February 2005 Blog Posts
A prime example of stupidity, penned by naren@cgt-consult.com has arrived in my junk e-mail folder. The mail was sent to web@idunno.org an email address that only ever appears on the web. No emails ever get sent from that address. The mail begins
I need an IT Auditor for my direct client in Los Angeles, CA - Full time Permanent FTE position.
Why yes, LA is commutable from Reading, England every morning. It continues with a list of qualifications necessary, qualifactions I don't have, then states
Client would prefer to have local US citizens or GC Holders only.
The spam has the usual "This...
The UK government has just launched a new service, ITSafe. It describes itself as
"...designed to provide both home users and small businesses with proven, plain English advice to help protect computers, mobile phones and other devices from malicious attack. It consists of both the Advice on this website, and an Alerting Service." So where's the RSS feed?
The alerts are limited to emails and SMS, although how you're going to send a decent sized alert over SMS escapes me. The site contains a sign up page, but no unsubscribe page. I've sent a feedback for asking where the RSS feed...
Joi Ito posted an apology to people in his address book after he signed up to sms.ac and then watched it pull in his MSN Messenger list and spam his friends with invitations. Today he posted an email he received from Kevin B Jones of sms.ac. They appear to be objecting to his use of the phrase sms.ac on his web site, but there are no objections to being called spammers. No wonder, as their behaviour is slimy. Every month someone on my MSN list seems to sign up to the service and my IM email address gets sent a...
Intel's Developer Services have published Geoff Koch's article on "Open Cell Phone Platforms". Open is a phrase that has been hijacked over the years by the GNU and FSF bunch, in this case it's a plea for transparency and control, which is why I'm rather smug I managed to get my comments into the final paragraphs.
It's a bit of a shame the rest of comments from the usenet thread didn't get included. It seems, to me, the phone platforms are limited by the needs of the carrier, not by the technology or by user requirements. Until that handcuff is broken...
Chandu Thota's BlogMap project gets a make over.
You have to love how MapPoint doesn't seem to understand the UK, I'd already realised that their Northern Ireland mapping data is sparse to say the least, but there's no excuse for naming my town as "England" (especially as I'm 10 minutes drive away from their UK headquarters in Reading). Now if only Chandu could pick up the ICBM meta tags that the seemingly defunct geourl used.
[update: 08/02] The town name has suddenly appeared, although the circle supposedly representing the centre of the town is outside the town boundaries (the shaded area you...
Sue me, but I like Starbucks. Despite having an espresso machine at home, the first thing I head for when I wake up, there's something easier about wandering into Starbucks and having a coffee in your hand 3 minutes later. 2 weeks ago Starbucks finally made it into Henley; it's bad. There were, this morning, 6 people working behind the counter. 4 people taking orders and 2 people making them; which results in an obscene queue which seems to permanently shock the staff, the "replace filter" buzzer goes off for 3 minutes without anyone attending to it and best of...
My poor wife. She came along to the geek dinner last dinner. She discovered I'm not alone in my obsession with electronic toys. Rachel had her Portable Media Player, complete with dodgy video, then Keni and Frank Shaw our guest from Waggener Edstrom produced the tablet PCs. Keni's Toshiba was sexy enough, but Frank had a little slim light lovely little thing, which I think was an Electrovaya Scribbler. Hard to choose really, Frank's had a decent battery life but Keni's had a decent keyboard. We even had a proper astrophysicist, Andrew (whose blog also mentioned Galaxie 500,...
Having moaned about technologies relying on honesty yesterday today brought me to mizzelphug's ebay member profile and what is possibly the best use of the right to reply I've ever seen.
[buyer] fast shipping A+ ++++++++++++++++++
[mizzelphug] I wasn't aware that shipping had polarity. Positively charged at that.
[buyer] Great seller, A+ would do business with again!!
[mizzelphug] I'll hold you to that. The next time i put an item up, you better buy it from me
[buyer] Great ebayer. Quick shipping and well packed. Thank You.
[mizzelphug] It was one night. Just leave it at that...i'll never pack the same way again.
That guy needs...
There's finally a UK geek dinner scene, kicked off by Scoble of course, although he won't be in attendance. The first dinner is tomorrow, Wednesday 2nd February at One Aldwych. The special guest is Frank Shaw, vice president at Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft's PR firm. You'd think that Robert would be giving him grief about not having a corporate blog.
Not a car park in sight though, which is a shame as I'm having to drive in from the client site near Oxford.
I was hoping that rolling my own blog code would mean I'd escape the comment spammers, but apparently not. Luckily Miguel Jimenez offers a CAPTCHA control for free use (with a promise of source code to follow). For the unaware CAPTCHA stands for Computer Aided Program to Tell Humans and Computers Apart.
So I'm afraid if you wish to comment you'll now have to enter the image at the bottom of the comment form, or as Phillip points out, write some neural network code to parse them automatically. More amusingly (to me) was my comment on a post Phil made...
There's a problem on the internet and that problem is the assumption of honesty. Email is geared towards emails being truthful about who they are from, adsense and other advertising networks rely on clicks coming from valid users, google's new NoFollow extension relies on it being used truthfully and not to deny page rank to valid links a webmaster simply doesn't like and meta tags assume that the tags are correct and unbiased. All of these technologies were highjacked by spammers.
Now Technorati is making the same mistake with their new tags.
Allowing web page writers to categorise their own pages and...
I'd guesstimate most Visual Studio developers have cursed source control at one time or another; SourceSafe is a kludgey, old and hasn't been updated in years (little hint here Microsoft, when you start shipping developer tools that support unicode make sure the source control system supports it properly). SourceSafe may well suffer because it's not used internally at Microsoft (from what I've seen), so there is no element of dogfooding. So there has been a market for replacement source control systems for a while now, and you'd expect them to be mature, stable and above all to not overwrite your...