Category: tech

As I mentioned in passing last week, I’ve upgraded this site to the latest version of Movable Type. But it looks like the upgrade wasn’t as successful as it could have been. I first noticed problems with the comment features. MT3 gives you the ability to moderate comments from not-registered users. This is all very… Continue reading Movable Type Upgrade

The BBC web site has the first part of an interview with Bill Gates. He talks in vague terms about the future of home computing and the importance of the Media Centre in that. One answer is very telling. He’s asked “It is a tricky area though. Digital rights management. Are you sure that you… Continue reading Gates at the BBC on DRM

I was trying to work out why I was vaguely uncomfortable about Google’s “nofollow” tag approach to preventing comment spam, but now I don’t need to as Ben has worked it all out for me. I love it when I don’t have to think :) Mind you, I’ve just installed the MT plugin anyway. You… Continue reading Google’s “nofollow” Tag

I like to think that I’m pretty laid back when it comes to dealing with other people’s coding practices. I really don’t care where you put your braces (as long as it’s consistant) and you can indent things as far as you want. There are, however, two non-negotiable and invarient rules of code formatting. If… Continue reading Formatting Code

So Lloyd wrote something pointing out this piece by Jon Udell about the Lazlo Soundblox which is a Flash front-end to a server for streaming MP3s. I’m not completely convinced by Soundblox. You can either run it from the installation hosted on the author’s server (and I don’t know how stable that installation is guaranteed… Continue reading Soundblox

And while I’m posting links from today’s Guardian, Victor Keegan is very positive about the Open Source movement. In recent months, as readers of Online will be well aware, open source has entered a new era with the arrival of a browser (Firefox) that is better and more secure than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and an… Continue reading Open Source

Nice piece by Jack Schofield in today’s Guardian about the damage that pointless email chain letters do. Everyone should read it and then STOP SENDING ME CHAIN LETTERS BY EMAIL!

Interesting discussion in the pub tonight about how people use cameras now that everyone[1] has one in their phone and therefore in their pocket all the time. It seems that people are using them as a photgraphic memory. Want to remember the opening times of your local supermarket over the christmas period? Don’t write it… Continue reading Photographic Memory

Whisper it softly, but I’ve turned comments back on. Actually, they were only off for about twelve hours. But it seems to have done the trick. Since I turned them back on I’ve had one piece of comment spam (as opposed to hundreds every hour). If you get overwhelmed by comment spam then simply removing… Continue reading Comments Back

Last night, this site came under a massive comment spam attack which effectively crippled the server. Until I can think of a better solution, I’ve disabled comments. Whilst I like giving you all the ability to comment on my entries here, it’s far more important to me that the other services on this server run… Continue reading I Surrender