Myspace

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Myspace was launched in April 1999 and was one of many sites such as friendster, livejournal, bebo, orkut, faceparty, friendsreunited to name a few which attempt to be internet social networking sites.
MySpace is apparently number 4 in the top 500 sites according to Alexa (after Yahoo, MSN and Google).
There’s an interesting one at number 45: 72.14.203.104
Which is the IP address for google

Anyway, back to Myspace. The original site was then sold to Tom Anderson, the founder of 2003’s Myspace and a group of programmers and at some point in the next year it became huge. This was further exemplified when a British band, the Arctic Monkeys reached the number 1 spot in the singles chart without being signed to a record label – their fans created a myspace site to share their music in around 2003-4

Myspace was part bought by Intermix Media inc which was acquired in 2005 by Fox Broadcasting (Rupert Murdoch’s Company)
Where am I going with this? There’s nothing new here and you can find all this out with a google search or on wikipedia
– This is just the preamble

I created a profile in December 2005 ish, i think but did nothing with it. Around February next year people started asking me whether i had a myspace because everyone has one. I said something to the effect of “yes, but i don’t really use it”. What happens? they find me and add me as a friend, so now i have to put something up. I quickly add some basic info and kind of get into how it works, but it’s rubbish!
It’s a blog, info, dating, comment leaving, music sharing mish mash of web space. And it does none of it properly!
If you want a blog, use proper blog software such as wordpress or moveable type which you can install on a proper webhost. You can change the php, add themes, maintain the sql database from your webhost, ftp files etc…
What has myspace got? a profile where you can append a bit of inline css in the profile. This does allow you to change the page design, but it’s a nightmare and not very intuitive. Is myscpace W3C compliant? Let’s find out… surprise surprise, even the front page has 103 errors. I put the url from my myspace and it had 255 errors including the classic no doctype found which is very lazy programming. Nice one myspace, get everyone producing non-compliant pages as per W3C on the internet – as if there wasn’t enough out there already.

You can edit the blog entries when you’re logged in but you can’t have anywhere near the control of a proper blog. You can’t add plugins, or customise things.
If there’s a link on the page there is no way you can change where it goes to or remove it (eg I can’t link the blog on myspace to this one), and it has lovely ad banners all over the place which you have no control of. It’s all coded into the core part of the page which everyone has to have.
The dating aspect of it is just an added encouragement for the are wannabe porn stars and models trying to get some money out of you

The music concept is slightly more interesting, but only if you set up a band page. A regular profile doesn’t let you upload files, and you can only have music files from another myspace band profile. The band profiles are quite good in terms of being able to promote themselves and getting your music heard. You can choose whether to have the files as streaming or downloadable or both.

Bulletins are a feature where people send something to everyone in their myspace friends list, but the only way you can view it is to go into your members area where a tiny box showing the last 5 broadcasts will appear. It will not email you to say that someone has broadcast something. In contrast to invitations which will email you but are also difficult to find if you don’t click the link. It would be quite possible not to know that you have received bulletins unless you looked for them

There’s the overall bit that I can’t stand – the horrific use of shockwave – every page uses far too many shockwave elements that slows things down to a crawl – i find it intolerable.
The site has never managed to remember my username and password despite me telling both keychain and clicked the remember password every time i’ve logged in. It will not let you view parts of other myspace sites unless you’re logged in, and when you do enter your details it takes you back to the main home page. If you have multiple tabs open with myspace sites in each, and then login on one it will not make you logged in on the others when you click links – the logged in status is only valid for that tab/window which is ridiculous and suggests serious problems with the cookie system.

Having said all that the thing that annoys me most is the comments feature. Most of the people i have on my friends are people i know in the real world. They mostly have my email address, aim screenname, msn name, mobile number, some have my home number and possibly my work number. But how do they choose to contact me usually involving a question? By leaving a comment on my myspace – this is stupid on more than one level. Firstly it is unreliable about whether i will get an email telling me that someone has commented and even then i may or may not want to put myself through the pain of looking at my profile to read the message (as unlike wordpress the notification will not contain any portion of the message). Next, comments are a bit like a mix between a forum and a guestbook with a twist…. you can’t add comments on your own myspace!
So what people tend to do is reply to that comment on the person who posted it’s myspace. This makes it doubly ridiculous for someone else reading a comments section, as it will make no sense. Each comment will be a potential continuation of a comment on another myspace so has no flow and serves little purpose after it’s been read.
Some are learning that I don’t like using myspace for communicating, but not everyone

I’m not the only person to think there’s problems with myspace:
myspace sucks and so do you according to Katie McIntyre & Casey Primeau

I haven’t factored in any of the hotlinking problems some websites are having due to the increased bandwidth. This is a direct consequence of myspace not letting users host files on their space so everyone hotlinks.

There’s the more sinister side where myspace ruins lives as it is a honeypot for pedophiles and child molesters around the world

It is a bit reminiscent of Microsoft – the most popular site for social networking and it’s horrible – most users doesn’t mean best.
40 million people using it so it’s gotta be good! right?
Approximately 90% of computer users run Microsoft Windows and a large chunk of them probably think it’s the best operating system to use or have never used anything else so it’s gotta be the best, right?

In conclusion – myspace waste of space – some of the ideas of it are good, but the execution is poor

Musketeer Formation

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Today is crunch day for England in the world cup
It’s their match in the last 16 against Ecuador at 4pm.
While the team can take heart at winning the group, things have not gone well in the tournament.
They looked ordinary in the opening match, beating Paraguay 1-0 with an own goal from their defenders
Lacklustre against Trinidad & Tobago until the last 10 minutes when it seemed to dawn on them that they needed to win
Drawing against Sweden was a real downer, but not nearly as bad as losing Michael Owen in the first 3 minutes with a knee injury. He hadn’t looked fit in the previous two matches either.

England coach Sven Goran Eriksson’s decision to bring 4 strikers (two of which were injured to start with) is now beginning to look foolish, to the extent that he is going to have to change the team’s formation from it’s usual 4-4-2 formation (4 defenders, 4 midfielders and 2 strikers) to a rather odd one: 4-1-4-1 which doesn’t really have a name, as it is a variation on the 4-5-1 but with one of the midfielders dropping back. And as the title suggests, the best name i’ve heard given to it is the “Musketeer Formation”. Why? Because it’s

One Four All and All Four One

I’ve tried to find a photo of the 4-1-4-1 but have failed and my scanner is throwing a strop
So, you’ll have to settle for 4-4-2:
4-4-2 formation
and 4-5-1:

To get 4-1-4-1 you need to drop the defensive midfielder further back into a position inbetween the midfield and the defenders. You would also push the centre midfielders up, allowing a flat 4 midfield in front of the 4-1 at the back, and then the lone striker

4-4-2 has become a bit of a standard formation in modern football, and 4-5-1 is what was used by the Brazillian champions of the 2002 world cup

Michael Carrick is expected to play in the defending “midfield” role and Wayne Rooney will play as the lone striker. He will get support from Beckham, Lampard Gerrard and Joe Cole who will be the line of 4 attacking midfielders who will provide the balls through.

The best attacks are expected to come down the left wing from Ashley Cole who will play on the left of the line of 4 defenders (the other three likely to be Owen Hargreaves on the right and John Terry & Rio Ferdinand in the middle). The two coles (who are not related) have provided the best through balls and it was Joe Cole who produced the 2nd goal against England.

It is a huge gamble by Sven, but he doesn’t have too many other options.
He has Peter Crouch, but he will need to keep someone in reserve in case Rooney gets injured as Rooney himself isn’t 100% after recovering from his Broken Metatarsal injury

There is one other striker who is fit, but he is more of a right winger and has never played a full international match (other than the England B fixture against Hungary which i don’t think counts). I am of course referring to 17 year old Theo Walcott. Players cannot be added to the squad mid-tournament so it is hard to see where to go from here if they overpower Ecuador – who are a strong team and have had no real problems reaching the last 16.

If it is looking good 3/4 of the way through the match and England have a 2-0 lead, Sven may consider bringing Walcott on to see how he can use him, but in reality he’s unlikely to play any real part in the competition.

I don’t want to be too pessimistic, but I don’t like the look of this formation, but if it comes off it could potentially win them the tournament

Completely unrelated, I’ve disabled the views plugin until i can figure out why it randomly stopped working as it was beginning to annoy me

Nokia and Siemens Merge

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There was big news this week in the telecoms markets as Finnish mobile phone company Nokia and German Telecoms (incl mobiles) & technology monster Siemens merged to create one of the largest network firms.
Read the full story on BBC News here

Nokia and Siemens are to merge their mobile and fixed-line phone network equipment businesses to create one of the world’s biggest network firms

It follows the recent merge of France’s Alcatel and US company Lucent Technologies
But it reminds me most of when Sony and Ericsson merged their mobile phone divisions to start making Sony-Ericsson phones which had a huge impact on the market about 5 years ago.

Nokia are already the most common phones that I come across – I’m onto my 3rd or 4th one and my next phone will probably be a Nokia. Their intuitive menu system and reliability makes them a good choice of manufacturer. I’ve also had a couple of Siemens mobiles too and found them to be good value for money (they were very cheap) and it was only after i’d thrashed them for about 1 1/2 years that things started to go wrong. They also have very funky blue backlights, though this deal seems to be more related to the carrier network as opposed to the phones themselves

Beware of the Cat

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beware of the cat
This article appeared in the paper last week and features some incredible pictures of what cats are capable of including one where a ginger cat called Jack forced a black bear to seek refuge up a tree in New Jersey.
Unfortunately while the article is available online they don’t put the photos with it, so i’ve had to google it up, so here’s the link to an article on BBC news with picture
It says it’s a tabby, but Jack looks more like a ginger tom to me!

there’s another photo on this link where you can see some close ups

The picture in the article also had a couple of other photos of cats with mice, birds and rabbits looking very smug about their catches

I am a huge cat fan but i think this particular cat, Jack, has taken things a bit far. Remember, Black Bear:
american black bear
1.5m tall
~ 500lbs
Big claws that can rip through flesh
Big Teeth
Loud growl
Bounds around the forest looking scary

Ginger Cat:
~ 10lbs
Sleeps 16 hours a day: catnap
Likes being stroked
Lives in human houses
Has small claws that would feel like a massage compared to bear claws: claws
and while their teeth are designed for flesh it would be difficult for a it to cause damage to an animal bear-sized: yawning cat

That must’ve been one terrified bear

On a sidenote, it has been pointed out by MHC that my views plugin isn’t working properly. Haven’t had a chance this week to look into fixing it, so i may end up disabling it at some point if it doesn’t work for this post

My G4 and why I still haven’t changed it!

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I’ve been saying for about the past 3 years that I need to replace my Mac (and before anyone gets excited no I still have the same Mac).

It’s now 5 and a half years old – the longest i’ve ever kept the same computer going and been through more upgrades than any other. In that time there has not been a single mac that I have wanted to buy to replace it. Apple’s systems with PPC processors are also not as easy (or cheap) to upgrade processors and even then the motherboard would hold it back.

I really wanted to replace it this summer, especially since I’m going to be going to Boston in September for my cousin’s wedding and could get a good deal if i “smuggle” it in with my luggage. However, the intel mac mini was a horrific disappointment with it’s low spec graphics and SATA laptop hard drive. Wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole as it has waste of money written all over it. Am kinda hoping there’ll be a mini tower when apple upgrade the Powermac G5s to Intels in the next couple of months as that might actually tempt me.

If not, you never know with macs being so similar to wintels i might finally give in to my threats that i’ve been saying the past few years that i’d buy a wintel box and install linux on it! Having said that the other thing i’ve also been saying is the only thing that’s kept me a mac user is the OS, so maybe not!

Anyways, let me tell you a little bit about my current mac

Bought it, a 1st generation G4 Powermac 450MHz in September 2000. I actually got the 400MHz version a month previously not knowing that I couldn’t fit an internal CD burner despite being told I could do by the useless sales rep at PC World
I had it for one day all set up and took it back the next day on the premise that they could fit the second optical drive only to be told that not only was it not possible, but the sales rep who sold it to me wasn’t there that day (how convenient!).

At that point I’d had enough and returned the whole thing. A mate told me i should’ve locked out the DVD drive by putting in a region 1 and 2 disc repeatedly till it hardware locked the thing just to annoy them before returning it!
A month later I bought the next one up from a different shop (450MHz) knowing what I was getting into and it came with a zip drive which i thought might be useful and AGP which would be a huge benefit later.

Realising I had no way to copy files from my old mac to this one and also not having a floppy drive, I bought an external CD burner which used USB 1.1 and discovered a way to use the serial connectors through two modems to transfer files at 1k/s between the two macs. Neither were particularly good. In the end i bought an ethernet card for the old mac (much better) and the 2x/4x cd burner wasn’t brilliant.

I kept the original setup for a few years until i needed to buy OSX 10.2 which came with Quartz Extreme for which the ATI Rage Pro wasn’t supported. Living in my student house with windows users I realised there was a money saving way to upgrade the graphics card. I did my research and with this knowledge went to a computer fair and paid a very cheap £20 for a OEM Geforce 2 graphics card which was just good enough. We flashed the bios on a windows machine and it worked first time in OSX.

The next upgrade was the CaseMod which turned the machine into basically what it is now. It gave me what i wanted in the first place and relegated the external cd burner to the closet – anyone want a 4x matsushita cd burner which has been sat in a box for 3 years? Works perfectly well, it’s just very slow and worthless these days!

However, it now has two 120Gb internal hard drives and all the other good stuff. The zip drive it originally came with is sat on a shelf somewhere since no one else uses zip disks (esp 100Mb ones).

And if anyone’s after any replacement bits for their G4 case i’ve got one sat in the cupboard – i broke the logic board tray so i can’t use that but the rest is in perfectly good nick and not doing anything. Keep meaning to sell it off on ebay, but these days i can’t stand the place!

Well, there’s my rambling, I hope there’s good news at this summer’s WWDC August 7th-11th. And it will mean that I will be able to replace my long serving mac with something more modern, as it’s got to the point where I cannot upgrade the parts that I want to anymore as I found out when I tried to upgrade the graphics card. The conclusion I came to was that if I wanted to ebay was the only way to proceed.

Posted in Mac

Last Couple of weeks

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I haven’t posted anything new on here for a couple of weeks cos it’s been a little bit hectic both socially and workwise. It was a long weekend two weekends ago and I ended up doing four days drinking in 10 pubs with a few mates.
Then the next weekend was the first day this summer where it’s actually been nice so I took advantage of it with a trip to see a bloody shakespeare play Titus Andronicus at the London Globe Theatre – it’s an almost exact replica of the original from Shakespeare’s time in nearly the same location

Afterwards I ended up in a party till 4am full of Greeks, Spanish, French and Dutch

Which reminds me a blog update: I’ve installed another wordpress plugin a while back but thought i’d mention it, to keep the spam out. It’s called Spam Karma 2 and seems to be doing a good job.

Monday afternoon saw Sri Lanka win the second test against England levelling the 3 match test series 1-1 where the first match was a draw. This will give the Sri Lankans huge confidence as England are currently number 2 in the test rankings. England on the other hand have a tough few months with the one day series coming up where they have not done so well and a test series against Pakistan.

Monday night was the first gig for French Car and the Bulimic Wizards who have been around in some shape or form for 10 years but have never played live. They have now made 4 albums as an unsigned band. It was a good gig with a strange combination of people there

I heard this morning that Mars Chocolate bars sold in the UK are going to be renamed “Believe” for the duration of the world cup to encourage fans to believe that England can win the 2006 Football World Cup which starts next week. In other world cup related news, I drew Ukraine in our office world cup sweepstake – somehow i don’t think i’m going to win the grand prize of £100 (Ukraine are 40-1 outsiders!)

And finally, I’ve been receiving a lot of invitations this week for people on myspace wanting to be my friend. Of the 10-15 who have invited me, I have known only one

Sri Lanka vs England 3rd Test

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Tomorrow is day 1 of the 2nd Test England vs Sri Lanka
The first test was drawn despite England being expected to win it due to a rearguard action from the Sri Lankan batsmen
Sri Lanka are expected to make changes to their bowlers and hotly tipped to play is the unusual Lasith Malinga dubbed “the slinger” because of his unusual slingshot action as Mike Selvey writes for the guardian newspaper.
Looking more like a javelin thrower he is able to bowl very fast (90+ mph), and is difficult to read from the arm due to his low action. He is young too at 22 with a promising future if he is able to maintain consistency. His unusual action stems from playing cricket in the streets of Galle
Some photos of the action:
malinga
malinga
malinga
(all these photos are hosted on other web sites so may not load for everyone)

Comparisons have been made initially with a west indian bowler, also young, also short in stature, Fidel Edwards. He rose to the side while bowling to captain Brian Lara in the nets. Lara was so impressed he told the selectors to pick him despite having played only one match for his island team of Barbados. Upon selection the papers were full of writers saying “Fidel who?” He silenced his critics when he took 5 wickets against Sri Lanka in his debut match in 2003:
Fidel Edwards

Another bowler who springs to mind is one who is often talked about in the fastest bowlers of all time, Jeff Thomson. Like Lasith Malinga, he had a reason for developing his action. He used to play cricket in his back yard which didn’t have room for a long runup, and the most efficient way to bowl fast was again to use the slingshot action:


In the 1970’s Thomson was timed bowling at nearly 100mph while his bowling partner, one of the greatest Australian bowlers Dennis Lillee was timed at 90mph.

All that said, the 2nd test match is being held in Birmingham, and the forecast is not good for the first three days, so chances are there won’t be too much play till sunday.

WordPress 2.0.2

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Did some updates today after a lot of spam was hitting my mod queue i installed a plugin called akismet. It intercepts the spam before it hits my mod queue and brushes it into a corner of the admin pane of the blog in a section called “Akismet Spam”. I’ve also just added an addon which sits on the top left under the search panel telling all those bots out there how many spam posts it’s deleted to keep them away. I’m not sure if it’s working yet because I haven’t had any attacks since I brought it online.
If you do find your comments aren’t being posted let me know in case it has been flagged as spam by mistake, as I haven’t been in the habit of checking it before.

The next update was to get the latest version of the blog software WordPress running on here, version. Version 2 came out about 5 months ago so am pretty sure they must have ironed out all the major bugs. My friend stretch has been running it for a good few months and Adrian has upgraded today also

There wasn’t too much downtime, but i took the precaution of renaming the blog while I carried out the update. It also took longer than i thought because i missed copying a couple of the files somewhere along the line and while it did the update it wouldn’t load the blog or let me login giving a couple of parse errors.

Thinking it was because I hadn’t deleted some of the old files I deleted them, but it still failed. So I went through the laborious process of re-uploading every php file. Magically it loaded and I was back to the default theme with no plugins as I’d left it.

For about 1/2 hour you might have seen some odd effects as I re-enabled all the plugins and put the Benevolence theme back on at the same time (bad idea!) but do drop me a line if anything doesn’t seen to work.

Haven’t had a chance to test out the new features, but I’m not entirely enamoured by the new admin pane colours and stretch has offered this admin theme which i will look to install.
Assuming nothing went wrong member logins and passwords should be as before, but I did take a backup of the database just in case anything didn’t transfer properly.

So far so good though including ip2nation & the browser detect plugins

BBC Interviews wrong person

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I’ve been a little slow in picking up on this, but following on from the Apple Computer vs Apple Records trial, the BBC called in an expert Guy Kewney
However, a taxi driver apparently raised his hand when they called his name and before he knew what was happening he was being ushered into the news studio as this blog entry describes

But presumably wanting to be on TV he didn’t tell anyone he wasn’t the expert they had wanted to interview but in fact Mr Goma and it went out live on BBC News 24
Google video has the footage available
It is also available in real video on BBC’s own site. It was a little more difficult to get the link but here it is

Someone must of realised that he really had no idea about the story and it was all over the press