Category: tech

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… Continue reading Comment Spam

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… Continue reading Eurofoo

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… Continue reading Home PCs hijacked to spread spam

In 1999 the Perl Mongers organisation started the White Camel awards. These awards are intended to recognised individuals who have made important non-technical contributions to the Perl community. A few years ago Perl Mongers was absorbed by The Perl Foundation and TPF have continued the awards. The awards are traditionally announced at the Open Source… Continue reading White Camel

The Internet Explorer development team have set up an official blog where you can track (and, more importantly, comment on) their progress towards the next version of IE. There’s an RSS feed and I’ve added that feed to Live Journal. The comments in the blog already demostrate how brave they are to do this :)

The Computer Shop (formerly Time Computers) have never had a great reputation amongst techincal people in the UK. They might be cheap, but their build quality is shoddy and their support is appalling. Now Yoz Grahame points out another reason for not using them. Apparently their systems come with a modem that is configured to… Continue reading Time Computers / The Computer Shop Scam

Even the (Microsoft-owned) Slate magazine is now publishing articles saying that Firefox is better than Internet Explorer. If you haven’t tried out Firefox yet, then you should. It’s really rather good.

A Microsoft employee happened to mention on his blog that he’ll be going to work on the team building the next version of IE. The comments then became a good place for web designers to list the things that they are looking for in the next IE (still not due for at least a year).… Continue reading The Next Internet Explorer

Let’s make some notes about what I saw at NotCon before I forget everything. On arrival I took a wrong turn and ended up missing Danny O’Brien’s Life Hacks talk which I really wanted to see. Instead I ended up in the geolocation session. The most interesting talks for me were Earle talking about OpenGuides… Continue reading NotCon 04

Whilst poking around the web seeing if I can legitimately buy MP3s of the Faithless album I came across Virgin’s download service. I have no idea if there’s anything useful available there as I was blocked at the front page for having the wrong operating system. A useful little pop-up window informs me: So to… Continue reading “Upgrade” Your OS