January 2008 Archives
I was browsing around the net recently and in my travels I came across an estate agent in columbus. I had a look at some of their listings to see what I could get for my money there.
The house on the right is worth £628,587. It has over 22 acres of land, thats over 70 times more than mine.
It has 4 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, 4.5 garages, and has a lower level with an office and conference room etc. Madness.
To say I am a little envious is an understatement. I couldn't afford it anyway but its quite obvious you can get a lot for your money in the states.
I just received a credit card offer from Capital One in the post today. They offered me a credit card with a 34.94% APR. Yes, thats right, 34.94%. Lets put this in perspective.
Lets say on your 18th Birthday your parents give you £100. Being sensible you invest this in a pension scheme which of course saves you tax etc. Over the next 45 years the pension scheme earns 34.94% interest annually. Guess how much you would be worth when you reach 65 years of age.
£670 Million
Lets say mum and dad could afford to give you £5000 pounds and you did the same with this. How much would you be worth at retirement.
£33.5 Billion
For our American cousins thats
$65.3 Billion
You'd be the richest person on the planet by a long margin. Bill Gates would be asking you to dinner.To say I was dumb struck is an understatement. I had a look on their website and they are offering credit cards for 9.9% APR. So if you take their mail offer up they charging you 3.5 times more than on line customers. What customers are unlikely to check on line? Yes, the elderly and low income.
I don't know about anyone else but charging 34.94% interest seems morally wrong to me. I recently read the book Super Crunchers and to be honest I am pretty sure that I am just one of a random selection of customers they have sent offers to.
Capital One have been pioneering the use of random statistical tests to see where customer pain points are. It works like this.
100,000 customers get offered credit cards (the numbers following are just examples). The customers are broke up into random segments where
25% get offered the credit cards at 34.94%
25% get offered the credit cards at 24.94%
25% get offered the credit cards at 14.94%
25% get offered the credit cards at 9.94%
They then count how many people in each segment take the offer up. Capital One can then work out where the maximum profit point is. This sort of thing is going on all the time so I shouldn't be that annoyed about it but I just cannot help feeling it's wrong.
Note: For these people who scoff at me not including inflation try the calculation where we assume our enterprising little investor saves the same amount each year plus another 10%.
blogbookmarker.com recently added a trackback to an entry supposedly tagged with Insane on my site recently. I don't mind them doing this but....
It is quite obviously nothing more than cheap advertising for them. I checked there link back to me and guess what, it had a nofollow attribute attached to it.I have nothing against using nofollow tags but if you want to put a link on my site using a trackback and have the cheek to add a nofollow tag to your link I think you are taking the piss.
I am not a fan of using the nofollow attribute in a blanket fashion. There are cases where it makes sense to use it but I think in their case where they are only really after the PR they can shove it.
If you see an error in your http logs similar to this.
client sent HTTP/1.1 request without hostname (see RFC2616 section 14.23): /w00tw00t.at.ISC.SANS.DFind:)
Don't worry too much about it. Someone is just probing your machine.
For more information of the tool that is generating the log entry have a look at Dfind. Dfind is a tool kids use to check for exploits.
I got a new Dell Vostro 400 this week and have been trying to get Debian Etch stable on it. This has proved a bit of a pain.
The following facts might help.
- Dell are using a new Intel Ethernet Controller
- They are also using a modern SATA controller
- The stock Debian netinst cd does not have the correct drivers for these.
Thanks to Kenshi Muto I was able to get Debian installed but this is where it all went bad.
My next job was to get Gnome running on the machine. I have a Nvidia card installed so I went to the Nvidia Unix Driver Page and got the latest driver. I tried to install this but it is incompatible with the rivafb and nvidifb modules so if I stick with Kenshi's kernel I cannot have a desktop but if I install a new kernel I cannot have networking.
At this point you are probably hoping there is some smart fix for this problem. Unfortunately I didn't find one. I ended up installing a separate network card to get the system running. I would imagine in the near future that the Linux Kernel will have support for E1000E and when it does I will recompile the kernel.
I complained recently to Virgin Media about problems with my account. Well, it gets better. Have a look at the following two numbers, numbers are in bits per second:
- 56000 This is the theoretical speed of an ordinary dial up.
- 147456 This is currently the average speed of my connection
Not bad. Virgin Media is 3 times faster than a dial up. Wow, slow down. The really shitty part is that I am paying for the following speed.
- 2000000
If we apply some simple maths to this we get:
2000000 / 147456 == 13.5
This means that my Virgin media bandwidth is 13.5 slower than what I'm paying for. At the current rate I would have to pay about £250 to get a real 2Mbit connection. Should I complain again...... Whats the point, I get through to someone who can only check the cable modem. You spend ages on the phone and they tell you nothing is wrong.
I hate changing services but this is becoming insane.
I was recently approached by a member of the St. Nicholas (East Dereham, Image on the right taken from Simon at the Norfolk Churches website) committee and was asked to go over a proposal from Daniel Gibbins. This committee member had some misgivings about the whole thing hence contacting me. He assumed that because I work for Yahoo! and bore him half to tears about websites a lot I might know a bit about websites, he was right.
Anyway, it took me about five minutes to realize that Daniel Gibbins is a novice posing as a professional. Professional web anything and Daniel should not be mentioned in the same sentence. This is not a particularly uncommon thing. For instance:- Honest Tradseman or Cowboy.
- Car Dealer or Wheeler Dealer.
The story gets better though.
I decided that rather than let Daniel take the money from the church I'd be prepared to do the thing for cost price (not charge for my time) which would be cheaper. I would also go through a proper requirements gathering process etc and provide them with a much more tailored solution. I am not normally that charitable, it just happens that the committee member that approached me is my future father in law and of course this makes his daughter my
The problem I had though is, how do I tell the church committee that Daniel Gibbins might be a conman without sounding like a tosser.
I could tell them that his DNS servers are running on the same class C network, not necessarily a bad thing for toy websites but not exactly something you should be selling in a commercial package. Or I could list evidence pointing to him being a reseller for Heart Internet. I could list some severe flaws on his websites, tell them that I don't believe the guy is a Christian, at least by my definition, or that most of the websites he has done are awful. His content is mostly vapour. Most of this they would not understand. For instance if you do not understand what dynamic content is how am I meant to explain DNS and why you need two servers.
After a lot of discussion with the committee member it was agree that I would meet with some of the committee to go over some ideas etc. I walked them through some bits and bobs and the whole thing took a couple of hours. This was mostly to show them possibilities for the website and to try and show them just how much more could easily be provided over and above Daniels proposal. I was asked some very pertinent questions and a lot of good ideas came out of the meeting. I was also asked some questions about what I thought of Daniels proposal and I answered them honestly, I only wish I had not been so damned politically correct. A couple of the committee members gave me the impression they had some concern about Daniel but I got the distinct feeling that the whole meeting had been a waste of time and that the decision had already been made by a higher authority.
Shortly afterwards the committee met with Daniel, and as I suspected "they" (I am not sure if the committee was actually involved in the decision or not hence the quotes) decided to go with him.
When I think about it why believe me
- I don't go to church and Daniel says he does.
- I don't claim to be a Christian Daniel does.
- I didn't wear a suit, Daniel did.
- I didn't wear a cross on my lapel apparently Daniel did.
I knew something was fishy and I am pretty sure more than one member of the committee suspected something was wrong. I decided at that point to count myself lucky I had not been asked to do the site and not to push any further with it or it might be a bit embarrassing for some people. Besides, shit has a tendency to float so I decided to keep an eye on Google and wait for Daniel to cock things up. Well, I didn't have to wait very long. I searched Google for Daniel Gibbins today and the first entry read Daniel Gibbins LIAR. For those wondering the image on the right is Daniel Gibbins (Image taken from ezinearticles.com where Daniel has created an expert Bio by stealing copying content from books)
I searched further down the results for entries about Daniel Gibbins and a lot of people have been giving him quite a pasting. Now, we all make mistakes, I'm as likely as the next person to cock something but what a pasting.
The basic story is this:
Daniel Gibbins Stole Content from other peoples books and sold this as his own. Is this dishonest? Hell yes, it's illegal. Daniel has infringed various copyright laws and in more than one country. He has been selling these articles to make himself look like a professional web designer. Of course this is not all he has been up to.
Off the back of his new found web professional status he sets up two companies/websites
- cortinawebsolutions.co.uk
- churchwebsitedesign.org.uk
In Daniels case I personally believe that this can only be attributed to one of two things.
- Daniel Gibbins is a Conman.
- He's not very net savvy and does not realize the severity of what he has done (hence Gibbon in the title).
My advice to Daniel:
First off, make a public apology. Especially to Rich. He should then start taking down all the copyright infringed content. I would also recommend he find suitable homes for websites he has already done on the back of a lie. I don't doubt that the other sites will learn soon enough about what has happened and the fall out could be quite bad. You don't want the church publicly blacklisting you or your business online.
My advice to the Owners of websites hosted by Daniel.
Get out before the shit hits the fan. Download all your content from the website and get it hosted somewhere sensible. Here are a few key points to get you started.
1. Don't confront him till you have all your content and control of your domain.
I am not suggesting he would take your site down but....
2. Get control of the domain name.
If you don't have the admin password to control the domain you need to get it and then change it. This is really important. You must have this to control your website.
3. Backup your website to your PC.
To do this you need to save each page or run a tool that will mirror the website. If you do not know how to do this let me know the website and I will download it for you and send you a zipped up file. Make sure you get all the images etc.
4. Find another hosting provider.
Hosting a website is cheap. You should not really be paying any more than £10 a month for a static website. You can get cheaper deals but if it's over a tenner they might be selling you a big white elephant. If you have a dynamic site (most of Daniels sites are static) then the hosting might cost more. For instance a wordpress blog. Again it still won't be very expensive. You can get reasonably reliable small hosting deals for £3 per month so shop around.
5. If you know other site owners using Daniel help them.
6. Put something on your website saying you are no longer associated with the church web design project otherwise he will be able to con more unsuspecting victims into giving Daniel their money.
Another thing for Daniel to bear in mind is that employers, particular in the technical area use Google and Yahoo! to research people so a job change might be a good idea.
I might add I am not a web designer myself. I'm a web developer, this means I tend to work at the back end of websites, this is part of what I do at Yahoo! If I have ever called myself a professional web designer, I meant professional web developer. Yes, there is a difference and I am sometimes guilty of using one when I should be using the other ;)
