Internet

In the continuing battle of people misusing the internet, first we had spammers, then comment spammers, now I’ve noticed a few sites taking content from here (like I get enough traffic that makes it worth stealing) and using it to create splogs. They take a few blog entries and then plaster as many ads on the new site as possible in the vain hope of earning a few pence. Honestly the people who do this sort of thing must have very much more time on their hands than they know what to do with, I just can’t see how it makes economic sense to do it.

Anyway, at the moment my morning routine involves sending a policy violation email to Google so that the thieving assholes don’t get any Adsense revenue for the stolen content, then I contact their hosting company to tell them about the site as well. It’s very labour intensive but at the moment it’s only one or two sites a day. Does anyone have a better way of dealing with them?

As everyone else seems to be making their Simpsons character, here’s mine.

Ever since selling the car the only issue I’ve had is how to get heavy shopping back home (mainly beers but there are other things as well 😉 ). I thought I had tried all of the online grocery shops, for some reason they don’t deliver to my block, I guess because it’s a bit of a pain to get into if you don’t know where you’re going. Anyway I found the online service for Waitrose, called Ocado and put in a fairly hefty order for all of the bulky stuff which is a pain to carry home. Well it arrived this evening, it was early, and the delivery guy couldn’t have been more helpful and cheerful to boot. What’s more they brought me a free bottle of plonk for being a new customer. It’s so nice when a service does exactly what it claims to.

I’ve been using PayPal for years and never had any real trouble with them, but I’ve never been entirely trusting of them either so never leave any balance in my account, as soon as I get any money I withdraw it. Reading this site from Andre I’m glad I’ve been cautious. If you can help then leave a comment over there or drop me an email and I’ll forward it on to Andre.

… then this is it. A poster produced by the British government during the second world war, as Boing Boing says, so much different from the government of today with their “OMG TERRISTS GONNA KILL US ALL ZOMG ZOMG ALERT LEVEL BLOODRED RUN RUN TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES MOISTURE BOMBS ZOMG!”.

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

(Brian Kernighan) via

Google Blogoscoped is reporting an interesting rumour that Google will be taking over Feedburner. This has the potential to be really good. The stats that Feedburner provides about your blog are unrivalled and in conjunction with Analytics it would make a pretty impressive combination. For those of us running Google Adsense I guess it will also offer the opportunity to put ads into our feeds. Not sure this is such a good thing, but it’s a price I think I’ll be willing to pay if the takeover happens.

My planned ADSL switch to IDNet couldn’t have gone smoother. I got an email from them at 7am yesterday morning saying it was all complete, then when I got home in the evening I just reconfigured my ADSL router to use the new connection details (including a static IP which will be very useful), two minutes later everything was up and running. And it’s already faster than my BT connection even though we’re in the “bedding down” period for the next three days.

I do like it when things work just the way they should with no hassles.

Julian’s recent post about Javascript Debugging in IE got me thinking, there are a ton of tools out there that are either free or very cheap and I’m constantly finding new ones. So in the spirit of wanting to find cool new tools to play with I thought I’d share the list of software which I use all the time and see if you have any recommendations you’d like to share…

– Firebug is without question the best web development tool around, it lets you see everything about an internet page, the speed it loads at, the files which make it up, internet headers, CSS structure and so on. It’s free, if you haven’t got it already, get it now.
– The IE Developer Toolbar is a similar tool which offers some of the same functionality, it’s not as good as Firebug but until something better comes along it’s still worth having.
– For pure CSS editing in Windows I’ve still not found anything better than Topstyle. It’s not free but has more than paid for itself over the years.
– Of course the Mac offers CSSEdit which would blow Topstyle out of the water if it were available for Windows. It allows you to edit style sheets “live” to see the impact of changes you’re making. Again it costs, but it’s a joy to use.
– For actual programming I’m a real MyEclipse addict, I use it for writing Java and Javascript, in conjunction with a simple CVS server for source control you’ve got a full, professional development environment for $50. Completely unbeatable in my opinion.
– For text editing in Windows I’ve used Textpad for years, it has all the functions I need, is stable and is cheap! For the Mac I’ve settled on SubEthaEdit, which to be frank isn’t as good as Textpad but is the closest match I’ve found.
– And then we have Altova XMLSpy. Now this is properly expensive, and I’ve never actually paid for it, but when I’ve used copies at client sites it’s hugely impressive, why can’t their pricing model match MyEclipse?

Of course we have the venerable Domino Designer client for Lotusscript etc, but again there are things which can improve your life in there…
– The TeamStudio suite of products is pricey, but worth persuading your boss to buy. If you have to get just one, I’d got with CIAO! which does a good job of version controlling your development environment so that you don’t lose changes over time which is always a risk for multi-developer projects.
– TeamStudio also give away the excellent Script Browser which is a plugin class browser for your LotusScript classes which does a nice job until we get Domino Designer in Eclipse.
– I’ve heard a lot of people swear by the Ytria tools, I’ve not used them myself (whenever I try and install them they crash my Notes client!) but they are probably worth checking out.

So this is the list of things which I use, what’s missing, what would you add or remove from the list?

This is just staggering and scary. It’s a genuine poster snapped on the London Underground.