August 2004 Archives

Last year I wrote about the large amount of comment spam that this site was getting. Readers kindly pointed me at a couple of useless resources and over the next few months I worked through most of Yoz's suggestions. Most of these worked for a while, but the spammers found ways round most of these blocks so eventually I installed MT-Blacklist. This has been working well for months now. I still get a few pieces of spam each week but they are easy to remove and I only ever get each piece of spam once.

Recently I realised that MT-Blacklist is logging its actions so I can see how effective it it. The results were very surprising. My activity log goes back to June 13th and in that time MT-Blacklist has stopped 2269 spam commented from being created. That's a lot of comments that I would have had to delete manually.

And it also logs the IP address that the comments come from. Here's a list of the most prolific spam commenting IP addresses on this site:

213.91.217.78 (487)
213.91.216.36 (457)
213.91.217.77 (401)
66.144.4.5 (144)
61.30.47.22 (119)
213.91.207.89 (104)
61.30.47.21 (87)
64.110.74.244 (49)
213.131.70.6 (32)
216.79.8.162 (30)
67.30.130.142 (20)
69.50.130.173 (19)
12.104.44.40 (15)

I expect that those addresses could be useful for working out which netblocks to completely deny access to the internet or something l.ke that.

Then this morning it seems that that the war has just escalated again. I found a dozen or so entries that contained links to random (and non-existant) web sites. It seems that the spammers are just testing us to see if we'll give up deleting stuff if there's just too much of it.

In a week I'm off on holiday with probably no access to the internet. I wonder how much of a mess I'll come back to.

A very interesting piece by Tim Ireland on how Rebekah Wade has been changing Page 3 into an extension of "The Sun Says". Apparently she thinks that Sun readers are more likely to lap up blatent propoganda if it is recast as the opinions of women with no top on. Unfortunately she's probably right.

More proof (if any was needed) that reality tv contestants aren't exactly the brightest of people. "Shell" Jubin was touted as one of the cleverest people on this year's UK Big Brother. During the course of the programme she got a first class degree in some fluffy subject.

But it seems that she's not too clued up on gender politics. Within a few weeks of coming out of the house she's posing for topless photos on page 3 of the Sun. And to compound her error of judgement she's babbling on about how page 3 photos help to emancipate women.

I'll leave it to The Guardian to explain just how muddle-headed her thinking is.

We've had it all wrong. For years, we thought that page three amounted to little more than the pornographic degradation of women, but it transpires that the Sun stalwart is up there with throwing yourself in front of a horse in terms of female emancipation. And it took Shell from Big Brother to inform us of this fact, while posing without her brassiere in that very paper on Monday. "Those who sneer at page three lack intelligence," she explains. "It's beautifully shot and tastefully pioneered the celebration of the female form," she continues, before suggesting that page threes should hang in the Tate. The following day, the Sun featured the gay wedding of another Big Brother contestant, Kitten, who confusingly was also a feminist - an "arch-feminist", even - but less sportingly wore all her clothes, which made her look "like a man". But, back to Shell on the politics of page three: "In many ways, it emancipated women, letting them exploit their assets, earn cash and keep control. I see it as a modern art form." By which fuzzy logic, Ms Jubin, you'll also be classing prostitution as a modern art form, will you?

Occasionally (!) films based on books end up bearing little relation to the original books. A good currenty example is I Robot. I haven't yet seen the film, but the trailers I've seen make it very clear that that it has almost nothing to do with Asimov's original collection of short stories. However there must be a book tie-in for the film so they have rereleased the book with a film-themed cover. I hope that new readers aren't too disappointed by the mismatch.

I noticed this in Forbidden Planet this lunchtime and, continuing the theme, I see that FP have a special promotion on Le Morte D'Arthur this month. I suppose that this is supposed to tie in with the recent release of King Arthur - but even the publisher's marketeers have realised that an official tie-in would be a step too far.

And while I was there I noticed that there's a complete DVD release of Timeslip. That was one of the earliest TV shows I can remember watching and I'd really like to see it again. I'm sure it will seem to be a bit rubbish these days, but I've added it to my Amazon wishlist just in case.

Very happy to see that Mark Thatcher has been arrested for his part in an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea. He's always been a nasty piece of work with his fingers in all sorts of dubious pies.

Let's hope the shock kills his mother.

I've just got a press release announcing that the music download site that I was working on earlier this year has gone live.

One particularly nice thing about it is that it has absolutely no DRM at all.

Over the weekend I was at the Eurofoo conference in Enschede. Tim O'Reilly invited a group of people to hang out for a couple of days and tell each other about cool stuff. Before I forget it all, here's a brief list of the interesting things that I saw.

• Ben Hammersley creates RSS feeds of error messages and things like that from his server. Then he can read them using an RSS reader along with all the blogs he reads. He is thinking about using RSS as a medium for distributing web applications.
• Nat Torkington told us that O'Reilly are seriously thinking of running a big Open Source conference in Europe next year. We had a discussion on locations, prices and how OSCON would differentiate itself from the million other Open Source conferences in Europe.
• SteveC talked about using cheap GPS devices to digitise map data and build an Open Source version of the Ordnance Survey Data (which currently has huge licensing costs).
• Paula LeDieu talked about the huge headaches involved in making all of the BBC's output available in the public domain.
• Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph talked about the new Radio 3 web site which is intended to be a prototype for new versions of other BBC broadcasting web sites. They are thinking of making available a large amount of RDF data describing the programs and were interested to know what cool things people might do with it.
• Tim O'Reilly repeated his talk from OSCON last month where he described how O'Reilly monitor the "alpha geeks" in order to work out what other programmers will be interested in 18 months later on - so they can have books ready.
• Stefan Magdalinski showed us theyworkforyou.com which takes the badly formatted data from Hansard and displays it in a much easier to use format. Use it to monitor what your MP is saying in parliament and (more importantly) comment on it.
• Simon Wardley talked about 3D printing. Which does what it says on the can. You take a file representing a 3D object (like from a CAD/CAM program) and "print" it as a real 3D object. Sounds like science fiction but isn't. He had examples of the output to show us.
• Tim O'Reilly then gave another talk where he explained how O'Reilly closely monitor book sales of both their books and books from other publishers to get a picture of the whole book market and how it changes over time.

This is just one slice of the conference. At any time there were up to eight talks going on. There were many times that I wanted to be in two or three places at once.

And, as always, the most interesting stuff came from random conversations in the bar. I found that there are already a large number of people who are creating Open Source software for health monitoring and management. At my day job we should probably be looking at what these people are doing.

The destruction that has taken place in Boscastle this week is, of course, terrible but there's one thing that I haven't seen mentioned on the news.

One of the most interesting buildings in the village was the Museum of Witchcraft. This museum had a number of interesting and unique exhibits about the history of witchdraft in the area. It seems that this building was very badly hit and a a lot of the exhibits are missing.

Which is a real shame.

I'm starting to suspect that there is an orchestrated campaign to turn Matthew Somerville into the new Craig Shergold.

When I first mentioned the closure of the Accessible Odeon site I got this response (which also appeared in a number of other places). I emailed the person who made these comments to correct their errors, but the email bounced back as undeliverable. It seems that, like me, the owners of most of the blogs that got this comment left it there for comedy value but posted follow-ups pointing outthe factual errors.

Then last night I got another comment that repeated many of the original errors. Once I again I replied in email (it's from a different address) and once again the email was returned as undeliverable. And this morning I see that the same comment is on at least one other site. I fully expect to see it appear on others during the day.

To attempt to put the record straight, Matthew Somerville is not a disabled little boy. He is an abled-bodied, adult web designer with a particular interest in building accessible versions on inaccessible web sites. And by "inaccessible" I don't just mean ones that aren't accessible by disabled people. In many cases these sites are completely unusable by anyone not using Internet Explorer as their browser.

Maybe we need to get this information on Snopes.

Note to broadcasters...

Most sports commentators are barely literate. They are (usually) able to commentate on their own sports without too much difficulty, but if you give them something more complex than that (like, for example, the opening cermony of the Olympic games) then they will have no idea what they are talking about and will just babble on incoherently. Whilst this is fairly amusing for a few minutes, it soon gets deadly dull and people either turn over or just mute the sound.

And whilst we're on the subject, most competitors are even less literate than the commentators. It's very rare that they have anything interesting to say. Please don't bother trying to interview them.

My local MP is Martin Linton. He was one of the people who got into parliament on the back of Labour's massive landslide victory in 1997, so he's understandably a bit "New Labour" for my tastes.

Like many MPs, he has his own web site and unlike many MPs he (or his staff) even keep it pretty much up to date. There do, however, seem to be a few omissions. I've suggested at least some of these to the webmaster, but my emails go ignored.

In 1998, Martin Linton co-authored a rather good book on electoral reform called Making votes Count. Of course, electoral reform isn't high on New Labour's list of priorities, so he doesn't like to talk about it now.

There are a couple of good UK web sites for keeping track of your MP's attendance an voting patterns in parliament. I think that MPs don't like to link to them on their web sites as it shows up how rarely the average back-bencher actually bothers speaking or voting. So anyway here are link to Martin Linton's pages on PublicWhip.org (which tracks attendance and voting) and TheyWorkForYou.com (which tracks speeches).

I'm hoping that this site's relatively high googlejuice will mean that this entry will become a pretty high-ranking result if you search for Martin Linton so that these pages can be found by more of his constituents. I'd encourage others to do the same for their MP.

Actually, I notice that a previous entry about him is currently at number six.

Blimey. A new album from the Blue Nile. That makes four in just over twenty years. Not exactly the hardest working band in the world.

Their last album, Peace at Last (1996), wasn't their best, but the first two, A Walk Across The Rooftops (1983) and Hats (1989), are two of the finest in my collection. I recommend them yo anyone.

I've just realised that they are actually slowing down at a uniform rate. There was a six year gap between the first two albums, then a seven gap before the next one and an eight year gap until this one. I predict the next one will appear in 2013.

Orange used to be a great mobile phone company. I think they are still the best in the UK, but their standards have dropped substantially since they were taken over by France Telecom. Here's an example.

On their website they advertise a talk plan that gives you 120 minutes of cross-network talk time and 30 free text messages all for £15/month. This sounded like a good deal, so I called their customer services to change to this plan.

Ah, but they claim that this plan is only for new subscribers. I suspected this might be the case so I had a plan ready. I pointed out that I could port my number out to a Vodaphone pay-as-you-go plan and then come back to Orange as a new customer a week later. And that would achieve nothing but wasting everyone's time. They said that if I spoke to the disconnections dpeartment and told them about my plan they might be able to short circuit the operation somewhat.

So I told the disconnection people about my plan. And they agreed that it was silly and that they could put me straight onto the new plan.

But I would have to upgrade my phone.

That threw me for a second. I like my current phone and Orange don't have any newer phones that I like more. Then I remembered that Orange always have a couple of crappy phones that they give as free upgrades. So I asked for one of those.

So here's how will works. At my next billing date (tomorrow) I get on my new talk plan. On Friday I'll get my new (crap) phone with a new SIM. I need to register my new SIM and throw the old one away. I can then use my new SIM in my old phone and everyone is happy.

But I don't know why they can't just make it simpler.

Official

I think that the episode in question is probably Smashed.

She died :(

I've never enjoyed being in control of powered vehicles. I think it stems from a visit to a go-kart place when I was about seven or eight. After only one lap I was deemed a danger to myself and my parents had their money refunded. The only time I was ever in control of a moped I fell off before I got to the end of the road. I had first driving lesson on my seventeenth birthday and over the next year I failed three driving tests. For all those reasons, I haven't been in control of a powered vehicle since about 1980.

So when it was announced that my company were all going off to a "team building" day last Friday and that it would involve trying out all sorts of strange vehicles, I was less than enthusiastic.

Our first activity did nothing to change my mind. We were in pairs in a small vehicle with two engines - each connected to one of the two driving wheels. Each person in the car controlled one of these engines. The way to turn was therefore for one person to pull back on their throttle whilst the other pushed forward on theirs. It was a disaster. I was convinced that there was a problem with my throttle lever but, of course, other pairs worked it just fine so the fault was obviously in my head.

The next activity was clay pigeon shooting. Now I've done this once before about ten years ago and I know I enjoy it. But that didn't prepare me for the instructor saying that I held the shotgun like a natural. I hit about two thirds of my clays and enjoyed it thoroughly. I thought I'd even got away without hurting my shoulder from the recoil, but I've subsequently found that to be untrue.

After lunch my team were in small six wheeled amphibian vehicles. Like the first vehicles there were two levers each of which controlled one side of the vehicle. I explained to my instructor that I hadn't driven a car for almost twenty-five years and she said that it probably wouldn't matter as the controls were so different. It actually turned out to be a bit of an advantage as I didn't have any preconceptions of how I thought it should all work. After a couple of laps I felt totally at home at the controls and was disappointed that we had to move on.

Our final activity for the day was driving (sorry, "flying") a one-seater hovercraft on grass. From what I understand, the controls were similar to a motorbike. There were a pair of handlebars to steer and the right-hand handle also had the throttle. Bringing the throttle up to 50% inflated the skirt of the hovercraft and anything beyong that moved it forward. The one complication was that (again, like a motorbike) turning the handlebars was only part of the steering mechanism - and a minor part at that. The majority of it was done by throwing your weight around. Again, when our turn was over I really didn't want to stop.

So my mind has been changed. I don't belief these days actually achieve much in the way of "team-building", but if this one is anything to go by they can certainly be bloody good fun.

We're already talking about going back next year. Next time I want to try out driving the tanks they have there.

Oh, and I'm serious considering taking up clay pigeon shooting as a hobby.

I'm sitting in my local pub yesterday when I notice that one of the (many) advertising postcards displayed in front of me has the name "David Cross" written across it - which is quite a strange experience.

Further investigation reveals that the American comic David Cross is performing in the UK for the first time later this month. The back of the postcard contains this quote

"If you miss an opportunity to see him perform... you're a total asshole. David Cross dominates my world." - Jack Black

Hmm... I wonder if I can create a set of .sig quotes based totally on what people have said about other people who share my name. I know of the comic, a musician, a 1970s British footballer and a chap who writes Photoshop books.

It's nice to see that the Statue of Liberty has reopened after it was badly damaged in the X-Men film... er... no wait... since it was completely unharmed in the Al-Queda attacks in September 2001. It's understandable that the Americans would want to celebrate its reopening.

But as a letter in today's Guardian points out, is it worth reminding them who gave the statue to the US in the first place - a bunch of cheese-eating, surrender monkeys.

We have, of course, known about this for some considerable time but this BBC story seems to think that the problem is getting worse. Which sounds likely.

It's well worth reading the readers' comments at the end of the story.

Whilst quite innocently searching on the web for a number of female actresses' websites, I was continually bombarded with pop-ups. Eventually my computer froze but the hard drive carried on accessing. When this had finished my home page was a junk advert that I could not remove, also whenever I tried to use a search engine a fake search engine appeared instead. I was plagued with pornographic pop-ups and had pornographic websites inserted into my favourites file which when removed reappeared the following day! All extremely annoying.

The internet is a mess and needs to be replaced by a well managed network that does not tolerate abuse.

There are plenty more like that.