paul and corinna and lucas' blog

Another nice review of My Mobible – that thing just keeps going!

Not very exciting, I know, but handy when your computer spontaneously combusts! Becoming a dad even affects how you store files... Like those important first photos of Lucas, etc. So I've been looking at how I do backups recently.

Previously I've done a mixture of things. Some stuff on DVDs, some on a different computer, at one point, some was uploaded to my webspace. I also have backups from old computers on various CDs. In the event of a major failure, I could probably piece the important stuff back together, but it's a bit all over the place, and not even necessarily safe!

So I started looking around for something better and discovered S3 – you can store your data in the same way/place Amazon uses for all its stuff! So you get Amazon's speed, security and (most importantly for this I guess) reliability. Plus it's very reasonably priced, and you only pay for what you use. (They're not even subtle about charging non-Americans more than Americans though, but at these prices you can't complain!)

Unfortunately, S3 isn't user friendly – it's meant as a data store for software (e.g. if you're writing a program that uses 5 million images say). However, I then found jungledisk which claims to make it very user friendly indeed – free to try so I gave it a go.

Jungledisk represents your S3 space as a local hard drive. It also comes with a very configurable backup manager, so that's that problem solved. I like the version history feature which will automatically keep old versions of deleted or modified files for a while in a separate area, that can be restored later if necessary. It's set to encrypt my files with 256-bit AES before uploading them (using SSL of course) to Amazon's secure servers – so I better not forget my passwords or I'm stuffed! It's available for Windows, Mac and Linux, and there's even an 'all platforms' bundle that will run directly from a USB drive – how's that for portability! (Not tried that myself yet, but looks very useful...)

And it works really well! I now have everything backing up to one place. Admittedly, the first backup took days, but answering the question 'do I really want to backup my music collection?' helped speed that up a lot! Backups can now take less than 5 mins (depending on how much has changed obviously). (You could make that even quicker by upgrading – which would allow block-level updates – but I've not decided if I want to do that yet due to potential security issues I can't be bothered to go into here...)

I suppose the real idea behind jungledisk is you can treat it like an unlimited USB drive, so I've stuck media I don't use often on there. Still, you can get the best of both worlds because of course it maintains a local cache. That means your data is accessible locally (from the cache) but is stored reliably (on S3). And it can do uploads from the cache in the background. (Hence why I need a bigger hard drive – so I can cache everything – which is a bit cyclic because I need to make sure I have a good backup before installing a new hard drive – me and hardware don't get on sometimes...)

As I said, you only pay for what you use – up/downloads, requests, and of course, storage. My costs so far are $20 for jungledisk and $4 for S3, but now the initial upload is done, I figure it will settle to around $2 per month for my 10GB of data – not bad eh?!

(One thing I'd like to be able to do is share a folder on my jungledisk with my network, but because it uses WebDAV under the hood, it won't let you. I'll just have to have it stored on my hard drive and backed up rather than directly on the jungledisk – not a biggie I suppose...)

So my "you'll go to hell if you spam my website" warning wasn't working (ok it's not worded quite that strong, but...) so unfortunately I've had to add a security code to the comments. There is some spam filtering on there, but it doesn't catch everything and I got sick of having to remove offensive comments – I couldn't tighten the filter up too much or it would block everything said by matt.

Personally I don't like having to do security codes like this, but neither do spambots, which is rather the point...

Though it still won't be 100% safe – apparently some spammers pay humans to solve these... Nice! Maybe I should add some kind of test like myjavaserver.com's where you have to write code to solve a problem...

I knew it! Some more from those ActOnCO2 nerds – see this article: "The campaign’s underlying message is that a diesel car is the best option to help to save the planet, unless you can afford a hybrid." (Assuming you drive mostly at <25mph, otherwise diesel would beat the pants off a hybrid too...) "All 30 of the larger family cars, estates and people carriers listed [recommended] are diesel, as are the top five luxury cars."

And, as we all know, driving to the corner shop is healthier for the planet than walking, hmm... "The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes." I think they possibly forget that it takes loads of diesel to get all that fuel to your car in the first place.

Clearly, the way to go is milk floats.

The government have done a CO2 Calculator – you can figure out your own carbon footprint with this rather nifty Flash thingy. (You can even get it to output the graph in feet shapes, nice!) Here's ours:

Looks quite bad when you have to measure it in tonnes! (Though these figures assume we do an average European return flight a year, which we're not this year.) The national average is 10.22 apparently, and they're aiming to reduce it to 6.39. So we're not doing too badly considering we're running two cars!

Oooo, ask google maps for directions and you can drag and drop parts of the route to change it/make it go via a specific point – and it updates in realtime! Wow! (Did everyone already know about this?)

(...when played perfectly.)

I guess everyone expected that, but wow! I didn't expect it to be proven so quickly! Draughts is solved!

My 3rd year uni project back in 2000 was a networked draughts program (which you can still download here), and my report was heavily based on Schaeffer's work. By then Chinook was well along the way. It had been World Champion for 6 years already. They looked more than 7 years away from solving it though. They had 8 or 9 piece databases, but they were already running into seriously thick computational brick walls trying to go beyond that (at the time). (For comparison, I only did 2 piece databases, he he...) Another article works out that they only had to compute 1/5,000,000 of all possible moves. Though of course that still leaves a humongous amount!

My program even managed to draw with Chinook which I thought was quite an achievement! Three out of four games too! Though admittedly it wasn't playing with all its World Championship resources (but still strong enough to beat other programs). And mine never looked like winning, just holding on for dear life! Though it did manage to beat all other commercial and freeware programs at least once, and didn't lose a game to them.

I wonder what Schaeffer will do now? That's the best part of two full decades work come to an end... Retire?

Ok, I feel a retraction of my earlier diatribe is in order. This morning I succumbed to facebook. It seems well enough written to avoid a lot of the issues I mentioned – it's definitely not as bad as other sites. (Plus it imports this blog, which is nice.) I can't see it taking over the business world tho. But it does seem to be a class A addiction for some people I know!

This may be old news I dunno, but I just found this and it's pretty cool: Pandora – you enter a song or artist you like, and it creates a radio playlist for you based around it. I.e. it initially plays the song/artist you entered, then goes on to explore similar/related songs/artists. It does this by looking at the attributes (or genes) attributed to it within the music genome project – there are over 400 of these attributes apparently.

Even if it doesn't have any songs from that artist, it has a stab at getting some musically similar ones for you. You can ask it why it played a particular song, guide it by saying which songs you like and dislike or if you are ok with a song but just bored of it right now (doesn't play it again for a month). You can click on the artist or album and it'll tell you some info including its genes. Nifty... It's even apologetic when it plays a song you don't like! And it's free!

Apparently that song I recommended the other day is:

electronica influences
new age influences
demanding vocal performances
heavy use of vocal harmonies
acoustic sonority
meandering melodic phrasing
paired vocal harmony
thru composed melodic style
a clear focus on recording studio production
major key tonality
melodic songwriting
a smooth female lead vocal

I think perhaps you get better results by entering a song rather than an artist (unless you really like everything they've ever done).

But it's great – I've already started discovering some new music! It had fun with Sigur Rós!

Oooo, you can check out my pandora profile and see what I'm listening to! 

Should you really say "Should you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us anytime, we are available 24/7." if it takes 4 replies and 3 days to get your question answered because you don't actually read the question?

I wanted to make comments easy to add, but we've been getting quite a few spam comments recently. They're easy enough to remove, but do get a bit annoying. No, I don't want any aflatoxin, tramadol, diazapam, alprazolam, hydrocodone, vicodine, levitra, xanax, vicodin, valium, or even phentermine. So I've added some spam filtering. Might have to add some IP blocking to deal with things like this in future, he he...

Woohoo – it just blocked its first attempted spam!

Woohoo! Finally! WiTricity is on its way!

Having said that, it occured to me recently that nothing is virtual – even the myspace "friendships" are something real. Perhaps the 'it just doesn't reflect reality' comment is unjustified – it's as real as anything else in that person's life.

No doubt you've seen Corinna's myspace. I refuse to get one. She's also on facebook, bebo, and just about any other site she's invited to. Matt signed me up for facebook, but after I found out what it was, and getting told off for writing on my own wall (whatever that is) and suffering the humiliation of being 'poked', I gave up on that.

I'm not against the idea per se – this blog being an obvious example of a related concept. And another being that I've just finished writing a social networking site myself! (Students Reunited – for the Abundant Life Leadership Academy alumni.)

But some of them go too far. They're too editable for people who can't do web design – you're pretty much encouraged to make your pages ugly and unreadable! Then there's the timewasting factor; people seem to get addicted to writing the comment "I like your page, look at mine" – what's the point? Then there's the fact that people will freely divulge every little detail about themselves publicly to the enitre world – there's something a little odd about that. And why have so many different social networking sites? There's only so many ways you can communicate with a person! But the thing that rubs me up the wrong way is this 'counting friends' thing – people feel the pressure to appear popular so add people they don't even know. I guess they're lonely, but meeting someone through myspace is not exactly the best way. It just doesn't reflect real friendships – I prefer tools that just let you relate rather than pressure you to make your life appear different to what it is. And comments like "are we still meeting up tonight?" are the equivalent of Dom Jolly shouting "I'M ON THE PHONE" in a public place. And worse: people end up surfing all those comments – what?!?! Plus beware: it's becoming common for employers to cyber-vet potential job candidates.

(I admit I have a linked in profile – that's almost as bad, but I can excuse it for business reasons.)

Oooo dad just got 1478 spam emails in a day! That's some good going!

I particularly liked one with the subject: "When you're writing a program, it's often a good idea to put in checks at strategic places for 'impossible' errors or violations of basic assumptions."

Oooo, the Lithuanian translation of My Mobible has hit the headlines! Respublika, a national newspaper in Lithuania devoted almost a whole page to it, including commentary from a Catholic priest!

I'm told the article was positive, but my Lithuanian is a little rusty.

I've shot some video on a camcorder, edited it in Adobe Premiere Elements 2 in Windows and uploaded to YouTube. I tried different settings/formats to try to maximise the quality, here's what I came up with. YouTube heavily compresses whatever you upload, so the trick is to give it the best quality video and audio you can in a format that's as close to the one it wants:

• Deinterlace: right-click on the video and select 'Field Options' then 'Always Deinterlace'. I tried 'Interlace Consecutive Frames' but it didn't work as well, and 'Flicker Removal' makes the video overly fuzzy. (I have to deinterlace because my source is a camcorder, if you're using something else, you may not have to.)


• Export to Quicktime (.mov) using these settings:
  • Video Codec: Apple MPEG4 Compressor (there is a H.264 one but it just comes out blank?)
  • Spacial Quality: 100 (though didn't really play with this much)
  • Frame Size: 320 x 240 (note: YouTube stores it in 320x240 but plays in 425x318, so if your video is fuzzy to start with, YouTube will make it worse! Best to make it sharp.)
  • Frame Rate: 30fps
  • Bitrate: 2,500kbps
  • Audio Codec: Apple Lossless
  • Output Channels: Mono
  • Frequency: 22.05kHz
  • The rest I just left on the defaults

That works for videos up to around 5m. For longer videos, reduce the video bitrate appropriately. It's not perfect, but it's as good as I've got it so far. I usually prefer .wmv but .mov seemed to come out better in YouTube. (Some pages that helped me: YouTube's advice, this tutorial and this how to.)

In assigning categories, I went through our 3 year backlog of entries (an interesting experience!) and noticed there was some good stuff there which wasn't easy to get to, so I've added Paul's Key Posts and Corinna's Key Posts on the menu (to the right) to act as a kind of index, a 'best of' if you will...

We've moved from pnc.me.uk to 01274.net. The domain name was bugging me and 01274.net is simpler and cooler. (It might not sound simpler, but 01274 is the phone area code for Bradford – where we live – so it's quite easy to find out even if you can't remember the number.)

With a new address comes a new look – I thought I'd use the opportunity to update the site a bit too. All I wanted was a blog/site hosted on my own webspace, easy to update, with a decent search facility and lots of control/flexibility. Blogger scored 1.5 out of 4. Other blog systems aren't much better. Thought about a CMS but I didn't get on with Joomla at all. I tried wordpress.com and was impressed, only to find out that wordpress.org (the version you host yourself) is significantly different to wordpress.com (in a bad way). Doh!

What do you do when you can't find what you want? Write one yourself of course! So here it is, our blog, written by my own hand! (Using my web app framework.) I've made it very easy to update so we won't have any excuses now. I've also put in some nifty features like auto-resizing of images (displays a cached resized one, when you click, shows in lightbox) and galleries. I've also added categories (see menu to the right). The change allowed me to tidy up some old entries (e.g. broken links and layout – I've not changed the content). I realised entry titles were probably a good idea, so have added that. Hopefully Google will pick up on the content better now too. You also have cheesey photos of Corinna and me to deal with (on every post) – blame Matt and Jo for that. The theme is mostly a wordpress one I like, but in theory I can change it fairly easily.

Importing from blogger was fun. I basically just changed the template to a simple format and output the whole thing. Then wrote a parser to import it all. Managed to keep all the (blogger) comments too which I'm happy about. Losing entries/comments would have been annoying as they still have some value for me.

So enjoy! Sorry it's taken a while (I see March and April are entirely missing...) but as Matt said: "A programmer's site is never done!" (I have kept a 'to blog.txt' so I might catch up with some entries at some point... Possibly.

Leave a comment to see if it works! And let me know if anything doesn't work...

Another continuation from an earlier post, this time on the craziness of light. I have been enlightened further (forgive the pun) by a Christmas pressie from mum and dad (thanks!), QI's book of General Ignorance. (I wonder if they were trying to say something? He he...)

Although relativity predicts that the speed of light is constant (i.e. always travels towards you at the same speed regardless of whether you're running towards it or away from it) that's only in a vacuum. In any other medium, it can vary considerably (well, decrease anyway). A diamond will half the speed, sodium will bring it down to 38mph (the book notes: "slower than a bicycle"... thanks), and in 2000 a team from Harvard managed to stop light (i.e. zero speed) by shining it into a Bose-Einstein condensate of rubidium!

As an aside, they add the obvious: light is invisible, all you can see is what it bumps into (otherwise all you would see is light), and although darkness is not there, you can't see through it. So interestingly, a beam of light in a vacuum shining at right-angles to the observer cannot be seen.

I just published a book, and it took me seconds! Not one that I've written mind you, I mean I just put The Everlasting Man by G K Chesterton on wikisource. Not read it yet but apparently it was influential in turning C S Lewis from atheism (to theism initially).

We just got our first Christmas card (yes, 'of the year' not 'ever' thank you). That's quite impressive!

Also, Corinna has written "Doh! I wrote this in permanent marker" on our kitchen whiteboard, he he... Yes, that's the whiteboard right next to the new kitchen door I've just varnished.   :)

Ooo, and our blog is finally back on Google after a long absence. The meta tags telling it to get lost weren't helping... If you have your own website, check out Google's webmaster tools which will help you understand what Google thinks of it...

Also, click here to read a blog I came across while trying to find something (the irony will hit you when you read it). Makes me feel a bit guilty for having "permalink" blog links. The w3 advice is useful too.

From matt: Pointer Game - it starts getting interesting at level 4. I took a look at world 3 and closed the browser! Maybe later... Ooo, it says there's a new game every Thursday!

Well, I'm writing this entry from the living room. (Actually it was a combined effort, living room, waiting outside Corinna's school, waiting at the train station, whenever I got a spare 2 mins...) Not much unusual about that I hear you say... Except I'm not sat with a laptop, I'm writing on my new mobile phone! My old phone's directional button stopped working which meant I couldn't do anything with it! Great phone, but useless because of that...

I grew to depend on the calendar and task list features, so I needed them in my new phone. Plus I saw that these new Pocket PCs have all sorts of things on top, like Word, Excel, Outlook. So I got an MDA Vario (i.e. an HTC Magician).

It's funny, the first thing I did with it was lock my SIM card so I couldn't even use it as a phone for a while! In fact, it's not really a phone - it's a PDA which happens to have an application called 'Phone'...   :)

It's very Windows, which I like though I know some of you don't! Syncing with Outlook/installing apps/copying files on and off is all very quick and painless. Especially now I've got my little cradle:

(That pen on the right lights up neon blue as well!) Syncing charges it too, though I'm really impressed with the battery life so far. It lingers at 100% for ages - even though you never really switch it off (it just goes into powersave mode).

One of the niftiest things about this one is the screen slides sideways revealing a mini qwerty keyboard! As you slide it automatically rotates the screen orientation to landscape too - oooo... The keyboard is pretty much thumbs-only, and the keys have to be multi-function because of the size, but once you get used to it, you can type away at a decent speed, like I am now!

My first use of it was to take notes in church on Sunday. I managed to keep up and not look like too much of a wally... (Some would argue no doubt.) I accidentally managed to switch on the caps and function locks in mid-meeting though, so it was quite funny trying to type normal letters... (I've worked out how to switch them on and off now...)

Another big plus for me was integrated wireless. Hence why I'm able to blog from the living room! (We have a wireless router.) Oooo I've just noticed the hotel we're staying at when we go away might have free wifi! Who needs internet caf?s?!

I've downloaded a few games, the usual suspects like Su Doku (not that I have the time to play it), Tetris, (the real) Pacman, even Solitaire and FreeCell! I found a chess game that uses Crafty as its engine, so it's really strong. I've also downloaded a load of emulators (NES, SNES, even GBA!) though not got many games yet. Got a load of other software too, like Skype which seems to work well.

It's really funny how disinterested Corinna has been. While waiting for it to arrive, I read a few not so positive reviews, but then I realised that most people are idiots. No, just kidding, they just don't appreciate the same things as me. It runs at 195MHz and the XDA Exec runs at 520MHz, so a few assume it does things a lot slower. But it has a totally different architecture, and I saw this article which shows it can do some things a lot faster! (>twice the speed) Though I just saw some other benchmarks that say it's nearly as quick... Who knows what the real figure is!

The camera is 1.3MP (whatever that really means), here's a shot of some flowers Corinna had delivered to me on our anniversary!




(Just resized and compressed a bit for web. It was very bright that day, hence the loss of detail.)

I was considering putting a bid on an ebay item, but checked out the user first as always. Firstly their location says they are in the Netherlands, but they are selling items from Ireland apparently. That's not too bad until you consider they are selling items from a place called "Chengshi" in Ireland, which is not anywhere I've heard of (or anywhere the Irish have heard of I suspect).

The user has 10 feedbacks, all positive, which is reassuring. But when I checked them out, all have nonsense comments. All are from users that are no longer registered, all of which had 0 feedbacks (apart from one which had one nonsense one). All of them registered within a 10 minute period on the 25/06/06, 11 minutes before the auction started. The feedback they left was just nonsense like "?!!!!!++++?!!!!!+++". And when you check the items they are leaving feedback for, all ten are nonsense items which have the title "??" and no description!

I tried emailing the user but no response. I've emailed ebay about it - do the scammers think we're that stupid?

Woohoo! We finally got broadband!! And we only moved 2 and a half months ago! Nice. First BT messed us around and then TalkTalk. It has eventually happened. And it gets the thumbs up from dslzoneuk.net: "Your connection is performing way above normal (110% efficiency)" It's somehow superefficient then? Nice!

Inspired by a recent visit to my folks (I can't believe they're miles more technically advanced than us) I've ordered a new PC. Got a pretty good deal too! Dell Dimension 3000, P4 3GHz (only 1MB cache tho), 1GB memory, 80GB hard drive (cheap to add to), DVD/CD RW, XP Home and Works etc + 19" LCD monitor + delivery + VAT, all for just under £450! Not bad eh? (Got it from the Dell Outlet store Matt recommended)

When you go to check out they say "Dell Computer Corporation is a US Corporation and is therefore subject to all US Export Laws and Regulations. In view of this, please answer the following 4 questions for US export compliance purposes." Q4 is "Will the product(s) be used in connection with weapons of mass destruction, i.e. nuclear applications, missile technology, or chemical or biological weapons purposes?" Ha ha...   :)   There wasn't an option saying "I wasn't planning to use it for that but now you've given me the idea..."

Argh! I just deleted all the files on Corinna's hard disk!! Thought that might get your attention... Yeah, I did delete them but intentionally. You see Corinna has an old slow small (4GB) hard disk (though I remember the days when we had 4k to play with in the old Vic20 and still got change out of some games!) so I splashed out thirty quid on a new 80GB one. Besides having no space left, I figured a new one would be faster too which is handy because this thing seems to be trying to thrash itself to death.

The first obstacle was getting it formatted. The dark ages versions of fdisk and format can't handle disks >32GB. They report that it is either 10MB or 14MB - nice, though as it happens, although they say the wrong thing, they do actually work!? (See this.)

So the next thing was how to use it. I wanted to move everything over from the old drive to the new one, but I didn't want to have to reinstall everything. But then I remembered a util someone mentioned (actually in an ebuyer review): xxcopy - like xcopy but handles long filenames. The cool thing about that is you can duplicate entire filesystems. So I did that and now Windows and all the programs have no idea they are on a different drive! They just think 'Hey! Where did that extra 70GB come from?' It felt weird having two drives with (almost) exactly the same content, hence why I truncated one of them...   :)

The only real problem was getting the two drives to work together. The old one absolutely refused to work on the same cable as the new one regardless of jumper settings. So in the end I shipped it onto the CDRW's cable.

It's all working well so far though. I did some tests to see what difference it made (sad, yes - but I wanted to know). Start up now takes 16% less time, though to be fair that doesn't hit the disk much. Starting Word takes 42% less time, finding *.* (gives up at 10000 files) takes 29% less time. The best stat though has got to be starting Firefox which takes a whopping 50% of the time to run now - 21s as opposed to 42s (which is why I stopped using Firefox, I've been using Opera for a while now and it's pretty good except for the lack of RoboForm support). It probably has a bigger cache too (2MB) so it should re-load things faster too, though I have no idea how much the old one had (or if it even had one) and I forgot to test it to see the difference speed-wise. Oh well.

So using Paul's patented hard disk benchmark, I'd say it's about 30% faster now. Not bad. Plus we have 70GB spare + a spare disk rather than a few MB! Much quieter too - doesn't sound like it's throwing itself against the PC case trying to escape. Hey cool, I just remembered I've still got my really old 1GB drive (only a year or two off 10 years old now! Oooo it were top o'range back then), I could stick that in too. I threw the old 256MB one away - remember that in your old 486 Matt?

My next task is the router so I can network up this PC with my laptop, should be interesting with Windows 98!

After Matt finished reselling his domain hosting, we have gone with heartinternet directly and I'm quite impressed with the service so far. I fired off four queries at them and they were answered (properly as well) within 11, 6 and 5 mins, and the more technical one within 30 mins!

And this year's 'must have' mouse: Floating Homer.

Cool! A while back a guy contacted me and asked for the source code for My MoBible so he could translate it into Lithuanian. Since then I've been helping him with the technical aspects, and just over 3 months later it's complete! See this page. It has my name on there but I have no clue what it says cos it's in Lithuanian! I tried it on my emulator (he's posted some screen shots of that too: 1 2 3) but again, I have no clue what it says cos it's all in Lithuanian!   :)

Ooops! I managed to permanently delete a load of really important files (including the only backup of them)! The comp was busy doing something, I had a temp directory selected and I hit Shift+Del and 'Yes', but while it was busy it had switched the selection to the parent folder! Argh!

I was in shock for a minute, but then I remembered a util I have for occasions like this, restoration, that undeletes files. I had to carefully run that quickly (so nothing else would have time to write to disk otherwise they could be overwritten) and restore the files to a different drive (same reason)... Thankfully I already had it installed, so installing it wouldn't overwrite the files too. They all seem to be there, and testing the integrity of the zip file, that seems to be ok so hopefully the rest of the files will be too... Phew!

Maybe I should start using the Recycle Bin...

Also, IE at work has stopped working with blogger for some reason so I'm using FireFox to blog this. We've made the switch at home, I guess I'll have to do it at work too...!

No way! I've seen those 'Fraudulent Email Alert' warnings before but today we received our first one! Corinna figured it was was suspect and didn't do anything with it thankfully.

It was all very official looking, following the Halifax branding and everything, and the link looked like it pointed to the halifax site like a normal link, well, it does. But on closer inspection it actually redirects you to some other site:

<html><p><font face="Arial"><A HREF="https://www.halifax-online.co.uk/_mem_bin/FormsLogin.asp?source=halifaxcouk"><map><area coords="0, 0, 593, 300" href="http://IP address/rpm/"><img src="..." usemap="..."></map></A>
(edited down a bit)

Nice! Obviously you'd notice the HREF in caps right? That makes it look legit. But who would notice a few numbers (the IP) in the other href buried deep inside the code? Non-HTML people would just ignore that as computery mumbo jumbo.

But the whole email is actually just a big image with an areamap on it such that when you click on anything it redirects you to their URL, a copycat of Halifax's site no doubt.

I mailed it off to Halifax but it seems like they already knew about it. You can see from the wording of the mail that the standard of English is noticably poor which makes it easier to spot. But it's still quite disconcerting.

I ran the IP address through whois and it came back as registered to a CCTV manufacturer in Taiwan. I have a person's name, email address, phone number and even snailmail address. It may not actually be him I guess. He might just be the sys admin who registered the domain, but still... I wonder if there's anything you can do about it? It is no doubt connected to more serious crime.

Woohoo, I've never been so happy to see a ping returned! I finally managed to get Linux connecting to the Internet! With it being a USB ADSL modem, Linux was being really stubborn and didn't want to work at all no matter what I tried. But I finally got it working, woo hoo!

Wasn't able to blog this from the linux box as such because I didn't have a browser (didn't even know what package to install to get 'links'!), but still...

I'm now trying various bits and pieces before I settle on the actual stuff I want to install properly, but it's looking like Slackware and OpenOffice so far.

The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology.

Ha ha, there are some absolutely classic horrors there... (There are some I've seen a few times too, so they must be genuine!) My favourite so far is this one: horrendous use of exceptions, terrible coding, and it could have all been done with a single, very short line!!   :)

Woohoo! We have lift off!

... well broadband anyway. And only just over 5 weeks after ordering it! - Not quite the 1-2 weeks expected, but I don't care! It's so fast!

Microsoft Showcases Robots to Watch Kids: That's one scary looking surveillance bear - it's more likely to cause nightmares than save kids from them...!

Stored inside the hat and eyes of Teddy, an interactive Microsoft bear, are four microphones and one camera using Microsoft face finding and sound vocalization technology

On Matt's advice, I've installed MS' AntiSpyware and the real-time protection looks great. Plus it has some neat 'System Explorers' so you can get details on installed ActiveX thingies, running programs, startup programs, etc. It's just a pity Win98 isn't supported.

The initial 'quick' scan took an age, but that's because it scanned my builds folder, he he... (7.6GB, 835,580 files - it took an age just to count them!)

It doesn't find the tracking cookies AdAware complains about, but it did identify a potential threat in MessengerPlus (which has optional spyware) and some popup-enabling program the others didn't complain about. Sounds like it may be worth keeping just for the real-time protection though!

Continuing on the spyware theme (earlier post here), Wassim mentioned another scanner so I put it to the test and here are the results:

It's slightly worrying that all three of them picked up quite a few that the others didn't (in total 59% were identified by only one scanner!). Then you do a google and there are loads of scanners out there! I wonder how many you would have to run to get all the spyware!?

AdAware has a great interface though, so that's the one I'm most likely to run. But it's still a bit of a hassle. I wonder if using Firefox instead will reduce the problem significantly? Aparently more and more people are using it over IE (up to 5% now). That's what I'm going to try at home next anyway...

Britons fed up with net service: I can understand why! We haven't even got ours yet and already it's going wrong!

I just got off the phone with TalkTalk and they hadn't processed the broadband application properly. It has gone through now, so it will be another 10-15 days... Doh!

"BT and Tiscali have been actively dissuading customers from leaving by offering them a lower price when they phone up to cancel their subscription." Hmm... Worth knowing for you BT and Tiscali customers out there.

From another article: if you live in Tokyo you can get a 50 Mbps link for £20 a month!! That's 100 times the bandwidth of ours for the same price!

Flip! Think upgrade before buying a new PC: A United Nations University study found that around 1.8 tons of raw material are required to manufacture the average desktop PC and monitor!

I don't feel so bad about using old computers now! I wonder if the Cell uses up 10 times that amount?

Sony, Toshiba and IBM unveil the Cell: Oooo, I think I heard about this a while back. Sounds really good though. It's like people have thought "We're exhausting pure speed increases, what else can we do to get computers processing faster? I know, glue a few together!"

A single Cell processor ... only three years ago would have been rated as one of the top 500 super computers in the world. ...

The size of a postage stamp, it contains 10 separate processing units ... copying the 'grid' system of super computers.

It runs at 4 GHz ... [and should] be capable of handling 16 trillion 'floating point operations', or calculations, every second.

He he... Nice! 10 CPUs though? Isn't that just cheating?

Apparently it should first be out in the new Playstation 3 next year, but would also be used in PCs, mobiles and TVs. Excellent...   :)

He he, look at some of the hits we've got over the last couple of days!

	Argentina (isol.net.ar)
DotNet Communications	Australia
	India (nic.in)
Wanadoo France	Lagny, France
	Singapore (singa.pore.net)
SingNet Pte Ltd	Singapore
The Internet Solution	South Africa
Comcast Communications	United States
Genuity/ BBN Technologies	United States
Nokia Group	United States
Pacific Bell Internet Services	United States
Qwest Communications Int.	United States
Road Runner	United States

Must be word getting around about My Mobible...

Cool! I just put a CD (re-)writer drive in our comp. It took a bit longer than the memory to fit (it was more awquard to get to) but still only took 10 minutes or so. No problems whatsoever. No device drivers needed, even in Windows 98 it was detected immediately. It came with Nero Express for burning and managing the drive too, and that seems really cool.

And all that for £20 and 15 minutes work! I must have the £20 upgrade bug.   :)

After all that, I didn't actually have any writable CDs to hand so I couldn't test it, but it read normal CDs ok.   :)

Cool! After releasing My MoBible I got some good feedback initially. One guy even said he was going to put it on his newsletter, and here it is! He he... And we've had quite a few hits because of that. Plus I even had an email from a Lithuanian who wanted to translate it!

I've just signed us up for TalkTalk (broadband + some free voice calls). Let me know if you ever want to sign up with them; if we refer you, then both you and us get £10 for it!

Wow! When I last added some memory, it was to my old comp. Old 72-pin SIMMs that were a right pain to wedge in at an angle, then bend into position. It always felt like you were going to break them. It was only after hours of hassle you would emerge with a working computer again.

So with that in mind, when I ordered some memory for our current comp, I wasn't expecting it to work easily. But I was wrong, it went straight in, and worked straight away! I tried a couple of combinations just to make sure everything was working fully, but even then it only came to 5 minutes! It took longer to get the cover back on!

So for just under £20 and 5 minutes work, I've tripled the computer's memory!

Well, that's not strictly true. Messing about with the cover took another 5 mins. Plus choosing the memory in the first place took a lot longer. First you have to decide what type of memory you want (how many pins, and of what type - there were 14 of those). Then you have to select the correct sub-type PC100, EDO, FPM, PC66 or PC133. And there are various combinations of those (3.3V or 5V, 50ns or 60ns, buffered or unbuffered, 64 bit or not, ECC or not, CL2 or CL3, registered or unregistered). Then obviously there's the size to choose. Plus when I looked into it a bit more, there were different combinations of Module Configuration, Lead Plating, and so on. Plus, you could get 'low profile' and other physical designs... If the combination tree was uniform, that would be 645120 different types! I don't care!! I just want some memory! Thankfully I got a bit of help choosing...

I'm clocking the memory too! Underclocking that is, not overclocking...   :)   (I got PC133 rather than PC100.)

Obviously tripling the memory will make the computer run faster, but it's also allowed me to try a Linux Live CD I was given (run a different O/S entirely from a CD without installing anything!?). It's Ubuntu and the reviews were all quite good. So I started it up and it all worked really well. It recognised things like the printer (which Linux is notoriously bad for), though it didn't print for some reason, probably just some minor issue.

Anyway, this linux comes with a set of programs like OpenOffice which after playing around with for a bit, seems like a great MS Office clone. Also has Firefox for browsing and a load of other stuff. Really impressed with it all so far. Still need to play with it more before I actually install anything, but it's great that you can just try it straight off the CD!

Check this out! I've just uploaded v1 of my latest program, My MoBible. You can now download the Bible to your mobile phone! Get it from here.

I've got a new Sony Ericsson K500i mobile. My previous Ericsson (yes it's that old) has finally given up the ghost a month and a half shy of 6 years. Yes it was a brick. Cutting edge 6 years ago though.  :)   Even my mum and dad have had cooler mobiles than me for ages.

It got some good reviews, though to be honest I don't believe some of them - one said they were a 12 year old when they wrote with the maturity of a 30 year old... Funny.

Has lots of nifty features though so I will have fun with my new toy. Comes with SEGA's Super Real Tennis (check out the screenshots - and this is on a mobile!? Awesome...) and a demo (level 1) of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell! He he, cool...

Also, when I typed in "Corinna" in T9 mode, it came up with "Borinna"... I wonder what it was trying to say by that?!  :)

Love the interface, very slick and intuitive. Excellent.

I've just re-organised the blog a bit. See the menu on the left has less items on it, and a new item called home. You can get at our links/articles/downloads/etc. from there.

One new download added, photoalbum, a program to create HTML photo albums.

I've also gone through some of our old posts and fixed a few image links that were broken due to the recent domain move.

I just saw a friend at work using picasa - Google's photos tool. Looked pretty cool, plus it's free! I'm going to try it...

Well, that's saved me a load of work! A couple of years back I had an idea about testing web applications. Most people either test by hand and/or buy an expensive specialised tool for doing it like Rational Robot or Mercury test suite.

I had the idea of writing something that would make testing a webapp more accessable for someone like me - a developer (so I don't enjoy manual testing and I don't have huge wodges of wonga). It would be a test framework in a standard language (not proprietry ones like those tools), simple, quick, free and able to handle vagueness.

I had in mind something that used assertions (as in the excellent JUnit) coupled with some pattern matching to handle vagueness. It would also have to understand HTML and JavaScript to be able to fully emulate a browser with a live user poking it.

JavaScript was the sticking point, the reason I originally gave up on it. I didn't really fancy writing a full-on JavaScript execution engine (JS is very complex nowadays - you can have Classes and everything!).

More recently though I thought I might give it another go. I found a good JavaScript engine. I used JUnit for managing and running tests. I got a tool to read HTML into an XML DOM (not trivial because HTML isn't as strict as XML). The XML DOM is all defined in Java 1.4.2 so I didn't have to do anything for that. I wrote a WebReader, but to be honest most of the work is done for you in Java anyway. How things have changed in a couple of years! Nearly everything is done for you!

All that was left was some assertion methods that understand XML and HTML, and some glue to tie everything together. Then I came across some libraries that even do those (see this list) so I hardly have to do any work at all! They've had the same idea I had. Excellent.

Of the ones I could see, jWebUnit seemed to be the best. Just look how simple this test is:

    public void testAddWidget() {
        beginAt("/index.html");
        assertTitleEquals("Paul's Widget Manager WebApp");
        clickLinkWithText("Add Widget");
        setFormElement("widgetName", "Fred");
        submit();
        assertTextPresent("Widget added successfully."):
    }

It's so readable, and very easy to write. With them being JUnit tests, they are easy to run and manage. With it being it Java, you get all the advantages of Object Orientation. It's free. It uses the libraries I was using, which I know are good, and jWebUnit itself will have been used (tested) by loads of people.

Read their quickstart guide, it has loads of features. Things aren't always called what I would have called them, but it will be great once I've got into their mindset.

So that saves me a load of work writing one myself! I just need to get using it now. I'm intending have:

• one WebTestCase for each Use Case;
• one testXxx method for each 'alternative route' in the Use Case (i.e. one for each 'successful' path, and one for each 'failure' path).

Yep, I think tieing TestCases to UseCases like this will work really well.

A nice addition would be a program that:

• acts as a proxy to your web application;
• provides a socket you point your browser at (to indirectly get at your webapp);
• records all your get/post actions (posting forms, clicking buttons, etc.);
• displays a window next to your browser window, that:
  • shows a list (or maybe a tree) of things currently on the browser window, and you can highlight items;
  • allows you to run existing WebTestCases;
  • includes a 'generate' button;
• generates a WebTestCase when you click 'generate' that contains:
  • all your get/post actions;
  • calls to any WebTestCases you ran;
  • asserts for all the things you highlighted in the list/tree!

So then you can quickly generate a basis for your tests, and all you have to do is tweak it into shape. That would be neat. There are programs that do some of these things, but either cost a bomb and/or aren't fit for this purpose (i.e. you couldn't get it to generate a WebTestCase).

This blog has moved to our brand-spanking new domain! Yay! It was pretty seamless in the end, thanks to my bro's excellent Internet hosting package. Loads of new features and things to play with too. His prices are very reasonable too...

(If a link doesn't work now, please add it as a comment to this post... Cheers!)

This blog will be moving to http://blog.pnc.me.uk shortly. (pnc stands for Paul aNd Corinna unsurprisingly.) Get ready to update your links!

Also, I just heard The Rock will be starring as the baddie in the Doom conversion to film, due next summer! He he... I wonder if everyone will have to run around looking perfectly horizontally and no-one will be allowed to jump?

Simply Computers continued: still useless. I was expecting them to concede after I complained to the manager. I was wrong. "Unfortunately, our Manager has confirmed that we cannot refund this postage for you, as had you given us the opportunity, we would have collected this from you." Oh well.

Simply Computers. Useless.

We were thinking of buying a printer, Simply were the cheapest for the model we wanted so I put in an order. They replied saying (roughly) 'Thank you for your request, we'll check our stock and let you know when we confirm we can fulfil the order, and when delivery will be'.

Later that day I was offered a better model cheaper (actually, work were chucking it out) so I telephoned Simply Computers (more than three times) to attempt to cancel the order, but each time I was put on hold for long periods and I just gave up. In the end I sent them an email to cancel it:

Please cancel this order request. I do not want the item anymore.

Later that day I received a Despatch Confirmation email - but no order confirmation email as they said they would send. I replied saying:

I tried to cancel this order earlier however I have just received a Despatch Confirmation email. I have tried calling many times but your customer service phone line is constantly busy. Please cancel this. I do not want the item anymore.

On the following Monday I got an email from the guy who handles the post here saying that he has taken delivery of a printer for me. Next I got an email from Simply Customer Service (a reply to my first email) saying:

Unfortunately, this item has already been despatched and is due to be delivered for you today. If this is no longer required, I would advise you to refuse the delivery and this will automatically be returned to us for a refund.

I replied saying:

Unfortunately I received an email at 10:14 saying the post guy here had already accepted it. I will return the item asap.

I sent the item and then sent another email saying:

I have returned this item, unopened, via Parcel Force at a cost of £10.12. Please refund £84.11 to my card.

I got the reply:

I am very sorry, I'm afraid that we do not refund the cost of return postage for orders that are cancelled after despatch. However, we will issue a refund to you for the goods once our Returns Department receive this.

I replied saying:

If you check your records you will see that I cancelled the item before the item was despatched, however you did not process my cancellation until after the item had been despatched. Under these circumstances, I do not expect to have to pay for the cost of return postage. As such, please refund the full amount.

They replied saying:

I am very sorry, we cannot refund this for you. Emails are answered within 1 working day as per our terms and conditions. Your email was responded to within that time and your order had already been despatched.

Unfortunately, you also did not give us time to respond to your email regarding the return. Had you done so, we would probably have arranged for our courier to collect to avoid incurring return postage costs. I am presuming that you have sent this order to our Walthamstow office, and if this is the case, we will also incur postage costs returning this to the correct returns address for you. Please note that this may delay you refund by a day or so.

I replied saying:

Ok, thanks for checking. I think that is a very poor policy indeed and it has put me off buying from Simply Computers again.

Which it has. So effectively we are out of pocket by over £10, and I had the hassle of going out of my way to return this huge parcel. And all because Simply Computers' customer service department is slow "enough" (according to the definition in their terms and conditions) to respond to their emails and their phone lines are constantly busy. And we may have to wait even longer for our reduced refund to come through. Great.

I've just re-discovered robocode. I remember being told about it a while back, but I forgot. I came across it again recently and it looks really good.

It's like the old CombatZone we used a play a few years back, but about 10 times better. You basically write the AI (the brain) to control a combat robot (basically just a tank). It's dead easy to do too. You write your brain in Java (robocode started out as an official IBM training tool to help teach people Java funnily enough) - which means you can do some interesting things. All you have to do is sub-class/extend the Robot class.

It's a lot faster than CombatZone was so it's more entertaining. There are more interesting rules for point-scoring (it's not just 'last man standing'). Things like your life/enery is used up by firing and being hit, but you regain some from other robots when you shoot them or ram them or whatever. Plus there's an additional 'team battle' which sounds quite deep - you write the AI for your team leader and droids, and the TL co-ordinates the battle and everything. Cool.

I've started working on Gonzo the Magnificent (a working title - C humiliates me when I mention it, she thinks it's a silly name but can't come up with anything better!) :)

There's loads of other people playing it too, some take it really seriously as well. As Matt said, there's some research out there on the net that should be classified by the military: neural networks, pattern matching, wave theory, virtual bullets, etc.!

Gonzo is a little primative so far tho. He will happily walk into a wall, then once he's done that he will continue to try and walk through it... :)

They've changed the blogger interface again! You can upload images and things now though so that's good...

Spyware continued. Most pages seem to recommend either Ad-Aware or Spybot, so I thought I'd try both.

name	things found	pros	cons
SpyBot	17	very configurable	'teatimer' (the resident registry watcher) is a little irritating
Ad-Aware	34	faster, very slick interface	you have to pay for the resident 'ad watcher' stuff

The funny thing is, the stuff they found was mutually exclusive! The 17 were different things to the 34. Strange. So I'm going to keep both.

This is funny. We've been having problems with viruses on Corinna's PC so I thought I'd better update my virus checker (it's 8 months since my last update, and subsequent updates don't work). There are some good free ones out there, but I found one that costs $50 (for the Virus Checker and Firewall) if you go to the main page or any 'buy here' pages from there, but if you follow the link from the Microsoft site you can can get it free for a year!  :)

So I'm trying it on my laptop. The virus checker seems a bit bog-standard, but should be ok. Didn't find anything on the laptop. The firewall seems really cool though. Very configurable, down to exact permissions you will allow for specific apps. Also, they stole my idea of stripping out banner ads and annoying animated ads before they're even downloaded. It's not perfect, but it seemed to work on a quick test. Should make surfing faster as we're still on a dialup connection...

Spyware: we've been having popups too that even Google Toolbar misses. I suspected it was something that had installed itself on our laptop. I'll have to try this SpyBot thingy.

The new version of Blogger is out, so I'm getting used to that... I think I've got the new comment system working, but that has the unfortunate by-product of losing all the previous comments. Not to worry, I don't think there were too many meaningful ones anyway!   :)   I've spotted a few bugs already, but hopefully they'll be ironed out soon...

I've just downloaded MSN Messenger, and this is quite a good add on: Messenger Plus! (thanks to Wassim), which adds a few options for things like:

• Hide Ad Banner
• Text Recall
• Encrypted chat logging
• 'Boss protection'
• Locking
• Make MSN check POP3 email address too

And so on, a bit like TweakUI for MSNM. Also has a neat 'make the MSN windows transparent' option. Cool... :)

Haven't used one of these Instant Messaging programs since good old original ICQ back in the first year of Uni. Mind you we just used that to arrange Quaking sessions... Those were the days... :)

He he, apparently I'm bloated... Or rather this page is bloated, according to Dr HTML anyway...   :)

I've added my PGP Public Key to the download menu (on the left) for anyone who's interested... PGP's up to version 8 now, but I'm still using good old v6.5.3 'coz I can't be bothered to download a more recent version. (PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy, not Paul Graeme Parkins by the way!) You should be able to download PGP from here (for outside the US).

The miracle that is the body continues to amaze: Every textbook on reproductive science indicates that women are born with their lifetime's complement of eggs which are steadily lost until the supply is exhausted, leading to menopause. But the textbooks may have to be rewritten after a study undertaken in America suggested that women may continue to produce eggs after birth from special stem cells, which have been overlooked until now. (Actually, the research wasn't performed on humans so some people are cautious about the results, but still...)

Just birth itself is a miracle anyway: the fact that our whole bodies come from a single cell blows me away! When that single cell divides and divides and divides and divides ..., the cells somehow arrange themselves into a body?! I mean, the blueprint for the whole body is in the DNA of every cell (which is amazing in itself), but how does one cell know it is supposed to go off and form a nose whereas another knows it is supposed to form a toe nail? It's just cool!

So, I'm a quarter of a century old now... "25 not out" as the cricketers would say. We had a nice day yesterday. After work, we went out to a Bengali restaurant and had some curry.

I've been playing with my new toy as well. A USB flash memory thing/MP3 player/voice recorder... Neat eh?

I'm fairly sure you can't get them in Britain yet. I got mine from Ebay (for my birthday) and it's obviously a Japanese import. The front cover of the box reads "Digital Music, Happy Forever". On the back are such things as "Combine for movable storage and MP3. Let you alternatly enjoy for work and amusement". The manual's got some classics too, "The MP3 player should be driver no need for Windows XP/2000/ME"... Mind you, I should be grateful they're in English. I remember when Andy got the first version of Gran Turismo as soon as it came out in Japan. He had to guess what all the buttons in the menus meant...   :)

I finished reading a book called More Than Meets the Eye a couple of days ago. It was really good. The subtitle is "Fascinating Glimpses of God's Power and Design" so you can guess what it's about. The guy is a medical doctor, but he also holds a degree in physics and is a popular speaker on science and the future.

I was surprised by just how much of a miracle the human body is. It's quite amazing really. I have never into biology much though, so the second half of the book was more interesting for me: astrophysics, relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. The language wasn't overly technical so anyone could understand it, and he didn't just focus on technicalities. He tended to give a general overview, look at the implications, and draw conclusions. It was good to hear (as I was ranting about the other day) a believer showing how much scientific research reinforces his faith. He made a good point in conclusion: some religious types are afraid of science, but science is the friend of truth. In reply, I would say that some people will always try to abuse it, as they do everything else, but his point still stands: in essence science is the friend of faith. That's how all the scientific disciplines started anyway, to find out more about God and his creation.

I would say virtually everybody in our culture sees the world in a pure Newtonian 'clockwork precision' point of view: everything follows clear, simple behavioral laws. Wherever you go, whatever you do, everything is simply three dimensions + time. Everybody gets the same amount of time, time passes one second per second for everybody all the same. Everybody gets the same amount of space, no matter where you are in the universe or how quickly you're moving, etc.

I know I think in those terms often. When you are surrounded by an unchanging, predictable structure, it is easy to fall into this belief. But this ties in with what I was saying the other day - experts are only experts in their field of research. In everything else, they are out-of-date. So when I revert to seeing the world in 3d+time, I'm thinking in an out-of-date Newtonian way.

The truth is that on the large and incredibly small scales, nothing follows this predictable view at all: relativity shows that time and space are only constant with respect to one frame of reference. Neither time or space are constant in the Universe. Light never gets even 1 second old, and always travels towards you at the same speed regardless of whether you're running towards it or away from it... How mad is that? Then think about how gravity works... Any ideas? Yes, we know what it does, but how? That's one of the questions in quantum mechanics, and that world is totally mad! At our level, everything seems simple, but down at the atom and sub-atom level, nothing follows any simple rules and nothing is predictable at all! I mean, just read about superstring theory, these things work in not just multiple dimensions but multiple time dimensions.

It's mad stuff, it really is.

I've been told that left-clicking on the download links on the menu to the left doesn't work. The best way to download is to right-click on the link and select 'Save Target As...', but I've fixed it so that if you do left-click on one, it should take you to a Download page with details of all the available downloads anyway. It's got brief descriptions and screenshots on there too...

Argh! Java is becoming a C++ clone: Java 1.5 in a nutshell - ok, slight exaggeration, but the 'Generic Types', enum, printf and 'Varargs' are reminisent...

I've added a new program to the download menu on the left. Do you ever have one-sided 5-a-side football matches, or any other sport for that matter? Annoying isn't it? Well, unbalanced teams are all a thing of the past now thanks to my TeamSelector software. As with the Draughts program, a readme.txt file is supplied to explain how to setup and use it.

Check out the new 'Downloads' section in the menu to the left. Only one thing there at the moment: my Draughts-playing program, but watch that space for more stuff in the future...

He he, cool. We made it on to Google and Yahoo: type in "Paul and Corinna" and we come up as the top result! :)