almost unplayable. Similarly today it's been bad, despite me trying everything at my end to get it to work. However, the upgrade did come at the same time as Blizzard's weekly maintenance and a lot of other Brits are also having problems, so it may not just be us. Indeed, a traceroute seems to pin the problem at their ISP, not at PlusNet or our house.

Okay... so I managed to go a whole week without posting here. Not intentionally, mind; but I've been busy with other things and so blogging has taken something of a back seat.

Rather than make one huge gazumping entry summarising what has happened lately, I'll split it up into individual posts, which I'll be publishing during the week just in case I end up with nothing to say again. But, so that you know, yes I am alive :) .

The university is in a bit of pickle at the moment, as apparently all messages sent from the university are being blocked by Hotmail. This, as you may be able to imagine, is highly inconvenient - many students have their email forwarded to their Hotmail accounts, and any messages to prospective students who use Hotmail will also get lost.

From what I can gather the block refers to the university mail server, so merely changing your email address to something else won't work. This affects me because I normally use the university's SMTP server, since it's accessible from anywhere with a username and password and supports TLS encryption. So any messages to people on Hotmail will probably come via my Gmail account for the time being.

Naturally the university were not told that Hotmail had blocked them, and it's only come to light about a week after the emails first started going missing. They're not even being delivered to the Junk Mail folder, they're actually being deleted outright.

PlusNet have followed through with our upgrade to DSLMax, and so our connection is now running at a cool 5 MBit, up from the usual 2. We should be able to get up to 8, but many factors limit it, such as the distance from the exchange and the quality of wiring.

In any case, 5 is definitely better than 2, and a whole world better than dial-up. I'm looking forward to making use of the extra speed. Obviously I'll be spending some time soon working out if I can squeeze some extra juice out of the line but I'll settle for 5 for the time being.

Well, this sucks. You can't use TCP/IP over a FireWire connection in Windows Vista, which means that the current setup I have with my MacBook and Hari's computer will only work in Mac OS X, not in Vista. Worse still, this is something that does work in Windows XP - Microsoft removed it in Vista because it "has not identified any customer dependency on this capability".

So if I want to use the internet while at Hari's, I have 3 options:

• Not use Vista at all (which, to be fair, I don't use much anyway)
• Buy a network switch and some extra cable
• Steal her neighbours' wifi connections

Incidentally, I'm using Vista at Hari's now...

Hari's internet is working again, hence the reason why I'm able to post this to you. They have a new modem now which appears to have fixed things, which is good. I'm unsure about their progress with their other Telewest grievances, though.

I'm actually posting this via my MacBook at Hari's - they don't have Wifi yet so I invested in a FireWire cable which now links my MacBook with Hari's computer, which comes equipped with two FireWire ports, and then use Internet Connection Sharing to share it to my machine. It actually works quite well.

Hari's computer has also seen an upgrade, in the form of an 80 GB Western Digital external hard drive, which means that she's no longer pushed for space and can finally defragment her main disk to get some better performance. Once we have some more money, we'll get her a memory upgrade - hopefully 2 GB, which should fix her currently sluggish World of Warcraft performance.

Speaking of which, I might just pop on there now.... see you later.

As far as my internet access has been this week, I have bad news and good news.

The bad news is that Hari currently has no internet in her house, which is where we've been staying of late. Earlier this week, they changed the name on their Telewest cable bill, in order to take advantage of an offer of 2 months free for new customers. At the time, they were assured the transfer would be a simple one - no need for reinstallation and it would happen quickly. As you can imagine, it hasn't.

The internet became very flaky, only being up for a few minutes at a time before going down again, so an engineer turned up yesterday to try to sort the problem out. And now it's not working at all. Their set-top box was also taken away by an agent acting on Telewest's behalf, who told them they should have had 30 days notice that this would happen - yet the change was earlier in the week. Their phone number was changed too, though apparently it has been changed back and they have been credited an extra month's free line rental for it.

So right now there's no TV and no internet at her house. Her housemates have also had to spend hours on the phone to Telewest, and there's a couple of other problems too. I have a feeling that if Telewest don't get their act together soon they may well be switching to another provider.

Which brings me to the good news - we're finally getting 8 Mb broadband! PlusNet have been upgrading customers slowly to the service, due to problems encountered in the transition, and it'll soon be our turn. I think our line will let us have up to 6 Mb - it could be better but it's still much faster than the 2 Mb we have at present. And at no extra cost, too.

Flickr now allows you to add your photos to a map, bring in place a long-requested feature that so far has only been possible through various Greasemonkey hacks. It's certainly welcome, and I've migrated my 99 existing Geotagged photos over to the new system so that you can see them on a map.

Of course, with Flickr being owned by Yahoo, it means that they have gone with Yahoo Maps for the mapping service. This is fine for people in the US, but as I've previously mentioned their UK maps are woefully poor and thus it's impossible for me to accurately Geotag my photos because the maps do not have enough detail for you to be able to pinpoint locations. It's a pity considering that Windows Live Local and Google Maps both have good UK coverage.

Oh, and another amusing mistake I've found on Yahoo Maps- it shows the two railway lines into Bradford as being joined up. Though the Caldervale line (from the south) and Airedale and Wharfedale lines (from the North) are on the same alignment, they both terminate at different stations either side of the city centre and are at significantly different heights above sea level. Though many would like them to meet up in the middle, they never have done and I'm sure they never will, what with Bradford not being a particularly important railway destination and the amount of engineering involved.

In Britain, we have this law called the Data Protection Act, which dictates what companies and organisations can and can't do with data about its customers, clients or employees. It basically puts a duty on organisations to ensure that a person's data is kept private and cannot be compromised, that the person is aware if that data is being shared with third parties (and seek their permission if needed) and that the person is aware if data is to be processed in another jurisdiction, where data protection laws are not equivalent to this act. There's more to it than that - Wikipedia goes into more detail and the full text of the act is here.

So how does this relate to Akismet, the spam-filtering web service that I conveniently mentioned in the title of this post? Well, I use Akismet on this site as a way of stopping spam (though to be honest it's been largely redundant since I started using Comment Challenge). This site is based in the UK, and therefore falls under UK law, but Akismet is a US service, and right now every comment submitted (bar those from approved TypeKey and OpenID commenters) is being sent through it.

Though I haven't yet got a privacy policy on this site - it's something I've been working on now and again for some time - this does bring up some privacy implications. Without Akismet, the privacy policy would say something like this:

Upon submission of a comment, the details provided (name, email address, URL and comment), along with your IP address, will be stored in a database. Your comment will also be displayed publicly on this web site.

Any comments you have made can be removed at any time, by contacting the site owner and requesting their modification/removal.

With Akismet brought into the equation, we have to add the following:

The details you submit will also be sent to the Akismet service, for the purpose of identifying possible spam comments. Akismet is based in the United States of America and falls under the laws of the State of California. The details submitted will not be stored, unless the comment is marked as a 'false positive' (a legitimate comment which is automatically identified as spam) in which case it may be stored for some time for diagnostic purposes.

For more details, please consult the Akismet Privacy Policy.

Now I'm not a lawyer and my experience with data protection mostly comes from a university module that I took recently, so this is certainly not legal advice. But it's something that I hadn't thought about until reading an email from the Six Apart Professionals Network this morning.

Akismet is done by the Wordpress guys and I'm sure they're trustworthy, and it's also not entirely fair to pick them out as this could be any other web service - it just happened to be the topic of conversation at the time. But while a few bloggers using it isn't going to cause much of a kerfuffle, a big organisation could land themselves in hot water if they're not totally upfront about what is happening to their users' data.

Since everybody else is doing it, here's my name as a Web 2.0 logo:

And no, I'm not going to use it :) .

Normal content may return in the near future but I've been kind-of busy lately. And no, the MacBook hasn't arrived yet.

I know several of you are PlusNet customers, so if you are, make a note of the following phone number:

0808 9933270

This is a freephone dial-up number that you can use in the unlikely event that your ADSL is down. Use your PlusNet username (without the @plusdsl.net bit) and password to connect. Previously the backup number was an 0845 number (roughly equivalent to local rate) so this is a welcome move, though in all fairness I've only had to use it on very rare occasions.

While looking through my referrals to see if anyone had dugg one of my articles since quietly adding 'digg this' links to my site (apparently they haven't :( ), I noticed that I'm getting a handful of referrals from pages on Wikipedia. It turns out that the following pages link to this site in some way:

• Dosamp
• Domains by Proxy
• Domain Privacy
• Pngcrush
• Mozilla Firefox
• Features of Mozilla Firefox

The two Firefox articles link to a post about External Protocol Whitelisting, and the Domain articles link to FauxDaddy, a post about a site (now offline) which told the story of someone who used GoDaddy's DomainsByProxy service to hide his details, only to have GoDaddy hand over his details when requested by lawyers. The Dosamp article linked to a screenshot, which now, with a bit of mod_rewrite trickery (and this guide) now shows a web page too as a way of potentially capturing traffic.

More surprisingly, a (recent) screenshot of this blog is on the Blog entry, labelled as 'A screenshot of a typical blog.'. I think I have a certain Mr Anderson to blame for that... :)

I had a chat with Les over Skype a few minutes ago. It was mostly so that he could verify it was actually working, which it was, and despite him being thousands of miles away in a different country the sound quality was almost perfect. Didn't cost a thing, either. He wrote his side of the story here.

Though I do log onto Skype regularly, I can't say I actually use it that much. I've only ever spoken to another Skype user once - I mostly use it for SkypeOut to call my parents. So this was a bit different.

Also, unlike Les, I have made international calls. I routinely receive them at work from overseas university applicants, and occasionally I've made them too. The sound quality is nothing on Skype though.

Yahoo! has launched Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 Beta 1 - the next generation version of its IM client for the Mac. It has a new interface and support for Growl, as well as webcam support (for both iSight and USB cameras). A future release will also add voice chat and connectivity with Windows Live Messenger users. Microsoft are also reciprocating by allowing users of Windows Live Messenger to talk to Yahoo! Messenger users, again in a future release.

This is good news. Chat clients for OS X are, for the most part, well-behind their Windows counterparts in terms of features. iChat AV does allow voice and video chat over AIM, but Yahoo and Microsoft's official offerings have only allowed text chat until now. The unofficial clients do not fair much better either - Adium X should have working voice support for Jabber/Google Talk by the end of the year but not for the main networks. The fact that Yahoo! will have a strong OS X client with multimedia support is good - and if it works fully with MSN users then all the better. Microsoft's Mac client - Microsoft Messenger - is mostly aimed at corporate users, with support for Exchange messaging; Yahoo!'s client is more consumer-friendly and I imagine that in future Microsoft may push Mac users towards it instead.

I called this post 'IM Interoperability' because we're finally moving closer to having unified messaging networks. Right now, we have 5 main distinct networks: AIM/ICQ, MSN, Yahoo!, Skype and Jabber/Google Talk. There are others but we'll focus on these as they're the most used. Yahoo! and MSN look to be merging, so that brings us down to 4, and apparently AIM and Google Talk will do too, so that should create 3. But that means we still have 3 separate networks, with different users and different programs needed to access them (or a combined program that doesn't make use of all of a network's features).

We never had this problem with email, and for the most part we don't with web sites - in general, no matter what ISP you have and what email client you use, your email will get to its recipient. And generally you can use any web browser to access any web site, save for a few. We don't have this with instant messaging, despite the technology having been around since 1998.

While the linking of networks is always a good thing, it won't be perfect until IM is like email. When I can open up Yahoo! Messenger on my Mac, and have a video conference with someone in Canada who's using Skype on Windows, then I'll be happy. Unfortunately, I imagine this is, at best, a long way off - if it ever happens at all.

I was quite expectant when I saw this article on CNet this morning:

AIM aims for developers

AOL was set to announce on Monday that it is opening up its AIM Software Development Kit to Linux, Mac OS X and Pocket PC developers. In addition, the company is providing the ability for developers to build customized plug-ins and other software [...].

Sounds all rather good - you'll be able to write your own software clients to access the AIM network, provide better web-based status icons (like ICQ does), and develop your own plugins to the official AIM client (provided that they do not interfere with the adware in the client). But visiting the new AIM Developers site which goes with the announcement and viewing their FAQ reveals the following note:

Q: Are there any restrictions on what I can build?
[...] Developers are not permitted to build Custom Clients that are multi-headed or interoperable with any other IM network. [...]

There are other restrictions but this one was the biggest letdown, in my opinion. I thought that with this announcement AIM was going the way of Google and allowing users of any client to access its network with authorisation. Now it seems that any clients using this new software development kit must be exclusively AIM clients and not offer any other IM network connectivity.

It's a shame, especially as the next release of Windows Live Messenger will allow users to speak to buddies on Yahoo! Messenger(see info here), and apparently the inverse is true too. And having seen some of the the Google Summer of Code projects, we could see improved Jabber and Google Talk in interoperable IM clients later this year, including voice chat. AOL could have done so much more with this announcement, but the restrictions they impose could marginalise the network even more. MSN has already overtaken AIM as the most-used network, and Google Talk is becoming increasingly popular with more technical users, due to its openness and flexibility.

As you know, I run Google Adsense adverts on this site. These usually pull in at least £100 per month, which amply covers the cost of running the site and leaves money left over.

Of course, if you run software which blocks web advertising, such as Firefox's AdBlock extension, you won't see these adverts. And sites like AdBlock.org which have a webmaster pledge which promises that if you turn your ad-blocking software off on their site, you'll only see "tasteful and passive advertisements".

As it happens, I'm also an Adblock user. I'm only a relatively recent convert to it, having seen one-too-many annoying Flash adverts, but it's already improved my web experience immeasurably.

18 months ago when I finally decided to bring advertising to the site, I made the decision not to block users of ad-blocking software, nor to 'punsih' them in any way. My rationale is based on too factors:

• I believe users should be free to modify web pages as they wish. If they find the text too small, or can't read it because of the design, then the user should be able to change it. If they find having postcodes automatically converted to links to Google Maps, then that's fine too.
• If you're using ad-blocking software, then you're probably not going to click on my adverts even if I forced you to view them.

So I'm not signing up to the pledge. You're welcome to use ad-blocking software here if you want to - and trust me, the web looks so much better without all of those annoying flashy things everywhere.

By now you may have seen The Broken Laptop I Sold On eBay, a site created to humiliate an eBay seller who sold a laptop which turned out to be broken and not to the specification that the description on eBay stated. The site includes various documents that were left on the hard drive, including a lot of pornography, pictures of womens' legs taken with a cameraphone on the Underground, a copy of the owner's passport and his CV.

A few weeks ago I compared Google Maps with Yahoo Maps Beta for their coverage of the UK. Today, I'm going to pit these against Microsoft's offering - Windows Live Local, formerly known as MSN Virtual Earth. Note that these tests are all from a UK perspective.

Aerial photography coverage

Google Maps does have some very high resolution imaging of major cities, but Windows Live Local beats it by offering pretty high resolution aerial photography of just about everywhere in the UK. For example, on Google Maps, York isn't in very high detail - you can make out the rivers, railway lines and the ring road, but not much else. In Windows Live Local, you can see each building clearly and pick out key landmarks which were too small and blurred in Google Maps. It also had imagery for very rural areas - I was able to see the Three Peaks in Yorkshire in very high detail.

That said, in cities like Leeds, Bradford and Manchester, you can zoom in much further with Google, and make out individual cars. So though Windows Live Local gives you very good imagery across the country, Google offers you adequate imagery but with superb imagery in places. Yahoo Maps Beta offers the same 'adequate' imaging that Google does, but it does not get better in cities, even in London.

Google also seems to have the most up-to-date imagery, dating from around 2002, whereas Microsoft's dates from about 2000. Therefore, if you want up-to-date maps in cities, then Google is for you - but if you want to look at rural areas then you need Windows Live Local.

Maps

Yahoo Maps Beta still has woefully out-of-date mapping - looking at York, it still has the York-Selby line marked on it (which has been a cycle track for as long as I can remember, and I'm 22 on Thursday) and is missing the A1237 York Northern Bypass, which was opened in the 1980s. None of the roads are labelled and it only marks out major roads, not smaller ones, thus making it useless in towns and cities.

Google and Microsoft both have good quality maps. All the roads are labelled and colour-coded, and it includes all roads, including those in towns and cities. Microsoft's maps are marginally more up-to-date than Google's but they are both less than two years old.

All in all, Google Maps and Windows Live Local are good services, though I personally prefer Google Maps. Yahoo Maps Beta, on the other hand, has a lot of catching up to do.

Myspace has launched its own instant messaging client, which allows you to talk to other users of the Myspace service. It's currently in beta.

The client is very basic - a bit like Google Talk - and will only let you communicate with other Myspace users as it's not linked to any of the other networks. A quick analysis using Ethereal seems to suggest that it's using something similar to the MSN Messenger protocol but I'm not entirely sure.

Though I downloaded it, I'm not going to be using it - mainly because I only have a handful of friends on there and most already use MSN or something else. But with AOL and MSN trying to compete with Myspace and already offering mature IM clients, it's easy to see why Myspace would do this. People tend to use what their friends use, and if all of their friends use Myspace IM then that's what they'll use. Though I prefer the ideology of Jabber and Google Talk, I use MSN most of the time since most of my friends are on it, though there are the picky few who insist on using AOL or Yahoo.

I'm sure it'll only be a matter of time before the likes of Trillian, Adium and Gaim support this network, particularly if it's very similar to MSN. But I do wish that the client was interoperable with other networks.

We're moving up to a better broadband package. Currently we're on PlusNet's Broadband Plus, which offers you up to 8 MBit for £14.99 per month. However, although there is no usage limit between midnight and 4pm, between 4pm and midnight we're limited to about 4 GB per month. Hari's new guild uses TeamSpeak for a lot of its activities and this has been sending our peak-time usage up to almost 3 GB in a week. Obviously, this is unsustainable.

We're therefore moving to Broadband Premier, which was the package I was on last year in my previous house. Back then we were paying £29.99 per month for up to 2 MBit (limited to 1 MBit due to the quality of our line) - now it's £21.99 and it also goes up to 8 MBit. This still has a limit for traffic between 4pm and midnight, but it's a more reasonable 15 GB per month. For now, we're only able to get 2 MBit since PlusNet are upgrading users in groups at a time, starting with those that have been with the service the longest, and since we've only been with them since October we're probably towards the end of the queue. But the 8 MBit upgrade should only be a couple of months away, hopefully, and since it's not (yet) an unbundled service we won't have to be messed around with the move away from BT Wholesale.

An extra £7 per month isn't much, especially when it is split between the three of us, and it'll give us that bit more flexibility, especially when Hari is over. We'll be getting the upgrade towards the end of the week hopefully tomorrow - woohoo!.

Incidentally PlusNet offers incentives to those customers who refer new users to the service. If you are interested in broadband from PlusNet, then by clicking this link and signing up I'll get a small discount on our next bill. Though some of PlusNet's cheaper packages are not suited for those who are heavy downloaders at peak times, or who regularly use peer-2-peer services, I would recommend them as we've had very good uptime and hardly any connection problems in the time we've been with the service. That's my honest opinion - I'd still recommend them even if I wasn't compensated for doing so.

Through Boing Boing I discovered Assault on 13th Labour - a project to decipher an encrypted message on a Perplex City card which remains unsolved by anyone thus far. The message has been encrypted using RC5, and so the task of deciphering the message has become a grid computing project which can be downloaded from the web site.

Though I haven't personally taken part in Perplex City one of Hari's housemates has been collecting the cards and has been stuck on the Thirteenth Labour card for some time now. The card does have some clues on it - some cows and a line, and the title may have something to do with it, but no-one has so far managed to find the right answer.

There are incentives to taking part - the user who processes the work unit which cracks the code wins a prize of Perplex City goodies. When you run the client you are asked for a name and email address - provide this and you may be with a chance of winning. You could falsify these but then you probably won't win anything.

The client, incidentally, requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1, but can be run outside of Windows using Mono, a Novell-backed project to allow applications written for the .NET Framework to run on other platforms. Indeed, if you're using Mac OS X, all you need to do is download the Mac build, open it and run the installer. Then, when you want to run a program compiled for .NET, open a terminal, go into its working folder and type 'mono [appname]'. At present this will only work for some .NET applications, namely those that work in console mode. It is a bit bizarre to be running .exe files on a Mac, though.

Speed-wise the program seems to run much faster on Windows, using my rather crude benchmark of starting a unit at the same time on my Mac (1.42Ghz Mac Mini) and my parents' Windows machine (2.17Ghz AMD Athlon XP 3000+) and seeing which one finished first. It's by no means a fair test though.

Yahoo Maps Beta has just launched satellite imagery, in the style of Google Maps. It has some coverage for the whole world, but only the US is shown in detail. The imagery for the UK is the same as Google outside big towns and cities but Google wins in places like London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds where you can pick out cars on roads, for example.

I also noticed its road maps were woefully out of date - roads like the A1237 York bypass, the A1 Newcastle Western Bypass and the A63 Clive Sullivan Way in Hull, aren't on there, which means it dates from somewhere in the mid-1980s. There's also no names on the roads either.

The mapping is so out of date that on hybrid mode, you can see roads on the satellite imagery that have been built, but with no line over them to show that they are actually a road. Google, on the other hand, tends to have the opposite problem, with the imagery being about 3 years old but the mapping data is from last year, so there are roads like the new A1(M) between Wetherby and Walshford which appears to go across several fields.

Having data that is a few years out of date is excusable, but Yahoo's data is almost 20 years old. Not good when your larger rival is already offering better data.

Here's one for This Is Broken:

I wanted to know where the Pizza Huts are in Leeds. So, I went to Pizza Hut's UK web site, but their 'Find Us' tool insists that you give it a postcode before telling you where the nearest restaurants to your postcode are.

Now that's fine if you know your postcode and want to go to your local restaurant. But I don't - I want to go to one in another town. I don't know what central Leeds postcodes are like, and you have to give a full postcode so typing 'LS1' doesn't work. Why can't I just have a box where I can type 'Leeds' and get a list of restaurants in around Leeds?

As it happens, it ended up being easier to just type 'pizza hut' in Leeds into Google Local. It gives you maps too.

Hari and I have just (inadvertently) found a flaw in a certain unnamed web site. She sent me a link to a page in her account details which I was able to click on and view all of her details as if I had logged in - without knowing her username and password. This is despite the fact that Hari uses a different ISP and is located around 200 miles away from me right now.

This is a major flaw, as you can probably guess. The situation was mitigated by the fact that the information was sent over HTTPS, making an attack by an unknown party less likely, but had Hari's machine been infected with spyware or a keylogger then theoretically some random third party could have logged in and stolen her account.

I'm keeping the name of the web site anonymous for now, but I'll give you a clue - it has around 5 million users around the world. Still, I'd prefer it if no-one tried to guess the identity of the site in the comments. But it does scare me that a web site like this would have such a big gaping hole in it, which could be so easily fixed with session cookies.

Update: It appears that the web site in question has fixed the flaw.

Because I may not be posting in a while, here's an entry where I'm inviting you to comment. The question I want you to answer in your comments is this:

Which Instant Messaging program do you use, and why?

As many of you know I use Adium on the Mac and Trillian Pro on Windows, since I have logins for four networks, including Jabber which is only supported on the Pro version of Trillian (it also adds metacontacts, which means that you can have multiple identities for the same person combined together). But what do you people use?

Yesterday I had an email from a UK government department asking me to remove or alter two comments on one of the entries on this blog. I'm not a big fan of censorship (my views on censorship having liberalised somewhat lately, in that I may not agree with what you say but I'll defend your right to say it), but I did comply with the request.

Though I may be denying someone of their freedom of speech, the comments were also denying someone of their privacy - namely, they had posted the name, email address and telephone number of someone working for the government's insolvency service. It was this person who contacted me, asking me to remove those details and also some other incorrect information.

I do believe freedom of speech is very important, but not when another person's right to a private life is sacrificed as a result. Though this was a minor case, it does mean that anyone who posts details another person's personal details may expect their comments to be deleted. As it happens, this has happened before but with less fanfare, since the information that was posted in a comment was protected by a court order and covers all media outlets in England and Wales, so I deleted it without much hesitation.

I've decided that the time has come to retire my ICQ number. By the end of the month I'm intent on leaving ICQ together, so I'm making people aware of this fact now so that anyone who still wishes to contact me through another method can do so.

If it interests you, here are my reasons for leaving:

1. Increase in spam Over the past couple of weeks I've had a marked increase in the amount of spam I've been getting over ICQ. I've also been getting authorisation requests from various highly-numbered accounts which seem to have been automatically generated by spammers which are also annoying.
2. Lack of use Only 3 people on my buddy list use ICQ exclusively and I honestly can't remember the last time I spoke to any of them (which probably means never). Most others have sign-ins on other networks which can be used instead.
3. ICQ is compatible with AIM If anyone using ICQ is desperate to contact me then almost all ICQ-compatible clients can also communicate over AOL Instant Messenger. All any ICQ user would need to do is send a message to my AIM account (totalxsiva) instead of my ICQ number.

So if you have my ICQ number on your buddy list and nothing else, you can add my AIM address (totalxsiva), or, if you use a multi-platform client like Trillian or Adium, you can also add my Jabber/Google Talk address (nrturner {at} gmail [dot] com) or my Yahoo! address (nrturneruk). I may even give you my MSN Messenger address if you're lucky.

There are some more interesting security improvements in Internet Explorer 7. In short, they are:

1. If you use IE7 to browse a site using basic authentification on a non-secured connection (i.e. not using SSL or TLS), you will now get a warning that your username and password will be sent in an insecure manner. Though the details are encrypted using base64 encoding, the average home desktop computer can crack this in no time at all so it's a bit of a security risk.
2. IE6 currently supports three cipher levels for SSL: 40-bit, 56-bit and 128-bit. In IE7, SSL connections will only be able to use 128-bit, and TLS connections can use 256-bit, which Firefox and Opera already offer. 40-bit ciphers are known to be insecure.
3. Changes to cross-site scripting between different zones. In IE6, if you have a page in your trusted zone which imports a script from the restricted zone, the script will run in the trusted zone. In IE7, the source of the script is respected, so any scripts imported from the restricted sites zone will run with reduced priviledges.

Most of this merely brings IE7 in line with the competition, but the first idea is unique as far as I can tell. It's a good one since a reasonable packet sniffer could be used to capture these passwords very easily, in, say, a public Wifi hotspot, since they have their own HTTP header, and if it encourages more sites to move to secure connections then the internet will be better for it.

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.

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)

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?

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.

The university has an electronic document management system, whereby documents can be stored centrally and checked out by staff to be modified and then checked back in again. A bit like CVS, I suppose.

In it are the past exams papers for all module exams from the past 4 (or so) years, and recently students have been encouraged to log in and download copies of the papers to help them revise. However, the server that houses the repository is only accessible from within the university - I'm guessing it filters IP addresses such that only those from the university's subnet are allowed access. Fine if you're using a cluster machine or in a hall of residence, but not so good for people like me.

However, the university are kind enough to give us shell accounts on a couple of servers that can be accessed using SSH. You can probably still use Telnet to access them too, but, yeah. So it's a relatively simple task of setting up an SSH tunnel to one of these servers and then setting your browser to use a SOCKS proxy.

On a Unixish (Linux, Mac OS X etc.) machine, all you need to do is open a Terminal window and type 'ssh -D [port] [hostname]' where [port] is some number greater than 1024 that doesn't conflict with something else and [hostname] is the computer you're connecting to, then in your web browser, set it to use a proxy server called 'localhost' on the port that you specified.

On Windows, you need to download PuTTY. Install it and run it, type in the hostname of the server, then switch the the Tunnels tab (under Connection --> SSH) and select the 'Dynamic' radio button. Then type the port number in Source, leaving Destination blank, and connect. Note that you will need a relatively recent version of PuTTY as older versions do not support SOCKS, but then old versions also have nasty security flaws so you shouldn't be using them anyway.

This was mostly for my own reference but hopefully someone reading this will find it useful. I doubt I'll need to use this again until the next round of exams in May since most university systems are accessible outside with the correct login credentials, but this seems to be the exception.

Because you probably have better things to do then get sucked into a silly internet meme that will waste your time before you realise how pointless it is, I think I'd better explain the 'best blonde joke ever' meme.

What this stems from is an actual blonde joke. You take a piece of paper that is blank on both sides, and write 'Please turn over' on both sides. The joke is that this will keep a blonde occupied for hours as he/she constantly turns the piece of paper over.

The web equivalent of this joke would be this:

Q: What's the web-based blonde joke ever?
A: Click here!

In other words, the page links to itself and the blonde is kept occupied for hours, like with the piece of paper. This seems to have found its way to some LiveJournallers, and people have linked to it over and over. You should eventually find that if you keep clicking on the links you get stuck in a loop - that's the joke.

I probably sound incredibly unhumourus writing this but hopefully it'll clear it up for people like Matt who are new to this whole thing :) .

I'm sure lots of people will be giving Google stick over its decision to offer a censored version of its results to Chinese users.

The thing is, I don't think that criticising Google is necessarily the right thing to do. Google has seen a revenue opportunity in China by operating there, and to do so it has needed to comply with the laws and customs of the country. To you and me, this may seem wrong - after all, the laws on censorship there are rather draconian and all internet activity is monitored, and I personally think that is wrong, but as a market China is growing fast and many multinational companies will want to be a part of that. In other words, the cost of adapting to the Chinese market is much less than the potential profits to be made there. If you don't censor your site yourself, then your site will be blocked and you won't earn anything at all. Google are therefore making the most of a bad situation.

The problem with censorship in China is not the companies that censor - it's the government that forces them to. And that's what needs to change.

Update: An official response on the Google Blog. Essentially: American version of Google doesn't work well in China, Google decided to launch local version but had to comply with local laws, the reason why it's taken them this long is because of ethics, they will make it clear when results have been censored.

Over the past couple of weeks we've been having a problem with our Netgear DG834G router which we use to share our ADSL connection. For some reason, it randomly stopped accepting the correct username and password - at the moment only I know the login credentials and I don't remember changing them. This is annoying as you need to be able to access the router control panel to be able to enable port forwarding for those applications which do not support UPnP.

What made it worse was that the password reset instructions at Netgear's site failed to make a difference. The router would simply not return to its factory defaults - it still had our ADSL settings (since we could still access the internet) and the bad login credentials.

Thankfully a kind soul on Netgear Forums had this solution: Unplug the RJ11 (phone line connection) and then hold down the reset button for 10 seconds. That worked for me and all the router's settings were erased, including the username and password, so we were good to go again.

Remember to have your ADSL username and password handy as you will need these to be able to access the internet again afterwards, and that any other settings like port forwarding will be lost.

A couple of days I added Bad Behavior to a few pages on this site. It's a set of PHP scripts that can be used to block evil bots from your site, such as those which harvest email addresses or send trackback, comment and referral spam.

If you're using Wordpress, or a variety of other PHP-based content management tools, installing Bad Behaviour is very simple, and it can work to its full effect. Unfortunately it doesn't have full support for Movable Type, so though you can get it working you can't take full advantage of all of its features.

If you want to get it working in an MT installation, here's how to do it:

Static Publishing

First of all, ensure that your files are being output as PHP documents - consult the MT manual or Google for instructions about this. Upload the Bad Behavior files somewhere, then, in each template, except those on the System and Modules tabs, add this code at the very top of each:

<?php require_once("/path/to/bad-behavior/bad-behavior-generic.php"); ?>

Replace '/path/to/bad-behavior/' with the path to where you uploaded Bad Behavior. Once you've modified your templates, rebuild.

Dynamic Publishing

You'll be pleased to know this is much easier. Upload Bad Behavior somewhere, and then paste the above code into the very top of the 'Dynamic Site Bootstrapper' template - you don't need to do each template individually (unless you have a mix of statically and dynamically published files, in which case you will have to do it for all the statically published files).

So far, Bad Behavior has blocked 80 bot accesses - it returns a HTTP 412, or 'Precondition Failed' failed error to the client if it has blocked it. I certainly haven't noticed as much referral spam lately.

Skype Zones is a new product from Skype that helps you connect to Skype-friendly public Wifi hotspots, and also handles payment. It's currently in beta, and only works on Windows 2000 and XP right now - no Mac, Linux or PocketPC versions yet.

But what's most interesting is its prices. It only costs $3 US for 2 hours, or $8 for unlimited access for a whole month. If that applies in the UK, then that translates to pretty cheap Wifi - we're used to paying up to £6 (over $10) per hour here. Furthermore, the Skype Zones service is available through The Cloud, who have 6000 hotspots in the UK, Germany and Sweden, including a number of bars and clubs. One reasonably accurate way of discovering whether an establishment is wifi-enabled is looking for an Itbox games machine - they're usually connected up to The Cloud. The Cloud is also upgrading some BT payphones to offer Wifi.

Skype Zones' billing service is actually provided by Boingo, though Skype themselves have developed the software which is installed in addition to any existing installation of Skype. If this really is as good as it sounds, then I may have to sign up.For too long Wifi has been prohibitively expensive in the UK; if this starts a trend of lower prices then I'm sure the technology will take off more here and be as ubiquitous as it is in parts of the US.

Well, some of them are. I keep finding images hotlinked from my site in their profiles and blog postings.

It's easily fixed with a bit of code in the .htaccess file, specifically:

RewriteRule .* - [F]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://profile\.myspace\.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /uploads/stealbandwidth.png [L]

This means that anyone browsing MySpace will now see this image instead of what they wanted. It shouldn't affect any other sites. If they really want to have the images up, then they can download them and upload them somewhere else.

PS: Shame on all of you for not pointing out the grammatical error in the title (now corrected)

My parents now have a fully functioning Wifi router. It was suppsoed to have come yesterday, but what with it being Christmas and the Royal Mail being deluged with Christmas cards and last-minute deliveries from online shopping and mail order companies, it took a bit longer.

It now fulfils a dream that I've had for the best part of 7 years now - i.e. ever since we had the internet first installed at home in 1999 - being able to use the internet in my bedroom. Of course, I have been able to do that at university since 2002, but not here at my parents house.

The router supports WPA so we've turned that on - it's not clear that it does from the descriptions on sites like Amazon but if you check Netgear's own site it does. It'll also mean that we can finally have more than one computer using the internet at any one time - before, you would have to unplug one computer, restart the modem and plug the other one in. The router also has a firewall and supports UPnP, which is a godsend for anyone who's ever had to configure port forwarding on a router.

At the moment, I currently have two Jabber user accounts, one with jabber.org and the other with gmail.com (Google Talk). I've decided this is overkill and so I'm getting rid of my jabber.org account and sticking with Google Talk. So if you have me on your contact list as totalxsive [at] jabber.org, please delete me and add me as nrturner {at} gmail (dot) com. I've (hopefully) transferred all of my contacts other to GTalk already.

Also, if you're using Trillian Pro, make sure you're using the latest version of the Jabber plugin, released in October. It adds extra support for Google Talk, as well as including your Gmail account in the 'My Mail Accounts' section of the Trillian main window.

Last week, the standards documents for 'Jingle' were published. This may not mean much to you but the chances are that at least some of you will have already used it.

Jingle is an enhancement to XMPP - better known as Jabber - which allows voice communication between Jabber clients. It's the protocol that Google Talk uses to allow it's users to, well, talk to each other. The press release explains more.

With this in the public domain this paves the way for more clients to allow voice communication with Google Talk. Google has been keen from the start to encourage alternative clients to access its systems, and from day one published details about how to access GTalk using clients like Gaim and Trillian Pro. Even so, at the moment the only other client that allows voice communication as well as instant messaging on GTalk is Apple's iChat AV, which is only available on new or upgraded Macs.

The press release lists various organisations that have pledged to support Jingle, and this includes Gaim and Cerulean Studios, the makers of Trillian, so hopefully future versions of these clients will allow voice - and maybe even video - over Jabber. In any case, the standard is open so even those developers that haven't specifically announced that they will back Jingle can join in too.

Google has already created libjingle which is a library that developers can incorporate into their clients to enable Jingle support without having to write their own code, and it's open source too.

Also of interest is the press release about Google's co-operation with AOL. In it, it says that the agreement between Google and AOL will allow ...Google Talk and AIM instant messaging users to communicate with each other, provided certain conditions are met.... Whether this will apply to users of other clients too, and also include ICQ (another AOL property), isn't yet known.

[With thanks to Download Squad]

To: The neighbour who owns a Belkin 54g wireless router

Dear Sir/Madam,
I would like to notify you that your Belkin 54g wireless router, with which you are using to share your network connection, is completely lacking in any form of security. Not only are you using the default SSID and default channel, but you do not employ any form of security method to stop others from using your connection.

You don't, for example, have any kind of encryption. Almost all wireless networking technology supports a minimum of WEP encryption, which at worst will stop casual hackers from getting in. It's likely, however, that your router, and indeed the rest of your hardware, will support WPA encryption, which is very strong and will stop less than honest neighbours stealing your bandwidth, or worse, any of your network data. You wouldn't want someone grabbing your email passwords, now would you?

You are also not using MAC filtering. If you were, you would also stop outsiders from getting in because your wireless router would simply refuse to talk to any system not on its authorised list.

Furthermore, you are broadcasting your SSID. While this makes setting up your network much easier, it also means that any Tom, Dick or Harry can see that you have a wireless network. I'd suggest turning this off unless you regularly add the new computers to your network.

As it is, there is very little to stop me stumbling across your network and joining it, and then using your internet connection. Just be thankful that I have my own perfectly good wireless network (using WPA encryption) and no dark motives.

Yours faithfully,
Neil Turner (your neighbour)

We've been back on PlusNet for about a month now, and so I thought I'd write a post about the experience. PlusNet used to be one of the darlings amongst the UK ISPs - charging slightly higher prices for a very good level of service - however, recently they have cut their prices dramatically and altered the way their services work such that a number of their customers have left them.

The changes reflect traffic on peer-to-peer networks and newsgroups. During peak times - from around 4pm until midnight - traffic on these services is speed-restricted. They're usable but very slow - a BitTorrent download will max out at around 10KB/sec, whereas ideally you should be getting 10-20 times that on a standard 2MB broadband connection. At other times, BitTorrent downloads are much faster although still not blazingly fast. I don't use newsgroups so I cannot vouch for their speed.

Other than these restrictions, the system is very fast and, after a patchy period a few weeks ago, seemingly very reliable. Normal downloads from UK servers can go over 200KB/sec. And at £15 per month it seems to be very good value for money.

If you use peer-to-peer services and newsgroups a lot, especially in the evenings, then PlusNet is not for you. But if you don't use these services, or only use them occasionally and are willing to either queue your downloads to happen overnight or download in the mornings then you should find them to be a good ISP.

Now here's something interesting: Google has opened an office in Manchester. Google already has offices in London so this is their first regional office. Most of the work at Google UK will still happen in London but this new office will deal with some of their advertising business - one job is already being advertised.

As for why Manchester was chosen, Kate Burns, who is the head of Google UK, said this:

Manchester is an ideal location for us. It's got the right mix of businesses, it's got a great pool for us in terms of talent, there's great universities in Manchester and we're always looking for highly educated individuals.

The jobs going aren't really up my street and I don't have the experience they're looking for, but if this office expands into other fields I would probably considering applying for a job there. After all, it's (just about) commutable from Bradford, and it's Google - need I say more?

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.

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:

1. Having good search engine rankings

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...

2. Having lots of 'good' content

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.

3. Have search-engine optimised pages

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.

4. Place the advertisements wisely

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 have just made a donation to the American Red Cross of US$40. It's roughly equivalent to how much Google Adsense revenue I would have got since the hurricane hit. As much as I'd like a bit more cash right now, I think the people of New Orleans need it more than I do.

Now that Jabber has suddenly become cool, thanks to Google, you may like to know about one of its coolest features - multiple instances of the same sign-in. You can log in to the same user account on many different clients, so instead of having a home ID and a work ID you could just have one ID signed in twice.

The way to differentiate between them is by using 'resources'. This will usually default to the name of the client - 'Gaim' for Gaim, 'Trillian' for Trillian Pro, 'Adium' for Adium X and 'Talk' for Google Talk, but you can change it to something like 'Home', 'Work', 'Laptop' etc. When you sign in to multiple locations, your contacts can then choose which identity to speak to.

On other IM services, if you sign-in on another computer while already signed in elsewhere, you are signed out of the first computer. With Jabber, you aren't.

In fact, Google actually makes this feature more powerful by appending a unique ID to each resource instance, so you can be signed in several times with the resource of 'Talk' without them overlapping. And you can even talk to your own resources, so if you were at work and wanted to put a reminder on your screen at home you could message yourself. Or if you have two computers and are feeling a bit lonely...

I'm connected to Google Talk as nrturner at gmail.com via Trillian Pro. Feel free to drop and instant message my way but be aware that I can't yet do voice chats. Though I'm sure that there will be an updated Jabber plugin for TP coming soon. :)

One of Trillian's advantages is that you can be connected using multiple sign-ons for the same network, so I'm also still using my old Jabber name of totalxsive at jabber.org, along with all my other various identities. That said, it also has a habit of crashing when you set your status to 'Invisible' which both myself and Dave seem to suffer, and for some reason doesn't always connect first time (but then I have this problem with other Jabber servers too). Still, awfully nice of Google to support Trillian out of the box.

My account at UKNova has been closed, despite me praising it several times over the past 9 months and maintaining a good upload/download ratio (including attaining Power User status). But, as the FAQ states, accounts are deleted after 6 weeks of activity, and them's the rules. Unfortunately the site is at capacity so it's almost impossible to create a new account. :(

If you do have a UKNova account, be aware that you receive no prior email warning of your account being closed.

Robert Scoble and Hugh McLeod are having a Geek Dinner in Cork, Ireland on the 30th November - here's the Wiki. There's only 9 people signed up at the moment, but I'm wondering about going myself. Ryanair have some stupidly cheap flights to Cork from Stanstead around that time and it would be nice to go to Ireland since I've never been before. I'd also get the chance to Dave for the first time and hopefully get to chat to Robert and Hugh again.

If CEO's torture comments weren't enough to put you off doing business with GoDaddy, then maybe the story at FauxDaddy will. The author of the site claims that GoDaddy's DomainsByProxy service (which allows you to register domains without your details appearing in the WHOIS record) revealed his WHOIS information without asking or even telling him after a law firm contacted them.

He's collecting donations for a lawsuit against GoDaddy/DomainsByProxy. Considering that it appears they have broken their own terms of service he's probably got a case.

According to The Register, it's possible that Bulldog will be facing an Ofcom investigation by the end of the month. It has had 130 complaints passed onto it by customers dissatisfied with its level of service, or lack thereof.

The article also quotes some figures from "insiders" which are somewhat shocking. Around 20 000 customer orders are still awaiting processing - a lot considering their subscriber base is only 65 000 - and that they are receiving around 10 000 calls a day with half not actually getting through.

As you can gather we're still without broadband, but I'm starting to think it's not entirely Bulldog's fault. We recently lost the ability to dial out on our phone line, with all calls being redirected to BT. It turns out that the housemate who is on holiday is responsible for the BT bill but hasn't paid it recently and so BT have started to take sanctions. If the payment isn't received soon the line will be cut-off altogether, so having ADSL would be out of the question. However, none of us know when said housemate is back, and unfortunately we can't pay the bill or have the account details changed.

And now for everything else... ;)

• I've made a couple of minor changes to the Atom 1.0 feed - like on the RSS feed it now makes it clear if an entry has been extended, and I'm serving up XHTML instead of HTML. This means that the whole thing is one long XML document instead of an XML document with bits of escaped HTML in it.
• Still no internet. I'm going to cancel Bulldog, since they've done almost nothing in the 4 weeks since we signed up, and properly cancel Tiscali, just in case they're lingering about. I'll then go back to PlusNet since they were never any problem last year.
• NTL are now offering 10Mbps connections. Which is good news but I do hope this is combined with an improvement in their quality of service - Which? did a survey of broadband ISPs recently and NTL were bottom by a long way with only 19% of those interviewed 'very satisfied' with the service. Zen did very well, as did PlusNet, with Bulldog, Tiscali and Telewest coming mid-table. Still, hopefully my parents will be upgraded to the 10MB package sometime soon.
• Or they could move to Chorleywood in Hertfordshire where NTL are trialling 20Mbps broadband. Lucky sods.
• Textpattern is due to hit version 1.0 very soon, as is the final version of Movable Type 3.2 which I'll upgrade to eventually.

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...

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 :) .

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)

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.

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'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.

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.

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 ;) )

When I first heard today that Grokster lost their Supreme Court case by a unanimous decision, my reaction was "Oh, bollocks". In theory, it means that companies which distribute software may be liable for the actions of their users should they break laws, such as infringe copyright. So, for example, if you downloaded copyrighted works using a Bittorrent client, the makers of that client would also be liable for allowing you to do so.

However, if you read the judges' decision more closely, you'll see this sentence (emphasis mine):

We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.

What this implies is that if you create some file sharing software and then promote it as a way of downloading copyrighted music for free, then you'd be liable. This is actually quite significant - if your file sharing software is created primarily for the sharing of non-infringing work and somehow warns or discourages users from sharing work in a way that would infringe copyright, then it's likely that you'd be standing on firmer ground.

From what I have read on the linked page, it would actually seem like the judges have concentrated on the specifics of the Grokster case and not peer-to-peer and file sharing software in general. They're not going after the technology but are going after those that are abusing it, even if that includes software makers. I suppose that's fair.

Maybe it's not such a bad decision after all. But then I'm not a lawyer. In any case, we'll have to see what happens.

If you're a product manufacturer, then make sure you put your product manuals on your web site, either in HTML or PDF form. One For All, who make replacement and 2/3/4/5-in-one remotes, do that, which was great when I had to reprogram ours today and had lost the original manual and box that came with it.

Since I'm moving house on Thursday, I've started packing and tidying up today. One of my other housemates moved out this morning, with the other off tomorrow, so I've had a bit more space to put things. Also, with less junk around, it's been much easier to get a vacuum cleaner around and do some general cleaning, so that the next tenants of the house won't have the same problems that we had.

This is mostly for my own benefit but if you need to have a PHP script create a permanent (301) redirect, here's how to do it:

header($_SERVER['SERVER_PROTOCOL'] . " 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.example.com/");
exit;

I had some pages on Smaller World whose URLs changed some time ago that I'd forgotten to put redirects in for. Since I'm useless at regular expressions (despite owning O'Reilly's Regular Expressions Pocket Reference book) I instead butchered the code for Movable Type's dynamic publishing and added some redirect code for the pages in question. Since the URLs have now changed permanently I wanted to send the correct status code and this seems to be the way to do it.

Just had this conversation with Arvind, who lives in the United Arab Emirates (UAE):

Neil T.

have you seen this?

Arvind:

gagh ISP's blocking that page

Arvind:

dear lord don't tell me they're blocking flickr

Neil T.

they are, that's what the topic is about :(

Arvind:

dear lord they are

Arvind:

if someone's reported it then there's no chance in hell it'll be opened

Not a good day for freedom of speech. More over at MeFi. It's a pity as there's a large number of users from the UAE over at Flickr.

It's also a pity for me as now I know that at least one of my regular readers won't be able to view any photos that I post here. This hasn't been a good week for Flickr - there's some fall-out over the moving of its data from servers in Canada to the US (again of free speech grounds), though this time it isn't really Flickr's fault.

The Guardian is reporting that Nominet may introduce IDN on UK domains:

Nominet, the not for profit company that registers internet addresses ending in .uk, yesterday launched a three-month public consultation on plans to introduce so-called international domain names (IDN).

[...]That would clear the way for websites with addresses which include accents, as in www.café.co.uk, or use entirely different alphabets such as Greek or Arabic.

[..] "We are asking everyone in the UK what they want," explained Nominet's head of regulation Edward Phillips. "We have Welsh and Gaelic, which require some additional characters, but when you start looking across the country you realise there is a huge range of languages spoken here. Should we open it up to absolutely everybody?

It's certainly an interesting idea, and one that I'd support. Internet Explorer is the only maintream browser that doesn't support IDN yet and that is coming in IE7 due later this year, so by the time these domains become available to register I imagine that a significant number of people will be able to visit these sites. The details of the consultation are here.

What's perhaps most interesting about this story is that it was in the main section of the printed edition of The Guardian today. It even included an inset box (reproduced at the bottom of the article) going in to some detail about what IDN is and mentioning Firefox.

Google Maps now has satellite imaging for the UK. Unfortunately, it's not very good.

There's two basic problems. The first is scale - the satellite imaging is not to the same scale as the maps. Horizontally they're fine but vertically the images appear to have been shrunk - sure, you see more on the screen but it makes everything look out of proportion.

Then there's the actually quality of the maps. You can't zoom in nearly as far as you can on the US maps and even zoomed out the quality is rather poor - the images are quite dull and blurred.

The aerial photography offered by Multimap is much better - while it's not quite up to the same standard as the satellite imaging offered by Google for the US it's still an improvement. With Multimap's photos you can actually make out individual buildings - with Google you can't.

Update: Gah, should have done some more research. The quality of the imaging varies across the country - there are 'pockets' of high quality imaging in places like London and Manchester, which is up to the same standard as the US imaging and much better than that of Multimap. Unfortunately all of their Yorkshire mapping is low quality, so while you can get up close and personal with the Millennium Dome in Greenwich, Bradford is just a dull blur. Make of that what you will.

Here is an aerial photo of RAF Fylingdales, a spy base in North Yorkshire not far from Whitby. Despite it being a spy base the aerial photo is quite detailed and doesn't appear to have been censored by the authorities.

But what is interesting is what happens when you have the mouse over the image. On Multimap aerial photos, the equivalent map is shown underneath - quite a cool feature as it helps you recognise what certain building are. But when you hover over this photo, the spy base is missing from the map. The only clue that something is there is the footpath that ends abruptly at what would be the perimeter fence of the compound.

This, actually, isn't all that uncommon as several other RAF bases are missing from Ordnance Survey maps (although Menwith Hill is on there). But considering the ubiquity of information out it (including a BBC photo tour from inside the base) you'd think that masking its location on maps was a pretty futile attempt at maintaining national security.

A while back Jim Winstead announced that blo.gs was up for sale and that anyone one interested in buying it should contact him.

Well, the purchase has now been completed, and its new owner is: Yahoo! Jim has the details on his blog. They've even retained the same privacy policy that blo.gs had.

As you can imagine, Jeremy has a few words to say on this. Congratulations to Jim, and to Yahoo!. Yahoo! is definitely getting its mojo back.

FeedBurner have announced an exit strategy. What this means is that if you use FeedBurner for your feed, but then decide you don't like the service, you can close your account and have FeedBurner redirect your readers back to your old feed. This is a good thing.

I offer a FeedBurner feed (which includes my latest Flickr photos) but the main reason why this isn't the main feed is because I was worried about lock-in. What if FeedBurner went to an overpriced subscription model, or suddenly disappeared off the internet? You'd be stuck reading a dead feed, and may not even know to switch back to the standard feed.

Offering an exit strategy means that you'll attract 'toe-dippers' - users who like the sound of your service but don't want to join because they're worried about losing data if they decide to leave. Here's some examples:

• Gmail allows you to forward all of your mail to another address. So you could transfer all your email to Gmail, decide that actually Gmail isn't all that good and then have your email forwarded back to your old account so that you won't lose any messages.
• Bloglines allows you to export your subscriptions as an OPML file, so you can easily switch to a service like Newsgator.
• Movable Type lets you export your posts to a plain text format that can be imported in to other systems like Wordpress.

If you're considering a service that lets users store their data on your systems, make sure that there's a way of them getting that data off again easily.

There seems to be a pyramid scheme going around involving UK eBay and PayPal users. I got an email from a user that I had previously had bought from or sold to (can't quite remember), asking me to send £3 to a PayPal account, then copy the email and send it on to other people who I have received PayPal payments from (or paid). PayPal makes this easy because it's possible to download a complete list of people you have previously had transactions with, including email addresses. The theory is that all the people that you send the email to will send £3, and so on.

Although we're only talking small amounts of money here and not the three or four figure sums that other schemes often entail, I'm not taking part. Pyramid schemes are unethical because those at the bottom of the pyramid are more likely to lose out, and in any case, I believe they've recently been made illegal in this country anyway.

Update: Oh yeah, it's also against PayPal's terms and conditions:

You may not use PayPal to send or receive payments for any form of multi-level marketing programs (including online payment randomizers), as well as matrix, pyramid and Ponzi schemes, "get rich quick" scheme, or other similar ventures.

It also seems to have been around in the US for some time. Note to self: must do a Google search before making weblog posts.

Bah. Holiday Inn Express offer Wifi in their rooms but it's £4.50 an hour. Cheaper than some places but still a bit pricy. Oh well, I'll have to grit my teeth.

Anyway, I've arrived in London and checked into the hotel - just putting my feet up and catching up with my emails before I head into the city and on to the dinner at 7. Transport has been fine, all the trains and tubes arrived on time and in fact I was at the hotel earlier than I expected. The room has a reasonably good view considering it's in a somewhat less-developed area of Docklands - you can see the Millennium Dome from the window - and it's pretty good for a basic hotel - AirCon, Wifi, satellite TV and whatnot. Although the movie guide for the TV is a little interesting...

If you're going to the geek dinner tonight, I'll see you there. Otherwise, I'll be updating here next time I have an internet connection, whenever that is.

This is my list of blocked domains which will not appear as adverts on here. They're mostly sites which offer rogue anti-spyware products or try to get you to pay for programs like LimeWire, Shareaza or eMule. Feel free to add the list to your Competitive Ad Filter in your Adsense settings if you have Google advertising on your own site. There's 162 URLs on the list - Google limits you to 200 blocked URLs so you may have to trim the list if you already have some of your own entries on there.

The National Rail Enquiries web site has been acting up all day. First it wouldn't load up at all, eventually timing out; then it would say that it was unavailable due to high traffic, and now it tells you either that your browser isn't accepting its cookies (when in fact it is) or that your session has timed out.

Unfortunately it's difficult to just simply use another site because almost all of the sites offering train times use this site as a base, so they're not working either.

Thankfully most offer the 'raw' timetables in either HTML or PDF so I'm using those for now. I need them for working out trains for Tuesday when I head off to London.

The numbers of people looking for the armadillo video is finally subsiding - I'm almost back down to normal traffic figures. For May as a whole, of all referrals made to the site from search engines, almost 19% were for that video. I'm only two-thirds into the month and the bandwidth usage is at 8.5GB, which is typical for a whole month.

On to the good news: I'll be reactivating the search function in a couple of days, and I've also made quite a bit of extra money out of it through increased Google AdSense earnings. On Monday I made $12 USD, and I've had a couple of $10 days since - the normal average is about $5. I could well hit $200 this month, which would be most welcome.

This is the bandwidth usage graph for this site, as of 12:30pm today:

That spike is when people started searching for the armadillo video. I had 1.05 GB of hits on that day alone, and 956.29 MB yesterday. I think I'd better keep the search facility off for a few more days yet.

Here's an idea: displaying TypeKey profile images when a user comments on a blog, as opposed to Gravatar. It's doable, since TypeKey profiles also have FOAF versions (here's mine, for example) - you'd just need to read the value of the <foaf:img> tag.

I'm not intent on removing support for Gravatar right now, but still, it's an idea.

The MPAA have filed lawsuits against 6 BitTorrent sites, including BTEfnet which I use for the new series of Family Guy and American Dad. The site has already gone down.

Great. Now how am I supposed to watch these shows? It's not like they're broadcast on TV over here...

Before you start the lecture about how I'm advocating piracy and denying the producers of these shows a decent living, can I just point out that I already own the first 3 DVDs of Family Guy and will happily by the 4th when it comes out. I'd just like to be able to view some of the episodes first, if that's not too much trouble.

Fred Langa's latest article is up, and this time he turns his attentions to Google and whether there are privacy issues with using too many of its services. The first two pages are okay, but on the start of the third page he makes this statement:

My recommendation is to use Google's services, but with caution, and only when it makes sense. The main Google search engine is still unrivalled, for example: It makes sense to use it. But there are many local desktop-search tools available; and, being local, they keep their indexes and search results local and private. Why would you really need a Google-based desktop search? The short answer is: You don't.

Fred seems to get the impression that Google Desktop Search stores its indexes on Google's servers. It doesn't. Just like pretty much every other desktop search tool, its indexes are stored locally, in the user's local application data folder (C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Desktop Search or equivalent). Even in a network environment they are only stored on the local machine and not on a central file store. Fred's claim that it doesn't is just plain wrong.

I used to really trust Fred's views but recently his articles appear to have been written in a rush and without proper fact-checking - he was guilty of it with a Firefox article last month. Now I don't feel as if I can take his ideas so seriously, which is a shame since I used to respect him a lot.

I've stuck a Blog Torrent tracker up over here to see what it's like. There's only one file on there right now - an amusing parody of a recent Citroen advert - but you're welcome to give it a spin. Right now the tracker is private in that only I can upload files but if someone needs it for something I can give them access. Nothing illegal though.

Blog Torrent is pretty easy to setup, although I had a couple of problems getting the optional MySQL support to work and when adding torrents it does seem to work best with its own client rather than a program like Azureus.

There are times when I'd like a bit of extra anonymity when browsing particular sites, especially as PlusNet puts their customers' usernames in their hostnames. For times like these, an anonymous proxy server can help your chances.

SamAir is a good source of servers, listing lots of addresses in different countries. It's best to choose one in a country close to you, and even then I would not recommend using those on the first few pages as they're more popular and therefore more likely to go down. To make the process easier I use a small free program called Multiproxy which lets you add multiple proxy servers to it. It checks all the servers to see if they're working, and then will distribute your browsing across those that do. Having a big list of servers is a good idea as if one goes down, the program will switch to another.

You will find that your browsing may be somewhat slower, and certainly more limited - some proxy servers block you from making POST requests, for example, and some sites refuse access to anonymous proxies for fear of spam problems (indeed commenting on blogs may become difficult). But for anonymous browsing of specific sites it's pretty handy.

MultiProxy does come with a built-in list of servers with more available from its web site, but this list hasn't been updated in a very long time and the servers no longer work, so you will need to provide your own server details.

You can use sites like IP Chicken and WhatIsMyIP.com to verify that the proxy server is working correctly - if it is, a different IP address will be shown.

Today I made another call using SkypeOut, but this time on my Dell Axim PDA using Skype for Pocket PC. Over a wifi connection in the university. And it actually worked!

It was somewhat inconvinient though. Although I own a headset, there's no microphone socket on the device - you have to use the built-in microphone, which means holding the device up to your mouth and speaking into it like a walkie-talkie. So as well as being inconvinient, you also look quite stupid.

Then there's the sound quality, which isn't particularly great. It sounded like a mobile phone call when you've only got one or two bars - quite broken. But it was good enough for each person to be able to understand each other which was important.

It was also much cheaper. The call (about 4 minutes) would have cost me around 60p on my mobile, but instead it cost me €0.05 (about 3p). A pretty big saving.

I really doubt I'll be using this all that afternoon, especially as I need to be in an area that has Wifi, but the potential money savings outweigh the inconviniences in my opinion.

I'm having a disagreement with someone over SMTP servers. I'm of the opinion that you should generally use the SMTP server that corresponds with your domain - so my mail should be sent through mail.neilturner.me.uk, and my Gmail messages should be sent through smtp.gmail.com. This is because of technologies like SPF and DomainKeys which are, as I understand, dependent on email being sent through the correct SMTP server for that address. For example, if I send a message using my Gmail account through Thunderbird using Gmail's SMTP server, the message will have the DomainKeys header added; if I didn't, it wouldn't and would look more like a spam message as a result since you'd expect Gmail messages to come via Gmail.

It's also more convinient if you use different internet connections frequently, since you don't have to change the server every time you use a different ISP - this is especially helpful for laptop users like me who use Wifi hotspots often.

But I've been told that this is wrong and that you should always use your ISP's SMTP server instead. To me this doesn't make sense - say an AOL user was sending a message, you'd expect it to have come via AOL's mail server and not some random server.

So who's right? Should I be using my ISP's mail server, or the mail server associated with each account?

Can I just say that I am not interested in receiving press releases via email. I am not a news outlet, just a guy with a blog who writes about things he's interested in.

If your product really is fantastic them I'm sure the mainstream media will pick it up.

Just got this email:

Hi Neil T!

You may have heard on the grapevine that we planned to reward our dear Flickr members who bought a Pro Account in the early days. Well, it's true! And since you're one of those lovely people, here's a little something to say YOU ROCK!

1. Double what you paid for!
   Your original 1 year pro account has been doubled to 2 years, and your new expiry date is Dec 4, 2006.
2. More capacity!
   Now you can upload 2 GB per month.
3. 2 free Pro Accounts to give away to your friends!
   This won't be activated for a day or two, but when it is, you'll see a note on your home page telling you what to do.

Thank you so much for putting your money where your mouth is and supporting us, even while we're in beta. Your generosity and cold, hard cash helped us get where we are today.

Kind regards,
The Flickreenies.

Woo :) . I'll be looking over my Flickr contact list for non-Pro users who I think deserve the extra features of a Pro account. I don't think I need the extra 1GB a month but having it extended by a year is pretty cool.

Update: the details are on FlickrBlog. Free accounts get a boost to 200 photos archived and a 20MB limit.

If you're not lucky enough to get a free Pro account, they will now be priced at $24.95 per year - considerably less than the $40 that they originally cost (and hence the extension for existing customers).

If you see a message about 'Error 28' around the site instead of content, it's because my host appears to be having database issues. It only appears to be affecting the dynamic pages since they pull content directly from the DB, the static pages are all fine.

Background reading:

• Wordpress Wiki on Error 28
• Error 28 and how to avoid it

Note that this has nothing to do with Section 28.

Thanks for all the comments on the Crazy Frog Remix article, especially quack's comment about the origins of the ringtone. There's actually a very good Crazy Frog article over at Wikipedia, which explains the history of it.

And, it turns out that a single based on the Crazy Frog noise is due to be released tomorrow. Great.

Update: I've now heard the single. I'm impressed at how the four (!) producers of it have managed to make the tune even more annoying than it already was. This was so unnecessary.

And then people wonder why the sales of singles have been declining recently...

I unfortunately missed this announcement yesterday:

In order to prepare for the forthcoming ADSL speed upgrades we need to perform some essential maintenance work on our network.

The first stage of the work will require our network engineers to drain the stale sessions on our 622Mbps central pipes that have built up over the past few months to bring them to full operating efficiency.

During the maintenance window we would advise that where possible our customers reverse the polarity of the neutron flow on their routers. As not every router supports this functionality we would advise as an alternative to unplug the router from both the power socket and the phone line and place it in a plastic bag to prevent any lost packets escaping into the atmosphere.

We will also be taking the opportunity to do our bit for the environment by moving our electricity supply at our Sheffield Headquarters to solar power.

As a backup measure for when it isn't sunny in Sheffield we have purchased 20 bicycles to generate the necessary power. The PlusNet Usergroup have volunteered to be on standby to cycle for the first month, after that the standby will be rotated around the rest of our customers in a similar manner to jury service. We will contact you via email giving you plenty of notice of when it is your turn.

Hmmm, can't wait.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Via Boing Boing is a cease and desist letter sent to Joi Ito from sms.ac, a site that allows you to send free text (SMS) messages. The letter relates to an earlier entry where Joi apologised for spamming his friends with sms.ac invites - during the signup process for a new account, sms.ac asks for your MSN Messenger screen name, and then proceeds to send an email to everyone on your contact list. This is what Joi, and indeed I, would call spam. In any case, sms.ac don't seem to like this and so have ordered Joi to remove his comments and any references to the site from his blog. This might have something to do with the fact that Joi's entry shows up as the fourth result on Google for 'sms.ac', right behind a similar entry from Russell Beattie.

In fact, the whole of the first page is full of people describing sms.ac as a scam, including entries from Community Mobilization, Rip Off Report, Unleaded Online and Bjarni R. Einarsson. If sms.ac are serious about their legal action, they have a lot of letters to send out.

I've had at least 3 emails to me triggered by my friends joining the service, but haven't yet bothered to follow them up. Now I'm definitely not going to bother. Congratulations, sms.ac, you've just lost yourself a potential customer.

To close, here's a quote from the Unleaded Online article:

Funnily enough if you rearrange the letters [of sms.ac] you get 'SCAMS'.

From time to time I get junk mail saying that such-and-such-a-site has linked to me because my site is highly relevant to it and that I should link back in return. Today I had one that, on inspection, actually had linked to me - often when I check the site out there is no link. And, for once, it was slightly related to this site as well - it was about sleep.

It might seem weird, but a search of this site using Google for 'sleep' returned 103 results. Evidently I talk about it more than I realise.

However, since the site has no real unique content of its own (here's the DMOZ editor in me coming out), I won't be returning the favour. In any case, the site has a Google PageRank of 0 so it wouldn't offer me any advantage.

incidentally, sleep is what I am about to do, so goodnight.

When choosing an ISP back in July, I'm quite glad I chose PlusNet (affiliate link) for our house. They've been consistently good to us and I'd recommend them.

I'd especially recommend them now that they're offering up to 8Mbps ADSL broadband from April. The interesting thing is that instead of offering specific usage allowances with each speed, you can, as far as I can tell, choose any speed from 512Kbps up to 8Mbps, but will pay for actually bandwidth used.

We currently pay £29.99 for "unlimited" usage at 1Mbps. Under the new system, that would get us 50GB per month of peak time usage (from 8am until 1am) plus more bandwidth between 1am and 8am when traffic is lighter - typically we use 30-40GB per month so that's ample. But instead of browsing at 1Mbps we could be going much faster. The limiting factor is line quality and it is unlikely that everyone will be able to get 8Mbps - especially those who live a long distance away from an exchange - but hopefully living near the centre of a city will mean that we can get a signifcant speed upgrade.

Google has a new beta version of their toolbar for IE. This would be cool if it weren't for the fact that one of the features emulates Microsoft's fated Smart Tags feature, which allowed the browser to alter the appearance of web pages by adding extra links (in this case to content chosen by Microsoft). The feature would have made it into Internet Explorer 6 but was dropped after an outcry by web page authors. Nearly 4 years on and many pages still include a 'MSSmartTagsPreventParsing' meta tag in their headers to stop this technology even though it was never included in a public release (as far as I know).

Via BoingBoing is a campaign by Daily Kos to have various non-partisan sources removed from Google News. This is because Google removed Daily Kos from its News index recently for being non-partisan, yet other non-partisan sources have recently been added, such as the right-wing Power Line.

If they're in need of a British example, how about the BNP's Press Release archive? This is most definitely not partisan (it's a political party after all) and their releases are biased often to the point of sheer untruth. Yet, they're in Google News and usually come up in most searches related to asylum seekers or refugees.

Kos suggests emailing news-feedback [at] google.com about this. I might well do.

Update: It would appear that Kos actually requested Google remove Daily Kos because it was picking up diary entries with very little content as well as news stories.

Sorry Dictionary.com. I know it's Valentines Day tomorrow but I'm afraid our affair has to end.

The fact is, you're not really looking after yourself. Your design is tired, and you're getting overrun by adverts and popups. Sure, my web browser was able to sort out the latter but the situation's been like this for a while and it's not getting any better.

Now I don't want to kick you while you're down, but I've found someone new. There's no popups and just a bit of conspicuous advertising down the side. It looks fresh, and, I'm sorry to say, does more than you. Sure, like you it's got a selection of dictionaries to hand, but when did you ever pull out Wikipedia entries too? What about translations into other languages? What about links to related web sites?

Sorry, but it's over. Answers.com is my new dictionary of choice.

As you might know, Google recently switched to answers.com as well, and, apparently, the decision was simply because answers.com offered a better service. No money changed hands. Impressive.

Background reading.

Update: Hello BoingBoing readers!

With my housemate having turned off our gateway server last night (and also having left the front door open all night) there's no internet, so I'm having to use the backup pay-as-you-go dial-up connection for a bit. It's bringing back horrible memories already.

But there aren't really alternatives - while a neighbour does have a wireless network running, it seems to be pretty well-secured - I can't even attempt to connect to it. Then there's GPRS which is free on my tarriff until the end of this month but I haven't set it up yet.

Anyway, the phone bill is about to hit 30p so I'd best be getting offline. Let's just hope that by this evening that this post by Kim will ring true.

Here's a new buzzword: 'astroturfing' (well, it's new to me, anyway). It's when a political or corporate entity creates an artificial 'grassroots' movement for their own benefit - an example of this being the New Millennium Research Council, a supposedly grassroots movement opposed to towns and regions creating their own metropolitan wifi networks. In actual fact, the group is owned and sponsored by Issue Dynamics, which is a lobbying firm that represents some of the US's biggest telecommunications companies, who stand to lose a lot from these networks. CNet dishes the details.

This, however, is neither a new thing nor a US-centric one - in the UK, an umbrella group opposing the construction of wind farms to generate green energy is actually linked to British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL), who obviously have an interest in the government supporting nuclear power over renewable energy. They've even opposed wind farms located over 3 miles offshore which would be barely visible on the skyline, and yet said that they would be an eyesore. The project eventually went ahead.

Here's how to guarantee that I won't read the press release you sent me:

• Include it as a Word file attachment
• Ensure it's about something that doesn't remotely interest me and is miles away
• Include 4 huge JPEGs of your publicity material that don't fit in my mail preview screen
• Ensure that the email is not far off 10MB in size

There's probably more but one email I got today did those 4. I'm currently handling all of the email sent to the magazine's editor, and while most of the press releases are vaguely relevant to a Bradford-based student publication and don't include lots of cruft, this stood out.

When using MT's QuickPost bookmarklet to post an entry on Smaller World just now, I got this error message from Apache:

Not Acceptable
An appropriate representation of the requested resource /scgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi could not be found on this server.

The HTTP error code was 406, which I've never seen before. incidentally it was caused by some character entities in the page title being passed in the URL that MT didn't seem to like.

Since an increasing number of my peers now distrust FTP for file transfers for almost anything but downloads I decided to find secure alternatives for the FTP servers I use most often.

Oh, this is priceless. Martin Schwimmer, over at The Trademark Blog, publishes a Creative Commons licensed blog with an RSS feed. Several (well... 190) Bloglines users subscribe to the feed so that they can read it.

Schwimmer finds out that Bloglines are 'reproducing' his content without the Creative Commons notice (since there's no mention of the license in the feed through the Creative Commons RSS Module or similar), and asks them to remove his content on the basis that it's a commercial use and a derivative work - prohibited under the conditions of the CC license that he had chosen.

He then closes his entry with this quote:

If anyone desires the convenience of being notified only when this blog (or most any blog) is updated, then I recommend subscribing to one of the many RSS programs available.

What??? Bloglines is an 'RSS program', of sorts. It just happens to be web-based and publicly accessible.

Something tells me this guy needs a clue injection.

With thanks to Ed Bott and Scoble. Actually, Scoble has more on this and has said he's unsubscribed. Not surprising, really.

Boing Boing has been collecting bizarre keywords used for AdWord results. I found one last month, but this one also amused me:

Potato Chips
Great deals on new and used items.
Search for potato chips now! -aff
www.eBay.com

Ahem... used potato chips? Please explain.

Link to screenshot and the Google search used.

The F-Secure Antivirus Research Weblog has been following the spread of the Santy worm, a Perl script which can infect and deface sites running the forum software phpBB. It's a popular package, running major sites like Cre8asite and MozillaZine.

If you run phpBB, make sure you have the very latest version (2.0.11) and also have the latest version of PHP (4.3.10) - my host upgraded to this version yesterday in light of the appearance of exploitive code.

It's reckoned that several thousand communities have been affected by this worm already :( .

Update: F-Secure, who really need better permalinks in their weblog, have made the very good point that this virus could be stopped if Google prevented the worm from conducting searches (its method of spreading).

In yesterday's Observer, BT had a half-page advert for their BT Broadband service. In big letters, it had:

For £17.99 a month, BT Broadband Basic is twice as fast as AOL Broadband Silver*

So then I looked at the tiny small print at the bottom of the advert, which read (emphasis mine):

AOL offer unlimited downloads and BT give you a 1GB per month usage allowance, deemed adequate by the vast majority of our users. BT Broadband Basic is a basic access only service and AOL Broadband Silver has other additional features such as email and anti-virus software.

Not looking so good now, is it. Personally I'd be more inclined to go with AOL's package at 256Kbps than BT's restricted 512Kbps based on that. But then I'd touch neither with a barge pole anyway.

incidentally, I learned from this ADSLGuide news item that the maximum amount of data that it is possible to download on a 512Kbps connection in one month is 170GB, and yet BT let you only download 0.6% of it per month. We're on an unlimited 1Mbps connection here and typically end up using around 20GB per month.

Sorry everyone, Firefox just doesn't cut it anymore. I've found a better web browser in the form of 32-bit Web Browser. Sure, it's $20 to buy, but heck, it's 32-bit! And just look at that gorgeous screenshot - it's even nicer than Netscape Preview Release! Here's the official blurb:

32bit Web Browser will browse the World Wide Web the easy, fast, and fun way. Imagine being able to sit down at your computer in the morning and use it just as you would on a regular day, knowing that you now have a qwick [sic], easy, and fun way to get the information that you need from the Web. Install 32bit Web Browser on your computer and it will use your Internet connection to let you access the World Wide Web with control not experienced with any other browser. Start your office toward an edge in productivity. Become one of the well equipped workplaces of the future. Do it today!

Make sure you get the new 9.72.01 release that came out today though!

A few hours have passed since Gerv posted about it but SCO's web site still hasn't been fixed after it was hacked into. Gerv has a screenshot in his entry but here's one from me too.

I like the subtlety of this hack - it's not immediately obvious but still funny. Obviously I don't support hacking into other people's sites, but, well, heh... :-D

Update: Netcraft is also covering it, as is El Reg and Slashdot. You'd think they'd have done something about it by now...

Update II: It does appear to be fixed now.

Over a year ago I registered for WebProWorld.com to reply to a forum topic. After that I started getting lots of unsolicited email from the site and related sites, no matter how many times I unsubscribed.

Later that month, after figuring out how to access their broken password recovery system, I was able to stop most of it, but a year on I'm still receiving the odd email that I can't seem to stop, short of disabling the alias I used which thankfully was unique to the site. I would think twice about joining that site if I were you.

Sometimes, when people post comments, you really hope they're joking.

If the following applies to you:

• You have Internet Explorer 6
• You don't use Windows XP, or you haven't installed XP Service Pack 2
• You visited The Register between 6am and 12:30pm GMT on Saturday morning

then it is possible that you may have been infected with the Bofra worm. This worm spreads through a flaw in Internet Explorer, which so far has only been fixed for users of Windows XP SP2. Users who have yet to install SP2, or who use IE on another version of Windows, may well have been infected with Bofra.

I would urge you to run a virus scanner to make sure you were not infected. Here is an official explanation from El Reg - the offending adverts were provided by a third-party advertising company which El Reg has suspended dealings with for the time being.

The fact that this is a third-party company makes this more worrying as other sites may well be affected too. I urge you not to use IE and instead use a browser like Mozilla Firefox or Opera for the time being.

Update: Falk, the company concerned, has issued a statement. It appears that one of their load balancers was hacked.

Just to warn you, I've disabled the alias 'weblog@neilturner.me.uk'. Any mail sent to this address will now be automatically deleted.

This alias was never made public, other than in the RSS feeds where it appears to have been scraped and started to receive its fair share of spam. It was used for comment and trackback notifications and that was it - I don't receive any legitimate email that way. So I've rerouted the notifications to another email alias and have disabled the 'weblog' alias.

This should have no impact on you guys but I'll let you know anyway.

El Reg has an article about how PlusNet is getting tough with people who hog its broadband service. These are people who use up lots of bandwidth and are affecting the connection speeds of others as a result. Only about 0.3% of the entire customer base is affected, however from what I have seen this seems to be quite a vocal minority.

To give you some idea, we're on PlusNet and are currently using about 40GB per month (we're on their uncapped 1Mb package). This is pretty high considering that a number of ISPs cap their usage at 1GB per month, and that this site transfers around 5GB per month. Yet, we didn't receive anything to suggest that we were hogging the newtwork yesterday. Those that are must be using some serious bandwidth.

Some have said that PlusNet is betraying these customers but in reality the 99.7% of customers who are not affected, including us, will see a benefit. It's probably only fair that those who are straining PlusNet's resources pay more.

Disclosure: I'm acting as an affiliate of PlusNet and get commission if you click on the adverts (or this link) and sign up for their broadband packages.

One of my favourite finds on UKNova so far has been the first two episodes of "Hippies" (Episode 1, Episode 2), a sitcom that was broadcast on BBC2 back in 1999. It didn't get much critical acclaim and only one series was ever produced, and I don't think it ever came out on DVD. It won't have you rolling around on the flaw with laughter but it's certainly funny and it was great to see it again after all these years. One its stars is Simon Pegg, who played Shaun in the spoof film Shaun of the Dead earlier this year, and it's written by the guys responsible for Black Books, Big Train, Brass Eye and Father Ted.

Thankfully it looks like it's being repeated on a cable channel somewhere and someone has thoughtfully created XVid rips and made them available as torrents. So far only the first two episodes are up but I'm sure the 4 remaining ones will come.

This is why we need the BBC Creative Archive. Stuff like this which never gets repeated or released on video/DVD just gets lost, so it would be nice to have it made publicly available so that the British public who paid for it can actually see it.

Don't know whether this has any relevance at all, but:

• Google search for "miserable failure" - George W. Bush's biography is the first result
• Yahoo search for "miserable failure" - George W. Bush's biography is the first result
• MSN Search Beta search for "miserable failure" - George W. Bush's biography is the second result (first result is about the [former?] governer of New Jersey)

Make of that what you will.

Today is the 10th anniversary of the National Lottery. And to celebrate, the official web site appears to be broken:

Update: The site is now saying that "Lotto & EuroMillions are temporarily unavailable." Hmmm...

Somehow, I don't think the next draw will be in 1970. In any case, its browser sniffing is also broken - parts of the site won't let you use Firefox, but as soon as you use something like User Agent Switcher to disguise it as Netscape 7.x it works fine. Which it should since the underlying code is the same, but I shouldn't have to do that. And yes, Powergen's site is still broken in the same way.

Looks like the lottery has some site fixing to do.

This is cool - Post a screenshot of your desktop to Flickr and tag it with 'desktopshowandtell'. Here's mine, and yes, I do like Fraggle Rock.

incidentally my desktop seems to be one of the tidiest of the lot, since I don't tend to keep many shortuts or documents on my desktop.

My new SD card for my camera arrived today - 256MB for £19. That would probably have cost over £50 a year ago.

I've no doubt someone will be able to find something cheaper but I thought it was good value. And it now means I can fit around 240 photos at 3.2 megapixels and high quality on one card, instead of about 16. Nice.

To show it's working, here's a photo of what my housemate ordered from Amazon which also arrived today :) .

Via Redemption in a Blog is Silktide Sitescore, an automated tool which tells you how good your site is in terms of design, accessibility and popularity. Redemption in a Blog got a score of 9.2 out of 10, putting it in the top 10 of all sites, so I had a go myself.

This site got 9.4, which puts it in 4th place! That means I'm only behind the BBC and W3C. Pretty darn cool.

Scrapie doesn't do too badly either, getting 9.1. This is mostly down to its lower popularity on Google - not so many sites link to it as to mine. Still, it scores top marks for accessibility, even if I personally know of some enhancements that could be made.

So how do your sites score?

Since Monday, georgewbush.com has been blocking any requests to access it from outside the US. If you're on a US ISP, you can view it, but anyone else gets this access denied message. BBC News Online has some coverage on it and possible explanations.

The page is still in Google's cache, although the images won't work. Update: Thanks to Richard and David in the comments, you can still use https://georgewbush.com/ or the IP address http://65.172.163.222/ to access it. Great blocking there.

I suppose judging by some of the isolationist responses by 'outraged' republicans to the Guardian's Operation Clark County campaign, this isn't surprising.

Update: More from Boing Boing and The Register.

McAfee just declared the Windows build of nmap to be a virus. I suppose it has its illegimate uses but it can also be a useful tool.

TODAY IS INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY!!! OMFG ITS SO K3WL LOL!!!!

I've created a new Yahoo account so I'm back on Yahoo Messenger, for those of you who use it. I'm 'nrturneruk' if you want to chat.

Since I'm a Trillian user, you can also use ICQ (149181635), AIM (totalxsiva) or Jabber (totalxsive@jabber.org). You may also be lucky enough to have my MSN sign-in name.

From Kottke's links comes a selection of letters and emails received in response to the Guardian's Clark County campaign. In short, the Guardian started a letter-writing campaign so that Brits could encourage the voters of Clark County, Ohio - one of the most undecided states in the US - to get out and vote. Being a generally left-wing paper, the majority of the people writing letters will be putting their weight behind Kerry. The article in question contains response from a variety of people, and while some are quite reasoned, some are just downright funny in their lameness. Here's some examples: (warning: strong language)

It's not my birthday for a while but when it is I'll have to remember that "Happy Birthday" is a recently-registered trademark in 25 countries (including Japan, US and EU countries) and that the "Happy Birthday To You" song is copyrighted until 2030.

Later this semester I'll be writing an essay on intellectual property for my social, professional and technical issues module and I'm doing so initial background research right now. The way it's going I could well write several essay's worth of content.

If you're in and around Yorkshire and can get to Leeds for around 7pm on Wednesday, then I'll be at the Leeds Weblogger Meetup along with Richard and Jonathan. So far there's only 3 of us so if you're close by it would be great if you could attend.

We're meeting in the Starbuck's in the Borders bookstore but may well be heading on afterwards. Hope to see you there.

It's a real cliche, but I'm going to have to repeat the phrase "The customer is always right" when it comes to online music stores, and in particular the news that MSN Music Store has been able to get deals with some 'exclusive' artists because they only offer the full albums and not individual tracks for download. The artists and bands include Metallica, Linkin Park, Dave Matthews Band, Madonna, and "Red Hat Chili Peppers" [sic].

The artists claim that this is because they want people to listen to the album as a whole and that just listening to individual tracks wouldn't give the same effect. But that's just their opinion. My opinion might be that the whole album is a steaming pile of pants apart from one song which is truly excellent. To me, paying £7 for the full album just so that I can listen to one track is a rip-off.

Surprisingly enough, the blame doesn't lie with the record labels this time - according to the comments attached to Scoble's article the labels are more than happy to take part - the hurdle is getting the artists to agree.

Still, I wish some of these artists would be less pretentious and allow the public to buy tracks individually. Metallica have often spoken out against piracy - if they want people to pay for their music then maybe they should be a bit more flexible in future. Otherwise users will stick to using the file sharing networks to download individual songs and they get nothing in return.

And if they're that worried about people not listening to the whole album, then why are the songs split into several tracks on the CD so that people can skip them?

This site temporarily disappeared off the face of the internet earlier on due to some problem at my host's end (all sites on the same server had the problem). Seems to be fixed now.

Similarly, MSN Messenger was down this evening. It felt eerie having just one contact online at a normally busy time - especially when that contact was your housemate. Update: Speculative CNet News.com article about the outage.

Got a phishing email claiming to be from Abbey which had this in:

If you have questions about your online statement, please send us a Bank Mail or call us at 1-800-374-9700

Erm, whoops. Abbey is a UK-based bank and that's an American phone number. Furthermore, according to Google, it's the phone number for Citibank.

You'd think these phishers would be smart enough to remember to change the phone number, but, oh well.

Update: Just got what looks like the same email again, with the same number. Some people never learn...

This might seem obvious to some but I only just realised that some SMTP servers allow users from other subnets to access them by logging in. Because I use a different ISP depending on whether my laptop is at home, in university or at my parents' house, it can get somewhat laborious having to change the SMTP server every time I use a different connection - if I use one ISP's SMTP server while connected to another ISP's network, the email is rejected. In Thunderbird, changing the SMTP isn't the easiest thing to do (Tools > Account Settings > SMTP Server every time you change ISP) so to have another way would be pretty useful.

But thankfully the university's email server allows you to log into it from outside of the campus network, so it means I can use one SMTP server on all 3 connections. The university system has the added advantange that it will validate any internal email addresses - so it won't send the email if you try to send it to an invalid internal mailbox.

For one reason or another I never got around to re-adding the Jabber plugin to Trillian pro, so I haven't been on Jabber much lately. Anyway, I'm back on, so if you want to chat, my username is 'totalxsive [at] jabber.org' (change the ' [at ] ' to '@' ). I'm also on ICQ as '149181635' and AOL as 'totalxsiva'.

Remember my piece on Paypal and how much easier it makes buying stuff from online stores? Well, it appears that Matt Haughey agrees with me. Buying stuff online using a Paypal account is so much easier than having to reach for your wallet and typing in your credit card details for every time you buy something.

Matt does, however, point out one disadvantage which I've also found with eBay - it makes impulse buying so much easier...

I think I've solved the problem with TypeKey comments being rejected, by not requiring email addresses from TypeKey anymore. I have, however, made one new stipulation - if you have never used your TypeKey account here, the first time you comment your account will have to be approved for use here. If you're already commented, this won't affect you.

For now I'm keeping compulsory moderation of non-TypeKey comments as although I now know who this Jebus character is who has been leavy silly comments (it's another student from the university) I'm not convinced that he's going to leave me alone just yet.

It looks like some people are having issues when trying to use their TypeKey accounts to comment here. I haven't changed anything at this end and it seems to work okay for me so I'm unsure what's up. Just keep trying and if all else fails just comment normally and I'll approve the comments.

Meanwhile, this is way-cool and well timed. I may well be reinstalling FeedDemon thanks to this.

All the excitement of the past few days has meant that I completely forgot about the second anniversary of my move to Movable Type and to this domain. Unfortunately, unlike last year, the entry ID isn't anything interesting - 1355.

Oh well, here's to another 2 years :) .

Always make sure you send the HTML code for your banner ad using the correct content type. Otherwise, this happens.

incidentally, the advert was for TV licensing, reminding students that there are more enforcement officers working this year than last year (yawn... ).

And yes, that is how many useful emails I've had sent to my Hotmail account since last July.

Here I am in Leeds Bradford Airport, and, if you can read this, then we have a 3G (third generation) data card connection going. :)

The technology isn't great - we're stuck in a corner of the building because it's the only place where we have a strong enough signal for data transmission. But it works.

Overnight there seems to have been a really intense comment spam attack against this site - I've had more attempts than at any other time in this weblog's history (possibly bar the flood). Thankfully almost all were intercepted by MT-Blacklist, bar one which was intercepted because the user didn't have a TypeKey account, so none of it every appeared, but when I checked my Blacklist log this morning over 50 items had appeared over night.

Update (6th Feb 2006): Getmetickets.net has ceased trading pending closure by the government.

Now this is interesting. Two comments were posted a couple of minutes apart to the article I wrote on Tuesday about getmetickets.net. The first one seemed alright - maybe someone who'd had a good experience with the company and felt my criticism was unfair. It happens.

But the second made me go "hmmm". It started quoting figures like how many customers the company had - not something that would be common knowledge - along with how many Glasto tickets were sold - again, not something you'd generally know. Unless you worked for the company.

The plot got fishier when I looked at the IP addresses. They were only different by one digit at the end, so they'd come from the same network. I then used RIPE's WHOIS tool to probe the IP address, and here's what I got. Both IP addresses were from a range owned by - guess who? - getmetickets.com ltd, the company owning the getmetickets.net site.

In a comment, Ciaran mentions that the company behind getmetickets.net is actually called getmetickets.com - yet www.getmetickets.com appears to be another company altogether. He also mentions the recent (and now resolved) fiasco over katie.com and how an unrelated book was published under that name.

Well, anyway, it reminded me of a van I saw yesterday morning on the way into work. It was for a company selling windows (as in the panes of glass that houses have). But the company was called Windows.com.

Why? www.windows.com redirects you to the Microsoft Windows home page on microsoft.com. It seems rather stupid to me that a company with nothing to do with Microsoft should use one of their domains as their company name, especially as Windows is a registered trademark (i.e. they're not going to be able to sue Microsoft to get it). Sticking .com on your name when you don't have a website isn't cool. It may have been in 1999 when the internet was new and funky, but not now.

I just wish I'd had a camera at the time so that I could show a photo to you.

As reported on the Google Blog, the Google Store has had a makeover and now caters better for non-US residents. There's a greater range of stock and more payment options added, including PayPal, which in my mind is a good move. Here's why:

A few weeks ago I was sat with my boss in Starbucks in Leeds. He was typing in his credit card details to pay for T-Mobile's hideously-overpriced wireless internet access, and was wondering if there was something easier than typing the same number and details every time you want to buy anything from any e-commerce site. PayPal is the nearest thing we have right now to that - it remembers the details of cards and bank accounts you add to your PP account, so all you need to know is your email address and PP password. That's a lot memoroable than a seemingly random string of 16 digits plus an expiry date, issue number and security code. It's the same reason why I like TypeKey as a sign-in service - it's one sign-in system for many sites, and if you have a browser which remembers your username and password for you it takes even less effort.

But I digress. The real reason for this post was that I was about to buy a Blogger t-shirt, which only cost £6 in the store. Then, I proceeded to the checkout, filled out my details and got to the confirmation screen. By this time it had adding international shipping (£3.50) and VAT (£2.25), so the actual price was £11.75 - a 96% increase on the base price. Oh well, maybe I'll consider it another day. There is some good (and also some very tacky-looking) stuff in there if you want to take a look.

Matt, the lead developer of Wordpress, has posted a great answer to my post about not switching to WP. It looks like WP is due to have some really great improvements in the near future. :)

By the way, thanks for the 6 comments to that page so far, they've all been great and I'm happy to see that everyone is playing nice so far. Give yourselves a pat on the back.

If you have a spare 15 minutes, then I'd urge you to listen to Guy Browning's Small Talk. It's a short radio show broadcast on Wednesdays at 11pm UK time on BBC Radio 4, although thanks to the magic of the internet, the most recent show is archived for 7 days as a RealAudio stream for everyone to listen at their convinience.

Guy Browning writes a column called "How To..." for the Guardian Weekend - here's this week's column, complete with typo in the title. His material is mostly based on observation but it is often painfully funny - a bit like Peter Kay but in a style that people south of Watford Gap would understand.

It's shows like this that make the license fee all the more worth it.

An interesting and slightly amusing article on news.com details problems that Microsoft has had with its products in foreign markets. Certain minor errors or misunderstandings have lead to their products being banned in various countries after they offended the authorities. The article lists some of the blunders, which in brief are:

• Microsoft marked a part of Kashmir which was 8 pixels in size as not being a part of Indian territory, leading to the recall 200,000 copies of Windows 95 in India
• A computer game which used the chanting of the Koran, the muslim holy text, as background music, offended the authorities in Saudi Arabia
• A Spanish version of Windows XP asked users to select their gender from 'not specified', 'male' and 'bitch', due to an error in translation

The article goes into more detail, but it shows even the biggest of companies can make the biggest of slip-ups.

On a somewhat related note, news.com now accepts trackback pings in its articles. An interesting move.

I don't always agree with GlassDog but they took the words out of my mouth when describing what's wrong with BitTorrent. Most of the clients, as explained in the article, suck.

When I say suck, I mean they do have a larger learning curve than clicking a link and downloading the file normally. Even some of the better clients, which have attractive interfaces, confuse the user with lots of toolbars and menus and terminoligy like 'trackers', 'seeds', 'peers' and other words that are alien to most people. The ideal client would let you click on a link, perhaps using a new torrent:// protocol instead of http://, and then show a progress dialog showing how much had downloaded and how long was left. Because that's what users expect when downloading other files and they're comfortable with it.

Mozilla could easily extend Firefox's download manager to support torrents in a post-1.0 release and display them in a similar way to how it shows downloads already. As could Opera. Heck, even Apple could do it and I'm sure they'd do a good job of it.

The article is quite lengthy but it's worth reading. The comments are also worth a read too.

If you want to get your hands on Windows XP SP2 then you can try this download link - it looks like an official one from microsoft.com and seems to work from me. You'll be downloading the full 272MB network installation, which will install on any legitimate copy of XP.

If the link doesn't work, go to this BetaNews page which was where I got the link from.

Today is the 5th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day (warning: designed with FrontPage), so, in honour of those people who keep our IT infrastructure in check, I'd like to give a special mention to:

• Andy and Richard who are starting and finishing (respectively) placements in system administration
• Richy C who works for my hosting company in an sysadmin role
• Nigel Hulley, who despite the best efforts of some of the students manages to keep the Computing department's machines working

To everyone above, and every other sysadmin out there, Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day! :)

dBpowerAMP Music Converter, the program I use for ripping music CDs, will no longer offer MP3 encoding for free starting with the next release. According to this forum thread, the developer has been told by the MP3 patent holders, the Fraunhofer Institute, that he must pay $0.75 for every copy of the program downloaded that decodes MP3s, plus $2.50 for every copy that encodes. dMC does both, so that's $3.25. This means that, as a free program, the developer cannot afford to pay these fees.

As such, MP3 encoding will still be included but it will cease to function after 60 days - the user must then pay $9 to be able to encode MP3 files.

Thankfully, other formats, like Windows Media and Ogg Vorbis are not affected by this, since MS is very relaxed about licensing and Ogg Vorbis has no patents whatsoever. But this is the reason why I begrungingly use MP3 - I do not agree with how it has been patented or how its patents are being enforced. The problem is that there enough big companies who can offer MP3 support in their free products (Apple, AOL, MS, Real etc.) and who can pay the fees, but by doing so they're making the format more ubiquitous and then putting the smaller developers in a more difficult position. After all, you wouldn't download a music player that couldn't play MP3s, would you?

Sadly, the main MP3 patent (5,579,430) doesn't expire until 2012 at the earliest so we're going to have this problem for some time.

Well, okay, Google isn't down, but it's having major problems right now with many queries returning internal server error messages. It's reckoned that this latest MyDoom variant is causing a distributed denial of service attack that is affecting Google as well as other search engines like Yahoo, Lycos and Altavista. It's using the search engine to find email addresses for domains that it finds on infected users' hard drives - so let's say someone had a document referring to neilturner.me.uk on their HD, it would search Google to find an email address on that domain. Unfortunately it looks like a lot of people have been infected and this is affecting Google's performance.

Naturally this is on Slashdot and in the comments there are some excellent quotes:

I found it hard to remember the names of other search engines that I could use though.

Other....search engines? Do explain such a foreign concept as this.

Just do a search for related:www.google.com, and Google will tell you. Oh, wait...

I misspelled yahoo 3 times before I got it right.

And this:

All Hail My Doom. For doing the very thing we always failed at doing. OH MY GOD, YOU SLASHDOTTED GOOGLE, YOU BASTARDS!

And all this when Google announces the price range for its shares as part of its IPO... poor, poor Google.

Being an open system, Wikipedia occasionally attracts the odd nutcase who creates silly articles, or adds pointless comments to existing ones. However, rather than delete them outright, some of these appear to be archived in "Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense". Some of the stuff there is quite amusing and certainly bizarre.

If you're not worried about buying non-branded ink cartridges then there are some serious bargains to be had. I've found a store - Phoenix Direct - which, if you buy the cartridges in bulk, work out at around £2.50 per cartridge (based on a black Epson Stylus C42 cartridge). The official cartridges retail at up to £18 - you do the maths.

You do have to buy them in bulk to get the best value but even individually black cartridges are around £3 and colour at £4. This company supplies one of the local computer shops and I've been using one of their cartridges this week - it works just as well as the official ones,although the driver complains about it being non-Epson the first time you use it.

This El Reg article, via Dave's Rants, has the results of a survey into the musical tastes of IT professionals. Interestingly, MS Certified Professionals tend to like mainstream pop music and list acts like Dido and Britney as their favourites, whereas software developers prefer heavy metal and acts like Iron Maiden and Slipknot. Which probably explains why I'm not a software developer...

The closest match on the list to me is electronic music, which is mostly enjoyed by Linux users, apparently. incidentally, if that poll is accurate, my mother would be an IT director and my dad would be project manager, and most of my friends would be database administrators...

If you can read this message then our ADSL connection and Internet Connection Sharing is (finally!) working. :)

• Are you a Republican party voter?
• Looking for something to put on your Freedom Fries without contributing to the Kerry campaign or foreign economies?
• Then worry no more!

Yes, if you're a xenophobic right-wing American voter you too can buy W Ketchup, which is made with 100% American ingredients. None of the money you spend on that ketchup will be sent abroad to help economies of struggling overseas nations, unlike that other famous brand. What's more, by buying this ketchup, you're somehow contributing to the memory of Ronald Reagan.

Of course, unlike the ketchup, the website is not 100% American, what with it being hosted on a distinctly "un-American" open 'sauce' (ho ho) web server with contributions from people around the world, and uses a scripting language originally developed by someone from Greenland while working in Canada.

There are unseen forces that are trying to prevent me from sending email today. The first is a problem with NTL's SMTP server that rejects any mail I send to it, and the second is that Bradford's Webmail system is also down, so I can't use the web interface for that. I'm having to compose all of my mail in the Horde webmail interface offered as part of my hosting package.

I'm sure there are plenty of open SMTP relays I could use if I wanted to but I actually want some of mails to arrive and not be blacklisted and deleted on the way.

In any case, if you've sent me a message today and I have yet to respond, now you know why.

Not quite sure what happened, but somehow I've won an auction that I thought I'd been outbid on. Which is a pity because just before that auction ended I'd won another auction. Which now means that my mother will have 2 phones to choose from - a Nokia 3310 or a Nokia 3510i. The latter went for a pretty good price - £28.55 plus P&P. Both phones were unlocked.

I actually think mum will go for the 3310 as it's a bit closer to what she already has in terms of functionality. But we'll see.

I'm mentioned on this article about drinks safety devices after mentioning Alcotop in a comment on a previous post. It's a piece of plastic that you buy for around £1 and attachto your bottle of drink (beer, alcopop or whatever) while out clubbing so that people don't spike it with date rape drugs. We got some in the magazine office a couple of months ago - here was our article about it.

Hopefully, this Nigritude Ultramarine link will help Anil win the second round of the SEO competition. If anything, it's helped to increase takeup of TypeKey accounts since various SEOs with too much time on their hands have been registering so that they can comment on that page. Even if it looks like one guy has registered several with the same URL and faked a conversation to try to boost his rankings.

There's something a bit revealing in my access logs. Here's one entry:

207.8.131.172 - - [03/Jul/2004:01:32:35 +0000] "GET /2004/May/09/nigritude_ultramarine.html HTTP/1.0" 200 10871 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)" 207.8.131.172 - - [03/Jul/2004:01:32:37 +0000] "POST /scgi-bin/mt/ping.cgi/1795 HTTP/1.0" 200 84 "" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90)"

Now, maybe this is just me, but I don't see how it's possible to switch from IE6 in Windows XP to IE 5.5 in Windows Me in 2 seconds, unless someone's using VMWare. Or, more likely, one or more of those is faked, especially as it didn't request my stylesheet or the external Javascript file for TypeKey integration. A lot of others sent a Typepad user agent instead of a IE5.5/Win Me agent.

I also found that IP blocking hasn't been as much of a failure as I thougt - I've had a number blocked. As Richy said, a number of these have been computers owned by the US military, which is both amusing and also very, very scary at the same time.

One thing I did find interesting was that I only had one GET request for any of the IP addresses used today, which was the one above. I reckon they have used that to find out what my trackback script is called, and then appended random numbers to it. Some of the pings were to entries where trackbacks had been closed for some months now. Richy says that despite renaming his script the attackers came back, so it's possible that they're rediscovering the script name once a day, or something.

incidentally, this isn't an MT-only phenomenon, as Les has been hit - he uses pMachine's ExpressionEngine. Therefore, my theory is that it is parsing the RDF code block with the trackback data to get the trackback URL, so any blogging system which includes that is potentially affected (assuming I'm correct).

Like Jay, I am surprised it has taken so long for trackback spam to get off the ground, considering how easy it is. I'm starting to wonder, what with the problems with character encodings that I've heard the likes of Sam Ruby and Jacques Distler talk about, and now this, that maybe we need a Trackback 2.0 system that addresses some of the problems with the existing system.

CNet News.com has an interesting article about how Kazaa is losing users. It is estimated that around 5 million fewer people now use the service, while the number of people using networks like eDonkey and BitTorrent have increased.

The article gives som reasons for the figures, but doesn't mention Kazaa Lite. Some time ago, Sharman Networks threatened legal action against people who hosted versions of Kazaa Lite, and even used the DCMA against Google to prevent them from linking to these sites. Kazaa Lite is a version of Kazaa that has been reverse-engineered to remove the advertising and spyware, which technically makes it illegal as this is forbidden by Kazaa's licensing agreement.

While it is still possible to download various cut-down versions of Kazaa, many major sites which hosted it complied with Sharman's demands and took the files down. Many then recommended that users switch to eMule, an open-source, spyware-free eDonkey client.

It's interesting to note that many of the eDonkey clients are open source - eMule, MLDonkey and Shareaza are all open source. There's a similar situation with BitTorrent, which can only be a good thing.

The Register have an article about the Bradford Computing department's new MSc course in Forensic Computing. It's a postgraduate course that deals with computer crime and finding evidence of it, and it's one that I'm considering taking after my undergraduate degree (along with Internet, Computer and System Security).

Admittedly the article is mostly ripped off the press release, albeit with somewhat less detail. Full details are here.

Still, it's cool to see one of our lecturers mentioned in a well-known publication :) .

Cerulean Studios yesterday patched both the free and pro versions of Trillian so that users could connect to Yahoo (see ZDNet UK article), and, at least for now, it works.

Gaim has also been updated to work with Yahoo's newly altered protocol - version 0.79 came out yesterday, which also introduces various other new features, like buddy icons and file transfers on MSN. incidentally, Cerulean Studios contributed the fix for Yahoo connectivity, which is awfully nice of them. It's actually not the first time - Cerulean helped them out last time Yahoo buggered upchanged their protocol.

Although recent Miranda IM releases haven't included a Yahoo plugin, the most recent nightly build also looks like it has a fix.

Still, I'd like Yahoo users to take note of this: Yahoo's decision is going to make it a lot more difficult to communicate with your friends, if they persist with constant protocol alterations. If you still want to be able to communicate, consider another network, such as the free and open Jabber network. Jabber.org has an extensive list of clients, which include all of the above (with the exception of the free Trillian). Jabber has no problem with third-party clients, simply because there is no official client and because the system is non-proprietary. You can find me there as totalxsive (at} jabber.org.

Yahoo is blocking Trillian again and this time it's for good, apparently:

This time, however, Yahoo said it will continue changing its protocols to prevent clients such as Trillian from finding new ways to incorporate Yahoo. Again, the measure was cited by Yahoo as a way to prevent IM spam.

"By making frequent protocol changes, it is our expectation that spammers will be blocked from abusing our system to spam our users," Osako said.

That's what they say. I'm sure there are several other more reasons for this, such as loss of advertising revenue from adverts in Yahoo's client. In any case, Trillian are aware of it. It apparently also affects users of Gaim, Miranda IM and Fire.

I really hope this backfires on Yahoo. People use Trillian for a reason - they don't want to have 6 different clients installed just so that they can talk to all of their friends. Obviously it's their network and they can do what they like with it but if people move to other networks because of this then it's their own fault.

But then, even if Yahoo do change their minds, it's not like I'll be able to log in anyway.

There's now a decoder for dBpowerAMP products that supports the Apple Lossless format. This is the file format that lets you losslessly compress files in iTunes for playing on an iPod without losing any quality. I wrote about it a few weeks back.

The trouble is that Apple have decided to use the .m4a file extension, the same as AAC, the default lossy format used by iTunes. Which is daft because a number of audio players, like Winamp, have adopted AAC decoders, and, when presented with one of these files, will try to play it as an AAC file. Then they realise it isn't an AAC file and panic. Winamp actually crashed when I asked it to play a lossless m4a file. If Apple had chosen a different extension (.ale, perhaps?), then Winamp could blissfully ignore those files until a proper decoder had been written for it.

In dBpowerAMP's case, it's been necessary for the MP4 decoder to be rewritten to allow for these files to identified. A whole lot of work that could have been easily avoided.

It's as if the people behind the PNG format decided to use the .jpg extension instead, and then watching while every web browser and imaging application had to be rewritten to accommodate it. Barmy.

My photo is on the university home page. I'm on the 'Order a Prospectus' button.

Update: Oh, but it gets worse...

After spending probably an hour or two browsing through the iTunes Music Store, I'm still unable to find any songs in there that I actually want. I'm assuming this is because I tend to like music by the sorts of artists who are signed to independent labels, of which there isn't much of in the store. Which is a shame - although these labels are complaining that Apple didn't give them good enough terms, it's not really Apple that's put at a disadvantage, it's them. They're turning away people like me who are happy to buy their music and support their artists.

The more I browse the store, the more I like it. Being able to effortlessly preview songs before buying them is great, even if it has convinced me that no, I didn't really want to buy that song/album after all.

I was also impressed by the fact that it had all 5 albums by the German artist ATB in there. A club remix of ATB's first single "9PM (Till I Come)" was really big over here about 5 years ago, and a couple of other singles came out which were also remixed for the clubs. Unfortunately, ATB isn't really a club music artist - his albums are more like ambient electronica, so the albums never sold well and he lost his record deal after his second album. Since then, we've heard nothing from him over here, so to be able to buy the three other albums that were never released here is quite cool. ATB in fact has a whole artist section over there.

Still, I just wish there was more music that I like out there...

Yahoo decided to terminate my account last night. Not that I used it much but it was useful for Yahoo Messenger. Naturally no reason was given either. Inactivity might be one but then an account I used to have before that is still around and I haven't logged into that in years (it still says I'm 15 on my profile).

I'm annoyed but their terms of service gives them every right to do so. In any case, you can take 'sashworld' off your Yahoo contact lists. I hardly used it anyway so I don't see the point in signing up again. If you need to get in touch, I'm 149181635 on ICQ, totalxsiva on AOL and totalxsive @ jabber.org on Jabber.

Update: For the curious, here's a screenshot of the message you receive when your account has been terminated.

Today is National Badger Day. Badger badger badger...

I don't know if this proves anything, but:

Number of Google results for 'paris hilton nude': 660 000
Number of Google results for 'paris hilton fully-clothed': 2 890

And a quick fact: this is the fourth entry to mention 'paris hilton' on this site. And no, I don't like her that much. She seems somewhat devoid of any real facial expressions.

I was aware of the existence of white-supremecy sites like Stormfront and Redwatch, but now Ben has found hosting companies that deliberately discriminate against black people. Personally I refuse to link to these sites but if you're desperate you can follow Ben's links.

I find it shocking that such companies can exist, but then the first one mentioned looks distinctly dodgy. Even disregarding their racist customer policy, would you have your site hosted on a company with no postal contact address and on a domain registered through Domains by Proxy?

It's probable that they're based in Australia, in which case I hope that the Australian authorities clamp down on them. One claims that the internet was made by white people and shouldn't be used by 'lip-smaking jungle bunnies', but I seem to recollect that Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the world wide web, wanted it to be for everyone.

Ken Edwards, better known as the guy behind Breaking Windows, was interviewed for a Wired News article about how TechTV is going down the toliet since it was merged with gaming channel G4:

Ken Edwards, a 26-year-old database specialist at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, has been watching since ZDTV launched. He claims to own every current game console but only watched one show on the old G4. He tracks some of the backlash to the cancellation of Call for Help and the uncertainty over Laporte's future. Edwards and other are bemused but pleased that Laporte's show has been picked up by G4techTV Canada and may eventually reach the United States through syndication.

The network's firing of the 285 employees at TechTV in San Francisco also caused resentment, even though some of them can apply for jobs in Los Angeles, where G4techTV is based. "It didn't look good to people," said Edwards, who wrote about the merger for his blog. "A lot of times that can hurt you more than anything else."

Nice one Ken :).

I got featured on Slashdot and Neowin yesterday! The articles link to a screenshot of Firefox's main window that I put up as part of last week's review, and was probably why I had 1.33GB of transfer yesterday (as a guide, that's half of what I had in April as a whole). Referals from Neowin alone brought 7000 visitors.

I've taken the image down (or rather replaced it with a half kilobyte apology), since I don't want to lose my hosting. I'm allowed around 10GB/month and so far I've used 60% of that with only half of the month gone...

I checked my host's terms and conditions again - it's actually 30GB/month, so I'm actually alright. Phew!

My parents are going off to France in the early hours of Thursday morning, and so they've asked me to print off a route plan from York to the Channel Tunnel. They know the route but it helps to have some indication of how long it's going to take and how many miles we'll be covering.

I first tried Multimap's planning system, which gave me this route. Apart from suggesting the M1 instead of the A1, A14 and M11, it looks relatively simple, until you get towards Folkestone. Instead of telling us to veer off the M20 into the terminal, it tells us to go straight on into Dover. And then through Dover into the Eastern Docks. And then onto a ferry. For 4.7 miles.

So, according to Multimap, the Channel Tunnel is located 4.7 miles out to sea in the middle of the English Channel. Hmmmm.

incidentally typing in 'Channel Tunnel Terminal' gave something more sensible, but it still amused me.

Today was the big launch of the iTunes Music Store in the UK, France and Germany (though strangely not the rest of Europe - that comes in October).

I haven't had much of a chance to play around with it, but I'm impressed with what I have seen so far - certainly moreso than other services. Here's why:

Cost

All songs are 79p each, which is cheaper than Napster (99p, although you can download as many as you like for £9.99/month) and the same price as the cheapest songs on OD2 (but most are 99p). So, it does well on price. It's still more expensive than the US store, where the songs are 99 cents (99p is $1.44) but for once Apple is actually cheaper than its rivals. Furthermore, albums are typically priced at £7.99, which is cheaper than they would typically cost on CD from a shop. All major cards are accepted, including Switch and Solo which is the main reason why I don't use OD2.

Catalogue

Allegedly contains 700,000 songs, putting it at the same size as its rivals. It has deals with all of the big labels but according to the Guardian article it was unable to negotiate deals with many independent labels, so many of the artists on Wippit are not in iTMS. Let's hope they arrive in future.

DRM

While the songs are DRM-protected, Apple is quite liberal in what it allows you to do with the files. You can put them on your iPod (although the iPod is the only device supported) and burn them, and Steve Jobs made a point about Napster's £9.99/month subscription, saying that if you cancelled it, your files would become unplayable - iTMS has no subscription model so as long as you keep your licenses backed up you can play the files for as long as you like.

It's also the only store where all of the files will play back on a Mac as well as in Windows. Wippit is the only other service that offers Mac-compatible files, and that only includes selected songs which are available as MP3s and opposed to WMAs.

Store environment

As you know, iTMS integrates into iTunes, which quite a lot of people have already downloaded. Certainly, everyone who owns an iPod will have it, along with many who don't but who like to have a classy jukebox program, so there's an instant audience. The store is fast and easy to use too.

Finally, AOL Europe intends to link their AOL Music channel into the iTMS, like in the US, and will allow users to buy music under their AOL screennames (from this Register article). No news yet of a tie-in with Pepsi yet though.

This is all old news for Americans, but surprisingly, even though Apple is quite late to the market, this store is the best I've seen so far. You'd have thought by now that its opponents would have taken a hint...

Remember this post from last month? Some dude posted his disatisfaction at my decision to support TypeKey here, saying that this would be the last time he would comment. Except that it was also the first time...

Well, turns out that the same guy has been trolling Jay Allen - the IP address and hostname were exactly the same. Looks like it's some bored University of California student who really needs a better hobby.

I've hit the big 500! Today I submitted my 500th work unit, 7 months after I hit 250. Which is better than the 23 months that it took me to do the first 250, but then that's probably down to this computer being more than 3 times faster at processing units than my last machine.

In any case, now I've got another certificate :) .

The Register is speculating that the iTunes Music Store will launch in Europe next week. A 'major announcement' is expected on Tuesday 15th June - whether this is the actual launch or something else remains to be seen. It's certainly long overdue - iTMS went live in the US over a year ago and there are a lot of people in Europe (myself included) who are waiting with interest. It's also possible that the iPod Mini will be launched in Europe that day too.

The Register also mentions that Napster has added 200 000 more songs to its catalogue, taking it up to 700 000 and making it by far the largest online music store currently available in this country. It's possible that the increase is linked to Apple's arrival here, along with the launch of Sony's Connect service which is also on the way soon.

Thanks to a change in my host's packages, I now have 2GB of space instead of 1.

Now, to think of some way to fill it...

NBC6.net has a really daft browser sniffer. Visit in IE, and the page appears as normal. Visit it in Firefox and you get a page from March.

It's more evident in Opera - if you have it set to identify as Opera you get the old version, but set it to identify as Internet Explorer and you get the normal version. The designs appear to be identical, so I can't really think of a reason for this.

[Via Mozillazine Forums]

AWStats, as well as listing user agents it recognises, has a list of those that it doesn't recognise. Most of these are miscellaneous robots (including all manner of aggregation tools), but some are rather more odd. Here's a few that I've had:

DumbBot

Appears to be the crawler for DumbFind.com, a search engine that isn't running yet.

rawdog

The nicely named RSS Aggregator Without Delusions of Grandeur, which a Python-based aggregator.

Firefox_0.8.0__(CP/M;_8-bit)

Not quite sure what to make of that. Firefox running on CP/M?

JpifsbxrjuuucJsmahqexxJgt5

Looks like something just burped on my web server.

Thunderbird_1.0_!!!__Go_Scott_!!!

I'm assuming that's something to do with an RSS add-in for Thunderbird.

SpaceBison/0.01_[fu]_(Win67;_X;_ShonenKnife)

I'm guessing that's someone messing around with FireSomething. I think.

Unknown_(Unknown;_Unknown;_Unknown)

I think I get the idea...

Any_Browser_(compatible;)

That's specific.

User_agent_strings_cannot_be_trusted!

Evidently.

Donald_Duck

Now you're taking the piss.

Six Apart have sent out the email they promised last week about discounts for people who have donated money to the development of MT in the past. I now get a 50% discount, bringing the cost of Personal Edition down to £20 for 5 authors and 5 weblogs. I'm tempted.

Since I primarily use Windows (begrudgingly), I'm a member of the Microsoft Windows group at Orkut. This message was posted to all members of the community:

i sent a message to - linux community
telling them how
linux SUCKS
and
Microsoft Rules
cause
that's all i got to use ,
my machine is microscopic, and i felt to share that with everyone,
Have a great day or night !

Right. That was wise, wasn't it? An OS sucks because I'm not in a position to be able to use it? Hmmm.

I'd love to see the flames piling up in that guy's email box.

Note: This guy does not represent my own opinion. I like Linux. I just wanted to point out this guy's stupidity.

Cory Doctorow has a rant about Googlebombing over at BoingBoing, and in doing so echoes what I said in April. There's a Wired News article about the recent "waffles" bomb and how the John Kerry campaign has now bought AdWords on that keyword, inviting people to read about Dubya's 'waffles'.

I still say it's silly and tired. Let's give it up before Google gets bombed into irrelevance.

Chris is having an IE problem, which looks like it's a regression from a recent IE patch that causes small GIF images to disappear, or something. I haven't used IE enough lately to be able to experience this myself.

Naturally, the post has attracted comments encouraging a switch to Firefox, but one anonymous comment was on the lines of:

Nobody uses Microsoft anymore. Get yourself a Mac or use Linux.

Riiiight. At least 95% of computers in the world use Windows. I wouldn't exactly call that "nobody".

As I keep casually hinting, it's my birthday next week, and so here's my Amazon wishlist. There's a variety of things on there with a range of prices (cheapest is £5.56). While I hate to beg, I'd be really appreciative if I wake up to find one of those items waiting for me.

Meanwhile, my MT3D review is doing pretty well - 12 hours after posting and it has 4 comments and 8 trackback pings, including pings from Anil Dash's Daily Links and Geek News Central. Something tells me that entry is going to generate a wee bit of traffic, but keep the pings coming :) .

Napster has launched its UK site today, somewhat ahead of schedule - the original date was "late summer". Its catalogue boasts 500 000 songs with another 200 000 on the way, making it as large, or larger, than iTMS, which still hasn't launched in the UK yet.

There's a 7-day free trial of the service, too, although you still have to enter billing details and if you do not cancel your membership within that time you will be charged £10 for a month's membership, which lets you download unlimited tracks without paying extra. However, you do have to pay extra (£1.09) to be able to burn them to CD or transfer them to a portable device. Alternatively, there's a non-subscription service where all files cost £1.09, which permits CD burning. Pricewise, this makes it more expensive than OD2 based services, like MyCokeMusic.com which I reviewed last week, however it looks like Napster has more songs available.

The other big difference between this and MyCokeMusic (et al) is that Napster requires you to install the Napster application, which is a 11MB download. This is too big in my opinion. I'm guessing most of the size comes from its CD burning facility, and seeing as Napster is owned by Roxio I imagine this won't be an optional feature, even though it'd be nice if it could be made optional so that those of us without CD burners wouldn't need to download it.

How the store actually works I can't tell you. I tried to enter my billing information, but I was told that I needed to enter my "18 digit card number". I was using Switch, which, like every other credit card, uses 16 digits, which it wouldn't accept. So, I couldn't register. On the plus side, at least Napster attempts to accept Switch, Solo and Amex - MyCokeMusic only takes Visa and Mastercard. Which is stupid because many students, like me, don't have credit cards (because we're told they're evil and will only get us into more debt), and we're exactly the market that the music industry wants to target with these systems. But then, when did the music industry ever have a clue?

I also can't tell you whether the files play outside of the Napster application. I sincerely hope they do, and seeing as Windows Media Player is a requirement I'll assume this is the case.

Normally I complain about Googlebombs, since in my opinion they undermine the usefulness of search engines. But when the Googlebomb is for nigritude ultramarine, I don't think it's a particularly big problem.

It's part of an SEO competition to get your site to the top of the results for 'nigritude ultramarine'. Some people have been taking it far too seriously, including buying domains with the words in it. Personally, I'd never do such a thing. Even a distinguish blogger wouldn't stoop to the level of pimping people to link to his Nigritude Ultramarine page.

Via LordRich.

With Windows XP SP2 being delayed until the autumn, I have decided to encourage visitors to this site to consider switching away from IE and moving to a better browser. Now, if you use IE and pull up the home page, you'll see the message below:

Upgrade your browser!

You're using Internet Explorer, which lacks features that many modern browsers have, such as

• Blocking annoying pop-up ads
• Tabbed browsing
• Protection from adware and spyware
• Support for the latest web standards

Try Mozilla Firefox, Opera or Safari and see what you're missing!

It's shown using JavaScript (so it only annoys IE users), and if you want to add it to your own site, download this file and paste it on to your site. Modify it as you wish. Let's get together and encourage people to adopt better browsers.

Hanni invited me to Breedster a couple of weeks back. It's interesting, but recently I've ended up as being some kind of rent boy, since random users have been breeding with me quite a bit.

So, as a result, I've got around 4 or 5 invites spare due to all these eggs being produced. If you want one, just let me know.

Scratch that. Apparently, A sexually transmitted virus has affected your reproductive system; all eggs are infertile.. I've cancelled my account.

Update: There's an interesting analysis of Breedster here, found via Waxy's Links.

This time last year there was a big hoo-hah about a bug in all versions of IE which meant that any web page that included the line of code <input type crash> would crash the browser (here's a test page and a post from Mark Pilgrim about it).

Well, it appears that one year on MS have actually fixed the bug - I tried it in IE6 SP2 and it worked okay. I don't have SP1 to hand so I can't verify it on a pre-SP2 system.

Guys, I need your help. I want to buy something that costs £24.99 on Amazon, but don't want to pay for next day delivery, which is £2.75. If I spend £25, I get free super-saver delivery, so, what I'm asking is:

Do you guys know anything on Amazon UK that is less than £2.75?

I'm not bothered what it is precisely, although it'd be nice if it was something useful. The cheaper the better, too. Thanks for anyone who can help.

This has to be a departure for me, as I've just issued an update to the IcyBlue template (which this site uses) that attaches 3 extra stylesheets, allowing you to select your own colour schemes. So, now you're no longer stuck with blue, a colour I've been using here for the best part of 9 months now. I've seen a few sites that have started using this new template and while I'm flattered, it starts to get a bit boring after seeing yet another site looking exactly the same. So, there are now a total of 4 colour schemes available, with the possibility of more should I ever get around to it.

Sorry for the lack of updates around here, but I'm incredibly busy at the moment. I had a very long and difficult assignment in today, along with a rather large programming assignment and another piece of coursework in tomorrow, so I've been working my little socks off lately. Coupled with the multitude of meetings I've had to attend this week (my sixth is tonight), and you see why I haven't had time to post anything.

This is broken is quite a cool weblog that updates every day with a story about something that has a bad user experience, whether it be a computer or in real life. Today's post about Amazon's personalised emails made me chuckle though. Someone bought a CD by 'Various Artists', so Amazon has now recommended another completely different CD, also by 'Various Artists'. Hmmm, whoops.

In any case, it's well worth subscribing to the RSS feed of that site.

Frank has a really interesting post about emmigrating to Canada after living in the UK for 23 years, and the differences between the two countries. There's some good points (the locals are nicer, the transport is better, the scenery is great) and some bad (mobile phones, sales tax, the weather). It makes very interesting reading.

I guess that puts Canada on my list of 'countries to visit when I have the money and inclination'. Germany, Ireland, USA and The Netherlands are the other big countries I want to visit at some point.

Google has officially responded to the complaints about a search for "Jew" returning an anti-semitic web site as the first result (see also this New York Times article, registration required).

I think Google have handled this as best as they could - 'fixing' the results manually would only have attracted more criticism from the other side of the debate, whereas providing an explanation (which is linked at the top of the search like Adwords used to be) will at least bring some kind of compromise. And in any case, they rightly point out that anyone searching for information about Jews would be more likely to search for Judiasm which returns plenty of informational sites.

The point is, this site is doing nothing wrong in the legal sense. I'm sure Jews wouldn't like the site, but I imagine it counts as freedom of speech. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, no matter how misguided it is (Robert Kilroy-Silk, I'm talking to you here).

From the guy who brought you the Church Sign Generator (see my effort), comes George Says... - choose a pose for old Georgy Dubya Bush, give him a background, and then type in some text for him to say. It fits nicely with the Bush background Generator.

Credit goes to Les, who brutally stole it from Brook's Blog.

Go to this page and click on the link, and then see where you end up. In Firefox, you end up at the page shown in the status bar, as you'd expect, but in IE, you don't.

The reason is that the link isn't just a link - it's a styled button with a link wrapped around it. The link points to a file called 'success.html', but the button submits a form to 'failed.html'. Firefox treats the button as a link but IE treats the button as some kind of link/button hybrid. The status bar shows where the link points to, but when you click the button, which I've disguised using CSS to look like a link, it goes to the form output. Therefore, an unsuspecting user could think they're clicking on a link to one site (say, paypal.com) but actually going to another (dodgysite.com).

The reason why I'm concerned about this is that an example is in the wild. A variant of the Terrakt in Australia trojan-thingy used this to trick me into going to aicworld.info instead of antivirus.com (or rather it would if Thunderbird hadn't marked the message as spam and had therefore santised the HTML, thus removing all form elements).

I only have IE, Mozilla and Firefox on here so I can't test other browsers, but I'd be interested to see how other browsers treated this.

Added: I downloaded Opera 7.23, and it failed the test, however the button appeared more like a button than a normal link and didn't show any URL in the status bar. Lynx would show the button but say that the document had hidden links.

Update: Codefish have a write up about the variant of the trojan which exploits this flaw. As Jeff posted, it looks like Microsoft are aware of the problem.

I've never really used BitTorrent to download files - today was my first time. That said, I'm impressed by it. I downloaded the latest beta of foobar2000 this way, and, in my experience at least, it was almost no slower than it would have been downloading from a normal web server - throughput was around 80% of my connection speed (256Kbps). More importantly, all I was downloading from the foobar2000 server was one small .torrent file, so I've saved on that server's bandwidth usage.

No wonder it's starting to become popular.

I think MSN is having problems again, since I've had 18 new comments posted to the MSN Typo article in the past 3 hours, all from people who cannot connect to the MSN Messenger service. No word from Microsoft about the problem though.

I'm connected to the network okay via Trillian but I have a feeling that it is affected too since the status window didn't show the contacts being retrieved at signon, however Trillian stores the contact list locally so the only effect of this is that fewer people appear to be online. It also looks like some accounts are affected and others are not.

Browsing through Scrapie's FTP folder I found the really old version of the site which was in use until March 2003 (although it hadn't been updated since around September 2001). With a bit of PHP techno-wizardry, I was able to knock up an import script for MT. So, now we have archives going back to September 2000 :).

Unfortunately the entries have some rather ugly markup in them, and also need categorising, so I'll have to go through them individually and then publish them properly. But it means that students with a desire for old news won't have to rely on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine for old content.

Although I'm on my Easter break now, and therefore have no lectures/labs/tutorials/meetings/whatever, the next couple of days is going to be a little busy for me. After nosying around the magazine's computers, I realised that digital copies of most of the past issues exist on one computer's hard disk. They're not on the web site, nor are they even on the student union's network drives. Obviously they were printed but old issues are hard to come by.

This, to me, seemed silly. A free magazine aimed at 10,000 students, yet anything older than a year is only within reach of around 10 people?

You can probably guess what I'm doing now, but if you can't, I'm going through various past issues and adding them to the site. I've done three issues, and have another two to do, and then all issues since September 2002 will be on there. With a bit of luck I'll be able to take that back to September 2001 - anything older than that, however, may be a little more difficult, but we shall see. As I've read through the articles while copying and pasting them into the CMS, I've found some really interesting content in there that, despite being published up to 18 months ago, is still interesting and relevant. It may make particularly interesting reading for this year's freshers, who will probably have never had chance to read any of this stuff.

Naturally, having the content on the web site makes it searchable too, which means that if you remember seeing an article and want to refer to it, but can't remember which issue it was in, all you have to do is tap in a few search terms and Bob's your uncle.

My host currently offers several stats packages - Webalizer, Analog, AWStats and Urchin, which is nice, but having all 3 generate reports (particularly on a somewhat high traffic site like this one) naturally means that they take up a lot of disk space. Fortunately, a new feature added today means that I can delete the excess files. While AWstats and Webalizer were under the 10MB mark, Analog, which I never use anyway, had eaten up nearly 50MB of space in just 3 months. So naturally I deleted it's log files.

As a guide, all the files for this site take up 44MB on the server. So I just halved my disk space usage on one swoop. It's not like disk space is a problem, since I have oodles, but if I ever decide to stick something big on here at least I'll have more room to do so. Especially as by the end of the year Analog will have probably claimed 20% of my total disk space.

Considering it's only a national holiday in a country with just under 4 million people (around 15 times less than the UK and 70 times less than the US), St Patrick's Day seems to be pretty popular around the world - I'm off to a St Patrick's night party-type-thing tonight at the student union tonight. It's about the one time each year that I drink Guinness, mainly because it's not the cheapest bear around but also because it's not proper Guinness, just a cheap imitation brewed in this country. The real Irish stuff is much nicer.

It's also been pretty popular around the net - I stuck a four-leaf clover in the banner today after seeing it on newrecruit but El Reg has also followed suit. Naturally Google has also taken on the Irish spirit, though only on its UK and Ireland portals (St Patrick's Day is also a public holiday in Northern Ireland, which is a UK state).