Bradford Degeneration Correct but not Politically Correct

In preparation for the upgrade of the site from drupal 5.? to 6.2 I have changed the system for moderating spam from the spam module to the akismet module - I have absolutely no idea what impact this will have so you'll just have to lie back and think of england.

I just noticed that when searching google that the Revenue and Customs website now seems to be listed as http://www.hmrc.eu rather than http://www.hmrc.gov.uk.

Can I draw your attention to the bloody great user log-in box in the left sidebar - if you can be arsed registering and logging in you will find that your comments no longer appear to have been submitted without parachute from such a height that you are no more than a pink blob on the tarmac.

Note the layout is best viewed on at 1680x1050 or greater - if you can't be bothered nicking a widescreen PC why bother coming to websites that need one?

I've found a decent program that makes windows mobile work properly (the problem being that programs don't close when you click on the x at the top righthand corner - on most programs this doesn't matter but with any that access the internet they keep your mobile data connection open - or worse try to reopen it when you have closed it).

Anyway the beautiful little application is magic button and it's completely free.

I found it in the comments on microsoft's nutty justification for this potential mobile phone bill disaster.

Oh well they didn't exactly advertise the fact and I didn't notice until it forced me to download a new version and it informed me it would expire in 3 days. The only thing worse than shareware is freeware that changes its mind and becomes shareware. The idea that anyone actually reads the license information that is displayed before installation is absurd.

Oh well a swift switch to filezilla and everything will be OK. Wonder how long smartftp will remain the most popular ftp client now? Not bloody long I would guess.

The story goes as follows while I was setting up my coming accounting blog last night I did something rather silly - I checked which database it was using and which this site was using then deleted the wrong one.

Fortunately despite it being nowhere in the small print it turns out my ISP does daily backups and when asked nicely will help out idiots who delete the wrong database!

These paragons of virtue are Xcalibre

I've now worked out how to get a feed of all aggregate of the various local blogs (only about half a dozen added at the moment but I'll get it finished this week.

The feed is http://www.bradfordvision.co.uk/aggregator/rss/7

If you have a Bradford related blog and want it adding to the feed just give the the url for your rss feed in a comment.

Now this beastie is a nice little camera - except the zoom on the shorter lens on mine seemed to stick at the half way point resulting in a huge leap when the second lens kicked in. Happily this problem is easily solved by projecting the camera in a horizontal trajectory into a wall from a distance of about 3 metres.

Oh and if you are thinking of buying a kodak z710 don't - it produces worse pictures than an Olympus UZ500 despite having 7mpixels vs 5!

Is it dead?

I appear to have finally conquered this little annoyance which plagues drupal based sites by adding the following to my .htacess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*bradfordvision.co.uk.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) ^http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/$ [R=301,L]

This ensures that any post requests are only processed on the host server of the referrer. So posts using the forms on this site work but the bot posters don't since they are using faked referrers (www.google.com at the moment).

No doubt at some point the bots will change and this won't work but thus far no comment spam for a week!

Obviously if you use it you need to change the third line

To everyone for letting a few spam postings from some brainless cretin slip through the net. Turned off the user blogging feature and turned on administrator approval for new accounts. Serves me right for being ill I guess!

well I was just going to give this a little run in so I could attend the Blogpower awards alas it refuses to support an ati rv535 (an x1650 card) with fully updated windows vista drivers (which succesfully run aeroglass on vista ultimate)

Can't see the point of w*nking about with it anymore - I'll put it down to teenage annoyances like myspace, facebook, youtube etc that are more trouble than they are worth.

As some residents have discovered, Second Life will not run on Windows Vista with ATI video cards. We tracked this down to a bug in the ATI OpenGL drivers, and have just confirmed that this issue is fixed in ATI’s Catalyst 7.3 drivers for which are still in development. ATI hopes to have these available by the end of the month. Thank you for your patience.

Now installing catalyst 7.5 drivers instead of the default vista drivers. Watch this space - last time I tried ati drivers rather than windows it stuffed the machine.

OK it works now but it still seems more trouble than it's worth! My second life persona if I ever bother with it again is Baht Hax (obviously pronounced 'ats)

In that myself and my ISP are being harassed by the owner of the BOLD CAP POSSE website who has variously spammed the site with links to his site, spammed the site with "bahtat you are an arsehole" comments, used two of his domains (ez-pz.co.uk and site-a1.co.uk) to repeatedly download large images from the site boosting the bandwidth usage and twice complained to my ISP about content (firstly the article about his site and then about my "racism"). Oh hum. The political views of the owner of that site can be found in his comments on this local newpaper website - it's also quite instructive on just how obnoxious the BNP are and their coded racism via islamophobia.

Anyway it's now been checked by the legal eagles at the ISP and (as I would have expected) been given the all clear:

It relates to the blog of Shilpa Shetti perfume, alleged comparing Lewis Hamilton to a monkey and Suppose you were a thick Chav, which relates to indirectly classing someone as A[dolf] H[itler]. As l stated before we will continue to monitor but at this time are satisfied that the content is above board. The main reason is legally we have to take complaints seriously and pass these concerns to the website owner.

Unfortunately they didn't actually send me a copy of the original complaint from the BOLD CAP SHERIFF so I can't print it out and put it on a nail in the toilet (to remind me of the delicious irony of someone who appears to support the BNP complaining about alleged racism of course!)

I've just replaced the covers on one of my home machines - that probably means it will go into the missionary postion fairly soon. What is impressive is the collection of microshit authenticity stickers, windows 2000, XP, X64 and now Vista .... needless to say the contents of the case now running vista ultimate 64bit are not the same as the when it was running 2000 32bit, although I still haven't fallen to the the temptation of a quad-processor. Now I have to get un*x on it to convert my lifedrives into lifeflashes - thus far the stumbling block is finding a darn compactflash reader that will read the microdrives so I might have to knit my own disk image for the compactflash cards. At the moment I have two lifedrives (in bits) and one working and one very dead microdrive plus one blank compactflash (and another on order). That bloody linux stuff looks far too DOS like for my tastes.

I've decided that a quick nostalgic blast on Master of Orion II is far more sensible that bashing my head against a dorkish operating system assembled by a team of autistic misfits so maybe sometime!

The trick of running MOO2 on vista seems to be to copy all the files from the CD to a folder on your harddisk, find and right click on setup.exe and set it to run in win98 compatibility mode then run it.

Firstly it won't write DVD+Rs in a format readable by my Samsung standalone dvd recorder (a divX compatible player) even though XP did this without a problem. Secondly it uncermoniously reverts the appearance to "basic" from "aero" whenever you visit a cyrillic website. First time it reverted when I closed the site but when I went back to check that was the cause the wind turned and vista got it's face frozen in the ugly "basic" appearance. All attempts to set "aero" seem to be refused .... maybe after a reboot it'll be OK, maybe not.