I ran into an unbelievable problem with Intelligent Finance today - enough of a problem for me to start moving my current account back to NatWest.

I needed to withdraw £800 cash from my current account by the next day, so rang them up to ask them what the daily withdrawal limit was on my cash card - £300 was the reply. I asked if this can be temporarily raised to allow me to withdraw the money over two days. 'It can't be raised above £300, it's a business decision'.

Next I enquired about getting a banker's draft - 'sorry we don't do banker's drafts, but you can arrange a CHAPS transfer', which will cost me £12. So basically, there is no way to withdraw your own money from your account without having to pay for it.

If you're considering an Intelligent Finance current account, I seriously suggest you think again. The interest rates on the account may look attractive, but you soon realise there's more to an account than that.

Is there a reason why the UK edition of a UK news website paid for by UK residents has currency conversions to US $ rather than GB £? For example, this story about the Asian earthquake gives the economic cost to Thailand as 20bn baht, and then helpfully gives the conversion to US$. Helpful if you live in the US that is.

This isn't part of an argument against the licence fee, as I am all for an independent BBC (and I used to display an 'I Believe In The BBC' button on here until Manic changed it to an FBI one), but it would be nice if they at least give a nod to who's paying for it.

After having a brief introduction to DAB digital radio over the Christmas holidays, I realised that if I could get it on my PC it would mean I could effectively time-shift radio programs at a half-decent quality, rather than having to rely on the BBC's piss-poor 'Listen Again' service. A bit of Googling led me to DAB Bar, a piece of software that would do exactly what I wanted. And then I hit a brick wall.

There seems to be three DAB hardware devices designed for receiving DAB on your computer - the Modular Technology PCI card, the Psion Wavefinder USB device and the Aria A-6000, none of which are now available. I was particularly interested in the PCI Card to save having wires and boxes cluttering up my desk. There aren't any on ebay and I couldn't find any retailers with one available, so if you happen to have one lying around that you don't use and want to sell, please let me know.

...when you use your friends' domain whois information to get their address for Christmas cards.

I recently got a new mobile phone (a Siemens S65 in case anyone's interested), so went through the annual ritual of finding a ringtone that is distinctive, but not cheesy. Since I last did this, there seems to have been a massive increase in the number of sites that offer ringtones for sale - you text a premium rate number costing up to £3, and they send you back an SMS containing the ringtone.

Is it me, or is this the biggest scam around? The message they send you contains a midi file, of which there are thousands available for free on the internet, and the cost to them of sending the message can't be any more than around 10p. The worst part is that the people most likely to use these ringtone sites are people who can least afford it - teenagers who don't know any better. If you're looking for ringtones compatible with most Nokia, Samsung, Siemens & Sony Ericsson phones, and can connect your phone to your PC, you could do worse than visit this site or just Google for 'midi files'.

I've added some older pictures of Concorde during it's last week of commercial flight. The evening photos were taken at Heathrow Airport on Sunday 19 October 2003; the shots of it landing were taken at Edinburgh Airport on Friday 24 October as it picked up passengers for it's final flight back to Heathrow. Use the link on the left to view them.

Amateur Boxing Association offers Amir Khan £70,000 a year to delay turning professional for four years. Eh?

The award goes to mp3players.co.uk, after I sent them an email asking why an MP3 player I had sent back by Special Delivery was refused at the delivery address and returned to me unopened. Their reply was:

It was refused because the guy we employed to take care of faulty units decided he preferred the dole to employment. He just resigned 10 days in to his employment and refused all special deliveries,
including yours....

...Please accept our apology for any inconvenience caused but hopefully you will appreciate we had no control over him resigning to be a dosser again.

At least they're honest!

This post is as much to remind me as it is to help other people. I built a new PC a couple of days ago and everything seemed to go very smoothly. Until I tried using Windows Update that is. I'm using Windows 2000, but I'm pretty sure this will also apply to XP and 98.

I'd done a clean installation of W2K, immediately followed by SP4 & Internet Explorer SP1. Nothing else - no anti-virus software and no firewall (I'm running behind a NAT router so I wasn't too concerned about worms or viruses). When I tried to use Windows Update it would get to 66% and then hang for about 3 minutes, completely freezing the Internet Explorer session. Eventually it would come back, but with an error message telling me 'Windows Update was unable to scan your drivers'. Windows Update.log in winnt shows error 0x800C0008. Searching the Microsoft Knowledge Base and Google brought up a few things to try, e.g. check your date and time or remove the Windows Update software, but nothing worked. Strangely, I also had a problem accessing one of my online banking sites, so I guessed that the two were probably related. If you're having the same problem, here's how I fixed it:

1) Download Dr.TCP from here or here.

2) Run DR. TCP from the downloaded .exe. In the drop down list at the bottom, select the device you use to access the internet, i.e. your modem or network card.

3) Change the TCP Receive Window to 13900 and both MTU values to 1430

4) Write down the URL of this site so you can come back and let me know if it works.

5) Reboot the PC.



And that's it. Your network settings may differ to the ones I used here, so if it doesn't work first time, it would be worth experimenting. If it does fix it you'll also have the added bonus that all pages should download quicker.

If this has helped and fixed your problem I'd appreciate it if you could just leave a comment to say so. Now if only I knew how to prevent a stop error displaying 'registry cannot load the hive systemrootsystem32software' that forces me to reinstall Windows then everything will be working fine...

My MP3 player woes continue. After my problems with the iRiver IFP-790, I received the 1GB T-Mate Premium (also known as the M-Any DAH-610 or the Mobiblu DAH-610) yesterday. The only reviews I was able to find were those on the mp3players.co.uk website, and they were almost all positive so it seemed a fairly safe bet. I'll post a full review in a few days, but suffice to say, it's going back too.



Design
The player is very small and seems fairly sturdy. Although the buttons are quite fiddly, they're not too difficult to press. I wouldn't give the rubber USB port cover too long before it breaks though.

Accessories
You get all the usual accessories with the T-Mate and this player also comes with an in-line (non-lcd) remote control. The first thing that you should do is throw away the headphones and buy some decent ones, as the supplied ones are dreadful. It makes you wonder what the manufacturers are thinking supplying such crappy headphones with a £170 player.

Controls
Not exactly what you'd call intuitive, in fact the exact opposite. This isn't really a problem to me, as it's just a case of getting used to them.

FM Radio
This is the first major problem with this player - the radio reception is non-existent. I have a cheap £10 radio that can pick up all the BBC local stations without any problems. The T-Mate struggles to pick up anything, and when it does find something it's unlistenable. The FM radio was one of the reasons I chose this player over others so this is a problem to me.

Sound Quality
I could put up with any of the other problems if the sound quality is any good - unfortunately it doesn't redeem itself. As I mentioned, the supplied headphones are useless, but even with a decent pair there is very little improvement. The specs say the frequency range is 20-20000 Hz, and if that is the case it's certainly not even across the range, there is a distinct lack of bass or high frequencies. Consequently, the player sounds very tinny, with too much 'middle', and even though there is a 5 band equalizer, adjusting it didn't improve the quality.

15 years ago I had a middle of the range (£50ish) Panasonic walkman that had fantastic sound quality. I find it unbelievable that it's proving so difficult to find an MP3 player with comparable sound quality today.

I've spent a fair amount of time over the past few months following the Presidential elections in the US, and you can tell from the links at the side where my political persuasions lie, but it is always good to hear both sides of the story. One of the BBC's 'Have your say' sections at the moment is 'Can Kerry Beat Bush?' Of the comments from Bush supporters, one is typical of many that I have heard:

Our country hasn't been attacked on our soil since Bush had the spine to address the terrorists and take the fight to them.

Or to put it another way, in the 3 years since 9/11, the Bush administration's policies have prevented another terrorist attack. I'm a smoker, have been for more than 3 years, but I don't have cancer - does that mean that smoking prevents cancer?

You know those flat 'escalators' you get at airports, the ones where old ladies spend half an hour getting on, only to be forcefully thrown off the other end? Ever wonderered what Maradona would look like trying to run the wrong way up one? Thought so.

The BBC have been reporting quite heavily today on new research that shows moths in the UK are in decline. The online story is here, and it's also been on the national & local news on TV. Now if it's true, great, I can't stand the little f*ckers. But hang on a second.

The way they track them is by placing light traps to attract the moths, who in turn are gassed; the researchers then count the dead. And they've been doing this for 35 years. Now in that time, maybe the moths have learnt to avoid the traps - maybe it's been passed down the generations, 'here son, mind you don't go near them triangular lights, we lost your uncle to one of them.' So none of this jumping to conclusions that they're in decline - they're actually getting cleverer.

I've added more photo galleries for your viewing pleasure, this time of a holiday to Tennessee a couple of years ago. There's photos of Memphis, Nashville & Gatlinburg, including Graceland, Beale Street, Sun Studios & the Grand Ole Opry.

For the first time, I've scanned in prints taken with a 35mm camera (using a cheap scanner, hence the quality) and discovered two things. Firstly, what a royal pain in the butt scanning photos is, but it's either that or pay Jessops £10 a film to do it. Secondly, how many duff photos I used to take without the luxury of being able to view them straight after. Click on the links on the left to view them (the half-decent ones that is, not the duff ones).

No reason, just something I did for b3ta

After coming across yet another copy protected CD, this time Brad Paisley's Mud On The Tires (another BMG CD), it occurred to me that by adding copy protection to CDs to prevent ripping, the record companies could actually be encouraging illegal downloads.

MP3 players are no longer the domain of geeks and early adopters - they are now the mainstream replacement for portable cassette and CD players. According to a recent article on the BBC, 10 million digital music players are expected to be bought worldwide in the next 12 months. Some people will give up buying CDs completely and start buying their music online, from Apple's iTunes and similar services, but for others the digital player won't be their sole music player and so they are likely to continue buying CDs. And this is where a problem arises.

To play the music on their iPod or other player, they need to be able to rip the tracks to a digital format, but copy control on CDs prevents them from doing this. So they now have three options:

1) Accept that they won't be able to play the tracks from their newly purchase CD on their digital music player.
2) Purchase the tracks online in a format they will be able to transfer to their digital player, and end up paying for them twice.
3) Turn to the P2P networks and use Kazaa or one of the other file sharing programs to download the tracks for free.

Option 1 is possible for those with very little technical knowledge, whilst option 2 is very unlikely to happen - who in their right mind pays again for music they've already bought. Which just leaves option 3, download the tracks illegally.

It doesn't matter whether a CD has copy protection or not, it will always end up on the file-sharing networks: hi-fi + cable to PC + PC audio recorder = high quality copy. There is no way to stop people from doing this, it is just a bit fiddly and time consuming to do, and it only takes one person to do it and then share the files and any copy protection is worthless.

So the person who's just bought a copy of a protected CD goes on to Kazaa, possibly for the first time, to download the tracks they've already legally purchased. Whilst they're there they realise that they can download almost anything they want. I challenge you to find anyone who won't think 'whilst I'm here, I'll just see if I can find the latest CD from X', and pretty soon you'll have a regular user of P2P networks.

If the record companies want to stop illegal music downloads, they should be doing everything they can to discourage people from using file-sharing networks. CD copy protection has the exact opposite effect. Sell 'clean' CDs at a sensible price and people will still buy them - the sound quality is better than downloaded versions (including legal downloads) and it's easier and cheaper to rip a CD to MP3 than it is to burn an MP3 to CD. Alienate your customers by adding copy protecting though, and you'll end up pushing them away.

Today was the 90th anniversary of Britain's declaration of war on Germany in 1914, and to mark the occasion a ceremony was held at the Centotaph. The only four World War I veterans well enough to attend laid wreaths, before receiving veteran's badges at the Ministry of Defence. According to the BBC, attending the ceremony were Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, veterans minister Ivor Caplin and Commonwealth high commisioners to London. Note who didn't attend: not one member of the Royal family, the Prime Minister or even the defence secretary, who was over in Gibralter ogling the locals. I am not anti-royal, and this is not an anti-government comment, but as this could be the last ceremony of this kind that they are able to attend, would it really have been too much to expect?

In case they got lost on the way, I've marked on a map the relevant locations, along with the approximate time it would take to travel to the Cenotaph:



1 - The Cenotaph
2 - 10 Downing Street (30 second walk)
3 - Ministry of Defence (1 minute walk)
4 - Houses of Parliament (2 minute walk)
5 - Clarence House, official residence of Prince Charles (5 minute drive)
6 - Buckingham Palace (5 minute drive)

Oh well, I'm sure they all had good excuses...

I've just added a new gallery to the site - Fort William, Oban & the Scottish Highlands, taken last week. I've also redesigned the existing Canada galleries so that they're integrated in to the site. In case you're wondering, I used Jalbum to generate the galleries. Links posted here open in a new window, so to view the galleries click the links on the left.

After the iRiver problems I wrote about earlier, I have been on the look out for a portable mp3/audio player that supports OGG, has an FM radio and has decent battery life. After my brief flirtation with a flash-based player I've decided to go for a hard drive one. I've completely ruled out iRiver - I emailed them to get clarification on whether the white noise problem has been fixed, and they couldn't even be bothered to reply; I'm not willing to buy from a company with that level of customer service.

Well, I think I've found what I'm looking for, one of these chaps, an iAudio M3:



It has everything that I'm looking for, has great reviews, is smaller than an iPod and judging from comments on the iAudio forum, they listen and respond to their customers.

So where's the dilemma? There are now three versions, the standard 20GB & 40GB models with 12 hours battery life, and now also a long play 20GB model, the M3L, with 35 hours. And the 20GB M3L is exactly the same price as the standard 40GB!! Why do they have to make these decisions so difficult!? So do I go with the smaller hard drive, but longer battery life, or vice versa? If anyone has a hard drive MP3 player I'd appreciate it if you could let me know which you'd go for and why, bearing in mind that neither will hold my entire music collection (around 60GB, and almost all of it legal!).

It's not often I write about really serious subjects on here, but sometimes you read something that so knocks you sideways that you start to question your own opinions.

This story in the New York Times, via Washington Monthly, tells the story of a mother who, after finding out she was pregnant with triplets, had an abortion. Except she only aborted two of them and kept the other one.

'I'll never leave my house because I'll have to care for these children. I'll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise. Even in my moments of thinking about having three, I don't think that deep down I was ever considering it.'

The immediate reaction to this is one of revulsion - aborting two and keeping one just because it would change your life too much seems just wrong. But how is this different to aborting a single fetus just because it was unplanned? I have always considered myself to be pro-choice, but I can't see any moral argument why this is worse.

Should we only allow the termination of all fetus in cases like these? But then you're forcing the mother to deny one of them life, and that doesn't seem right. If it's for medical reasons or after rape then decision is a completely different on, so perhaps the motive should be examined? But again, how is this different to aborting a single fetus because it will get in the way of your career? I think I'm going to need some time on this one.

Following their purchase earlier this week, Google are now offering Picasa, a digital photo album for free from their UK site. It was previously for sale at £30.The main features are:

- Slideshow. Automatic or manual full screen slideshow of an album.
- Editing. Red-eye removal, cropping, black & white, rotation and auto-enhance.
- Timeline. Full-screen graphical view.
- Email photos with automatic resize.
- Keyword searching. Add keywords to each image for easier searching.

I've already downloaded and installed it; my inital thoughts? Good stuff:

- Very nice clean, minimalist interface.
- Quick import: it imported my 1393 photos, 1.69GB, in about a minute.
- The slideshow is well implemented.

Whilst it's free, and I shouldn't really complain: the not-so-good stuff:

- There doesn't seem to be a way of displaying a single image full-screen without starting a slideshow.
- The keyword searching is very basic. For example, you can't use 'and' or 'or'.
- The timeline feature doesn't seem to work on my PC - it displays in a very low resolution, making the pictures fuzzy.
- I can't find any reference to whether the rotation is lossless; until I can be sure it is, I'm going to avoid it.

Is it worth downloading? If you already use another album package, such as Adobe Album or PS Photo Album there is nothing ground-breaking in Picasa that warrants changing. This may be different in the future - I wouldn't be at all surprised it the next version contains built-in Blogger functions. If, though, your photos are spread all over your hard drives at the moment with nothing to help organise them, then follow the link and download it now - for free, it is a very good product.

Sorry, shameless plug here. If by some stroke of luck you're in the market for a late 70s Kramer 350G aluminium (or aluminum for those across the pond) neck guitar, then have I got just the thing for you - I've just put mine up up for auction on Ebay. I was expecting about £200 for it, but with 7 days left it's already up to £220, with a fair bit of interest. The auction ends Saturday 17th July at 2334.

When it's sold I'd like to get one of these, an Ibanez AR3000, but I haven't found anyone in the UK who sells them yet. If you happen to know of somewhere that's got them, let me know.

**UPDATE 14/07/2004**
Come on, get those bids in. Up to £255 with just 3 days left. Pictures of it here.

I took the plunge a couple of weeks ago and bought one of the iRiver 700 Series, the iFP-790 from Ebuyer, total price £120.

Based on reviews and user comments it seemed to offer the most features for the price and have good sound quality. After using it for a fortnight I beg to differ:

Problem 1 - USB Device Not Recognized By PC
After installing the software that comes with the iFP-790, I followed the instructions and connected it via a USB port. After a couple of seconds my PC displayed a message 'The installation failed because a function driver was not specified for this device instance'. I tried following the instructions on the iRiver website, which involved trying to install the drivers via Device Manager, but could not get it to work. I emailed iRiver support and received the exact same instructions that are on the website - very useful! Eventually I found this post on the iRiver forum about problems with USB1.1 ports. I tried connecting the player to my PC at the office and it worked first time. I upgraded the firmware to version 1.14 which specifically mentioned a fix for USB connection problems - this time it worked on my home PC. How bad must their testing be for this kind of bug to go out on a product? I was lucky that I had access to another PC. It seems from comments on the forum that the problem isn't only limited to USB1.1 ports - people are also having difficulties connecting to USB2.0 ports. You pays your money, you takes your chance.

Problem 2 - Limited Ogg Support
I particularly wanted Ogg support due to it's superior sound quality at higher compression rates. Despite having Ogg support advertised on the packaging, there is no mention that it only supports Ogg tracks with an average bitrate above 96Kbps. As this player only has 256MB of memory this immediately reduced the number of tracks I'm able to store.

Problem 3 - Loud Background Hiss
When I first listened to the player in an almost silent environment, I could here a very noticeable background hiss. This is not background noise on the tracks themselves, as the hiss is audible as soon as the player is switched on, with nothing playing. So I did some digging. Today I found these posts on Mistic River, and the iRiver community forum. To summarise, they are recalling all iFP-700 series and iFP-800 series in Korea because of this exact problem. However, they are not doing the same elsewhere. If there is a known problem they should be recalling them all to be fixed, replaced, repaired or refunded. Anything less and they are knowingly selling a faulty product.

As far as I can gather from the forum posts, these problems exist on all IFP-700 series players, the IFP-780, IFP-790, IFP-795 & IFP-799, as well as the iFP-800 series, the iFP-880, iFP-890, iFP-895 & iFP-899 which differ only cosmetically.

Perhaps 'review' was the wrong word to choose for this, maybe rant would have been better. There are postitives, battery life and the ability to set a timer to record FM, for example. But when it's primary function is to play uploaded tracks, and you have problems connecting and a persistent background hiss, then no amount of positives out-weigh this. If you're willing to risk it not connecting to your USB port, won't be using Ogg files and can tolerate a loud background hiss, then I recommend this player. Otherwise avoid.

**UPDATE 13/07/2004**
Ebuyer accepted it as a return, and after testing they agreed that it was faulty and refunded the price. At least it wasn't just me being over sensitive. Knowing what I know now about the Ogg limitations, if I could be sure that there wouldn't be the background hiss I would still buy the 512MB model. The trouble is, I wouldn't trust buying one by mail order now, and haven't seen any in high street shops.

**UPDATE 22/10/2004**
As the most recent comments from other people on this post have been mostly positive, I took the plunge and bought an IFP-895 yesterday. And the verdict is.... thumbs up. There is still a very, very slight background hiss, but far less than the IFP-790 I had and it's really not noticeable. For those who are interested, I bought it from Overclockers for the bargain price of £129 including VAT and delivery (the lowest Advanced MP3 Players would go was £149), it's the European model rather than the US one that came from Ebuyer (different packaging and loaded with the EU firmware) and the firmware version is 1.21.

Just creating a spam trap to improve my filtering

[email protected]

..no please, don't, I'll get in trouble. You see, according to this page, 'Hyperlinking to this site, is not permitted without the express prior permission of Sellotape®'.

Pinched from Scaryduck, who I hope won't be sending the lawyers round.

I've run out of people to send Gmail invites to and still have a couple left, so I thought I'd see how many people actually read this thing. Leave a comment and I'll choose a couple of people to send invites to on Wednesday.

From one of the sock puppets at Danny Baker's Internet Treehouse comes this. Pure genius.

And now, the end is near
And so I've faced my last election.
My friends, you've made it clear,
You've fecked me up, with your selection.

I've lived a life that's smug.
I've grinned like Turpin on a highway
But more, much more than this,
I did it my way.

Lies, I've told a few
But then again, I won't be rueing.
I did what George told me to
And saw it through without the UN

We planned each bombing course
Each reckless step along the byway,
But more, much more than this,
I did it my way.

Yes, there were times, I'm sure you knew
When I thought Gordon was a pile of poo
But through it all, when there were rows
I shut him up, and slapped his jowels.
I faced him down, and made him frown
And did it my way.

I've loved, I've laughed and cried.
Sometimes for real, but mostly contrived.
And now, as votes subside,
I wonder how I got that landslide

To think I did all that
And may I say, in quite a sly way,
Ah yes, oh that was me
I did it my way.

For what is a man, what has he got?
In Peter's case, bum sex a lot
And Alastair, where is he now?
As he's fecked off, I'll take my bow
The record shows, my record blows
I did it my way.

Could someone please explain to Peter Snow the difference between % and % points. An increase from 30% to 33% is not a 3% increase, it's 10%, 3% points. How long has he been doing this job, you'd have thought he'd know better by now?

I've just been reading on slashdot about a competition, run by Search Guild and Dark Blue, to get the highest Google ranking for the search term ' nigritude ultramarine'. As this site somehow does quite well in Google I thought I'd give it a try. I'm not going to put any effort into it, I'm just interested in how I fare against those who really try.

Full details are here, and so I'm part of the competition, here's the image I have to display:

Inspired by a comment on Daily Kos, this is my prediction of the scene as George W Bush and Dick Cheney arrive for their joint appearance at the 9/11 commission.

Happy Easter

...according to the BBC. Repeat after me, 'I don't have to use it if I don't want to'. FFS, no-one is forcing anybody to sign up - if you don't like the terms and conditions or the way it works, use something else.

After reading about the fire in Manchester's Guardian Underground Telephone Exchange, a formerly secret telephone exchange built 34m underground during in 1954, I decided to do some digging to see what else is out there (digging, get it?). Sorry, I know this will bore some people to tears, but for some reason this really interested me. Well, it seems that the UK is awash with underground tunnels and rooms, some still in use, but many lying disused.

The most widely known are the London Underground tunnels that, for one reason or another, are no longer used. In many cases they are just sealed up, and the stations almost become time capsules, untouched for years. For further reading, Underground History has a very comprehensive write-up and accompanying photos.

Staying in London, there are also an extensive network of tunnels used by the government, some that are officially acknowledged, such as the Cabinet War Rooms, and some that are not. Outside of London there are ancient tunnels in Glastonbury, a secret British Military Installation at Rudloe Manor near Bath, which is rumoured to be the UK Government's new nuclear command centre.

I found a few good sites with extensive information - take a look at Urban Underworld, Darkplaces, Subterranea Brittanica and this page on freerepublic.com.

This link will probably die soon, but over at Google's new beta email site, Gmail, there's a link to a page wishing April a happy birthday, love Paul. Presumably Paul works on Gmail, and April is his other half. How sweet. I wonder if this will start a trend - who can wish their other half a happy birthday in the most public way?

There's a campaign over at Terry Wogan's TOGs site to get Danny Baker moved from his slot on BBC London's Breakfast show to Radio 2. It appears that his appearances on the Terry & Gaby show have endeared him to a whole new audience. With the listeners of Radio 2's most popular show on his side maybe there's a chance this time.

If you'd like to hear Danny Baker freed from the constraints of no music, traffic reports every 15 minutes and, with a bit of luck, also free from Amy Lame, head over there to sign the petition.

It was announed yesterday that from September 2003 all visitors to the US are going to have their fingerprints and photograph taken on arrival to 'help fight terrorism'. Could someone tell me any act of terrorism, anywhere in the world, that would have been prevented by this? If someone is already suspected of terrorism they won't be let in to the country; if intelligence is gained after they enter the country it's too late, and a fingerprint won't help track them down.

Consider this: in October this year, someone other than me enters the US with a faked copy of my passport. The US fingerprints and photgraphs them, and their details are added to the database as me as they are none the wiser. Unaware of this, I then visit the US some time after. As soon as they take my fingerprints it is going to be flagged up that I've visited before and the fingerprints don't match. Imagine the hassle trying to prove you are who you say you are, and that the first person was the imposter.

This just won't work unless other countries share information; as far as I know the UK government doesn't have my fingerprints, and even if they did, there is no plan to share it.

All this is going to hurt tourism. The last time I was in the US, in June 2002, the wait at immigration was an hour. After a long flight this was just about bearable - everyone understood that security would be increased after September 11 (even though you spend 5 minutes getting asked stupid questions that are not going to stop anyone). These new measures are going to double the time it takes to get in to the country. After an 8 hour flight, a 2 hour wait would be just too long. My tourist pounds will be going elsewhere, as, I suspect will many others.

It seems it doesn't matter how big you are, it's the simple over-sights that catch you out. Logging on to my adsense account this evening I was presented with this security window warning me the certificate had expired. Looking at the details, it expired at 19:52:39 BST.



They may be worth billions, but they need to spend a few extra quid on someone to do the admin. I've emailed them to let them know; let's see if they reply.

Googlebot was here for it's daily visit this evening - nothing unusual there - but what was strange was a couple of the URLs it tried to spider - /atom.xmlindex.phpatom.xml & /atom.xmlindex.php. Whilst this site is written in php and does contain feeds (which are already indexed), both of these returned 404s as I don't have these files on this domain and never have had. Judging by the filenames, it was attempting to find an atom feed, a syndication feed similar to RSS.

I can only think of two reasons Googlebot should have tried to spider these addresses - either someone has manually submitted them to Google or it is trying new tricks to keep ahead of the competition. The former seems rather unlikely as it would be a complete waste of time, which only leaves the latter. They already have Google News, which syndicates stories from 4500 news sites; perhaps they are planning to do the same with blog feeds or maybe have a dedicated blog search. Could this see them splitting out blogs from the main index entirely? Probably none of these, but I'm going to keep an eye on the logs, and I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has had similar visits.

If you're looking for a reason to choose b2evolution over any other blogging software, then your search is over - the latest (beta) release contains a fantastic new feature, AntiSpam Deluxe. If you find yourself getting spammed, either via referers or in the comments, you can immediately delete all instances of the URL and instantly block it. Better still there is a central domain blacklist, so if you update regularly, via a single click, you can block spam before it reaches you.

How was Wordpress chosen as the official successor to b2? b2evolution has easy installation, straight-forward skinning and powerful features, what more can you ask for?

In the vain hope of making a bit of cash, I applied for Google's AdSense program. I wasn't sure I'd be accepted, as one of their program policies is that they don't generally accept personal pages. Well, it seems that the content must be just far enough away from their definition of a personal page, as this morning I received a 'Congratulations, you Adsense application has been approved' email from them.

Concious of not turning the site into a billboard, I've decided not to put the ads on the front page, and have so far only put them on the gallery pages. When I can work out how to do it in b2evolution, I may also put them on the permalink pages. I'm not looking (or expecting) to make a fortune from it, but enough to cover my hosting costs would be great, and anything over a bonus.

**UPDATE** 14/03/2004
Well I'll be damned if I can work out how to get the Adsense links to only display on certain pages, so they're going on all of them.

...according to some graffiti on the M25 between junctions 16 & 15. So someone, somewhere, is pissed off enough at Carl that they've taken the trouble to paint abuse at the side of a motorway. I'd love to know who wrote it, who Carl Moggford is and what he's been lying about, but I guess I'll never know.

As an outsider, I've never quite understood the way that American presidential elections are run. Why do the potential opposition candidates spend the first half of an election year attacking each other, drawing attention to each other's weaknesses? Surely this just helps the incumbent President? I just hope that whoever wins the race to be the Democrat candidate can go on to beat George Bush. I won't go in to why now, but take yourself here (Bush Watch) or here (CNN) to read more about the US President.

After seemingly ignoring him for the past year, President Bush has decided to go after Osama Bin Laden again; it's amazing what capturing a wanted man can do to your approval ratings. So, when will he be caught? The most likely dates are:

w/c Monday 19 July - Just in time to pour cold water on the Democrat national Convention.
w/c Monday 23 August - The week before the Republican Convention.
w/c Monday 18 October - Two weeks before the election. A pretty handy time to get an approval boost.

Other likely times are the weekends of any US holidays, so that's the weekends commencing Friday 28 May (Memorial Day), Friday 2 July (Independance Day), Friday 3 September (Labor Day) or Friday 8 October (Columbus Day).

My money is on the Memorial Day weekend. George Bush has received a lot of flack over his military service (or lack of it), and for not attending any of the military funerals of those killed in Iraq. I can hear him now: 'See, those that lost their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq didn't die in vain... the war on terrorism is being won' etc, etc. Or am I just a little too cynical?

I have to give it to the spammers, they're getting cleverer. Referer Spam started off nice and simple - the spam site spoofed the http referer when visiting your site so it would appear as a link in the 'recent refers' section of your site. Lots of links to a site = a high Google page rank and a higher placing in Google searches. Site owners soon got wise to this though, and after a quick check of the page the referer would be banned using a .htaccess file on the server, and the link deleted.

The spammers are now trying to make it harder to spot, by spoofing an http referer of an interim site which in turn links to the sites that the spammers are trying to raise the page rank of. Theoretically, if enough sites are linking to the interim site, it's page rank increases, which in turn raises the page rank of the target (links from highly ranked sites count for more).

Have a look at this site - *http://www.synapseiowa.com/ (* added to prevent a hyperlink). At first glance this isn't the type of site you would wish to block refering traffic from, a genuine site from a legitimate business. A genuine site apart from the 'Site Hosted' section in the bottom left corner which are links to porn sites. Now refresh your browser - the links are gone!! The first time you visit it writes a cookie, and on subsequent visits the links are not shown, so if you miss the links the first time you won't see them again. Googlebot doesn't store cookies so will always see the links.

Synapseiowa is by far the most sophisticated, but there are a number of others that have hit my logs in the last couple of weeks:

*http://www.skipme.com
*http://www.evesmith.com
*http://www.skipme.com
*http://www.jennyknicks.com
*http://www.princessnina.com
*http://www.tawnygirl.com
*http://www.veronicabee.com

all of these contain similar links to porn sites.

The question is, how have the spammers managed to hijack these interim sites? What seems to be happening is that the spammers are making of copies of sites on domains that are about to expire. As soon as they do, they register the domain themselves, and upload the copy. That way they have real looking sites that don't look like normal spam.

The moral of this is two-fold. Firstly, if you have a domain expiring soon and you don't intend to renew it, make sure you remove any old, out of date content. That way your site and name won't be associated with spam. Secondly, if you run a weblog, check your referers carefully so you aren't unwittingly helping the spammers.

The new release of Mozilla Firebird, 0.8, is out today, and to take advantage of all the positive publicity that Firebird has had... they've renamed it Firefox. Crap name, but a great browser. First impressions are that it's much quicker, both starting and rendering pages. Don't be put off that it's only beta - I've been running 0.7 for the last few months with no problems. Once you try it you'll find it very difficult to go back to Internet Explorer.

The main ftp site is swamped at the moment, but you can grab it from this mirror.

Are the people working for the record industry born stupid or do they put them through some kind of training course? Whilst the Record Industry Association of America is busy suing people who download music using file-sharing programs, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) have managed to go one better - by forcing retailers to raise their prices.

Read about it here (BBC) and here (The Register).

When is a security code not secure? When it's only 1% as effective as it should be.

I recently applied for an account with Intelligent Finance, the online arm of Halifax, and because of some problems at their end I ended up having to ring them a number of times. To verify your identity they ask you for your full name and address, both publicly available, and two random digits of a 4 digit security code.

Except they don't. Every time I've rung them (6 times in 2 weeks) it is always the 1st & 3rd digits; if you've got an account with them try it and see. So from a possible 10000 combinations it is down to 100, which doesn't exactly fill me with confidence - it's like having a 2 digit pin number for your cash card. Perhaps I've been exceedingly (un)lucky, but if that's the case then I'm going to start playing the lottery again. More likely they figure that as it's an Internet-based account you're unlikely to ring them that often so no-one would cotton on.

I first signed up with PayPal over a year ago, and just left the account dormant - I didn't bother it, and it didn't bother me. Over the last week I bought and sold a couple of items on Ebay, which involved me upgrading to a 'Premier' account. Two minutes after I upgraded I received my first bit of PayPal related spam, trying to trick me into entering my details on a spoof site.

The email address that I signed up to PayPal with, and received the spam to, I rarely use and receives no spam - I have a few disposable ones that I generally use. The only people that have this one are the two people I bought from and sold to and PayPal. So either one of them added me to some kind of mailing list, or my details were somehow 'leaked' from PayPal. Coincidence? It could be, but a very big one.

Could someone please explain the point of this please? My girlfriend was given Will Young's new CD Friday's Child as a Christmas present and found it wouldn't play in her car cd player. I took a look and it has a tiny 'Copy Control' logo on the front of the case, and on the back a box showing that the compatibility is <100% on devices other than 'CD Audio Home Player'.

When I tried it in my PC, Windows Explorer is unable to read the tracks and you have to install a proprietary player to play highly compressed versions. However, when I opened it with Media Jukebox, cdex or Extract Audio Copy (EAC) I was able to play and rip the tracks without a problem. So BMG's copy protection prevented the one thing that they can't complain about, namely playing the CD, and completely failed to prevent me ripping the CD.

I'm now in posession of MP3s of the whole album and am toying with sharing them on Kazaa and WinMX to serve them right for making me spend half an hour re-recording the CD. Well done BMG.

Originally posted by Big Ian at b3ta, but in case you missed it it's is definitely worth reposting. This is the original innocent decoration:



and this is the same decoration 'when combined with a twisted mind' as Big Ian puts it: