Handy Hints _#

Sorry, will compose some literary masterpiece about the awards for Surge shortly (gist is, Nick won Technical Innovation award, me and Nick won Silver for best website!)

Firstly though, spam. Blogging supergenius Woodge notes that some pretty odd names are coming up in spam emails lately. This is true, and got me thinking about spam, the big picture and so on...

So, my thought: what if spam actually became useful? Seriously if they're going to send out this crap and we're supposedly unable to stem the flow, the spammers should turn to more friendly ways to attract attention. They should make the email interesting, useful, and still advertise their unsavoury products.

What could they have? Anything from tips, quizzes, puzzles, game hints, trivia, to even recipes. You could just imagine it now:

From: evilspammer@spamcorp.com

To: sven@lovelybloke.net

Subject: Penis spam + handy recipe



Want A Bigger Pen1s?

Gain Up to 3+ Full Inches In Length

100% Safe To Take, With NO Side Effects



Want to make delicious cajun chicken wings as well?

It'll impress the wife almost as much.



  2 1/2 lb Chicken wings

    3/4 c  Plain yoghurt

      2 ts Garlic powder.....

Spammers continue their onslaught of genital-growing advertising, and we get some useful and handy hints along the way. It's win, win!

Tip of the Day _#

Try going to the BBC homepage, then click a link in on of those pastel boxes. Once that's done and it's gone to the new page, go Back and do it again. Repeat this several times. You should notice that the box gets darker over time. It's intended to indicate subtlely which sections you frequent and effectively 'wears a path' over time. I rather like it.

The reason I found this is that I was searching through Google trying to find out which CMS the BBC use, and ended up on a few blogs discussing it. Although I knew about it before seeing it again reminded me to post it here.

Tip of the Day _#

Samba Server can be a real bastard to get working sometimes.

If you ever get the error 'getpeername failed. Error was Transport endpoint is not connected' try:
smbpasswd -a nobody
then hit Enter twice (for a blank password). It just worked for me, after about an hour's reinstallation and Google searching. Why can't error messages be less unfriendly :'(

Morning All _#

Euaraura. Am up at 6am for meeting, followed by Student Radio awards in London, where's I'm nominated for a website. Photos and news to follow :)

Spam Side-effects _#

Argh. 382 emails last night alone. Somebody is spamming the entire continent of South America using sales@1do3.com as the From adress, which has the rather undesirable consequence of hundreds of 'Mail Delivery Failure' notices arriving in my inbox. I daren't just filter them out, in case something genuine that I need to be alerted to comes in, but it's very tempting....

Camera Fun _#

I bit the bullet and got a Canon Powershot A80, as I promised. It's a very nice camera with superb quality. As its my first real foray into the world of photography I'm finding the camera simple enough to understand without reading (all) the manual, yet complicated enough for me to continue to be suprised by it.

For the first couple of weeks, I've been playing. Unfortunately didn't get any shots of the total lunar eclipse last Saturday (bloody cloudy, wasn't it) but I did get some interesting long exposure shots on the way home.

I must install Gallery at some point. However much I dislike the complexity of it, it's still the best one I can find that doesn't require me to manually create all sorts of thumbnails myself. Unless any of you wise surfers have come across a better one?

Post Phenomenon _#

Haven't posted for a while, so in true blogging style I think I'll start with something mundane, and complain that our next door neighbours have put up their Christmas decorations already! It's quite depressing how early people seem to embrace Christmas - makes it far less special (and I'm not a Christian, I just enjoy the holiday time - Atheists get bugger all else to enjoy....). Actually that's not strictly true. It's quite annoying how early shops embrace Christmas (mid-October sometimes). It's just odd to have your decorations up this early though!

WordNet _#

Until now, I'd used Google Toolbar + Dictionary.com to look up definitions of words rapidly (I type the word in Google Toolbar, click Search, then click the word itself in the results page which loads up dictionary.com).

Looking around on the Internet for more detailed meanings of words, I stumbled upon WordNet, a project that has a very useful approach to word searches. You can type a word to find a meaning as one would expect, but the clever part is with what you can do next: a dropdown menu presents a list of futher searches based on your word, to show Synonyms, Hypernyms and Hyponyms, and a number of other searches. Hypernyms and Hyponyms are particularly interesting alternatives to Thesauri.

Blogwise is One Year Old _#

Blogwise is one today. The past year has gone quickly. Admittedly development of the site has gone a lot slower than I expected, but it IS a hobby so it's gotten the time that I have to spare, rather than the time I'd like to give it. Anyway, the best news is that I hit 10,000 blogs today - a great achievement imho.

Unfortunately I didn't get as many hits as I'd hoped for this month (was hoping for 100,000 - got 95,000!) but it's still up on last month, and every month before, so it's growing! That said, I did tip 20,000 visitors for the first time this month and have transferred over 5 gigabytes of data (mostly images). I know this is nowhere near the size of the larger sites, Technorati, Eatonweb, etc. but it still makes me very happy inside.

I have been very proud of how well Blogwise has climbed up the ladder though, it's 15th on the Popdex all-time popular links, eighth on the Technorati Top 100, and is doing quite well on Blogshares (which is down atm :-( - it's also fourth if you search for 'blog directory' on Google - which quite a lot of people seem to do.

What's next? Well, I am definitely committed to developing a more autonomous site, although I still intend to have all sites checked by hand for now. Metadata is going to be playing a very much more important role in the listings (and is already starting to creep in now). I'm also very keen to get logins done asap now - it's top of my list of priorities, since many other features I expect to roll out will depend on it.

Finally, thanks to everybody who has shown their support for Blogwise - it's been a great first year and I'm very much looking forward to the second, the third and beyond being even more successful.

New Hobby _#

I get really sick of computers sometimes - and it's certainly unhealthy to sit in front of a screen all day, so I've decided to expand my horizons and find a new hobby.

Since getting a Pocket DV cam and a camera phone, I've developed a liking for photography, so I thought I'd take the plunge and get some "proper" equipment.

Come Monday, this should be mine :-)

Useful Regex Tool _#

The Regex Coach is an excellent desktop tool for Windows and Linux that helps debug and analyse your regular expressions.

Bookmarks _#

After a chat with others about web browsing the other day, I suddenly realised that I don't use bookmarks at all. Ever. It's completely empty.

I'm a creature of habit - I only check a few pages daily and these are all listed here (for convenience only; I can remember the URLs) - this page is my home page all the time!

I think I've reached a point where memory and weblog combined have made bookmarks completely redundant for me. Any unusual websites of note I list here - any oft-visited sites I can usually remember. It also helps that I'm getting pretty skilled at using Google to find results quickly and accurately.

Is this common? Are any of you guys finding bookmarks completely redundant now?

Blaine in a Box _#

Blaine and box comments aside, CNN seem to have a rather one-sided view of the whole event.

If you view the QUICKVOTE results on this page, apparantly 100% think that the event was "A heroic act of strength" and precisely 0 voted for "A stupid publicity stunt".

I find that very difficult to believe! In fact, I voted for the latter, and my vote hasn't been recorded - yet in the last five minutes or so another 60 or so people have voted Yes.

Screenshot available here

Top Tunes _#

Since the beginning of June I've been running a little Winamp program, Personal Hit List (sadly deceased now), and I've just looked at my top ten played songs:

I'm just a little pop bitch really :-|

Advertising _#

My good online friend Simon Kittle has just launched a new company and an interesting product to go with it. The company is Lionkey Technologies and the product is called My Inventories. It is aimed at the homeowner; landlord; tenant, etc. market and is essentially a domestic inventory tracker. Which is very cool.

It looks like a good idea - I wish Simon the best of luck and remind him that by placing this advert on my blog he is legally bound to give me 20% 40% of the earnings.

On the Air _#

First week of uni has been hectic. I'm a little annoyed about how many last-minute changes there have been to the schedule, but the lectures themselves have been good and very interesting.

The other thing I'm also glad to be back into is the DJing. For those who don't know I DJ on the local radio station, Surge. Now for some gratuitous advertising :-)

You can catch Sven on the radio every week, Sundays 1-3pm (The Sunday Show); Mondays 6-7pm (I produce Open Mic) and Tuesdays 8-11pm (Sven, Chris & Em show). All times are BST. Tune in 1287AM in Southampton area, or over the net at www.surgeradio.co.uk.

Gratuitous advertising in place, I expect everybody to listen now :-)

Hurrah. You can see this title. _#

Finally got that awful 'Post from Blogger API' message to go away. All is good in my life now.

Post from Blogger API _#

I keep getting requests for p3p.xml on Blogwise, as well as one or two requests recently for a Privacy Policy to appear on the site (which I agree is quite important).

So, I looked at the W3 P3P page, then ended up running IBM Alphaworks' P3P Policy editor - this has got to be one of the most complicated bits of beaurocracy I've seen in a while!

I think my policy is quite simple - I never re-sell or make public email addresses, they are used as contact points (and shortly, unique logins) in case of problem/update and any stats I make are completely anonymous. Cookies are used to retain user preferences...basically the good innocent use of cookies and emails. :-) I have no idea how to encapsulate this in the P3P standard!

Maybe one day I'll revisit P3P but until then I'm just going to put up a human-readable copy of the above!

Post from Blogger API _#

Found via Hessis weblog, the url2bmp program looked like a quite promising solution to my ongoing problem of how to reliably capture snapshots of websites for Blogwise (see example here).

Unfortunately it doesn't get around Internet Explorer's annoying popups and prompts for things like Japanese language support, that has been dogging me for ages. I've tried using the Mozilla/Firebird engine in a home-grown app a while ago but couldn't get the DDI calls to work properly.

Post from Blogger API _#

Pinch punch first of the month. It's Oct 1 :)

This month is going to be a good month. Blogwise will be celebrating its first birthday at the end of this month. It's also extremely likely that this month will see the number of blogs top ten thousand, and the number of page impressions tip 100K. Woo!