Monthly Archives: February 2006

Members Only

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I can’t be bothered with dealing with spam comments, so as of tomorrow the blog’s gonna go members only to comment
I’m not gonna put restrictions on who can register, and if I need to upgrade your membership to allow gravatars i’m willing to do that
I haven’t been flooded with spam since the blog isn’t that active, though it did have a period where the moderation was picking up posts every day advertising sites selling Viagra and all the usual junk, but i traced that back to my Custom 404 page which had a link back to the blog. Soon fixed that and linked it back to the main page.
All was fine till today when i got three comments from two different IPs (one from the Netherlands the other in the US) with the same URL and email address – moderator picked them up.
Sorry if they were legitimate comments but they looked like spam to me so when the moderator picked them up – i deleted them

I’ve enabled registration by anyone, and as of tomorrow i’m gonna make registration compulsory to post a comment.
If you have any difficulty joining drop me an email with your login and password and i can create it for you. You should be able to change the password if you want to give me one that you don’t normally use so that you can change it to one you’ll remember (hope that makes sense)

So yeah, as of tomorrow sometime (when I remember) i’m gonna stop guest posting completely – of course you can register now and be prepared – there’s nothing stopping you

Sorry for any inconvenience but i don’t want to have to be dealing with spam on here

The UK justice system has gone mad

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Two stories for you
The first is a sad story about a three year old girl who was killed by a joyrider. The “killer” was caught but the sentence is appalling

Driver Mohammed Hussain, 26, admitted careless driving, having no licence or insurance, failing to stop and failing to report an accident…In addition to the driving offences, Hussain admitted handling stolen goods when he appeared at Burnley Magistrates’ Court on Friday. It emerged he was out of prison on parole after being convicted of wounding in 2001…

What do you think from that that the sentence was? Years right? Well this is what he got:

He was sentenced to four weeks for the handling charge and 12 weeks each for the fail to stop and fail to report charges, to run concurrently. He was also banned from driving for five years.

Apparently they couldn’t charge him for death by dangerous driving because they couldn’t prove that his driving was dangerous and “Careless driving is an offence which does not carry a jail sentence”

Shocking! He’s killed a human being and the only offence he apparently committed was not stopping and reporting the incident – exquease me? Baking soda?

From the sublime to the ridiculous we head to Dudley in the West Midlands where a man has been charged with Actual Bodily harm for Cutting his girlfriend’s Ponytail off

Man, 21, admits ponytail attack
A Dudley man who was cleared of assault after chopping off his former girlfriend’s ponytail has pleaded guilty to causing actual bodily harm.

Apparently the reasoning behind this is that your hair is considered to be part of the body and therefore by cutting it off he was causing actual bodily harm!
I’m lost for words – the UK justice system has gone to the dogs

Let us consult wikipedia on Actual Bodily Harm

Actual Bodily Harm (often abbreviated to ABH) is a type of criminal assault defined under English law. It encompasses those assaults which result in injuries, typically requiring a degree of medical treatment of the victim. The offence is defined in s47 Offences Against The Person Act 1861 and it is a hybrid offence, i.e. it can be tried in either the Magistrates’ Court or Crown Court. There is a maximum sentence of 5 years imprisonment (or 7 years if it is racially motivated).

So get this, the driver who kills a small girl while driving a car which is not his, with no license or insurance gets 16 weeks (it’s not clear if he got 12 weeks for each offence of failing to stop and the other of failing to report the incident but it doesn’t make much of a difference) while a disgruntled boyfriend could potentially get 5 years for cutting his girlfriends hair off – anyone see a problem here?

Magistrates courts – whatever next!

U-19 World Cup

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Sunday is going to be the under 19 world cup final of the cricket world cup
It will be between India and Pakistan – in the quarter finals, India beat England convincingly on Wednesday and on Friday Pakistan beat Australia
Australia, England, Pakistan and India are arguably the top 4 countries so it is only fitting that they are the four countries to make the semi finals
It is even more interesting that it will be an India vs Pakistan final – the two countries that were previously one that have become such huge rivals to the point where they could not even play each other in their own countries

On initial inspection, Pakistan appear to have the better bowling attack, while India appear to have more in the batting lineup. That has been what India and Pakistan have had as their advantages in the past, but as always there is scope for variation.

These are the players of the future, maybe not of the next year, maybe not two years but perhaps in 5 years time – some may have a big part to play in world cups of the future. I for one will be watching the U-19 Final on Sunday and looking forward to how they progress.

Bots

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I was piddling around with my webspace today setting things up and looking up the analogue stats
One of the things they have on there is an analysis of User agents of browsers that are visiting your site, and i noticed that all the search bots from search engines have a unique user agent to describe themselves.
From this i was amazed how many there are these days as i scrolled through the list and here is what i found:
Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us
Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

Check them out, there’s MSN’s msnbot, the googlebot, Yahoo’s Slurp bot – what a name!, Ask Jeave’s teoma bot – it means expert in gaelic. There’s some Japanese bot called the baidu spider and even sites like picsearch have their own PS Bot

So let’s take a step back now, these are all the bots that are properly registered and being recorded for a large portion of the internet. Call me suspicious, but what about those bots that well, aren’t quite so well known and have a very specific mission of what to keep an eye on. I don’t know how many people keep an eye on their stats – i’m generally lazy, but i am interested in who’s getting to my site and from where. The majority come from google, resex, serafin message board and more recently the techsurvivors’ forum, which is a little odd since i haven’t been posting there for a while.

One more thing – i noticed that someone accessed my site through a Symbian OS – that means someone saw my site through their mobile phone – how bizarre

Ups and downs of the last 24 hours

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I don’t really know what to call this entry because it’s really just a summary of the past 24 hours – i’ll come up with a title at the end
Saw my fave band last night Serafin for their first gig in about 2 years. They’re struggling with the mixing of their second album at the moment, as well as having problems with label since Warner Music bought Taste Media.
But it was really good to see them live again, even with all the problems and they’re great guys – if i hadn’t been working would probably have gone out late with them

Fast forward to this morning a little bit tired having not got to sleep till 1am and running late, despite knowing that I was low on petrol. On my route to work I’m driving along and see the most humongous mile long traffic jam on the dual carriageway. Fortunately it turned out to be just a van that had broken down in an inconvenient place. The petrol gauge was pretty much on the zero line, and i kept debating whether or not to stop for petrol since i was going to be late anyway. I decided i would risk it and fill up on the way back. I thought that that would be that but five minutes away from work a cyclist jumped the lights and i have to slam on my brakes stopping inches away from them brakes squealing. At that point i really felt maybe i should just turn around, go home and go back to sleep. Surprisingly was only 15 mins late and no one noticed cos my manager wasn’t working and everyone else was in meetings! Decided i needed a lazy day at the office and spent much of the day messing around on the internet chatting about yesterday’s gig and trying to find loopholes in the computer system at work’s network for no particular reason!

But back to last night, the drummer from Serafin wants me to design a website for their side project French Car and the Bulimic Wizards. Currently, I am hosting their three albums on my webspace but it’s just there to let people know about the band’s stuff. It’s not a proper site or anything. Designing web pages is something i’ve done for a long time, but i have mostly done sites for me except for a couple i did years ago one for a friend of a friend’s business which isn’t there anymore cos i think he forgot to renew his web host or something. The other was for a company my dad was working for. That design has also gone after they contracted it out to a professional company (rather than me doing it in my spare time in between exams at uni!). But my point is that it feels really weird to do this as a project for a friend aswell as for money and I haven’t got the foggiest what to charge even ignoring the fact that it’s for a friend. I’ll have to do some research on hosting & domain name companies as to which are the best to go with and then i’ll have to see whether or not i have the software to make what he’ll ask me to create. My sites are simple clean, reasonably W3C compliant and easy to maintain. But maybe that’s what he’s looking for – we’ll have to wait and see!

Explaining the Difference between MacOS and Windows

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I was pottering through google on my day off today trying to find the solution to a problem where the minimize button would disappear on my mac. I posted it on ResEx forums as i usually do, but thought i’d see if i could find anything on google

Anyway, as always happens when you’re opening links all over the place from google, you stumble on something else which interests you. It doesn’t actually help you with what you were looking for but has turned up because some of the words you’d put into google are on this page too and you are compelled to have a read.

What it was was a Mac Switcher who was asked to explain the difference between using a Mac and a PC after buying a MacMini.
Or as the author puts it:

I wrote this when someone in a reply to my journal asked me to tell them about the mac. I figured it was long and well-punctuated enough to merit usefulness to others. I’m too lazy to fidn the best place on the internet so I’ll put it in this forum and hope no one minds.

Before I get completely distracted again here’s the article Forum: For Those Considering A Mac

I’m always interested in how people would describe the differences, because I’ve been a Mac user for the best part of 15 years, but at the same time had a Windows computer in the house/work/school/uni. Growing up I learnt on BBC Micros learning to program in Basic and playing games as you do when you’re 7-10 years old! Then we got a Amstrad 1640 which apparently had a 68086 intel processor though i thought it was a 286 *shrugs* – it had DOS and something called GEM Desktop as opposed to one of the early versions of Windows. I got a Mac LC II a few years later having used a Mac at school, and my dad bought a Packard Bell 486DX2/66 to replace the Amstrad which nobody ever really liked. I got a Performa 6200 with a 603e processor, and the 486 got replaced with a Pentium 2 laptop. My brother needed a computer, so he got a HP desktop with an AMD Athlon on my recommendation of what he would find most useful. My last (and current) mac was a Powermac G4 450 which is coming to it’s last legs in terms of performance, but still running perfectly well. My mum got a Windows laptop from work, and every office i’ve worked in has had Windows computers. At Uni i used windows, but also DEC Alpha unix machines (which i used to use for transferring files to and from uni as they were essentially ftp servers and accessible off campus) and SGI’s running IRIX. I’ve also got a FreeBSD server at home which i don’t have nearly enough time to play with and took what seems like forever to install. It originally had a Smoothwall Firewall & NAT Gateway which we used in my old uni house to share our internet access – at the time it was cheaper to buy a cheap PC (2nd hand didn’t need to be good and only needed to last a year) and install Smoothwall (which was free) than buying a router.

Anyway, back on topic…
The author is very complimentary about Mac OS X, and is clearly using OS X 10.4 Tiger since he talks about Spotlight. I like the way he talks about things i wouldn’t think twice about like the close, minimize and zoom buttons:

Instead of Minimize Maximize Close buttons on top left, Mac OS X has Red (close) Yellow (minimize) Green (fit window to content, which is sometimes like maximize); and these circle buttons are on the top left.

I would just say the buttons you’re used to in windows on your PC are on the left of the window instead of the right on a mac, a slightly different order and largely do the same thing.

I like the analogy of saying that the taskbar in OSX is at the top of the screen as i know that when i’ve wanted windows to look more like a mac i move the taskbar to the top. I think the description of Windows’ “My Documents” folder is spot on:

There is a My Documents like area of the hard drive and it functions much the same way as in Windows (except that Mac OS X will always let you go up a folder and end up where you should, unlike Windows’ My Documents which sometimes seems located in two places)

For those who don’t use Windows much My Documents appears as both a folder/alias/shortcut/something alien. Because it has an icon on the desktop that is created automatically which is not a windows shortcut file, and displays as such in the location bar. But what it is actually showing you is the contents of
C:\Documents and Settings\Username\My Documents\
If you choose to go up a level when viewing it from this icon on the desktop it takes you to the desktop
If you go up a level when viewing from the actual location it takes you to C:\Documents and Settings\Username\ which is very confusing, and if like me you forget this you want to tear the thing to pieces.

The other comment that is spot on and really well expressed is on installed apps where windows chucks stuff all over the place, but Mac OS X is different:

the entirety of most programs is all packed into one seemingly indivisible icon of beauty – un-installation requires only that you drag the icon to the trash bin (recycle bin). You can of course choose to explore inside the program’s icon and get to the nitty gritty if you feel the urge

I like that expression a lot!

The other thing I like is the comments on constant state of refresh:

Mac OS X is in a constant state of seamless refresh. Whereas in Windows you may need to exit a folder and come back to see a change, or refresh the desktop for some reason, Mac OS X has no need for such things. Something happens, you see the results everywhere, instantly – how it should be.

I only really became aware of this when i had internet access on a windows computer. The reason i noticed it then is because every version of the Mac OS right the way back to System 7 has had the feature described above and I found it very odd when downloading files on windows. In the Mac OS, the instant you start downloading a file it creates it and you can see it in the download location. Windows doesn’t do that, it downloads the file to the temporary internet files and doesn’t show it to you until it’s finished and then moves it to the download location.

I’m surprised the article doesn’t say anything about icons lining up on the right instead of the left because that’s the first thing that hits me when i switch between the two, and has quite an effect on desktop pictures. Also surprised there’s no mention of Exposé yet he talks about X11! I still play with Exposé while waiting for saft to load all my saved browser windows up in Safari, and i’ve had 10.4 for nearly a year – still can’t get over how amazing it is. Dashboard isn’t as much fun to play with as it’s not as quick as playing with the windows!

I’m a big fan of understanding things from doing them, so i would find it very difficult to explain to someone why I prefer the Mac OS without actually showing it to them. But anyway, i think i’ve quoted enough of the article and you won’t read the actual one if i quote any more.

Completely unrelated, MacHeadCase told me about a thread on TechSurvivors’ forum talking about an anonymous surfing add on called Tor – link is to the OSX instructions but it also works on Windows, and various Linux & BSD distros. It uses something called Privoxy but all packaged in a nice friendly installation.
I installed it, set it up, and it’s far too slow to be acceptable so i switched it off – will probably keep it installed in case i have a need for it but I wouldn’t recommend it
It’s a clever idea, and it’s all explained on the Tor: Overview site, and allocated me an IP address somewhere on a virtual server in Amsterdam. Mighty impressive, but the speed hit outweighs the benefits of having that anonymity when i go to sites.

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* Edited to fix one of the links – missed out a quotation mark!

Stating the Obvious: *Caution Rant*

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This is a bit of a rant, so just to give you some advanced warning

My latest gripe is one that i’ve become increasingly annoyed about and is pushed on us more and more
News/Polls that state the obvious, but try and make out that it’s something that’s new/shocking/amazing.
What’s got up my nose to make me want to rant about it? The headline from yesterday’s newspaper that we get at home Blair-Bush deal before Iraq war revealed in secret memo
My first comment on seeing it was “No Shit!”
Ok, so the story is about some memo from January 2003 which has made it’s way to the papers, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg which joins surveys that essentially say things like “Drinking beer will make you drunk”, and “Taking drugs will make you stoned” but wrapped up in a pretty wrapper pertaining to be breaking news stories. In fact what they are are a waste of money and peoples’ time. Someone is being paid to do pointless research when there is plenty of research which can be done to be beneficial to the human race
On top of this there is so much information out there and so many statistics & market research being done that often by the time you get to the core of the article there’s so much information overload that it can be hard to summarise what it’s saying.
These days i’m very much against beating around the bush before getting to the point. I can’t stand it when people spend 10 minutes asking something which could’ve been said in less than 1 – i just don’t see the point of saying things that aren’t necessary or over complicating things.

I’d like to give more actual examples of these kind of stories, but… wait, i’ve found another one in the same newspaper:

Lack of Stroke awareness puts victims at risk
This is not news in my opinion.
Check out the percentages from some survey – they report that 33% would suggest the person lies down, and 12% would wait to see if symptoms worsened. So, what did the other 55% say? Have a pint of beer? Or did they actually say call an ambulance? If that’s the case, it’s not really big news. It would all depend on who they asked (particularly age & profession). The article also says that 22% of people did not recognise the symptoms – i’m not particularly surprised at this and would suspect it was higher for those of my age range. But what it does try and imply is that not recognising the symptoms would mean you wouldn’t call an ambulance quickly if you saw them. It is also implying that the 22% and 45% are related and plucks this magical figure of 25000 lives being saved – when in fact they are two separate questions – so there’s almost certainly a bit of bad maths in there.

What really amazes me is that these are stories from a respected newspaper – makes me wonder what kind of drivel the more common papers like The Sun or The Daily Mail are printing

But back to my original point of stating the obvious – i do find it very irritating, and although the examples in this thread arent particularly good, it does show at times how little thought goes into newspapers before they put ink to paper