Tim Hardy

Firefox has been annoying me recently. I tend to have dozens of tabs open at once and every now and then I find that my machine freezes as my CPU usage hits 99% for several minutes at a time. Yesterday I discovered the culprit.

Flash adverts - that I hadn’t noticed before because they were running in background tabs - were choking the machine.

Enter flashblock. This firefox extension replaces all flash animations with a little play icon that can be pressed to get them running if you really want to see them. Problem solved.

And as a side-benefit, it stops pop-ups launched by flash that can otherwise creep around firefox’s excellent pop-up blocking.

SessionSaver was number one on my “can’t live without” extensions list: it remembers what you open in each tab and can restore them all if you restart the browser and lets you reopen any individual one you might accidentally close. Flashblock has now joined it on the podium.

I’ve finally got round to posting my xf86config for the Compaq Armada 1540D.

While online with the machine, I decided to install something a little more user-friendly than lynx for web browsing. Now I know some people consider it heresy to install commercial software, but I had a play with Opera the other day and was impressed by its performance. Firefox is a fantastic browser but it is a slow starter and can be a CPU hog. Given the low-specs of this laptop, even a slight increase in performance makes a considerable difference. Opera has a smaller footprint too which is significant when you’ve only got a 2G harddrive. The decision was made.

The official Debian package from Opera had unmet dependencies so I downloaded the static rpm and created a .deb package with the following command:
fakeroot alien opera-8.0-20050415.1-static-qt.i386-en.rpm

Several minutes later I was presented with a .deb package easily installed with:
dpkg -i opera-8.0-20050415.1_i386.deb

The free version displays adverts in the title bar. You can chose images or google-provided text ads. I’ve opted for the latter and they’re not that distracting. If need be, my friend can pay for the commercial version and get rid of them but, as a struggling writer, he may be happier to save the money.

Michael Hampton, producer of the Bad Behaviour anti-spam plug-in for Wordpress has posted a convincing attack on the rel=”no follow” code proposed by google and implemented by MovableType, WordPress, Blogger, Flickr, and Slashdot.

This code gets added to any links left in comments on a site and is an instruction to search engines to ignore the link.

The supposed benefit? It stops link spammers from gaining google ranking from your site. The major side-effect? It breaks the structure of comments and links back-and-forth with which weblogs maintain their position in search rankings.

The post effectively dismantles any claims about the effects of rel=”no follow” on link spammers, showing how in fact it is likely to lead to an increase in spamming attempts. Its only effect will be to make blogs drop lower in search results.

If I’m looking for information I’d rather read a post written by an interested individual who has taken time to research it for themselves than a press release reprinted verbatim by a lazy hack or marketing copy that deceives to sell. People who complain about “blognoise” in search results are misguided. If you keep find irrelevent blog posts about someone’s new diet when you’re looking for something else, then learn how to use a search engine. Taking blogs out of google won’t make poorly constructed attempts to search the internet any more precise.

There’s a nonofollow plugin for Wordpress that removes rel=”no follow” from comments after a configurable number of days, allowing you to reward your true readers with a splash of googlejuice but giving you time to dump freeloading Texas Hold-em and his Viagra-toting buddies.

There are better ways to stop spammers. Michael is working on a real-time DNS-based blacklist to monitor the open proxies used to hammer websites with link spam so you can block any comments, pings or trackbacks sent via these anonymising machines. A Wordpress plug-in is now available.

A slashdot posting warning of a future shortage of Computer Science graduates led me to this site: www.jobstats.co.uk/.

Every week, site creator Nick Wells parses job adverts in the UK and publishes an analysis breaking them down by skills, salary and region. Comparisons with past data enable you to see changing trends in the industry too.

In the face of so much “My job went to India and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” doomsaying, it’s good to see that there is still demand for IT professionals. My gut instinct tells me that a lot of people jumped onto the Information Technology bandwagon during the internet boom, lured by the insane money being thrown at inane ideas, and that these opportunists have now all jumped ship. I believe that people who are genuinely passionate about the possibilities of technology will find a way to make a good living from something they care about.

Then again, I have to believe in that. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Since I upgraded to Wordpress 1.51 my RSS feed has not been updating in bloglines and other aggregators.

It turns out that there’s a bug that means the feed gives a “HTTP Error 304: Not Modified” warning by default. This warning vanishes if I make a post - until midnight of that day when it resets to error status. Bloglines has clearly been skipping my site updates because of this.

Digging around in the forums lead me to the solution here.

However, while investigating this I find myself drawn to using feedburner instead because I like the idea of splicing in feeds from my del.icio.us bookmarks. I had noticed that Stephen O’Grady did this in his feed and have been meaning to investigate how he did it for a while.

There are good instructions on using feedburner with wordpress here and here. Using a .htaccess to redirect readers to the feedburner supplied feed should make the transition invisible to any current subscribers (both of you!) and make it easy to restore the old service if feedburner proves unreliable, goes bankcrupt or acts “evil” in future.

Here’s a link to the feedburner feed for the moment. I’m not sure if I’ll stick with including images from flickr but we’ll see.

UPDATE: Wordpress 1.5.1.1 has been released, patching the feed problem and a couple of others. I’m going to hold back before changing anything else.

I received the proofs of my first article for Linux Magazine last night. It will be in Issue 56, July 2005. (Update: PDF online: Podcatching without an iPod)

Two years ago when I started playing with linux, I picked up a copy of this magazine and thought “This stuff seems fascinating - but I don’t understand a word of it.” Thanks to the hundreds of free tutorials online, the generous and patient advice of users of bulletin boards and a now well-thumbed collection of O’Reilly books, I’ve finally learned enough to start contributing back.

Neal Stephenson famously noted “unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.” Linux has grown out of that oral history and the decision to make it open source has made every user part of a community, whether they realise it or not.

I once read a Buddhist parable in a book about the Dalai Lama by Claude B Levenson, Le seigneur du lotus blanc. In the story a monk goes to live in a house filled with selfish, slovenly, morally lax individuals. Rather than preach to them about the error of their ways, the monk just picks up a broom and starts tidying. He never passes judgement on his fellows, just cleans up without comment. After several weeks, his good influence makes itself felt and the others begin to be more considerate and slowly reform their ways. Without doing anything, the silent monk changes their behaviour through his own good example alone.

In the same way, the generous individuals who create, develop, debug and document the tools that together comprise a GNU/Linux operating system through their good influence alone encourage others to share their own growing knowledge and skills.

Yeah, I’m a hippy at heart, I know. Laugh and call me unrealistic but I’d still rather live in a world where people believed in co-operation not competition, where people were rewarded for what they created rather than what they stole, either directly or indirectly through gaming the system. I want a world where technology is used to extend humanity’s reach rather than the bank balances of a few lucky rights holders, a world where we put as much collective energy into meeting the material needs of the impoverished many as we now put into the generation of artificial desires for the overfed and bored few. Open source is part of that ideal world.

I’m not saying do away with money. I’m getting paid for this article. Writing articles is how I pay my rent. I’m saying we should stop looking to make a profit at the expense of others. Doc Searls is fond of quoting Walt Whitman to describe the enemies of open source: they are “demented with the mania of owning things”. GNU/Linux is the product of people who believe that they are enriched by giving away what they know rather than jealously hoarding skills and knowledge. Using the operating system brings you into repeated contact with that radical idea and with each repetition it seems a more and more desirable way of living.

Backpack has the potential to be a very useful web-based PIM - even more so now that they’ve opened up their API.

I’m particularly excited by the ability to create reminders.

I’ve been trying to implement a “tickle folder” system with my email, moving messages from the inbox if they do not need any action to be taken before a certain date to a series of datestamped folders so that I can forget about them until they are due. I check the folder for the day each morning with fetchmail to warn me if I’ve filed something for review. (This wouldn’t work nearly so well without IMAP.)

Backpack gets another bump up on my “to play with when I have time” list.

Demonstrators chained themselves to the Uzbek Embassy earlier today and daubed the building in paint in protest against the alleged murder of hundreds of civilian protestors by the government in Andijan last Friday and in Pakhtabad on Saturday.

This is how the building looked when I walked past earlier.

According to the website Muslim Uzbekistan, a larger demonstration has been planned for tomorrow.

Looking for a broadband provider in the UK? Stay away from Bulldog.

Sure, their ADSL package is very fast - when it works.

But sadly it doesn’t always work and good luck on getting through to Customer Services - they don’t have enough staff to answer calls and their exchange can’t handle the call volume. In my experience, you can only get through one time in ten. (Oh and I should add that they only work from 8am to 9pm so god help you if you’re working from home on something urgent and your internet connection and phone line both go down at midnight.)

And don’t expect any help when you do get through. Each department seems to be on a different system and cannot see any notes on your account or records of calls placed by staff elsewhere in the organisation. So expect to have to repeat everything to everyone you speak to, again and again and again.

There seem to be no managers or supervisors - and no one is willing to call you back or give you a contact number for someone capable of actually helping you with your problem.

Of course, you can always email them if you can’t get through on the phones, like I did on 31 March this year after my phone line went down and stayed down for voice calls followed by my broadband connection several days later (they supply both on the same line: I don’t know why one worked, for a while, without the other).

No reply. Or to my resending it on 4/04.

Sending it a third time on 7/04 got an answer the next day - a template answer that ignored the content of my email and my description of the problem and gave me a list of patronising questions (Is your computer switched on? Dammit, I knew I was missing something simple…).

Somehow I found the patience to answer these and to repeat my original complaint.

I was told it had been forwarded to the technical department.

I got a call from an engineer the next day telling me that my line was working because they could see I’d used it since my last email. I explained to him that my issue was rather that the line had died for several days without explanation and I wanted to know why this had happened so that they could work on making sure it did not happen again. It turned out that the customer services employee had not forwarded my details at all to his department, simply told them that my line was not working. He promised to look into it and call me back.

He never called back.

Since then, nothing. And the line has gone down several times. I have emailed their customer service and technical departments each time - and even, as desperation grew, their public relations department. No answer. Not even a courtesy email.

The other week I woke up to find I had no broadband or phone line. I work from home. I cannot do my job without access to the internet.

Three hours on my mobile to bulldog customer services and six members of staff later, I finally had a supervisor on the line who was able to tell me that my local exchange was down, that they were working on fixing it, that she was sorry no one had answered any of my emails, they were short staffed and training new people. I asked to get my money back for the last month’s bill in compensation and she agreed.

My bill has just arrived. Guess what. No compensation. And their phone lines are all engaged.

UPDATE: 1/6/05

I have finally been credited with the promised refund. I still stand by my original statement, however. Bulldog Broadband’s customer service is the worst I have ever encountered. I would not recommend the service to anyone.

I’ll always love literature and I can’t bring myself to regret my choice of first degree, but IT seems the most truly creative and meritocratic space at the moment and I want in. Scott Adams does not scare me. Cube farms and pointy-haired bosses are everywhere.