(I’m Not Asking For A) Second Chance

The title has nothing (much) to do with the post itself, I just really love the song.

If you’re not familiar with the song, It’s James Blunt.  Yes, some people hate him.  Me?  Some of the songs are pants but You’re Beautiful, 1973, High and Same Mistake along with a couple of others I can’t remember right now are simply awesome music.

Still none the wiser?  This is the video for Same Mistake.  Even if you hate watching video, hit the play button open a new tab (Firefox FTW!) and just listen.

Oh, by the way, I’m blogging here again today because I just can’t stop myself. Oh, and I forgot to pay for my hosting!

I have a bit a decision to make though. I might continue blogging here for the moment as, even with all the restrictions I rather like the fact that wordpress.com is just “here”. It doesn’t go away or fall over like my hosting does (twice in two months, once my fault, once not!). I will still keep Cornell Finch but might turn it into a photoblog on a new host.

New Apple Product Free??

Everyone - and I mean everyone - has access to this product.  You don’t even need a computer (PC or Mac)!

It’s entirely free and usually made up of entirely natural products.

The only catch is that you have to assemble it yourself.  It’s really easy and every version is entirely unique.

Follow these simple steps:

1. Announce to everyone nearby that you need to use the bathroom.

2. Sit on the toilet.

3. Go for a crap.

Voila!  You just created your own iPoo…

Sorry.

Electro Ffffffunk Daddy Superstar Break - Beat Boxing

This is just awesome. By now everybody knows what beatboxing is. If you don’t you are square. Yes, an 80s reference for something that first appeared in the 80s.

Anyhoo, this is the perfect recipe for the “Electro Ffffffunk Daddy Superstar Break”:

This is one of those skills I will never have. Not enough teeth in my mouth…

Hat tip to the awesome Jon Dyers for the vid.

Killing Off The Porn

Following some Link Love (this could get confusing!) from Options on one of my previous posts, I glanced at the tags. I noticed that one of them was Porn.

My first thought was “idiot tag gaming spammer”, which I very quickly revised when I realised the plan and then formulated one of my own.

This might get me kicked out of the News Departments, but I don’t care.

Here’s the plan:

1. Write a technical post. Computers, Internet, WordPress - whatever.
2. Tag it “Porn”.

This will eventually have the effect that the Porn tag will be overrun with techy posts and the actual porn tags from WordPress.com blogs not declared mature will disappear. Ok, this will probably piss-off the non-adult bloggers that talk about porn, but that’s a small price to pay. They should get a life and not spend it thinking about titties.

This goes along (somewhat) about my idea for the Forum Tag War…

In case you don’t hear from me again, check Matt’s (lost the plot using IE7!) BBQ for a fat human looking piece of meat on the spit roast…

Give us the Damned URL!

Just a very quick one. If you’re asking for help in the wordpress.com forum then let uss have the URL for your blog (warning if it’s NSFW!). Threads like this one do nothing to help either you or the volunteer trying to help you.

Oh, and read the bloody stickies! If you’re too damned lazy to do that then learn just this:

1. Are you blogging at wordpress.com or do you have your own host?

If you’re at wordpress.com use this forum.

If you’re self-hosted, use this forum.

See, not hard is it!

EOS 40D - Want One?

Hong Kong based Roland has written an awesome review of the new Canon EOS 40d. If you’re a wp.com blogger you’ve probably already seen (or ignored) it but I wanted to pick up on it anyway.

I currently shoot (semi-professionally) with an old (think 6 years) Canon EOS 10d - 6 megapixels, slow write times - and a variety of lenses. When I heard the rumours about the 40d I got all wishful. Wishful that I could afford one. Now I am glad that I can’t afford one. I don’t want it. That’s not quite true. If I could afford it (like I had ten thousand pounds spare) then I would have one tomorrow. As it i, much like the rest of the world I would struggle to raise the money. Yes, it’s gorgeous. Look at the 3″ screen (below) and apparently it has live preview - something that compact cameras have had for years.

Then I read Roland’s excellent review (probably the first in the world and one of the most in-depth) and I saw one word that put me off. CMOS. Yes, it’s actually four words, you get my point.

I am absolutely scratching my head though. The CMOS sensor is all well and good, 10 megapixels or whatever, but it’s not full frame. You still have to take into account the 1.6x crop factor. For most people that won’t make any difference at all. What you see in the viewfinder is (essentially) what you get on the image.

But that means that my 50mm f1.8 Canon lens is actually an 85mm when connected to my 10d (or the 40d). My 19-35mm lens is actually 30-56mm and my 70-300 comes out to 112-480mm. I have nothing that will work as a wide angle.

I could go and by the Canon EOS 5d (12.7 mp full frame) but that’s retailing at £1599 in the UK right now and I can afford that even less than the 40d.

I know that Canon used the CMOS to keep costs down but surely economies of scale apply? If they started using the full-frame sensor from the 5d in the lower range then surely the cost of the sensor would come down and the price of the camera would too?

Grr! As much as I want to upgrade I will not be buying a new camera until Canon put the full-frame sensor in a reasonably priced body. And don’t tell me to buy a Nikon! I would have to change all my lenses. And anyway Nikon suck…

Yet Another Reason To Avoid Blogger

We all know that Blogger is the root of all blogging evil. It’s been well documented in the past that Blogger has been hacked and malicious scripts, viruses and malware installed on users’ blogs.

BBC News is reporting today that Alex Eckelberry from Sunbelt Software noticed booby-trapped links on 27 August.

From the report:

Now many hundreds of blogs on the site have been updated with a short entry containing the link.

Mr Eckelberry said it was not yet clear how the links were posted to blogs. The bogus entries could have exploited a Blogger feature that lets users e-mail entries to their journal.

You would have thought that after the first three widely publicised takedowns that Google (who own Blogger) would have tightened security on the application. Apparently not.

Among the other recipients of spam e-mails generated by the virus are users’ mail2blogger accounts, which allow them to update their blogs via e-mail,” said the spokesperson.

The email addresses on mail2blogger accounts are stored in Blogger so that the system can associate the account with the email address. A simple (relatively of course) or an insider would be able to get said email addresses and pass/sell to the “gang”. This would mean two things:

1, The “gang” would be able to post the malicious scripts to blogs via cloaked email.
2. The “gang” would be able to email the script to the owner of the email address infecting their computer and causing it to pass on the script in the usual virus like manner.

I don’t know about others but I try my hardest to avoid blogs hosted by or running Blogger type software. Yes, I may be missing out on decent content but I just really can’t stand the interface, the spam advertising, the porn and the black templates of death.

My suggestions:

1. Avoid any blogs on blogger.
2. If you want to blog, use a decent service. Yes, it’s very restricted but so far there have been no reports of hacking into the system.
3. Get a Mac.

Facebook At Work? No!

In a news report from the BBC today the Trades Union Congress reckons that social networking sites such as FaceBook, MySpace and Bebo should be allowed at work:

Employees should have access to social networking websites such as Facebook during office hours, the TUC has said.

This is utter utter crap. These sites have the “social network” tag for a reason. They are SOCIAL sites, not WORK sites. I don’t know about you, but the only friends I have on Facebook are friends, no work colleagues.

When you are at work, you are there to WORK. If you are surfing Facebook you aren’t working. You are not doing your work, you are reducing productivity and effectively costing the company money.

Some firms have blocked workers’ access to the sites, or disciplined staff for misuse of the internet.

However, the union organisation says it is unreasonable to try to stop staff from having a life outside work and suggests setting guidelines instead.

My employer blocks all the social sites, including Face Book and MySpace, they even block eBay. It’s no bad thing. Since blocking these sites we saw a reduction in internet usage. We also installed monitoring software which has had a similar result. Allowing users to to access non-work related sites simply adversely affects performance.

Stopping staff having a life outside work? What utter crap. The organisation is trying to get the time back that the employee is paid for. Thankfully there is some sense in all this:

Employment Law Advisory Services, which provides advice for employers, said access should be for business use only.

Personally I believe that many more sites should be banned too. The shopping sites like Amazon and play.com would be a good start!

Does your employer block any sites? If they do, what do you think of the ban?

Crashing Internet Explorer

I hate Internet Explorer. So do thousands of others.

I found a little script that will, when used will crash Internet Explorer.

for (x in document.write) { document.write(x);}

Wrapped within script tags this will every time crash IE. Cool huh!

Well, no not really. On the site where I found this the poster suggests inserting this script in a page and then sending the link to your friends that you know are still using IE. As all it’s going to do is crash their browser, all you’re going to do is piss them off.

Unless you explain (before you give them the link!) that Firefox will handle it properly and this is yet another reason to switch to Firefox.

It would be very sensible NOT to put this on a page with high traffic. It’s just going to drive traffic away from your site, not force them to change to Firefox.

Similarly, how many people do YOU know that have installed Firefox having seen that bloody annoying message at the top of a blog when surfing with IE:

You’re using IEx. Some features are disabled for IE users because it sucks. Please use Firefox and come back again.

Yes, IE sucks. No, I can’t install Firefox at work and no, I won’t be back, thanks anyway. Listen to me, MAKE THE F*****G SITE COMPATIBLE!

WordPress Still The Best

Well, it is. Yes, I am biased. Yes, I run all my sites with a WordPress backend. Why?

Well, Matt mentioned that MovableType 4 had been released. In a moment of pure boredom on a Sunday morning I thought I’d have a play.

It sucked. It took nearly 10 minutes to download the 4.9mb zip file. Expanded that came out to 18mb when expanded. WordPress took a whopping 9 seconds to download and an even more unreasonable 3.93mb when expanded.

I have a local XAMPP installation on my server, sat next to me in my office. I use it to play, in situations exactly like this. The MT Quick install instructions said:

Copy the mt-static directory from your local computer to the Web root directory on the Web server.

Open the cgi-bin directory on your Web server. Make a new directory within it named mt. Copy all of the other Movable Type installation folders and files to the mt directory.

I’m sorry, cgi-bin? PERL? What, no MySQL? This isn’t looking good guys. I might be wrong but surely this means you’re storing all the blog data in flat files?

Nope, can’t be arsed with that. Where’s the delete button… Ah, there it is. And MT on my server is history.

And that, even with all its faults, fanboys, haters, hackers and everything else is still THE blogging platform of choice. Best bit? You don’t have to pay to get support.