Aehso’s Output

The Rubber Bandits have done some excellent prank phone calls like the Jerky Boys and they’ve put two of them up on the web for download (be patient, they’re on GeoCities so the bandwidth limit kicks in every now and again). It’d be good if they
manage to get enough done for their new CD without being rumbled - Ireland is a small place and eventually the Limerick accent will give them away.

Incidently, I found
via the Wikipedia page for Scangers - Wikipedia seems to cover everything these days!

As the number of RSS feeds I’ve subscribed to has increased over time, I’m already in the routine of periodically pruning some of my lesser read feeds - I put them into a Firefox old feeds bookmarks folder in case I ever need them again. I’m sure everyone does this - subscribe to feeds while working on a particular problem or just monitoring a ’space’ for a while. In time their content is no longer relavent. All nice, good and the way things should be.

I’ve recently noticed a converse reason to unsubscribe from feeds. A couple of normally high quality feeds are more frequently posting single line items that just link to another site with an additional cryptic comment. I’m sure the author is trying to be very clever (or very lazy) but, well, it’s just not clever. A little context goes a long way and means I don’t waste time following links to pages I will invariably have no interest in.

Here’s an example from Dave Winer’s blog. See, how am I supposed to know what he’s pointing to? On the one hand, I do occasionally read Geek News Central so I’m curious go to see what he’s found. Then I find out it’s a comment on an OPML directory that I have no interest in. Would it have killed Dave to put “Geek News Central on Libsyn OPML directory” into the link text?

So, in the interests of preserving my sanity, I’m just removing any feed that does this. The internet is a big place and I’m sure I’ll survive on feeds that have items with real content, or at least tell me what they are point to.

Via Race off: Forza Motorsport vs. Gran Turismo 4 I noticed a link to the Renault Espace F1 Matra - what a crazy idea, a 193mph MPV back in 1993! (I used to watch F1 back then but I don’t remember ever seeing it)

L.J.’s LIVE Football is a very useful football schedule site. Never again wonder what upcoming domestic/european matches will be shown on what TV channels (no matter where you are in Europe!)

This is shocking. The International Association of Chiefs of Police have issued guidelines advising officers who confront a suicide bomber […] to shoot the suspect in the head. Take a second to analyse that nouns used in that sentence - first the target is identified as “a suicide bomber”, then a “suspect”. The same thing?

I digress, I think anyone who reads of this change of policy has to wonder is it really such a good idea for individual officers to be judge, jury and executioners, no matter what the risk.

So things are going to have to change. I probably won’t be able to listen to my iPod in public anymore - it might protrude from my bag(1) and then there’s the obvious visible wires(2). And as I’m not a great singer - I tend to mouth the lyrics (when I know them) but that could be misstaken for mumbling prayers(3). I also tend to space out a litte when I’m listening to music - so much so that I’m not looking to engage eye contact(4). Oh, and my ear buds seal my ear, drowning out all background noise (they are Sony MDR-EX71s, highly recommended) so I don’t normally hear unexpected calls, phone or person(5). 5 “anomolies” that could get me shot in the head for listening to my iPod. Am I really that weird?

I am kidding, a bit, but if these really are the critera they are going to use then it’s bound to happen to someone. (I was going to comment on Apple’s stock price but that would be in bad taste).

Antoin tried Three’s service and saved me the bother. Sounds awful, I think I’ll be switching over to O2 shortly, much as I hate jumping in with another dominant player - their “3G” network will be i-mode based (apparently i-mode networks already have over 42million users worldwide, predictably, 40 million of them are in Japan).

Recently I’ve been getting a couple of thousand spam messages in my inbox every day (mostly delivery failures for spam not-from-me). Rather than pull them all the way down to my laptop to delete them, I’m deleting them using Pine after ssh’ing into my hosting account. I’ve found a quick way to delete all messages in the INBOX almost automatically, rather than tagging the messages for deletion individualy.

Here’s what to do:

1. Enable aggregate command sets in Pine - go to Setup (’S') -> Config (’C') and tick the box for enable-aggregate-command-set.
2. Exit Setup (’E')
3. Open the folder list (’L') and open a folder e.g. INBOX.
4. Hit ‘;’ and you should see “SELECT CRITERIA :” in the status bar.
5. Hit ‘A’ to select all messages. The status bar should change to something like “[All XXX messages selected] and you should see an ‘X’ at the start of each entry in the message list.
6. Hit ‘A’ and you should see “APPLY COMMAND :” in the status bar.
7. Hit ‘D’ to Delete selected messages
8. Hit ‘X’ to Expunge the deleted messages

Or you could just edit the /var/spool/mail/<USER_NAME> file and delete everything in it using your favourite editor, as I subsequently remembered…

The reason why? My blog seems to make it onto a comment spam hit list yesterday and this morning I got a nice email from my hosting service indicating that my disk usage had noticably increased. Needless to say my poor blog had been overrun with spam last night - nice to see I’m moving up in the world.

The writeback plugin for Blosxom (the engine I’m using) is pretty dumb out-of-the-box so I just plugged it out for the moment - I’m going on holidays for two weeks and I don’t want to come back to another mess. All of this is a terrible shame as one of the most valuable things about blogging after all is public reader feedback.

Once I get back, I’ll switch the blog over to another engine, maybe Wordpress but then I’ll probably need a MySQL database. Pair Networks are great (uptime, support, advice is all fantastic) but their Advanced hosting package (the cheapest that offers MySQL database support) is a bit expensive for my needs.

If anyone has any advice to offer (esp with Irish hosting services) email me at “aehso at xlml dot com”. Thanks.

The movie, Stealth is bad. Not just bad but terrible, apparently. Just in case you were tempted by the flashy trailer. And that’s a pity, I really like Jamie Foxx.

Aside, it is almost comical to note the varied, yet predicable, reviews collated by Metacritic. No surprise that Premiere gave it a high score - Premiere have to promote films no matter how bad. Yet back in the real world of the Washington Post and the Boston Globe an anternative view exists.

Hmmm, I wonder which I’ll believe?!?!