Harry Jackson

I started getting the following error when trying to ssh into a chroot on a debian machine.

stdin: is not a tty

I fixed it using the following entry in /etc/fstab

devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0

I'm positive this is not the way I should have fixed it but it works!

Having tried for several years to get into DMOZ and getting rejected every time I always wondered why. There are literally dozens of sites doing exactly the same thing as me, indeed.com, simplyhired.com etc and they are listed. These site have a lot of clout and a lot of money whereas I am a one man band with little cash.

Imagine my surprise when I came across Corrupt DMOZ Editor. I may just have been a bit naive when I assumed that DMOZ was the real deal but this blog has given me food for thought.

Google and various other large sites use DMOZ for seeding their search or for their own directories etc. So If there is any truth in this and DMOZ is rife with corruption then anyone using the data is perpetuating the problem. Putting on my cynical head I can see how DMOZ could be easily corrupted. What I would like to know is if there is any truth in it or not. If so I can forget about DMOZ.

I actually admire what DMOZ is trying to do. I am not sure if it as relevant as it was but I do believe that there is a place online for a human edited directory. DMOZ needs to change though. It is becoming less relevant as time goes by and it would be a shame to see it all go to waste.

The more I dig into this topic on Google the more I feel dismayed. It looks like a lot of the top editors are corrupt and are disabling account of the lower editors that are not. To paraphrase Charles Adams "Bad Editors drive out the Good",

Here are a few more interesting entries on the topic of DMOZ.

This guys site got banned after he refused to pay a bribe!

Removed from DMOZ for not paying Bribe

The following DMOZ editor's account was disabled when he tried to do something about the guys website above.

Editor Banned for doing the right thing

Time for ODP to Close (Danny Sullivan)

ODP Founder Coments (Danny Sullivan)

Lords of ODP

The alternaitives system in Debian is a pain in the arse! It's one of those things that when you need to use it you spend twenty minutes trying to figure out why various paths etc have changed and then you need to figure out the syntax to change to the path that was working before you installed Tomcat or some other related system that downloads a bunch of stuff and sets itself up as default for the rest of the system. It's a tad irritating.

I am not saying I know a better way to do it but it still pisses me off. Anyway to use a sane version of java I had to run the following command to get eclipse working again.

$:~# update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/local/sdk-5_05/jdk 1
$:~# update-alternatives --list java
/usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/jre/bin/java
/usr/local/sdk-5_05/jdk
$:~# update-alternatives --remove java /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/jre/bin/java

I now have eclipse working again and tomcat installed. I was going to use jetty6 over tomcat but because Debian comes bundled with a binary tomcat distribution I have decided  to use it. This decision may cost me dearly later.

Don't go blaming Glibc. You wouldn't catch me thinking I had something wrong with my c-libs etc. No Way!

Anyway I was getting glibc errors that appeared randomg etc. It turned out I was using HTML::Strip in a non standard way. When you have finished with parse method call you need to call (eof) on the HTML::Strip instance or it all goes horribly wrong.

It makes me sick!

I walk past the Unison building every morning and for the last few days there have been several beggars stood outside asking me for more money.

It galls me to think that the beggars posing as workers think they deserve more money. Damn few of the rest of us are getting anything. In fact we are all TAKING A PAY CUT. Thats what it means when times are tough. But Oh No, if you're in a union, in particular if you are in the public services you can bend us all over a barrel. Didn't anyone teach these people economics 101.

1. You force the government to give you a pay rise.
2. The government still needs to pay for hospitals, police, roads etc
3. They raise taxes and print a few billion notes to cover costs.

We're all feeling the pinch. Petrol is up, food is up, gas is going up and the private sector is suffering. What makes these unions think they deserve the money more than anyone else. They don't!

I sincerely hope I am not alone in thinking that Gordon Brown should tell them all to grow up. I'm sick of pampered public sector workers thinking they're having a harder time than anyone else in the country. Their two day strike has cost some families two days more childcare. Did they think about this, I would imagine that the ones organizing the strike have and the more pain they can inflict to get what they want the better.

My personal opinion is that anyone striking for more pay in the current climate should be positively encouraged to find alternative employment elsewhere (fired).

It's time society and government stood up to unions, that are nothing more than self interest groups and lobbyists, shafting the rest of society. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against an honest gripe and workers putting down tools, but this is taking the piss.



 

I am sure I am not the only one who loves Foyles bookshop. I don't know what it is or why I prefer it above all others in London but I cannot get enough of it. Anyway, I had reason to write them a letter recently about a book I bought there.

The following is the letter;

Dear Foyles,

Having been lucky enough to find myself in close proximity of you for a number of years I have had the great pleasure to get to know you. It's been a long and fruitful acquaintance that I have much enjoyed and I believe having relieved me of the best part of a small fortune I would imagine that you yourself have enjoyed the times we have spent together.
Don't assume I am in any way disagreeable about parting with the money.
Like any worthwhile addiction there is always a price to pay.

You Mathematics department is currently babysitting me through a degree, your computing department has tutored me through four jobs and one major career change and just recently your second hand store has been furnishing my mind with classics like Sophocles, Virgil and the Essays of Charles Lamb.

Unfortunately, like a typical Sophocles play this does not end well!

I recently, (a few months ago, I read a lot of books so to me a few months is recent), was dumb enough to buy an even dumber book. This book was to help me do more of what I like to do best faster than I had ever done it before. No, I do not mean Sex, my wife informs me that I am quite fast enough in that area. Yes, it was a book on speed reading, no, this is not a joke. The offending parchment is as follows:

Contributor(s):
        Tony Buzan (author)
Format:
        Paperback  , 198 x 129mm, 96pp
Publication date:
        21 Jul 2006
Publisher:
        BBC Active
ISBN-13:
        9780563520351
ISBN-10:
        0563520353


Having read the first chapter of this scroll I noticed something woefully wrong with it. The first test that is meant to test your reading speed and understanding is complete gibberish. I wondered at this for a while and I decided to test the first and last tests in the book. I tested this using various reading ease scores commonly available on Microsoft Word. The tests confirmed my doubts about the book. The end test is substantially easier than the first test in the book. I can only assume this is to prove that the book has worked wonders on the reader when it has done nothing of the sort. Basically I believe the book to be nothing more than a farce created to make the scribbler of said rubbish some cash by taking advantage of us bookworms.

Having never purchased such expensive toilet paper before. I decided that I should take it back and try and exchange it. Note: I am avoiding puns about used or even partially used toilet paper.

I left it in my drawer and like any avid reader, promptly forgot about it!

Just today 01 July 2008 approximately 14:15 I found the offending papyrus in my drawer and decided that I should try and exchange it for another book. There are several unblemished darlings (books) I have had my eye on that I would love to take on a date and where better to chat them up than at an old friends. So off I went to yours in the hope that I might get lucky and be bringing back a real beauty.

This was not to be!

To cut a long story longish I was met with many woeful looks from you. I was informed that there is a 14 day return policy and that without the receipt there would be no exchange. Like Ajax in a fit of rage I left the offending parchment with one of your brazen cronies ( sounds better than staff, they were actually quite nice ) on the basement floor and exited the building. In such a fit I have never been and I must surely have looked a madman as I dashed across the road like a spurned book lover.

However, unlike Ajax I am not about to throw myself on my sword after a severe bout of self pity. Instead I would like to appeal to an old lover to see sense in this matter.

Kind Regards,
Harry Jackson


I wasnt't sure what to expect by way of  reply so when I got the following letter it amused me no end. I must say that the following reply was much more eloquent than mine.


Dear Mr Jackson,

As is the ultimate fate of all cronies, it has fallen to me to brazenly resolve the troubles of which you so eloquently speak.

Being the very crony who served you yesterday afternoon, I suspect that I am best placed to do so - and am, by the way, thankful to have been left in your mind's eye with my personality somewhat intact.

I can assure you that there is no-one more generally suspicious and specifically outraged about the content of certain and so called Self-Help texts. Your humble author has in fact ended up offending several eavesdropping customers with irate tirades against the fake and the spurious. Yet, both sadly and happily, in a homage to freedom of expression we continue to sell all books, and allow the discerning to make up their own minds.

No more do I like the prospect of standing on protocol and informing people that "orders are, in fact, orders." It makes me feel like everyone that celluloid and print have taught me so painstakingly to mistrust.

However, I have a natural aversion to being bereft of a job at certain key points in my life, and as thus refused your request in order to ensure my continued employment.

Happily though, there is nothing more adept at melting the heart of any customer service operative, crony, and manager thereof than a complaint that shimmers gently, winks and promptly turns in to a message of amour.

Therefore, having engaged in a lengthy discussion of over twenty temporal seconds, we have decided to stand upon our own codex and offer you the proposed exchange.

In the language of the relationship, we donate you the ubiquitously mentioned "trousers", descend upon one knee and weepily inform you that we would like to give the whole thing another try, but that we still do not think it is the right time to move in together.

Those terms accepted, please return to the Natural History desk at your leisure, where the Unmentionable will be awaiting exchange for what will hopefully be a less distressing tome.

Kind regards,
AI,


My favourite line is "but that we still do not think it is the right time to move in together". That had me on the floor. Needless to say I am more than pleased with the outcome. I am still very much in love with Foyles.

H
 

If you ever run the set command and get any of the function definitions listed at the bottom of this entry then check your .bashrc file for the following entry.

# enable programmable completion features (you don't need to enable
# this, if it's already enabled in /etc/bash.bashrc and /etc/profile
# sources /etc/bash.bashrc).
if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
    . /etc/bash_completion
fi

If it is not commented out then it is likely that name completion has been activated elsewhere. Comment it out and start a new shell to see if it helps.



_alias                         _lvresize
_apt_cache                     _lvs
_apt_get                       _lvscan
_aptitude                      _make
_args                          _man
_aspell                        _mkisofs
_aspell_dictionary             _modules
_available_interfaces          _mount
_bzip2                         _mplayer
_cancel                        _mplayer_options_list
_cardctl                       _nslookup
_cd                            _ntpdate
_cdrecord                      _ooexp_
_chgrp                         _openssl
_chown                         _openssl_sections
_chsh                          _perl
_command                       _perldoc.........etc

I just love this sign. Pay particular attention to the two rightmost boxes. I need to get a better resolution one. This one does not do the original much justice. It was taken by Glen Scott. Have a look at a bigger one.

I have been waiting for this.In fact I think the whole world has been waiting for this. I just seen an advert tonight where Pierce Brosnan advertised Vitalift. I know we have had adverts for male perfumeaftershave for a while now

but I think Pierce doing this is another step towards a truly liberated male fully in touch with their feminine side. Is it little wonder 007 had a way with the ladies, he wears make up, splashes perfume and wrinkles are a topic of conversation.

I wonder who'll be the first male to advertise lipstick or am I not watching enough TV.

I use First Capital Connect (FCC) to go to work every morning and have started to notice a sickening trend. The trend is: in order to meet their performance targets passengers are being left on the platform. This trend did no start with First Capital Connect but with Thameslink who were the previous operators of the Bedford to Brighton line. The problem I am noticing though is worse now that FCC are running the line.

First Capital Connect measure their overall performance on the following:

% of planned train service that was less than 5 minutes late at final destination

This sounds like a great way to measure performance but for anyone who has read The Fifth Discipline they will immediately see the problem.

The immediate problem with the above performance measurement is that there is no mention of the customer. Taken to the extreme there is no requirements for passengers to be on the train at all for them to meet their performance targets. I know this sounds daft but think about the people under pressure to meet those targets. When a train pulls into a station 30 seconds late with a normal allocated 60 seconds allowed to get the passengers on the train then cutting the time the train actually stays at the platform by 10 seconds means the passengers have 20 seconds to get on the train. This is not too bad but during rush hour it can be a problem, especially at the likes of St. Albans where the train is particularly full.

The problem I have in Luton is that the problem becomes extreme because the train I catch can come in on any of two platforms. The platform is indicated on the board but if any of the trains are falling behind at all the platform might change.This would be no problem but to get to the other platform you need to go up a flight of stairs and across a walkway and down another set of stairs. I have had to do this three times in the past because the platform number has change three times before the train comes in. Originally I thought it might be the controllers working on the nations obesity problem but since some of them were in as bad a shape as me I decided that could not be it.

I then witnessed, one November morning, over sixty passengers changing platform due to a board change. Off they went leaving the platform to get to the other side. I waited on the original platform. I watched as the people got to the other side only to see the board change again. I felt glad I hadn't changed. They all came back to my platform. I could see the train and I noticed that it did not look like it was coming into my platform but I decided not to go to the other side. Anyway, there was an announcement and the sixty potential passengers trudged off with a lot of swearing about how crap First Capital Connect are. I watched the train pull into the opposite platform and open its doors. I have never seen doors on any train in my four years using Luton station open and close so fast. I would not be surprised if people actually got stuck on the train. Anyway the people who had moved to the platform the train was leaving from arrived to the tune of the beeps indicating the doors were about to close. A couple of people (ie the young and fit) got on the train but the vast majority where left standing like lemons on the platform. Having been in the Navy I was convinced no civilian would ever teach me a new swear word, I was wrong.

This was when I realised just what was going on. In pursuit of the set performance targets First Capital Connect had not thought through the impact on their customers. Or if they had they had decided that performance targets are more important than customer service.

I have no idea what would be worse, late trains or being unable to catch the train you want and I imagine Luton is a particularly bad case because of the way the platforms have been laid out. All I can suggest to people in Luton is don't trust the board and wait at the top of th stairs until just before the train arrives. This introduces its own problems but I have found it works reasonable well for me.

I had an operation recently for an Inguinal hernia. You can
see on the right the scar.

The scar is between five and six inches long and you can see that there is an opening along the scar. The pale colour in the opening is an infection and it hurts like hell. The area around the scar is numb to the touch. It is an odd sensation to have no sense of feeling when I touch the area with my finger but for it to actually hurt when I move.Not sure if this is because the wound is quite deep or some other reason.

I have been taking Ciprofloxacin to get rid of the infection. It is working because the wound above is a lot better than it was. I am a bit worried that even though I have been on the antibiotics for about a week now the wound has not closed yet.

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.

To get it all to work you will need to get the Backported Images. The point to note for etch is the addition of the E1000E Intel Ethernet Driver. This is not currently in the latest kernel (2.6.23.12) so no point going to kernel.org to get the latest kernel, this may be fixed by the time you read this.

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:

1. 56000      This is the theoretical speed of an ordinary dial up.
   
2. 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.

1. 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.

Sometimes people are just misguided, they have done a two month DIY course and they consider themselves plumbers, brickies or joiners. It's an ongoing war professionals in any trade or profession have.

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 bosswife to be.

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
  

Of course he's a Christian so the next logical step is to help the church, so he starts canvassing them for business. Now at this point we might think that Daniel is not very clever. But, if we dig deeper we would find that the price Daniel is offering for his services is suspiciously close to an amount each diocese was offered to build themselves a website. I can hear people saying that this is just being enterprising. I also found it odd that he offered huge reductions to get close to this price. Is he doing this genuinely because it's the church or has it more to do with thats all the church could spend.

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).  

Now. If he is a professional web designer then he fully understands what he has done. This is schoolboy error stuff i.e. only someone under 12 might be able to claim it was a mistake. Even so, most schoolboys understand what plagiarism is. In either case this is not someone you want to be running your website for you.

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 ;)

NTL hell is now Virgin Media Hell. I have had a fault on my broadband for over a week now. It's Christmas and I am not using my broadband much so I have not been overly bothered about it. I made the stupid assumption that Virgin Media would be hot on the heels of any faults.

How wrong was I!

I checked on their website to see if there is a local fault and according to Virgin Media there is no faults in my area. I decided to report a fault....

Virgin Media, in their wisdom have introduced a charge to call their technical support line. Basically to report a fault I need to pay them 25p per minute. Yes, you heard that correctly! I spoke to a different helpline on the local rate and was told that I would be refunded if it was a genuine fault so this leaves me in a bit of a dilemma.

You see, I remember spending in excess of 40 minutes on the old NTL technical support lines and eventually hanging up. So is Virgin Media different Do I risk spending £10 waiting for them to answer my call? I wonder if they have seen a drop in fault reports since introducing the charge.

I decided to call and see how long it takes to get through because with no Internet connection I cannot work. So the story goes like this.

I called them at 12:39:10

and I let it ring until 12:41 (I was surprised I didn't get music)

Got someone at 12:41:20

and left the phone at 12:50

so the call came to over £2 but I was told I would get a refund. I was also told that there is no problem with the cable modem and that if an engineer comes out they will run the exact same tests and if there is no fault they will bill me £25. I decided against calling out an engineer.

Now. I have checked all my gear, it works fine. I have connected to two different servers in two different countries to make sure it is not the ISP the server resides with. Same problem, intermittent connection. So the lowest common denominator is Virgin Media. Unfortunately Virgin Media technical support are unable to diagnose faults unless it's the cable modem. So this leave me with a severe problem.

The Internet is where I make my living. if I can't work the mortgage won't get paid. So! Do I stay with Virgin Media or do I go with BT?

I am sure BT has it's own problems but they might be able to diagnose faults and therefore fix problems better than Virgin Media.

Has anyone else switched from Virgin Media to BT?

MT3 used underscore to separate names then along comes MT4 and it uses dashes (better choice in my opinion). Having read some recent articles about non technology specific urls I decided to take the liberty of cleaning them up.

To that end I wrote a script to generate mod_rewrite rules based on the old urls. I also removed the .html extension. So the urls should look something like.

/blog/archives/2007/12/19/movabletype-urls

At least I hope they do.

I just noticed this tonight. I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.3 and from what I can tell Firefox ignores xsl style sheets!

Should I be bothered about this?

No! RSS is probably not the best thing to be styling when we consider the consumer and what they want. It is really meant to be grabbed, scanned and ditched. My attempt at pretty formatting is probably just crap to most RSS readers, machine and human alike.

If you have been struggling with Firefox styling your input boxes a lovely yellow color, it's not Firefox, it's the Google Toolbar. Check to make sure you have not got the AutoFill option enabled.

I noticed this picture on flickr the other day....

Facebook Hell. I know exactly what the guy means. I have been on facebook for a very short space of time, have 3 friends on there and I am already inundated with drivel. I suppose thats why it is not really appealing to the over 25's. The application has taken vitality to a whole new annoyance level. I wonder if Dom Jolly will be doing a comedy sketch on this sort of shit.

The title is not a spelling mistake.

This is worth a read. Its fairly tongue in cheek but good fun.

The Last Language War / Language Trolling Post You'll Ever Need To Read (Hopefully)

The comments are a testament to how dumb some people are. Bits like:

"Oh.... Why didn't you include my language".
"I cannot believe you didn't include the language X"
"Language X would have been the cool kid, splurgh"
"Blah blah blah"

Why are developers so petty, why do they not get sarcasm. I have heard developers, between bouts of mental wanking, talk about "Fashion Victims" as if these people had some sort of disease. Wake up, we're all susceptible to fashion. You might be fashion conscious about:

Clothes.
Programming Languages.
Cars.
Gadgets.
Processors.
Pets.

Yours might not be on the list but I am sure that between us we could find something. Does this make us all fashcists?

I have been playing around with hadoop recently and came across the following error

org.apache.hadoop.mapred.InvalidInputException: Input path doesnt exist :

If this happens have you ran a command similar to the following

bin/hadoop dfs -put input /user/root/input

if not that might be your problem.

I used to go to the roundtable pub in London every Sunday (sometime in the 90's) to see budding comedians strutt their stuff. One of the comedians there was Alfie Joey, he was compere. I got to know him a bit and never tired watching him introduce each comedian to the mic.

Anyway. I was browsing around the internet today and stumbled on Alfie's website purely by accident. I recognised him immediately. If you ever get the opportunity to see this guy in action, do it.

If you get this error:

"Could not find file.ocx"

do the following:

Open your file explorer by right clicking on "Start" and selecting "Explore".
Open the "WINDOWS" folder on your C: drive
Open the "system32" folder.
Open the "Macromed" folder.
Open the "Flash" folder.
Copy the file called flash9.ocx and save it as file.ocx.

Don't delete the original flash9.ocx.