Archive for October, 2003
When I said that I had no plans for the weekend, I was in fact lying. As a surprise I took Kate to the Yorkshire dales for two days, which was very nice indeed. We stayed at a B&B in the sentence-defying Hawes, and had a very pleasant time. The only problem with the more ‘country’ towns and villages is that none of the shops open on Sundays. I know everyone needs a day off, and people do tend to be more religious in the countryside…but how much business must they lose? Never mind, we got some Kendal mint cake, which is the important thing 
It rained a fair bit, so over the four days we saw Finding Nemo, Intolerable Cruelty and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The latter was based on a graphic novel, which I’m going to have to get to see how it compares.
We turned onto teletext at an unfortunate time over the weekend, to see the headline ‘Prime Minister Rushed To Hospital’. That’s not a headline you want to see! I read that it’s a stress related condition, which isn’t exactly surprising. It would be bad enough if being Prime Minister were just about the job, but coping with every aspect of your life being analysed / criticised / deconstructed can’t be easy. I keep hearing people saying ‘I don’t like Tony Blair’. How, exactly, have they come to this decision? You can disagree with his policies or the way he does things, but how anyone can claim to have any idea of the man behind it all I don’t know. Iain Duncan Smith suffers the same way. At some point politics became personal, and that sucks.
I notice that Charles Clarke has been touring universities, sitting in debates over tuition fees. Brave man. He raised some interesting points in an interview I saw, I must try to read up on it at some point. What does interest me is the universities clamouring for higher tuition fees, yet it’s the government who get all the attention from annoyed students and hence the media. While the Government certainly need to be questioned, whether their motives are good or bad, would it not be worth asking the universities why they want them raised? Or does that not get enough attention…
So how many books of the top 21 have you read? 9 for me, although I can’t remember whether I finished Wind in the Willows. Good to see His Dark Materials(ooh ooh, a new one!) in there, although somewhat surprising! I’m not sure which would get my vote for best ever, if you can even decide on such a thing. You can’t really compare 1984 and Harry Potter; they’re both great, imho, but for wildly different reasons. Incidentally, did anyone notice that BBC2’s recent George Orwell documentary clashed with Big Brother? That’s got to have been deliberate…
Off to watch CSI shortly, in the meantime let me point you in the direction of this. If you’re male and have any interest in computers whatsoever, let me offer my apologies to your bank balance.
Well…it’s not. But it is in a way, because I’m having a 4-day weekend and going to see Kate. No particular plans…am hoping to catch a film at some point, and will have to buy Matrix Reloaded now it’s out I’m hoping none of my clients have any computing emergencies! The first time I stayed in York an extra day, I got back to find that every single one of my clients had left messages. Mind you, I only had 5 at the time.
Those of you who live only for my updates, get therapy for the weekend and I’ll see you on Tuesday.
Yep. The late ghost is up early tonight.
Just watched “The Human Mind”, which amongst other things investigated the signs that someone is lying. Indicators shown were: a marked difference in hand movements from when speaking the truth, a lack of eye contact and the lack of the first person when relaying a fabricated story. They interviewed a psychologist who after many years of research into the subject says he can normally tell when someone is lying. Would this be a good skill to have, I wonder. I can see arguments both ways. It’s a bit late for me to elucidate now, so I won’t CSI last night, btw, said that people’s eyes move to the right when remembering and to the left when creating, so this may be another indicator.
In unrelated news, the Booker prize was last night won by “Vernon God Little” by “DBC Pierre” (real name Peter Finlay and a drug-addicted con artist - you like him already, don’t you). The Booker judges described it as a “coruscating black comedy”. So I looked up coruscating, and to coruscate means ‘to sparkle’. So the best compliment they could come up with was a word that’s already there, which doesn’t mean much when it comes to writing anyway. Chances of it not being very funny: probably quite high. Or maybe I’m just a cynical, grumpy, walking example of judgemental youth. I’d better read it, I suppose…
Agent Smith’s number plate in The Matrix Reloaded: “IS 5416″. Isaiah 54:16. Thanks Fark.
I can’t believe the number of people who complain about that film. Based on The Matrix, what exactly were people thinking The Matrix Reloaded was going to be? In my opinion TMR was a superb sequel, but that’s just me. I can see how if you didn’t like the first, you probably wouldn’t enjoy the second. However the number of people who claim to have loved TM but hated TMR is a bit odd, if you ask me. I honestly don’t see how someone who liked the first wouldn’t like the second. Is it possible they didn’t enjoy the first that much, but got sucked into the hype? Or do people just like to complain? It’s far easier to criticise than praise, after all. Here endeth the editorial.
Plan for this evening: Five show CSI: Miami followed by CSI on a Tuesday. Great entertainment, and you rarely come away not having learnt something.
Outlook is no more. Well, email-wise anyway. After it decided to re-download 154 messages (already downloaded, but left on the server for various reasons) I got fed up and moved everything over to Eudora. It didn’t go totally smoothly - my mailing list archive is now in triplicate - but I learnt a vast amount about the program in the process.
At about 3 this afternoon I wasn’t convinced it was such a good idea. Eudora was throwing up various problems of the very irritating variety, and the better-the-devil-you-know element was coming to mind. At about 4, however, it was like I suddenly ‘got it’. I solved a particularly annoying niggle, and then I could suddenly see why everyone raved about the program so much. Was quite odd, actually
Hints
If you copy ‘esoteric.epi’ from the plugins directory to the main directory many more options become available through the GUI, including the ability to turn off the error panel’s habit of springing to the foreground whenever there’s a problem.
I’ve got 8 different email accounts, and Norton Antivirus doesn’t like it when you try to connect to all of them simultaneously. Norton hijacks all pop3 traffic to scan for viruses, and seems to have a strop if you try to do too much at once. To fix this, go to the ‘threading’ options, and lower ‘maximum number of concurrent tasks’. People are whining all the time about Outlook’s lack of multi-threading, and the first thing I do in Eudora is turn it off!
I think I mentioned before that when transferring email it’s an all-or-nothing situation. To try to keep some control as to where it would all end up, I transferred using the imap server set up in the office (it uses the freeware Mercury Mail btw, which works extremely well). Outlook seemed to have trouble copying more than 2000 emails in one go, so I copied a folder at a time. Copy a folder’s worth into it from Outlook, then move them out in Eudora. Nice and easy
And the answer is…Barry!
Yes, it was he. He of the currently down Baguetter’s. What did he do to warrant such attention, I hear you ask? Well, my chicklets, that is a mystery that even those in the room did not understand. He had not, contrary to popular opinion, farted and blamed it on the lampshade. He had not sprayed a bogey into the ceiling (yes, toilet humour is alive and well and living in Pratt’s Bottom). The real reason may be more mundane, or perhaps it is stranger than reality…who knows.
This game gets you to think of a character from a (presumably US) sitcom and tried to guess it by asking yes/no questions. It’s guessed correctly every time for me. My characters were: Diane from Cheers, Charlotte from Sex and the City and Eddie from Frasier. Clever
Update: It does dictators too, btw. It’s now successfully guessed Margaret Thatcher, Josh from West Wing and Sally from 3rd Rock from the Sun. It couldn’t get Greg from CSI though. Bwaahahaha. But then calling CSI a sitcom is pushing it a bit.
Update 2: It just got Dr. Pulaski from ST:TNG, Pike from Dad’s Army, Samantha Mulder from the X-Files and Clegg from Last of the Summer Wine. Now I’m impressed! I’m also thinking I could have spent this time doing something more productive…nah
Proof: I am God
Sub-Argument:
Premise, just for this sub-argument: “If A is true, I am God”. This is called premise A.
Suppose that A is true:
If A is true, I am God
So, I am God (still supposing A)
Main Argument:
We’ve shown that IF A is true then I am God
But that’s what A says
So therefore A is true
So I am God.
However, I’ll tell you now that I am not God.
This is known as “Curry’s Paradox”, more about which can be found here; the above, more simple, wording is here
What’s the explanation for this picture?
Some suggestions:
- I’d asked them which way was North was
- “Who wants to see me naked?”
- They didn’t understand what I meant about a ‘point and click’ photograph
- Selfridges
- Damage limitation for the 8 invisible floating men with live grenades in their intestines
I’ll reveal all on Monday. Post ideas in comments
The Christmas tree is up! Just thought you’d like to know
Woohoo…no work for 2 whole days.
What to do, though? I have this habit of finding it’s sunday evening and I’ve done nothing all weekend. I could go find some pretty locations to take pictures of…there may be a competition in Practical Photography this month, thinking about it. I could paint the ceiling in my room…This is riveting stuff for you all, isn’t it
I notice that Hidden and Dangerous Deluxe has been released for free download! It’s to get publicity for H&D2, which is as good a reason as any, I suppose. May give it a try later, though I’m not normally into war games.
The last game I really got into was Neverwinter Nights. It (the single-player game) was fantastic for a long time, but I had some problems with the structure. I got to a point where I simply wasn’t powerful enough to kill the monsters I was facing. In the end I resorted to a walkthrough, which simply said that I should be able to kill them by now (you ‘level-up’ as you progress, and I wasn’t at a high enough level). Unfortunately, other than restart the game there is little you can do about this and in the end I got fed up.
The only FPS I’ve ever got totally hooked on was Half-Life, which was simply superb. I broke my golden rule and got excited about HL2, so it was really disappointing when everything went nuts and it got pushed back. Unreal Tournament was fun for a while, but I was never much good and didn’t have the patience to practice when I was getting fragged two or three times a minute. UT2K3 was a similar story, but UT2K4 looks promising…Onslaught mode sounds great (aircraft!) and Assault returns!
“The level starts off with both sides flying around in ships, trying to blast each other to smithereens, but eventually the action moves inside the base. Once the attacking team secures the docking bay, everybody spawns inside and engages in some more traditional, gun-to-gun combat.”
w00t
It must be true: the vatican says so. More here.
Some quotes:
“Aids…has grown so fast because of the availability of condoms” - The “Archbisop of Nairobi”
“The Aids virus is roughly 450 times smaller than the spermatozoon. The spermatozoon can easily pass through the ‘net’ that is formed by the condom” - a “senior cardinal”
No…words…
I’ve been reading Ozzy and Millie for a while, and this struck me as particularly funny. While I’m on a religious bent, this is a great quiz, which isn’t quite what it may seem at first…Questions 20, 21 and 28 are particularly interesting. Please flame me, I’d enjoy the attention
Imagine the scene: I need to reply to an email, so switch to Outlook and open my work folder. I select the email, and go to hit the ‘Reply’ button. But no. Outlook, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that the menu bar and associated icons will no longer respond. Buttons do not depress, menus do not open. I can change folder, but I can’t click ‘Send and Receive’ or any other email manipulation tool. In the grand scheme of things, Outlook doing annoying things is infinitesimally insignificant. However at this particular moment in time my entire language banks were devoted to producing new phrases with which to describe this once useful POS (piece of software). As Yoda would say: colourful it was; bleach out his mouth, he should.
What to replace it with, though? There is no other major program that combines email/calendar/tasks/address book. I don’t mind paying, providing I’m going to get something good. After a bit of searching it was obvious I’d have to separate the calendar and email programs. Eudora seemed to receive universal praise, so I downloaded it. I’ve tried it before, albeit briefly, and didn’t get on with it. However version 6 just came out so I thought I’d give it another go.
Now it’s a week later, and I thought I’d give you my first impressions.
It’s available in three versions: free, sponsored, or paid. Free is, as you may expect, free, but limited in features; sponsored has nearly the entire feature set but with ads; paid has no ads and a by-all-accounts effective spam filter. Sponsored it was. After installing I fired it up. First impressions were ok. It looked reasonably attractive, although it provided no escape from the ubiquitous beige. As any self-respecting habitual-computerite would, I delved into the options straight away, turning off the annoying beep when email arrives (I’m subscribed to 2 high-traffic mailing lists, so I get something pretty much every minute), setting the server addresses, that kind of thing. The columns weren’t very intuitive at first, but they were easily rearranged. Setting up accounts was slightly tricky, but that’s probably due to it being different from Outlook / OE, which are all I’ve ever used.
I decided to use Eudora for personal emails, but stick with Outlook for business, as I’d rather the former get screwed up than the latter. Importing from Outlook turned out to be a hassle. It would find the emails fine, but there was no option to select which folders you want: it was all or nothing. After copying my personal emails to a separate .pst file they imported ok, but nothing I could do would import the address book. After reading many FAQs I eventually came across Dawn - a freeware address book converter. It copied the email addresses but nothing else. Oh well, it’s a start.
After I’d got it configured how I wanted it, I found an email from Ben, and hit reply. Annoyance No. 1: Eudora adds a ‘you wrote:’ to the top of the recipients info, but doesn’t insert a line feed. So you have to press enter (twice) to put any blank space between the reply and the original text. I’ve yet to find a way around this. It’s possible it’s just me having done something wrong, as nobody else seems to be complaining. Or I could just be fussy. After much reading on the Euroda website, I found that there are about 1,000,000,008 more options available in the eudora.ini file. Many of them, however, aren’t in there already, so you have to find them on the website to add them. You can change the ‘you wrote’ text, but can’t add two line feeds as far as I’m aware.
Other than that, things have gone pretty well.The program starts up in a reasonable amount of time, unlike Outlook - which has been known to take up to a minute on my machine (granted, there are a few more emails to open, but it’s Just Silly sometimes). Eudora also doesn’t hang around in task manager after it’s been closed, receiving all emails but not applying rules so that next time I go to check there are a billion flakes (?) of spam sitting in my inbox. Guess which program does that. But comparisons with stupid quirks aren’t very fair. How does Eudora stand up as a program on its own?
So far, I think it’s pretty good. Not yet great, but getting there.
The Half-Life 2 saga that has erupted over the past week has strengthened my resolve to move away from Outlook. I’m not one of those people who thinks every Microsoft product is devil-code - I’d like to see how Linux would stand up to every hacker in the world trying to nuke it - but the fact remains that Outlook / OE are the major targets, so not using them is another level of security. This works the other way, of course. If there’s a bug in Eudora will it be fixed straight away, or will they wait for the next scheduled release? How would they let people know? There’s nothing as simple as Windows/Office Update to fix it for me. In a way it’s less secure than Outlook / OE, because less people are using it so less bugs are being found. Therefore it could take longer for exploited holes to be found and fixed. However I think that the benefits outweigh the potential disadvantages; for now, anyway.
The full version is $49.95 - so £30ish. I’m not paying that just yet, but I may if I continue to get along with it. Now if I could just figure out how to insert line feeds…
Advantages:
Fast
Easy to use, one you’ve got to know it.
Powerful filters
Free sponsored version has unobtrusive ads
Not Outlook - increased security and less quirkiness
Disadvantages:
Limited address book
Occasionally unclear UI
Reply line-feed issue
Not Outlook - everything that needs access to addresses/emails is compatible with Outlook. ActivSync and programs that synchronize with mobile phones, for example.
If you register under the Data Protection Act, you will likely receive one of these letters. One of my clients received one this week. From a company called ‘Data Protection Agency Services - Enforcement Section’, this letter explains how failure to comply with the Data Protection Registrar constitutes a criminal offence, and you need to send them £95.
As you may have guessed from the fact I’m posting it at all, this letter is not what it seems.
It’s not a con, it’s just brazen. This company have nothing to do with the ‘Information Commissioner’, who handles all data protection registrations.
The first bullet point says ‘You are not held on our records as having registered under the Data Protection Act 1998, to comply with the Data Protection Registrar”. This is likely to be true, they probably don’t have any records of these things or they couldn’t send out the letters. It then warns you of the dangers associated with not registering and various gumph about the reasons behind it etc. There’s a little booklet you have to fill in, which is remarkable in its lack of spelling / grammatical errors (which makes me wonder if it’s just taken from something that actually is official). Then we come to the following:
“Once your cheque has reached us we will register you with the Notification Department, and provide you with helpful documentation for developing your codes of practice, under the legislation set within the Data Protection Act 1998″ (bold type theirs)
Whoop tee do.
The official term for registering under the DPA is ‘notification’, so many people assume this is an offical government thing, but it isn’t. The “Notification Department” of this company isn’t an official body, so it won’t matter one jot whether you are registered with them. It will, however, cost you £95.
The “Data Protection Agency Services” do exactly what they say they’ll do, so there’s nothing against the law about this. It’s just that many people will read the letter, assume it is from the government, and send off a cheque. Personally, I would say that’s the whole point, but that’s just my opinion. It’s a bit like me sending you an invoice that says “I thought about your computer last week - you owe me £50″. Most people would see this for what it is, but if I made it look similar to Microsoft documentation and crammed it full of warnings about how failure to comply with the EULA can get you fined, there’d be people who would simply send the money without paying too much attention.
According to the official website, the annual statutory notification fee for official notification is £35. There are no other charges.
I’ve just found this page on the official DPR website, warning about this kind of thing, and listing the addresses of the companies involved.
UPDATE on 18/05/04
Well, this page seems to have helped a fair few people! For a while I was in the top three google results under a ‘data protection agency services’ search, but I appear to have now disappeared from that. I appreciate all the kind words, although, please, if you want to go on an anti-government rant, this isn’t the place (and mentioning cars in the same sentence is a sure fire recipe for an email on road safety 
)
I’m updating to add a copy of the letter you’ll receive if you really do have to pay. You can see that the scam attempts to copy as much as possible from the official documentation. The real letter comes from the ‘Notification Department’ at ‘Wycliffe House’ and does, to be honest, look more professional. The official email address of ‘data@notification.demon.co.uk’ doesn’t help in this regard! It is, however, only £35 as opposed to the newly-increased total of £135.
The Information Commissioner’s Website (down at the time of writing) apparently maintains a list of the addresses of these scammers. Trading Standards will also take action if informed - you can find your local office from the central Trading Standards website.
UPDATE on 23/11/05:
Somebody has commented that the fraudsters have been prosecuted successfully. Excellent news!
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