Spoof song of the day
Respect to Makke for his amusing spoof I won't let your mom go down on me

[Listening to: Makke - I Wont Let Your Mom Go Down On Me]

Happy Halloween!
Happy Halloween everyone! Not going to a party until tomorrow night, but I see Google have got into the spirit of things!

[Listening to: FTC - Arkanoid (SLAY Radio) ]

Postal strike
Bloody postmen are still on strike in London - its been all week so far. Typical, when I'm waiting on the finishing touches to my Halloween costume, some Linux CDs and a Linux book. Oi Royal Mail! Get Postman Pat back on duty or the cat gets it!

[Listening to: Revisq - Syrius Orbitter (Nectarine Demoscene Radio) ]

Colour Co-ordination
First of all, yes I have spelt Colours correctly - I'm English not American! Right, now that I got that one out of the way, if you want some nice co-ordinated colours for your website, check out ColorMatch (and yes, I know they spell it the American way....

[Listening to: System F - Spaceman (matti laamanen remix)]

Falcon rocks!
Played a bit with the new Atari Falcon last night. Plugs into my PC monitor, which is something my old Atari ST never did. Also has a headphone out socket, so I can run it through my hifi too. Played SuperFly on real Atari hardware at last (previously played it on SteeM) - wow does that thing play fast! Smooth scrolling at 60 frames per second. Much harder to play now its fast (or is it just that I'm crap at games?)

[Listening to: 4-Mat - chip shop - ]

Fuji Power!
My Atari Falcon finally arrived today - can't wait to go home and hook it up. Should be fun to get back into that old-school coding vibe, check out Falcon games and demos, and try to get back into the atari scene again

Cookie Monster
After the success of my homemade lemon and lime cookies a couple of weeks ago, I'm baking a batch of orange cookies to take to work tomorrow. Hope they come out okay!

Trip to Bruges
Nice trip to Bruges at the weekend. Went for a meal at a little restaurant we visited last time called Aquarel, had a little tour of the city on a boat on the canal, and visited the Temple of Beer where I picked up a case of 16 assorted Belgian beers.

[Listening to: Raja Ram - Raja Ram's Stash Bag Vol. 2]

Server back
All done, normal service resumed. Not spotted any problems yet, but you never know....

**** THIS SERVER IS BEING UPGRADED --TOMORROW-- (23rd Oct) at 10am UK Time *****
Sorry for the short notice, but its down to my service provider - hopefully its not gonna take too long to sort out!

[UPDATE: Work scheduled 10am - 12pm. Should be back in the afternoon]

Another popular search term
Looks like I unleashed another can of worms on my site as the search engines are all throwing traffic my way for people that are searching for the quiz I mentioned on Monday. On a few of the search engines I'm ranked second only to the original creator's website. You would of thought people would of gone to there first....

Rotaract meeting
Another Rotaract meeting last night. Trying to come up with more ideas for publicity, so thought I'd give it a mention here. Aged 18-30? Like doing things like going to pubs, bowling, nightclubs, cinema? Wanna hang out with other people that do? Might be worth checking out Rotaract then

The MiniPops Quiz
This fun little quiz has been doing the rounds on email lately, but for anyone that missed it, click on the link (NB: Needs MS Excel to open it)

Weekend at Disneyland Paris
Well, I'm back from a fantastic weekend at Disneyland Paris. We managed to visit every ride we wanted to - Big Thunder Mountain, Indiana Jones, It's a Small World, Phantom Manor and much more. Didn't seem to have to do too much queuing (with one exception) and getting around wasn't too much of a problem. I really recommend the place to anyone thinking of going, but get there for when the park opens and leave when it closes!

While I was there, I proposed to Alison, at sunset, upon the balcony of Sleeping Beauty's fairytale castle - she said yes, so now we're engaged!

Server Downtime
The server that this blog is hosted on is having an upgrade next week (dunno when exactly yet) and will be unavailable for a short while. I'll post another entry when I know more details, but I won't keep my regular readers waiting too long hopefully....

The French Connection
Off to France for a long weekend, so no blog entries while I'm there, but expect a flurry of catchup entries when I get back (especially my experiences at EuroDisney's Halloween festivities!)

W00t!
Oh joy! SLAY Radio is back up and running!

[Listening to: Starlost (arranged by ruiner) - Seduction of the Innocent (SLAY Radio) ]

Zen and the Art of Website Maintenance
My mate Joel is into reading about Zen philosophy, and also into reading about CSS. So he'll probably enjoy the CSS Zen Garden

Mono-culture and the .NETwork effect
Interesting article on Mono

Fooling the spambots
Interesting technique for preventing SpamBots from harvesting emails from your websites/blogs - display them as graphics not as text. You can do this dynamically too - the PBM package (which seems to be packaged with Linux) is a great way to generate these graphics, for example:

shell> echo user@example.com | pbmtext | pnmcrop | pnmpad -white -l2 -r2 -t2 -b2 > email.pnm
shell> convert email.pnm email.gif

Oh, and my shell account I tested on, convert wasn't in the default path, so try /usr/bin/X11/convert

Should be a way to script that from your page, so that the user inputs text, and the graphic is constructed and output on the fly. Any PHP whizkids wanna have a go at it?

[Listening to: Maf - Inspector Gadget]

Another fun-filled weekend
Back to work after a great weekend. Highlights included baking homemade lemon-and-lime cookies and shopping in Canterbury (where I found some great Halloween costume ideas

[Listening to: Man With No Name - Reincarnation (D I G I T A L L Y - I M P O R T E D - Goa & Psychedelic Trance - a voyage out of this world!) ]

What pre-1985 video game character are you?
Find out here

Finding Nemo
Ok, which of you little buggers is called Nemo?

Student sued over CD piracy study
Interesting article detailing another example of DMCA abuse and heavy-handedness by the record industry and its cohorts. Apparently SunnComm's CD protection can be bypassed wiht a single keypress, and they're trying to sue the guy that published this information on the web.
SunnComm are bleating about having lost $10m in market value since the publication of the information. I reckon that any company that produces copy-protection code that is so trivial to circumvent deserves to lose market value, as its stronger competitors succeed in the free market. Its called business guys, and only the strong survive....

Running late
Well, I overslept this morning for work, as I thought I might. Currently sat on the train to work. Good job I'm not due to start until 9:30....

Coding blitz
Its now 1:10am here, and I've been coding into the small hours again (ah, brings back memories of my old demoscene days). Time for bed!

Whoosh!
God I love the bandwidth I got at work (as tested by ZDNet's Bandwidth Tester)

Or see the Speed Thermometer version

Coding continues
Did some more work on my little game last night on the train home, up until the point that my laptop battery ran out. I'm having trouble with the power management setup on that machine - it goes into standby when it runs low without saying "I'm about to standby, save your shit now!". I tried switching it to hibernate mode this morning and 15 mins later it was still thinking about it. Bah!

Did a bit more on the game on my lunchbreak today too - fixed a little rendering bug, and got ½ way through the graphics rotation code. Hope to be done by the weekend.

[Listening to: Johannes Bjerregaard and Jeroen Tel - Stormlord (Nectarine Demoscene Radio http://www.scenemusic.net) ]

Configuring IIS SMTP Security
Ok, a bit of a geek blog entry, but it was useful to me, and might be to others. Nice tutorial on configuring SMTP for IIS properly.

[Listening to: ron klaren - battle squadron title (Nectarine Demoscene Radio http://www.scenemusic.net) ]

Save that screen!
Some really nice looking screensavers to be found here. Thanks to Aaron for bringing it to my attention.

[Listening to: freeman vs. liquid metal - Optical Crystal]

Uncle Sam drops by (again)
Last week I had NASA visit my blog (bubs.arc.nasa.gov). This week its the turn of the US Air Force (hal9000.grandforks.af.mil)

Game on!
Started writing a little windows game on my lunchbreaks. Nothing too advanced yet, I'm still teaching myself DirectX and GDI+ but I don't see that its gonna take me too long to finish. Good fun!

Spot The Bot
Nice little list of common web robots and comments about whether they are friendly ones or not, courtesy of Edith Frost (Roller-skating enthusiast)

[Listening to: Little Bitchard - Italo ]

Here kitty kitty...
Some silly git decided keeping a 350 pound Bengal tiger in his flat was a good idea. Read the report here

[Listening to: makke - hell on earth spells game over (Nectarine Demoscene Radio http://www.scenemusic.net) ]

Aaaaargh PHP
PHP getting on my nerves - trying to add new functionality to my comments script. Although I don't know PHP, I've worked with enough programming languages to be able to read most things. Doesn't help that the script I'm trying to work on has its variable names in another language though....

[Listening to: DJ Doboy - Trancequility Volume 26 (D I G I T A L L Y - I M P O R T E D - European Trance, Techno, Hi-NRG... we can't define it!) ]

Dover District Council
...can kiss my ass! That's all I gotta say about them

AOL shun my email
Got a bounced email back from AOL last night, after trying to email a friend. Apparently they don't like the fact that I run my own local SMTP server. Got the following error:-

SMTP error from remote mailer after initial connection:
host mailin-01.mx.aol.com [64.12.138.152]: 554- (RTR:SC) The information presently available to AOL indicates
554- that this server has been repeatedly used to transmit unsolicited
554- bulk e-mail to AOL. Based on AOL's e-mail policies at
554- http://postmaster.info.aol.com/standards.html, AOL cannot accept
554- further e-mail transactions from this server for an extended
554- period of time. Please have your ISP/ASP contact AOL to resolve

Which is very annoying - the reason I run my own SMTP server is so I can send mail from my ISP account regardless of whether I am at home (where I am on their network) or at work (where I'm not). Most ISPs won't let you send email on their servers unless you are connected to their networks, and the local SMTP seemed to be a workaround.

Oh well, looks like no more mail from me to anyone on AOL

Web robots and why they're useless for blogs
Regular readers will have seen me observe the number of times my page has been hit by people coming from search engines looking for this phrase.

However, I'm not entirely convinced that the search engine folks (and other sites that run blog-tracking robots) really had accounted for sites that are updated daily/hourly/whatever when they designed their systems. My blog is certainly designed to show the last 7 days only on the front page. Anything outside that scope goes off into my archives (which aren't spiderable in the search engines as far as I know). Unfortunately (for the person doing the search at least), the search engines are still showing my page as containing their search terms, and redirects them to my front page, where they are frustrated that there is no sign of what they were looking for.

Maybe now that the Blogger people have been absorbed into Google, they'll think about this problem a bit more (well, for Blogger blogs at least)

[Listening to: Jesus Jones - Zeroes & Ones (Prodigy vs. Jesus Jones Mix]

Big brother is watching you (with guns)
Disturbing BBC News item about the Hollywood movie industry's attempts to crack down on piracy, especially those people that take camcorders to the cinema (my bold emphasis):-

To combat this, US cinemas are now employing armed guards equipped with night-vision goggles at screenings to spot anyone attempting to illegally record the film

You thought the RIAA were tough on piracy? These guys shoot on sight!

[Listening to: Orbital - Technologicque park]

Day off
Got the day off today - you will have to wait until tomorrow for a proper blog entry