Plop in the Ocean

Experts Exchange, Google, AllFAQ.org and misappropriation of copyright.

2011-01-19T21:50:45Z

Opinion Piece

I was googling (as a verb) and came across a rather peculiar message at the bottom of Google's search results:

In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.

Interesting - never saw that before!

Following the link to Chilling Effects shows a copy of the complaint which has some interesting text in it.

Experts-Exchange makes a detailed itemisation of their registered Copyrights, none of which I find objectionable, however, the complaint then goes on to list several issues against the Defendant, the first and most egregious of which is:

a direct "copy and paste job" lifting the content of Plaintiff's question and answer forums and inserting them onto AllFAQ's website. AllFAQ's question and "Solutions" are verbatim to Experts-Exchange's questions and "Accepted Solutions;"

From this Experts Exchange is accusing allfaq.org of Copyright infringement against Experts Exchange owned Copyright.

At first glance, this might seem fully justified - but look at what they are claiming copyright on. Experts Exchange are assuming copyright ownership of content that you, and I, and all their users create by asking and answering questions on their web site.

I looked at Experts Exchange's Terms of Use and could not find any agreement that users were assigning their rights and copyrights to Experts Exchange. The relevant paragraph is:

"5. Content License

EXPERTS EXCHANGE enables Members to post problems or questions, proposed solutions or answers, information, comments and other content ("Your Content") to its Site. When you post Your Content to the Site, you understand and agree that Your Content can be viewed and used by other Members who visit the Site with or without attribution.

You represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to Your Content and that use of Your Content by EXPERTS EXCHANGE and its affiliates will not infringe upon or violate the rights of any third party. Before you use EXPERTS EXCHANGE Services to post any information or content that is protected by intellectual property laws, you shall have acquired the legal right to do so from the owner or authorized licensee of such information or content.

By registering with EXPERTS EXCHANGE and posting Your Content on the Site, you hereby: (i) grant EXPERTS EXCHANGE a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, unrestricted, transferable, fully sub-licensable, worldwide, royalty-free license to use, distribute, display, reproduce, perform, modify, adapt, publish, translate and create derivative works from Your Content in any form, media or technology, whether now-known or hereafter developed; (ii) grant EXPERTS EXCHANGE and its affiliates and sub-licensees the right to use the Member Name that you submit with Your Content for purposes of attribution; (iii) authorize EXPERTS EXCHANGE to assert and prosecute claims against any third-party making any unauthorized use of Your Content, including any use that violates this User Agreement ("Third-Party Claims"); and (iv) appoint EXPERTS EXCHANGE as your attorney-in-fact for the purpose of asserting and prosecuting Third-Party Claims. If you do not wish to have Your Content attributed to you, then you must notify EXPERTS EXCHANGE at customer_service@experts-exchange.com.

Experts Exchange acknowledges that the copyright belongs to the author as "Your Content" and that by posting you are granting them extensive licenses to use that content. You are not assigning your copyright to Experts Exchange.

Now I am glad that their ToU does not attempt to wrest copyright ownership from its rightful owner, that is right and proper.

allfaq.org is demonstrably guilty of screen-scraping the Experts Exchange web site and I do not condone those actions at all. However, looking at what they copied - it was the Title, Question and Accepted Solution text - the copyright of 100% of that is with the original authors, and not Experts Exchange.

Thus, in my opinion, this complaint against allfaq.org is without merit and should be dismissed.

It would also appear that Experts Exchange has also abused the provisions of the DMCA in forcing Google to remove the content. Google should restore the links.

And finally, Experts Exchange should implement some technical measures to prevent automated scraping. Find better ways to improve your search ranking, and if your competition beats you don't ask your own members how to do better SEO; be told by them that you have no Copyright Claims on the content; and then proceed to file DMCA take down notices when you know you have no (copy)right.

Vodafone UK + HTC Desire + Android 2.2 FroYo = Fail.

2010-08-04T17:59:03Z

Well, it looks like Vodafone UK royally messed up the timing of the HTC Desire OTA Update yesterday. While most owners were eagerly expecting the announced Android 2.2 (FroYo) update that HTC have been pushing out, Vodafone decided to push out a 2.1-update1 which only provides Vodafone branding, apps, a few bugs, and even a couple of "adult" related bookmarks to everyone - and leaving them on Android 2.1 (Eclair).

Needless to say - Users are ~~not happy~~ at all. *Vodafone appears to have moved the thread ~~here~~. [2010/08/06] Moved again to here (is Vodafone trying to hide the complaints?).

In work, we (coworkers and I) now have a total of 8 HTC Desires (out of 16 people) - even two iPhone users have converted! A few have been espousing the wonders of FroYo on their phone (some had rooted, and did it themselves, others had bought unbranded phones and got the stock HTC FroYo upgrade). I was jealous(ish) and wanted it myself.

Given Vodafone's actions yesterday, it was likely that the FroYo update from Vodafone was minimum several weeks away, if not 3 months (as was intimated on the Vodafone forum - end of October) - it was also noted that the Vodafone FroYo update would include the Vodafone 360 branding and software.

Thus, last night it was time to embark on the adventure of flashing my HTC Desire to a stock image direct from HTC. I reasoned that my goal should be to flash HTC's Android 2.1 (Eclair) image to the phone, and once there, the normal software update process should take me to 2.2.

And so it began...

I knew that I needed to create a gold card because the Vodafone image doesn't let you install non-Vodafone images. This I discovered as I tried to simply apply a stock 2.2 download and using boot recovery update.zip - all attempts met with a complaint of a "Fingerprint error".

I ended up at this page:
[TUT]Complete upgrading guide(root, unroot, flashing ROM & updates)

and followed Post #3 which details a) How to make a Gold Card* . Ignore the rest of #3
and then Post #4 - the "unrooting" guide.

You then need to find a download of the correct stock HTC Bravo WWE image ROM - I chose the second WWE ROM from this link (140MB download):
[ROM] Official HTC Desire RUU ROMS and OTA Update URLs
RUU_Bravo_HTC_WWE_1.21.405.2_Radio_32.36.00.28U_4.06.00.02_2_release_126984_signed.exe

Proceed through the rest of Post #4 "How to Flash ROM" with the Goldcard inside your Desire, and plugged into your PC.

The phone will take 5-10 minutes to complete upgrading (or downgrading) to HTC Stock 2.1 image. When it reboots you will have to go through all the original setup sequences you did when you first unboxed your phone.

You can then perform a Software Update Check and you should find you have a Android 2.2 FroYo update (90Mb) waiting for you. Proceed and let it do its thing.

Once done, welcome to FroYo.

All future updates will come direct from HTC - not from Vodafone, and you won't ever have the Vodafone 360 branding rubbish foisted upon you.

* My GoldCard creation had a bit of a hiccup, in that it turns out that the 4GB Samsung card which came with my Desire does not work as a Goldcard despite formatting and following the instructions to the letter. Trying an old 1GB Sandisk I had resulted in a good goldcard.

Aside from the goldcard hiccup - this all went surprisingly smoothly and painlessly.

Good luck.

Disclaimer: If you try any of the above - it is all your responsibility. I take no responsibility should you brick or damage your phone.

Is BT still collecting usage data?

2010-03-31T07:30:00Z

After the recent scandal over BT using Phorm (see here and here) is it still possible that BT is still covertly collecting data profiling its user's internet usage?

I have, as part of my home BT Total Broadband package, a HUAWEI Mobile Connect 3G Modem. This is a USB dongle that provides internet service. I rarely use it, but because of the storms last night my internet connection has been very unstable, therefore I plugged it in today.

When I started the "BT Connection Manager" software, it informed me that there was an update to the service and would I like to download it? Yes, ok, and a couple of minutes later it began to install itself. Then popped up the obligatory EULA which contained the paragraphs:

"Installation of this Software will automatically apply a unique identifier to the Software, this identifying feature will only be used in accordance with the BT privacy policy which can be found at www.bt.com.

This software automatically collects session and client parameter Information for all connections made via this Software. This information is automatically transmitted to BT at the start of each session where Internet access is available. This session information will only be used in accordance with the BT privacy policy which can be found at www.bt.com."

BTConnectionManagerEULA.txt

I also note that the software package uses the Open Source packages libCurl, openssl and sqlite. Combined they enable the package to record "session and client parameter Information for all connections" in the database (sqlite) and to encrypt (openssl) and transmit the data via a web request (libcurl) back to BT.

At this point I am unable to confirm if such a transmission is taking place as I declined the EULA, but would welcome feedback or comments from others that are able to investigate this more fully.

Update: Even though I clicked "Cancel" to reject the EULA - it did update the application and actually started it up before I exited the installer. Guess I have this privacy invading feature now.

Amazon 1 - 0 Waterstones, aka this morning's rant.

2009-09-29T10:02:59Z

SWMBO asked me to order a book for her this morning, so being the tightwad that I am, I go hunting for the ISBN and the cheapest place to buy it.
Amazon has it for £17.24 and Waterstone's for £18.49 (but if I order through quidco, then I receive another 8% cashback, making Waterstone's cheaper).

Waterstone's need me to create an account, fair enough and state "Also, please be aware that passwords are case sensitive, and must be a minimum of seven characters long and at least one character must be numeric." Again, all fairly standard.

So each time I try to enter a password which meets this criteria I'm hit with a javascript popup that claims: "Your new password must be at least 7 characters long and contain at least one digit."

"But it is!", I yell in frustration.

Using the Firefox "Web Developer" plugin I unhide the password boxes and see that my password doesn't have digits... wtf! I enter the digits again and find there is another hidden rule:

<input name="newPassword" type="password"
id="fPassword" size="40" maxlength="16" value="" />

Yes, an upper limit of 16 characters on the password.

Right ok, make a password of 16 chars or under and move on...

Add name, postcode to the next form and it finds my address ok - click continue to (I presume) proceed to the CC entry form and voila!

Well not quite.

"There has been a problem processing this request
Please use the refresh button on your browser to try again.

Thank you."

A few refreshes later, it is apparent that Waterstone's has no intention of working, sod it, for 20p more I can have less hassle at Amazon.

Getty Images / BBC Math Fail.

2009-06-03T19:50:50Z

From the BBC Magazine today is an article 7 questions on GCSE maths.

Can you spot the fail?

Yes, epic.

Register your broadband not-spot now

2009-05-28T08:00:00Z

thinkbroadband, formerly ADSLGuide.org.uk, have setup a community site where UK sufferers of the lack of universal broadband can register their inability to obtain broadband (a not-spot) or where you are unable to obtain up to 2Mbps service (slow-spot).

The Northern Ireland map is here - if you currently suffer from a lack of, or poor broadband coverage (including satellite) please register your details on the site - by adding your postcode it will appear on the map and we can begin to get a true picture of the poor state of broadband in Northern Ireland.

Thanks.

Borland, Farewell my sweet.

2009-05-06T14:31:36Z

Today, May 6 2009, marks the day that Borland, that once great master of all software development has finally recognised there was no other recourse but to up and sell itself off in order to survive.

Back when I was a teenager, in the early 80s and personal computing was coming to the fore - I, and many others, aspired to work for that great company Borland. It was the pinnacle of language development and development tools and we wanted to work there. However, based in Ireland it was never to be.

Also, once upon a time I happened to be working for a very promising young company with a fantastic product line called Segue Software, based in Boston, MA. Segue also had its troubles but a new CEO saw its fortunes turn and it was climbing to success. This success was noticed by the aforementioned Borland as it tried to re-invent itself as an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) company. The same day it was announced that Borland was acquiring Segue, it also announced it was selling its developer tools division (that's Delphi, JBuilder, and later Delphi for PHP, 3rd Rail line of products).

This was such a bitter-sweet time for many. I was overjoyed that I was going to work for Borland (childhood dream) - it didn't matter I wasn't going to work with the developer tools, working for "Borland" would just be cool. Sadness also because our little 200-man company was being consumed by a 1200-man behemoth (relatively) and no-matter which way you looked at it, people were going to lose their jobs. Pretty much the entire US East Coast staff (Segue Head Office) lost their jobs and the office was closed. Product development labs and Technical Support survived, simply by virtue that it was the product and product skills that were purchased, not the G&A functions - they could go.

I 'lived the dream' for the next 2.5 years in the IT department. Despite being remote, I loved working with the rest of the Borland teams as I was intimately involved in the merging/migration of Segue's systems into Borland's. I also had the pleasure of working with several departments to architect and deploy several new platforms (such as product downloads and licensing via Intraware, and the companies Salesforce.com, SFDC, deployment). I'll treasure the time I spent at Borland.

Of course there were several WTF moments. Most significantly, for me, was the company "hanging its hat" on BMS (Business Management Solutions) which ultimately proved to be a hatstand made of jello. Very few, outside of management and that product team, believed in it. Another significant WTF for Borland was, If you plan to be the Application LIFECYCLE Management company - why divest yourself (for a paltry $27m) of two of the world's major AppDev toolsets (Delphi and JBuilder). You've just removed the feeder market and upsell opportunity into your ALM business. Finally, and internal WTF to get off my chest, on what planet does the IT department belong as a subdivision of the HR department?

Borland will live on in the hearts of many of us who knew what she used to be. I think I left Borland a better place than I found it (as long as you don't look at the stock price ;), and I made some good friends. At the end of the day, there isn't much more you can ask from your tenure.
It is sad that today if you ask a typical Software Engineer if they know who Borland is, they'll respond "Who?" which typifies the company's slide into obscurity.

I wish the best of luck to my former colleagues, who I'm sure, will be wondering what is to happen next. I also hope that the new owners, Micro Focus International (who?), have good fortune with their ALM drive. Perhaps the Borland name might live on as a brand for a suite of ALM products - who knows what they'll do.

In the immortal words of Dr. Seuss "Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened."

Caught red-handed.

2009-04-26T10:49:35Z

Only two hours after he was supposed to be asleep...

Only light source was the Nintendo DS.

Comment: Why Firefox is failing in the corporate environment.

2009-03-26T23:19:05Z

I've sat on this article for a number of years, hoping against hope that the Firefox development team would get off their elite self-indulgent asses and realise that, guess what? - the world doesn't work the way they think it should.

Don't get me wrong, I love Firefox. I use it daily for nearly all of my web browsing needs, but there is just one little problem - a massive little problem - and that is why I am writing this article.

Most articles on this subject tend to focus on the lack of IT department deployment and management tools for rolling out Firefox, but that isn't the issue. Really?
So what is it then?

The answer is very, very simple: Firefox does not work on a real-world company Intranet. There, I said it.

Really, it doesn't - the Firefox development team have decided that in their infinite security wisdom that links from one method (e.g. http://intranet) to a local method (e.g. file://server/expense_claim.xls) are so bad that they won't even put out a warning.

I feel it is bad enough that it doesn't work, but silently failing without any alert boxes, or an option saying "Yes, I know I'm risking my life, but really, do let me click this link" or putting file://intranet into the trusted domain is the root cause why Firefox will never be accepted as a corporate browser.

IT departments just do not want to deal with the questions "Why doesn't the link to the document work?". The simplest answer for the IT department is "We only support Internet Explorer".

Any amount of Firefox protestations saying "Oh! but you shouldn't be running your Intranet like that." is not going to change the real-world Intranets, and ultimately it keeps pushing Firefox back from acceptance into the Corporate world.

Until the Firefox is able to be used the way that real users want to use it, IT departments will continue to push that reliable old line that we only support IE.

Welcome to the real world.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=84128
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122022

St. Patrick's Day in Downpatrick

2009-03-17T20:26:26Z

I took the kids to the St. Patrick's Day parade today in Downpatrick, Co. Down (in Ireland for the non-Irish based people), the "home" of St. Patrick.

The event itself is described by the organisers:

"ST PATRICK'S DAY CROSS-COMMUNITY CARNIVAL PARADE This cross-community event, the centre-piece of the festival, will be a spectacular cavalcade of floats, bands, people in fancy dress and lots of attractions! Parade theme: 'The Sun, the Moon and the Stars'. The parade will assemble on the Ardglass Road at 1.00pm and depart at 2.30pm for the town centre where it will arrive at approximately 2.50pm. Parade route: Ardglass Road, Edward Street, John Street, Irish Street and Market Street. The closing date for parade entries is Friday 27 February 2009. Organised by Down District Council."

Anyway, I took loads of photographs and put them all up over on my photo gallery:

http://photos.pgregg.com/v/Users/pgregg/stpatrick2009/

The kids enjoyed it greatly, though the funniest moment was a local Manchester United supporters club who went the entire route to boos and chants of " FOUR - ONE ! " (in reference to Liverpool beating Manu 4-1 at the weekend).

The parade had a huge variety of themes, only a few of them Irish. Others included an American Flag waving troop from Florida, Salsa dancers, puppeteers on stilts, Spongebob (anything with Spongebob is a win), Chinese Dragons and drummers, through to kids dressed as Star Wars characters.

Valentine's CISS

2009-02-14T00:03:53Z

Printers. Love them or hate them, you still have to feed them Ink (or Toner) cartridges.
These are expensive little beasts to keep running - it has been commented that printer ink is expensive, and to give to an idea just how expensive it is:

Printer Ink is 7 times more expensive than Dom Perignon.
Printer Ink is more expensive than the most expensive perfumes.
Printer Ink is more expensive than human blood.

Or if you want to see the scale, here is an often posted image (attribution unknown): Update, found the original source at Gizmodo from Nov 2006.

Like many people I had found the relative comfort of 3rd-party or remanufactured Ink cartriges which brink the cost per cart down from around £3 (instead of £9) for my particular model.

However, as I was installing the last of my replacement carts, before having to order more, imagine my horror when the magenta cart simply failed to work. Nothing - printer refused to accept it, thankfully my old cart had a dribble of ink left and was able to convince the printer to keep going while I got my order in for more.

Next step, the online store where I order my carts, SVP, typed in my printer model in the search box as they recommend and the first hit wasn't my usual multipack of 3rd party R265 carts - no, it was a CISS (Continuous Ink Supply System). Interesting.

Here is the page: http://svp.co.uk/product/ciss_for_epson_r265_r360_rx560_printers_mte058

Intrigued, I read the install manual they have on the page and thought it looked easy enough to try. And so I bought one - couldn't hurt - it cost the same as a complete set of carts and would last 10 times longer on the first fill.

The device arrived a few days later, I sat on it a few days more, then got stuck in. I took some photos of the completed install and I have to say I am very impressed with it.

I originally had the Inkwells on top of the printer, but I found it was putting out way too much ink - blobs of the stuff - and I figured gravity was playing a part. Placing it down beside the printer saw the ink flow backwards, so I taped a few empty DVD cases together to get the right approximate height beside the printer and placed it there.

I have printed the equivalent of 20 full A4 colour pages at photo quality - quality is excellent and although the computer thinks the carts are now half full (or half empty), the evidence above shows just how much money I am going to save even in the short term.

If you are feeling the cost of Ink is too high (who doesn't?) and if you can find a well reviewed CISS system for your printer, I would encourage you to give it a go.

Migrated to MovableType

2009-02-03T01:44:06Z

Well after a few days of poking and prodding and working my way around Ubuntu Hardy Heron bug compiling Image::Magick (tip: it is a bug in the supplied gcc-4.2.3 - you can get gcc 4.3 in gcc-snapshot apt package), I finally have a working MT install.

Next up was writing a PunBB article and comment exporter to create a MTimport format file that I could load into MT to pre-populate the blog. Couple of trial runs later and here we are.

Let's see if I can manage to post a little more frequently.

For those syndicating the old blog, rewrite rules should mean you have nothing to change but please let me know if anything is awry.
General feed is /feed/all
PHP category feed is /feed/php

My year with Microsoft Vista.

2008-07-30T08:40:05Z

Today sees the 1st birthday of my current laptop so a happy birthday to it. The machine was a top-of-the-line, fully tricked out Dell Latitude D830, Core 2 Duo 2.2Ghz, 4GB RAM, 160GB HD, nVidia quadro NVS graphics plus the new snazzy 1GB Intel TurboCache Memory module.

Because of the specs - you need a 64bit OS to make use of the 4GB - and the TurboCache part only works on Vista I thought I would give Vista 64 a try - a serious try. I would give Vista a whole year as my primary OS. Here I am one year later to report my findings.

The is a company laptop, and Vista is not yet an approved OS for use in the workplace, but I work in IT and I'm quite proficient at taking care of myself, plus some IT members are evaluating Vista as an option for corporate roll out. I also installed Automatic Updates from Microsoft to stay current (bypassing the corporate WSUS server that sometimes takes months to push out updates because of close periods, quarter ends, etc).
Thus there was minimal risk to this endeavour.

Setting up a new machine so you can get your work done is always the most painful part of getting a new computer, this proved to be the case again with Vista. However, the pain was double in that many of the drivers I needed didn't exist or were hard to source plus some of my loved devices just didn't work any more (my MSI USB TV dongle has suffered the indignation of remaining in my drawer for a year).

Ricoh were really good with drivers for the multifunction printer/copiers in the office. Installation of the driver was a bit fiddly, but once done it worked very well. However, for anyone with Vista it means the drivers need to be installed manually whereas XP users get the driver delivered to them when they connect to the printer.

Most of my regular applications worked fine out of the box, Eclipse, Visual Studio, Office (well you would hope this would), McAfee AntiVirus, however I had significant issues with other necessary applications.

Initially the corporate F5 VPN didn't support 64bit and I had to wait some months before were were given a beta version to test.

VMware Workstation was just into beta supporting Vista so I was able to use that from the off which was useful - because I virtualised my old XP laptop and was able to keep that around for legacy app support for the things I just couldn't get going in Vista - VMware, I love you dearly. However, I am also our VMware Virtual Infrastructure goto-guy and to this date VMware Virtual Infrastructre Client does not install natively on Vista 64... I had some pretty nasty hoops and hacks to go through to get that installed. I wouldn't like to have to do that again. Come on VMware, sort it out.

Microsoft AD and Exchange Admin Tools. What can I say? They don't work. Microsoft acknowledge that they won't work on Vista. Your prime adopters of Vista in a corporate department are the IT people - but we *need* the admin tools to do our jobs. Thus we need XP. How can you expect corporate IT departments to push Vista to the workforce when we can't use it for our basic Windows AD/Exchange administration? Major, major oversight.

Yahoo Messenger was another troublesome application, and still is. Before the "beta vista" version, it frequently crashed out and would not remain connected. However since the beta vista version arrived it has been stable but and it is a big but, RAM usage in it is insane. I have just started the application and have had no messages sent or received and it is already claiming over 500MB of ram.

Which neatly leads me on to.... RAM usage. Everything takes more RAM in Vista. Vista introduces some new processes to the mix like the PresentationFontCache.exe (520MB) plus lots more buried in svchost.exe processes (the DLL service runner program). If I total up the RAM usage in svchost.exe processes I come to 1.8GB ram.
This laptop has been powered on for maybe 30 minutes and it is using 2.5GB ram - what applications are open? Firefox, putty and Task Manager. By the time I fire up Outlook and some other apps I use I'll be looking at 3.8GB - which isn't necessarily bad, it is within my physical RAM limit so the machine isn't swapping. However it does bring into question the reason for a 64bit OS in the first place - to make the 4GB ram available. Would I have been better taking the addressing limit of XP and living with 3.5GB ram?

Finally, and the cruncher. This machine is slow, sometimes and frequently, painfully frustratingly slow. I fully expect that it will take minutes from pressing the power on button to getting to my Desktop. Powering down sometimes takes longer and frequently hangs/locksup/bluescreens when powering down while in the docking station (I can't believe Microsoft and Dell still haven't figured out this constant and widespread problem after all these years - this is a constant bugbear for Dell owners).

When in operation the machine will start to act slowly, to the point that I can see the putty terminal window repaint itself. Firing up SysInternals task manager shows the CPU(s) at 100%, sometimes it is McAfee's updates, sometimes other apps, sometimes nothing is apparently consuming the CPU, but all the same, it is pegged at 100%.

This week already I have had 4 "coffee events" - where the machine gets so slow that you decide you may as well go and make some coffee in the vain hope that the machine will rectify itself by the time you get back. If it is still stuck when you get back then it is a measurable coffee event. The responsiveness will return perhaps within 5-10 minutes, but it is frustrating and supremely annoying.

My conclusion?

Vista is not a terrible OS by any means. It is Windows, it works like the Windows and for the most part behaves in an acceptable fashion. However, I find it hard to justify the resource requirements - I don't see the benefit. Vista doesn't do anything more than XP did except for perhaps the annoying UAC controls and the feeling that somehow you are slightly better protected from the world. I constantly ask myself if XP would perform better on this machine (which isn't a slouch) and now that I have completed my Vista year the next (if you'll pardon the pun) window of opportunity available to me, I will be reformatting and going back to XP.
Vista is years ahead of its time - maybe in 3-5 years when we have Eight Core 10Ghz CPUs it might perform to an acceptable level.

Holy Irony Batman!

2008-01-04T18:47:37Z

There's a new website about to be launched over at http://www.mycatholicvoice.com

In the Terms of Service it notes:

"YOU AGREE THAT CATHOLIC CONTENT, LLC, ITS AFFILIATES AND ANY OF THEIR RESPECTIVE OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, OR AGENTS WILL NOT BE LIABLE, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT, STRICT LIABILITY OR OTHERWISE, FOR ... ANY FORCE MAJEURE"

haha

Airline Security and Personal Hygiene

2006-09-26T23:30:19Z

I have just returned from a week in California and the security on flights is pretty strict - no fluids, gases, liquids of any kind. So I have 18 hours of travel time from Belfast->London->Los Angeles->San Jose and a further 18 hours coming back.

All very well, until you realise that if you are on such long flights with connections you can get pretty sweaty, and you can't take any deoderant with you. I would like to apologise to the poor girl that sat next to me for 11 hours on the LA->London leg.