Dearest friends, family & idle passers by, the news about the washing machine is good. Continue reading
Dyson, Rocks.
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Monthly Archives: April 2005
Dyson, courtesy appears to come as standard.
9am and we just got a call from Steve the cheery Dyson repairman, letting us know exactly when he’s going to be with us, and confirming his arrival vector (checking he knows how to get here).
Another +1 for Dyson.
Our Dyson Washing Machine is Poorly
Close friends will be disturbed to hear that our Dyson CR-01 washing machine is not well. We think it might have fallen foul of a few sneaky coins which somehow infiltrated the wash yesterday. Continue reading
RegEx Plugin for Eclipse
I’m rather enamoured with this little plugin. It’s a regular expression evaluator, great for writing and checking regular expressions and knowing that they’re going to work in the way you think they will. Continue reading
Got NTL Broadband?
Do you have NTL 750Kbps Broadband? I have. Today I just noticed something rather dubious about it. Continue reading
ITV F1 Shambles – how it was reported.
The shambles of ITV’s 2005 San Marino F1 coverage has been picked up by several of the UK’s newspapers and news websites. Here’s what they’re saying: Continue reading
Formula1 ITV: That Advert Break
I was introduced to F1 by my grandfather, when James Hunt was fighting to be the world #1 back in the 70′s. We always watched on the TV. In those days that meant the BBC with Murray Walker’s insanely eager commentary and every episode introduced by the ominous bass of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain”. We watched the British drivers come and go; Brundle, Blundell, Coultard, Herbert, Hill and Nigel Mansell in his Red 5 Williams. We watched Senna and Prost collide as team mates; Senna and Mansell go wheel to wheel; the track invasion after Mansell’s home win in 92, and the shock of Senna’s death in ’94. My grandfather incidentally was such an F1 nut that he had a scale model of the McLaren on his television, so as a four year old, Formula1 was something that was just a part of life: and a very exciting part of life too. Continue reading
Turbocharging StatTraq
If you use StatTraq and WordPress, or if you use any kind of open-source statistics package on your website, you may benefit from this. Whilst reading around the intricacies of MySQL yesterday I discovered something so blindingly obvious that I think there must be a conspiracy to not talk about it. Continue reading
Google Maps the UK (and increases it's earnings potential again)
It’s only two months since Google introduced Google Maps to the USA, and yesterday they started to introduce it to the rest of the world, one country at a time. Happily for me (the first apostle of the church of Google) the UK was the first to benefit. Continue reading
UK Election 2005: Adverts and Immigration
The UK General election is now only three weeks away, so the country is awash with billboard adverts and whole pages of newspapers bought for the purpose of swaying the public’s opinion. Continue reading
Comment Spam, RIP soon?
A couple of years ago, a web page with an open comment form would have been used for commenting intelligently and considerately on the subject at hand or sending a message to the page author. Then, with the advent of Google’s page rank system, comment forms became the subject of massive misuse, because pagerank gave a higher rank to web pages based on the number of times they appeared on other sites. Spammers would use automated tools to mercilessly link and relink their sites on any and every open form. Having a high pagerank means coming first in search results, which for a commercial site equates to more sales: so comment spamming had rich rewards. Continue reading
Kurt Cobain, Still Dead.
Kurt Cobain was a musician who (by his own admission) could only just manage to play the guitar and sing at the same time, who was emotionally unequipped to deal with fame and stardom, and who therefore paid the ultimate price by killing himself, alone, using a shotgun. Continue reading
Google's Satellite Search
I previously discussed how I believed Google’s purchase of Keyhole, the 3D mapping company, was a very bold and possibly critical move in their future. I said at the time that in Keyhole, Google holds all the building blocks to make the next killer app – one that changes the world just as much as Netscape did when it was launched back in 1994. Continue reading
Extending StatTraq and Spam Control
I spent a while chatting with StatTraq author Randy Peterman over the last few days, we’re both interested in how to remove (or hide) referral spam from site usage statistics in order that they may be a realistic and meaningful reflection of actual human visitors. Continue reading
