bignoseduglyguy

Hallo-bloody-ween!

Don't get me wrong - I love any excuse for a party. However, Halloween in the UK these days also means that we have to suffer trial by that worst of American imports, trick or treat.

A little research indicates that I can blame our neighbours, the Irish for this PITA activity. Starting as a pagan festivity in the 5th century, Halloween celebrated the coming of the Celtic new year. The practise was exported to the US by early Irish settlers.

I wish I had had time to put one of these outside the front door to welcome the little toerags who'll be decorating the doormat with dogshit and pelting the windows with eggs. You see, in the dodgier parts of the East End of London, it is treat THEN trick, regardless of one's generosity.

More call centre job losses

The BBC have posted a piece concerning that fact that Lloyds TSB have announced that they are to close another UK call centre. Outsourcing the work to the Indian subcontinent means the loss of over 900 jobs (750 fulltime equivalent) in the UK but the creation of 1,500 new roles in India in a move that is claimed to keep the banking group competitive. Strange then that none of their press releases mention this amongst the flurry of PR concerning the latest senior management appointments.

As someone who manages the front end of a large regional technical contact centre, it is hard not to read this stuff without some concern - though European language requirements make it harder to transfer our work outside the region.

Jamie's Christmas gift to us all

Looking for a Christmas gift for a foodie in your life?

Look no further than Boots' online catalogue and their offer on Jamie Oliver's 2004 Calendar. Note the phrase 'Click to enlarge' under the strangely cropped photo. It is strangely apt. The strange cropping of the product shot is to disguise the true glory of the full picture on the calendar, which looks like this. Apparently, it was only when someone posted in another newsgroup that the alarm was raised with Boots' webmaster and the site was changed - though not before whoever managed to cache the original.

My thanks to Anne Jackson, one of the unbeatable crowd on the uk.food+drink.indian newsgroup, whose post alerted me.

Seattle's crime of the week

Writing and posting this last week resulted in this this week for Michael Hanscom who, seemingly, now rates as a major security threat over at Gates Central.

Stupid for them; sad for him.

And there was me...

...thinking of getting a mac.

Gobble, gobble, aaaargh

With ten million turkeys being bred in the UK specifically for this year's Christmas season, could thethe blackhead disease threat to turkeys mean a veggie Christmas this year?

Another step towards news Nirvana

I have moved my favoured feeds to the AmphetaDesk aggregator, which is fine on its own but really comes into its own when injected with the AmphetaOutlines add-in. Collapsable and expandable feeds, variable sorting, age-releated font size - all help to make life a little easier.

To get an idea of what on earth I am on about, take a peek at this hi-res pop-up screenshot.

Creature Comforts

Creature Comforts - a weekly 10 minute dose of claymation fun that proves Aardman Films are still top of the Plasticine puppeteers.

Getting to know you

With autumn nudging temperatures lower tonight, there's a chance you'll be sleeping snug under that new duvet you bought online from John Lewis. Before that, you might watch a DVD rented from movietrak or read a chapter or two from the Amazon bestseller you got last week. This bout of retail therapy, with reputable suppliers approved by Verisign and others, will be conducted with a clear and guilt-free conscience because you checked the balance of your Smile account earlier, over an SSL connection, and found a reassuring onscreen balance. In fact, the extra overtime you've been doing this month means that you could treat yourself to a nice Sunday lunch in a smart restaurant on your Visa card, knowing you can easily cover the cost when you get the statement next month. Whilst you're sleeping later, I'll be hard at work processing your financial data. The only problem is that I don't work for you bank, a retailer or clearing house.

In this hi tech world, there are plenty clever enough to steal data from your online transactions but that's a little too advanced for me. You see, I'm the waiter from the restaurant, who you'll be tipping so generously after finishing your roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Although I'll be grateful for the tip you're going to give me, it is peanuts compared to the money I'll be getting from a bloke in my local pub in return for your credit card details. I'll start by using a portable magstripe reader hidden in my apron pocket to copy the data from your Visa card's magnetic strip whilst on my way to the till to make up your bill. An easy £25 for two second's work. However, I'm learning my new trade fast and have invested a few of my 'extracurricular' earnings in a decent PC - you see, I've moved from credit card theft into ID theft. So, instead of selling your information, maybe I'll download it to my PC and, using some cheap software, I'll start to exploit it. First, I'll confirm that the name, address and telephone details I got from the restaurant's reservations book match the one from your card's magnetic strip. Armed with these, I'll pop over to your place sometime in the small hours of the night, to have a look around and find your wheelie bin. From it, I'll quietly remove black bags containing the last few days rubbish. From these, in the seclusion of my garage and away from suspicious eyes, I'll pull three soggy but readable documents - a bank statement, your gas bill and your electricity bill. The first will give me your bank account details as well as reconfirming your name and address. The second two will come in very handy as they are among the most widely accepted proofs of ID. With the information gathered so far and a few little white lies, I'll be able to acquire yet another two 'cornerstone' proofs of ID - a replacement birth certificate and driver's licence - porably via a pefectly legitimate service like this. From the former, I'll get your mother's maiden name, which will come in handy when your online bank ask me for it later. Having said that, they could ask me for the name of your first school instead but I'll get that in 30 seconds flat from a name search at Friends Reunited. Within an hour or so of raiding your bin, and to cover my tracks for long enough to abuse your account, I'll be calling your online bank's 24 hour helpline, posing as you of course, to change the billing address. This way, you won't be getting any statements or other mail to raise the alarm. As soon as they're awake, I'll be visiting the nearest Royal Mail sorting office to have all your mail redirected. In the space of a few hours, I'll have enough information regarding your identity to ruin you financially and leave you credit blacklisted for years to come. Or maybe someone has beaten me to it? You might want to check, just to make sure.

Sleep tight and mind the bugs don't bite.

Inspired by Rachel Shabi's Weekend Guardian piece: Hijacked your bank balance, your identity, your life.

Still repelling boarders

A month ago, I mentioned my efforts to minimise the seemingly never-ending spam onslaught on my various inboxes. My brief dalliance with Oddpost was shortlived due to the fact that it is reliant on MSIE and I was keen to use GPL/open source apps only if at all possible. I mailed a variety of concerns to the Oddpost team and I received reply with a glimmer of hope for a cross-platform version:

Mozilla support is one of the most common requests we receive, so it is on our developers' "wish list" for possible implementation in a future version of Oddpost, and I will add your vote to the tally. Would you like us to notify you if we do produce a Mozilla-compatible version?

That said, I have now configured POPFile to work alongside Firebird to weed out the c**p from my incoming mail. Whilst it doesn't have the most intuitive of interfaces, POPFile does have good supporting documentation that guides users through setup and usage. The extensive configurability of both POPFile and Firebird's message filters means that each user can, with a little thought, time and effort, have their 'ideal' setup in place, filtering the mail they want from the mail they didn't ask for.

Your number's almost up

BBC ClickOnline's Ian Hardy has posted a concise piece, Tackling the net's numbers shortage, about what's being planned for the time in 2005 when the current four billion available IP addresses that are all assigned.

Those wanting more technical detail or wishing to play a more active role in IPv6 should surf over to ipv6.org/.

Matchbox car memories

Reading a post by Kennamatic just now (the wee small hours) reminded me of my gran who died when I was 8. I remember coming home from my first night at Cub Scouts to see everyone looking sad and being told she had died.

Apart from photographs and the smell of braising kidneys - she cooked a lovely breakfast - I sadly remember little of her. The only thing I recall with clarity is that when we visited her, after a hug at the door, I'd always run to her chair. Tucked between the cushions would be a small box containing a shiny new car.

I miss not knowing her better.

Happy Diwali!

Tomorrow will see the celebration of Diwali in the UK and around the world. This 'festival of lights' is the most popular festival for Hindus, Jains and Sikhs.

Hopefully, we will go over to Upton Park tomorrow, wander up and down Green Street and tuck into some first class food and sweets.

For details of Diwali events around London, go here.

The lunacy of Herr Lutz

I have a friend called Nic.
He's from Bremen, the home of Beck's.
He's on a year-long round the world backpacking trip.
He sends guidebook-length emails back about his travels.
He also sends instant messages from South East Asian internet cafes.
He sent one whilst I was out just now.
About the World Beard and Moustache Championships in Carson City.
He obviously is missing Bavarian facial hair styling and desperately needs medication and help so I'm calling Australian Immigration now so they're ready for him.

Have fun, Nic!

The End - plane and simple

Working close to the busiest airport in the world has its advantages, like being handy for business trips and for meeting customers from their flights. Today, however, I took a half-day and hightailed it as quickly as possible back to this side of town. The first reason being I need to be home for the birthday party of one of my sprogs - a low maintenance affair involving a stack of DVDs, popcorn and cakes. The other reason to be nowhere near Heathrow this after noon is that, in the next two hours, the final flight for Concorde will land there, bringing to end the era of supersonic flight. For 34 years, Britain and Concorde led the world in supersonic passenger services but never recovered, commercially speaking, from the tragedy of the Paris crash 3 years ago.

Blog Block Unblocked

I have experienced issues with updating my blog over the last 24hrs. The MT window seemingly hangs whilst 'rebuilding' after pressing Save in a bloglet or main Edit Entry page but the browser status bar shows 'Done'. On checking my site, the relevant post didn't show on the blog page but when checking the MT entry listings, each attempt was registered as a separate post.

Interestingly, I tracked this problem down - by process of elimination - to the Ad Blocker in Norton Internet Security. It seems to be the culprit as enabling it cripples MT blogging, despite MT and NIS having previously coexisted without issues.

Those with nothing else to do can read more on the movabletype.org : Support Forum

Thanks for the heads up

My friend Roger is saying Bye Bye Blogrolling over at his site...or is he?

Blogrolling have started charging for a Premium service and he believed that they'd taken down his second roll, leaving him with just one (the secondary one, as it happens) running under their Basic service. All this with no notification or warning. Blogrolling then mailed him to say that his 2nd blog was a fluke - he should never have been able to set it up in the first place.

Well I hate to tell Roger this but I think Blogrolling are pulling his leg. I've been using a 2nd blog to log my geocache finds (link top right) for over a year and, after reading Roger's post, checked it. Surprise, surprise, it has disappeared. As with Roger's cache list, the links remain on my site as does the mandatory blogrolling link beneath - which will be disappearing shortly.

Prove me wrong...

...would appear to be the key defence tactic for the recently-arrested insider dealer who claims that he is a time traveler. The penultimate paragraph of the story adds a certain 'Area 51' flavour to the whole thing.

[Cue X Files theme - Do de do de do deeeeee...]

Out and outsource

The online version of the Weekend Guardian is carrying a story from its paper-based sister on the growing trend for major UK companies to outsource their call centre activities to contractors in India and Pakistan.

Indians heed call of the west makes for depressing reading for those of us involved in the contact centre industry, whether in the West or the East. Europeans in £18-£20k first line jobs with no regional language requirements grow ever more concerned about losing their jobs when their companies take the seemingly inevitable step of migrating the business to markets with cheaper labour costs. Those in the Indian subcontinent who take their place often do so knowing that, despite their university degrees and impeccable English, they will more than like be working in what Narendar Pani of the Economic Times newspaper calls "Industrial Revolution conditions" for little more than £2,000 per year.

Those companies who, like my employer, are a little more cautious often chose the 'middle' way by relocating functions and headcount to Australia and the PacAsia region, where highly skilled technical staff can still be hired for significantly less than is possible in the US or Europe. Ironically, it is companies like the one I work for whose networks and technicians make such global communications easier and cheaper with each passing year.

A case of being hoisted by one's own petard, methinks.

Comment at your own risk

As I wrote in the 'finger on the pulse' below, I was surprised at the number of places that 'bignoseduglyguy' was mentioned on the web. I mentioned this as an amusing aside - much in the same vein as when most of us searched for our names when we used a search engine for the first time.

One of the links the BlogPulse displayed was for Gary Murphy's wide ranging Teledyn blog. On opening the link, I noticed that there was a link to this post of mine concerning spam which, I have subsequently discovered, is also of great concern to Gary. In response, late last night, I posted the rather lazy and brief comment below (as I try to thank all those who comment on or link to this site):

Thanks for the link! Posted by bignoseduglyguy at October 18, 2003 07:38 PM

Upon checking my site this morning, I found the following comment:

Comments: A finger on the pulse

Do you suppose perhaps one of the reasons you made he BlogPulse top list might be because you spam other blogs with senseless comments just to get yourself a free link? [1] Do you suppose perhaps?

Just wondering, y'know, finger on the pulse of what's happening and all, and especially knowing how easy it is to end up on someone's blacklist [2] I'd really expect people to be a tad more engaged than an off-topic "thanks for the link"

Or maybe I misunderand your connection to McDonald's new viral marketing campaign?

[1] http://www.teledyn.com/mt/archives/001260.html
[2] http://www.teledyn.com/mt/archives/001388.html
Posted by mrG at October 19, 2003 04:11 AM

Upon checking the comments for the [1] link above, I then found this comment:

I'm glad you figured it out, but, you know, as I "posted to your blog": http://www.bignoseduglyguy.com/archives/000161.html (and there you go, you now have two links) in these days of people with hair-trigger blacklists, it is customary to at least explain your connection to this McDonalds viral ad campaign ... unless, of course, you truly were just spamming my comments for the sake of bumping your PageRank. Posted by mrG at October 18, 2003 11:15 PM

Despite only having a faint idea what I did to occasion these two comments, I mailed Gary with the following apology, though for what I'm still not sure.

Dear Gary

I am not sure what I have done to annoy you so much but, if I have given offence, I apologise. As you can see from my archives I am, at best, a spasmodic and recreational blogger posting bits and bobs that are, for the most part, of no consequence to anyone other than myself or close friends. Contrary to your assertion, I'm not really bothered with how many hits my blog gets (though I can see that having a counter might seem to indicate otherwise) so your comment credits me with a Machiavellian streak I don't actually have. I confess I don't understand the McDonalds reference (I don't patronise their 'restaurants' either) but, after reading the links you posted in your comment, I guess that you view my comment on your post as some sort of spam. In retrospect, I suppose my comment was a late night, dog-tired lazy way of saying 'Thank you for taking time to read my blog' and I should have taken the effort to say so rather than type what I did. I must admit that I don't really follow the email/usenet/blog netiquette debate and suspect I have trangressed some rule somewhere.

I hope that this answers the question/s in your comment - or were they rhetorical?

Regards

bignoseduglyguy

I suppose my point is that, for some, even blogging seems to have become a high-risk, full contact sport and I think that is a shame. As in life, folks will take one action and will know you by that one action alone. The lesson I draw from this experience are don't bother with comments unless you're sure you'll meet the exacting standards of the recipient. What those standards are, well, you'll just have to guess.

UPDATE @ 1600hrs 19TH oct 2003

I have received Gary's reply to my mail:

>Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote:

>understand that MovableType has become deluged by comments exactly as
>you had, nothing relevant to say except the link to their own blog.
>You had posted "thanks for the link" which is, according to the
>language I know as English, not the same as "thanks for the blog"
>and when I checked that story, sure enough, it doesn't link to you
>anywhere except where you placed the link yourself.
>
>Thus my warning: The MT-Blacklist module is probably the fastest
>deployed plugin in MT history, and when blog owners see posts such
>as yours, they are able to blacklist your URL with a single click.
>
>I refuse to ban open comments to my site because I have met too many
>friends that way, but as with any welcoming policy, no one likes to
>have their hospitality abused. That's more than nettiquette, it's
>just common sense. If you have some comment about the Macdonalds
>viral marketing campaign, then it's just common courtesy to add
>something more than a link back to your own site.

and have responded in kind:

Gary

I find it a sad reflection on the world that comments posted to your site have left you so distrustful of other's motives that you see aspertions and 'warnings' as the only way to deal with those less 'web-aware' than yourself. I hope that I am and will continue to be more forgiving of those that post in haste and tiredness as I did. As I have pointed out, whilst the post you linked concerned my attempts to limit the spam I receive (nowhere near as advanced as your, I admit), I am still none the wiser about the 'Macdonalds viral marketing campaign' despite searching your site and others. As I intimated in my earlier mail, I am no supporter of the chain concerned.

In a different world, I would go on to say how much I have enjoyed reading various posts written by kee-may and yourself today and how I can empathise (to a small degree) with your financial situation, having be down a similar road in the past. However, I suspect that now, as a blacklisted persona non grata, my empathy would come across hollow for you.

That said, I will have a good thought for you and your family, hoping that a change in circumstances and fortune comes to you soon.

Kind Regards
bignoseduglyguy

'Fear arises when we view everyone else with suspicion' - His Holiness The Dalai Lama

Does technology really bring us closer? Or simply offer more avenues for misunderstanding?

Do visit Gary's blog as he has posted thought-provoking stuff on subjects that touch on some key areas of modern life.

Sunday morning reflection

I think we all tend to forget what an amazing development the internet is. On Friday, I was helping a colleague new to telecomms to get some networking basics under her belt. Firstly, we visited the centre's switch, computer room and test lab, where I pointed out the bits of kit I knew the names and functions of and glossed over those I didn't have a clue about. Afterwards, back at her workstaion, I was wanting to demonstrate how to ping a server. With my head full of customer issues and upcoming appointments, I couldn't for the life of me recall a reliable IP address to use. So, in a last ditch attempt to salvage my geekish pride, I entered this site's domain name so it would resolve to the IP address and give me some results to discuss.

"Oh, you have your own website, do you?" she said, in a neutral but polite manner.
"Of course" I said, or words to that effect.

It struck me later not just how arrogant that the comment must have sounded but also how we so take for granted the technology at our disposal. It is not even remotely remarkable that a teenager can, from the bedroom of their parent's home, establish and grow an online business that can make them a paper millionaire before a year is out. Earlier in the week, my father and I were having one of our regular phone conversations whilst I crawled home through the rush hour traffic. He recalled that, during the Great War, my grandfather, stranded on an ambulance train somewhere in France, would have only had recourse to a hastily written letter or, at the very best, a telegram, to send word to his worried family. Later on, in the 1930s, my father not only had to ask his father permission to make a telephone call but, having provided sufficient evidence to have his request granted, make that call from the one handset in the house, often in front of the whole family. Now, fast forward almost ninety years, to the present day where I can, from my home, post my opinions and comments to website that has a global audience and been viewed thousands of times. My children don't even think twice before sending an email or an SMS instantly to friends around the globe - friends they'd never have had the chance to meet in years gone by.

Not earth-shattering revelations, I grant you but ones that we shouldn't forget in this world-on-a-plate, take-it-for-granted world.

Footnote:

Mike Muuss, father of the original UNIX ping code (his 'thousand line hack'), stated that the following ping story was his favourite.

"The best ping story I've ever heard was told to me at a USENIX conference, where a network administrator with an intermittent Ethernet had linked the ping program to his vocoder program, in essence writing:

ping goodhost | sed -e 's/.*/ping/' | vocoder

He wired the vocoder's output into his office stereo and turned up the volume as loud as he could stand. The computer sat there shouting "Ping, ping, ping..." once a second, and he wandered through the building wiggling Ethernet connectors until the sound stopped. And that's how he found the intermittent failure."

Full text at http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/ping.html

A finger on the pulse

Whilst hooking up my RSS subscriptions, I came across a neat way to get the results of a refined daily search delivered to your desktop without lifting a finger.

Google Alert will mail you or provide an RSS feed with the results of personalised daily Google searches as and when new results appear.

Just the thing for boosting your ego* or tracking news on a particular subject.

*Talking of which, I have just discovered that I made No.3 (well, sort of) in BlogPulse's Top Links for March 2003. That would account for the three visit to my site that day.

A need for feed

My recent decision to move from IE to Firebird 0.7 means that my trial of Oddpost.com is pretty much over, given that they have no plans to port the idea to other browsers. Whilst it would still be handy to use it to access my personal mail from work, I'm not sure it offers enough over services like web2mail or pop3mail to justify $30 worth of my English pounds.

One of the pluses of OddPost was the integral RSS reader that allowed me to keep up with the online antics of friends Jason, Roger and Chuck without firing up another another app. Looking to replicate this setup, a flick through the Extensions list on the Firebird site led me to Aggreg8, which was easy to download, easy to set up and provides me with easy access to the sites and blogs I want to keep up with.

Boks boxed up

Just spent a very pleasant couple of hours watching England beat the Boks. Bring on Samoa and Uruguay.

Meanwhile, whilst they did eventually lose to France, Japan were a joy to watch for their sheer passion and dedication to the task in hand - with two excellent tries from Konia and Ohata. Definitely a nation to watch in the years to come.

More open source...2

...and Thunderbird.

More open source...

Jason has finally convinced me to try Mozilla Firebird.

And now the news...

As has become a habit since my PC rebuild, part of the weekend has been dedicated to searching out GPL alternatives to the old standards I had installed on my old 98SE box. In the newsreader department, this had previously meant OE or FreeAgent, neither of which really appealed for a variety of reasons. So you can imagine my smile when I surfed into Colin Wilson's Delphi website. There, amongst his other Delphi coding projects, I found XanaNews, a richly featured and superbly executed newsreader with enough functions to keep the inveterate fiddler happy for hours.

Interested but lazy? The screenshot is here.

The blogger's eternal dilemma

I can relate to this, as they say.

Sigh.

Miranda versus Trillian

I'm currently back re-evaluating Trillian against Miranda. Despite previous bug problems, I'm hoping it'll prove more stable this time around.

Open source government?

Bill Thompson, the BBC's forthright online technology correspondent, is running a story that highlights the Government's supposed renewed commitment to pilot testing open source solutions.

The Office of Government Commerce has just announced a deal with IBM to trial open source software under the supervision of the Office of the E-envoy in a move that put clothes on the arguments put forward in last year's Open Source Software Policy statement (.rtf).

A small step but hopefully a significant one. Let's hope the spin-meisters and Labour grandees don't suffocate this initiative with the pillow of the back-scratching Old Boy's Network.

Goodbye GAIM, hello Miranda

A solid hour or two trying to fix the GAIM / 100% CPU issue with various downloads and bugfixes has left me no better off. There are enough mentions of the 100% CPU thing in the Sourceforge forums to convince me that I'm gonna need more time and inclination than I have at the moment to sort it out.

As not having a multi-protocol IM client would be more than a little restrictive, I have downloaded and configured Miranda Instant Messenger onto my W2K box. Small footprint, sparse interface but supports a bunch of protocols so will be more than sufficient until I can trace a fix for the GAIM memory leak / resource hogging / whatever.

No GAIM without pain, it seems

Over the last two days, Gaim (v.69)has been maxxing out my CPU usage, making the PC crawl and I am unable to suss out why.

Have justed grabbed v.71 debug version (Oct 9) in the hope that I'll be able to resolve or at least pin down the problem.

Bloody wobblers

RANT
I like motorcycles. I have owned and ridden a few in my time. I was a despatch rider between acting jobs back when I was struggling actor. They are a sound, economic and socially-aware form of transport.

However, my love of things two-wheeled is diminishing with every day, thanks to a certain type of rider who uses these to weave and wobble through traffic, swerve across lanes, exhibiting no roadsense, no courtesy for others and generally being a complete danger to themselves and others. This type of rider thinks they look like this even though it is a freezing cold dark autumn morning and they're in the middle of London, when in fact they look like this!

It seems the Irish and Italian governments agree with me as they have joined forces with some Federation or other to create a crack team to solve the problem.
/RANT

Constant Craving*

At my desk earlier today, I was busy putting the finishing touches to the latest draft of an action plan in Excel. All of a sudden and out of nowhere, the following thought popped in my head 'Chili's Soutwestern Eggrolls....Chili's Soutwestern Eggrolls....Chili's Soutwestern Eggrolls....Chili's Soutwestern Eggrolls....' Oh boy - I haven't had them since I was in Atlanta last year but the memory still lingers on.

As I am the wrong side of the Big Pond for a fix of the same (the version they make in the UK franchises is NOT the same), I shall be working up a batch based on shawnandjamie's Chili's Southwestern Eggrolls recipe come the weekend. Then all I'll need is some godawful American beer to go with 'em.

*With apologies to kdlang

Big Brother Google is watching you

A story in the NY Times has raised questions about the motives and machinations behind Google's latest experiment.

In a move modelled on the airlines' frequent flyer programs, Google are using cookies to record the search frequency of their busiest users and display them on that user's display each time they search.

For Google's viewpoint and that of the US-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, read the NYT story here.

Going to school on Sunday

In order to fend off the usual Sunday afternoon lethragy that seems to weld the sprogs to the sofa, we have just spent a couple of very interesting hours and the Ragged School Museum.

This museum was opened in 1990 in three canalside warehouses in Copperfield Road, East London. The buildings were previously used by Dr Barnardo to house the largest ragged school in London. The displays and exhibitions concern the unique history of the East End of London, and in particular of the Copperfield Road Ragged School, which provided education for the poorest of the area's children.

In a re-created classroom of the period, visitors can now experience how Victorian children were taught - and punished. Displays on local history, industry and life in the East End are supplemented a varied programme of temporary exhibitions. Today, as part of the London-wide Black History month, the kids took part in an art workshop where they made doorhangers decorated with their names in Egyptian pictoral hieroglyphics. If you have a burning desire to see your name in hieroglyphics, you can click over to here and translate your name online.

Oddpost update

If you're wondering 'What's Oddpost?' and can't be bothered to hit Page Down, you can get up to speed here.

Well, I'm about a week into my trial of Oddpost and, on balance, things are going well. I am pulling mail into OP's IE interface from five seperate POP3 accounts. Three of these are with my UK-based ISP, another is the ubiquitous Yahoo WebMail and the fifth is my SquirrelMail account, sitting on my host's* box in Bakersfield, California. On top of this, I am subscribed to at least 9 RSS feeds at this time, including those of my buddies, Jason and Roger. All this means that after logging in over my 512k DSL link, it usually takes around 90-120 seconds to pull all this stuff into OP's clean and crisp three-pane interface.

Reading, sorting, filing and deleting mail is exactly as one would find in any other mail client. Drag and drop into user-created subfolders works fine and right click menus are abundant, making the OddPost experience a simple one. The spam filtering works well and improves every time I give it a helping hand by manually classifying the odd one that slips the net. Suspected spam gets triaged and held in a folder from where, with the wry humour evident right across the OddPost application, website and FAQ, baddies can be zapped with the 'nuke cloud' button and the goodies can be restored with the 'peace' symbol button.

Although not a biggie for me, the calendar seems more than capable and provides the usual web-based diary and scheduling functions that one looks for in such a service.

The only bug bear so far has been importing my address contacts. The FAQ gives basic details on importing from CSV files and mentions that Palm users like myself need to jump through a few more hoops to get from the vCard format to CSV. Having extracted and converted the contacts from my Clie with LinkeSOFT's excellent AIMEX, I tidied it up in OpenOffice.org 1.1 and then used OddPost's import function. After import, the address book was far bigger and obviously had added records but they were blank. I believe that this might be a field mapping issue and have sent a support request because various experiments with reordering CSV columns to match OddPost's address book columns have drawn a blank.

On the odd occasion that there has been a problem whilst using OddPost, there has nearly always been a useful error dialogue advising as to the likely cause and offering remedial advice or suggesting a bug submission. Such proactive tactics certainly help to give the end user more confidence that these niggles will get address in the next release.

So, to sum up, OddPost has delievered what it promised so far and has done so with some panache. I find that I have to remind myself that OddPost is actually an application and not just an interface for a webmail service. I am intrigued as to whether the long term experience will be as rewarding as the initial period.

Finally, Jason, amongst others, has commented on his disappointment that OddPost have chosen to implement only on the later versions of IE and, as yet, have not ported to Netscape/Mozilla, Opera, Eudora et al. For the reasoning behind that and a bunch more on the OddPost philosophy head over to unraveled's interview with Ethan Diamond, President and co-founder of Oddpost earlier this year.

* Chuck's crisply customer-focused and entirely excellent Thrust Networks.

Bobbies on the web

A mail from my ISP (bless 'em) contained a link to the Fraud Alert page of London's Metropolitan Police website. Amongst other things, the page and numerous links on it carry information about the many and varied internet scams currently being perpetrated and makes for an interesting read.

OpenOffice.org 1.1 with PDA compatiblity

One of the benefits of having friends like Chuck, Jason and Roger, the other staffers over at HappyPalm, is each of us will pick up on something the others might miss in the seemingly endless search for that 'perfect' PDA or application. An idle comment on GAIM to Jason last night prompted him to give me the heads-up on a neat feature I'd missed whilst whilst installing OpenOffice.org 1.1.

Although I run a Windows PC (despite Jason's attempts to get me onto Linux), I have grown tired of being a slave to Microsoft's heavyweight and finicky applications. In particluar, I resented using resource-sapping Office suite at home as well as at work. So, in line with my desired policy of populating my newly reformatted HD with alternative applications where possible and having run StarOffice for a while some time ago, I turned to the GPL and open source communities for my replacement. Naturally, I was drawn to the leading multi-platform OpenOffice.org 1.1 productivity suite.

OpenOffice is comprised of WRITER, a powerful word processing tool that can handle simple notes to sophisticated HTML layouts; the CALC spreadsheet, data analysis and graphing tool; IMPRESS with which multimedia presentations containing special effects & animation can be produced and DRAW that can be used for simple diagrams or dynamic 3D graphics and special effects. The bundled Database User Tools help to run database work in a simple spreadsheet-like form. They support dBASE databases for simple applications, or any ODBC or JDBC compliant database for industrial strength database work.

Meanwhile, back at last night's install, I was chatting back and forth with Jason whilst looking through the new features. Amongst the documented features of the 1.1 release is support for mobile device formats like AportisDoc (Palm), Pocket Word and Pocket Excel. However, having run the typical install option, I could not find the Palm/Aportis .doc format as an option in the Save As or Export menus. As a seasoned user, Jason advised that the filters for the mobile device formats were a user-specified choice under the Custom install option and wouldn't have loaded as part of the typical install process.

One annoyance was that when I ran the setup again, the 'modify' option wasn't available or visible which necessitated me uninstalling and then custom reinstalling the whole kit and caboodle this morning (after a cup of rocket-fuel-grade coffee had brought my eyes into focus!). Having said all that, I am now able to save my text documents to the AportisDoc format at the click of a mouse or PDF format if you prefer. On second thoughts, maybe not because folks who get Jason started on his favourite subject of getting PDFs onto PDAs need a little time on their hands - the man's a demon for that stuff! :D

PDA Photo Study of NYC

If you think that PDA cameras are only good for office pranks, supporting your insurance claim for yesterday's fender bender and snapping funny road signs, Jeffrey Fitzgerald can prove you wrong.

Surfing through the CLIE User's Group over at Yahoo, I came across a link to Jeffrey's web photo gallery with three pages of fine, well composed and visually interesting photographs of New York taken with a Sony NX-80. Jeffrey freely admits to a little tweaking with Photoshop to tone down the colours and make up for the lack of depth of field but the results speak for themselves. As another member of the group says, the man has a talent.

Never off duty

Out the door at six. 90 minute commute. Straight 12hr day managing big and very busy technical centre. 120 minute commute back. Collect kid from Cubs. Eat cold takeway. Iron shirt. Take call after jumping from shower. Spend two more hours trying to assist friend who wants to install DSL modem but gets "Can't find instdll.dll" error on loading s/ware CD. Trying to support W98SE uesr from W2K box was OK but it got way too scary when I had to talk him through the Registry clean up.

I'm off for a few hours before doing it all over again. Oh, I nearly forgot. If you get the same fault, you can get the missing file here. Case closed with customer's permission.