dave2002.alt

Compressed audio files and streaming audio

2005-07-30T20:29:00.000Z

Compressed audio files and streaming audioI've been revisiting audio files in the last few weeks, following the BBC's Beethoven Experience during which they made all the symphonies available in MP3 format at 128 kbps encoding. I, like many others, downloaded all of these, but I found them a little infuriating. Some of the performances are very good, but I just found the audio quality a bit tiring

Sardinia - Nuraghe -using flickr to post blog entries

2005-06-01T20:38:00.000Z

Sardinia - Nuraghe Originally uploaded by dave2002. Sardinia - Nuraghe -using flickr to post blog entriesThis is a picture of a nuraghe, one of those curious stone buildings they have in Sardinia. They are actually rather large, and also rather old, dating back over 2000 years. They appear to be some form of community building, perhaps a castle or some other similar form of

Commenting

2005-05-12T10:17:00.000Z

CommentingSince Google took over Blogger there have been a number of improvements, including enabling the use of newsfeeds and providing a commenting system. I've finally noticed the commenting, and turned it on - or at least made new comments visible.I've had to tinker with the settings a bit - in the end I settled on Show the comments, but to use a pop-up window. This means that comments don't

Furling

2005-04-19T04:16:00.000Z

FurlingI've mentioned using furl several times, both here and elsewhere, but now I'm trying to get the latest furled entries into my weblogs. I know it's not the best place to do it, but here they are:Actually I tell a lie. I tried to put the code inside this entry, but blogger wouldn't let me put the code here, so I'll have to put it in the template after all - so the following paragraph is

Wireless tinkering - a RetroSpective

2005-03-04T05:16:00.000Z

Wireless tinkering - a RetroSpectiveI have now succeeded in getting my old Powerbook 1400c computer to operate wirelessly. I have achieved this by buying Dell TrueMobile wireless cards from ebay and using the 7.2 drivers from Orinoco. There have been a few glitches, but it does seem that these are now operating OK. Actually I also bought a "new" 1400 machine in order to keep the original machine

Systems tweaking

2005-01-24T22:42:00.000Z

Systems tweaking I've been trying to tweak a computer system which was particularly sluggish after installing Blinkx. The machine only has 128 Mbytes of memory, so that's an obvious problem. In the end I decided to abandon Blinkx and replace it with the new Yahoo Search - but even here I decided to prevent it from loading up at startup or login time. I used the great little tool WinPatrol (

Setting up wireless

2004-12-30T07:29:00.000Z

Setting up wireless I have by now built up experience of configuring wireless networks, and configuring end user laptops for use with wireless LAN (Wi-Fi) systems. There are some horrendous pitfalls, and I have found that some users report that it is easy, while others have great difficulty. Problems can arise even for very experienced users who do installations almost every day. I believe that

Things have changed round here

2004-12-30T07:21:00.000Z

Things seemed to have changed round here Things seemed to have changed round here since I last posted to this blog. The interface appears to be much easier to use - though whether this is really the case only time will tell. It looks as thought the title facility now works - before I think it only worked for premium users. Nope - this was misleading. The preview feature makes it look as though

OnSpeed

2004-09-20T21:23:00.000Z

I was tempted to try out OnSpeed. I wasn't sure if I needed it, or if it would do any good, as our broadband is generally reasonably good. However since it works by compressing, I figured that it could still make a difference. Initial impressions were favourable, but after a week I've noticed some problems. Mostly they're not major, but for broadband users they're probably sufficient to deter

Wireless subversion - multiple connections via a laptop

2004-08-11T12:58:00.000Z

Wireless subversion For some time now I've been trying to run a web service from an iBook using a wireless connection. I have succeeded! There are some snags though - at present it's necessary for someone wishing to connect to identify the machine name and/or IP address, and there's a chicken and egg situation there. Commercial operators, and some other largish organisations have managed to fix

More partial success

2004-04-11T21:04:00.000Z

More partial success After considerable fiddling around, I finally managed to get the other wireless adapter working with my borrowed iBook. There are major problems because the USB device is difficult to detect. It has to be plugged in and left in, while the machine is rebooted. There is an added complication that the connection does not appear in the obvious place - in Internet Connections. It

It's not over yet!

2004-04-11T12:55:00.000Z

It's not over yet! My previous post seems to have expressed premature optimism. I still can't get the two Belkin devices to talk to each other properly - not even when trying to configure one on an Apple iBook. I am almost at the point of just junking these and starting again with another manufacturer - or just implementing a wired network - though sadly I think that some of the same problems

Wireless LAN networking and testing - ad hoc and infrastructure networks

2004-04-10T10:02:00.000Z

Wireless LAN networking OK - after over a year I've finally got wireless networking to work! Why didn't it work first time, and the second time etc...? Well, actually I think I've discovered that I may have been working on the margins of distance with the equipment I've been using - a couple of Belkin wireless adapters. Since I generally try to do cheap solutions first, I will say that I tried

IE hijacking

2004-01-26T10:28:00.000Z

IE hijacking This article from TechRepublic has some interesting comments and tips about how to deal with IE hijacking.

BlogWeaver

2004-01-21T14:19:00.000Z

BlogWeaver BlogWeaver is an editing tool which provides WYSIWYG editing for use with blogger. Presumably this integrates somehow with a browser, such as Internet Explorer, and could therefore be useful for some who use that kind of interface. One problem is that for people on the move, they may still not be able to integrate the tool with each browser they meet. For people who stay put, there

Blog comments

2004-01-20T12:37:00.000Z

Blog comments It's common for there to be some form of delay between submitting data to a web site, and it being distributed. This is something which bloggers often overlook when first setting up a weblog. Being able to see a posting in the creation tool (which may well be web based) is no guarantee that the weblog itself will be updated immediately. Similar remarks may also apply to other web

Faster email

2004-01-18T14:32:00.000Z

Faster email As time progresses I certainly find that my email clients slow down. I've even been in situations where they have stopped working altogether. My policy used to be to keep all the email until this happened, then try pruning or backing up what I wanted to keep. With the rise in spamming, and the real need to keep on top of this, my policy has changed. Now I try to avoid getting so much

Happy New Year!

2004-01-18T14:20:00.000Z

Happy New Year! A belated Happy New Year to all readers

Instant Messaging

2003-12-05T23:18:00.000Z

Instant Messaging What with worries about security etc., I wasn't surprised that my instant messaging stopped working at work. Eventually, however, I discovered that it wasn't anything our tech people had imposed, but a restriction by Microsoft. If you use an old version of MSN Messenger with MSN IM, the server will not connect you. The solution is simple - download the latest version. It's

2003-11-25T22:45:00.000Z

Gremlins The one thing which I've identified as problematic with the new Mac OS version is that I have difficulty in running the Opera browser properly now. It's been suggested that I kill the preferences file, and that this will fix the problem, but so far I've not managed to do this, which is a pity. I have downloaded the latest version, but problems are still remaining. I hope that I get this

2003-11-25T22:40:00.000Z

Active corners I didn't think the active corners feature of the latest Mac OS would be very much use, but actually with a bit of tweaking of the preferences for Exposé, this turns out to be about as useful - or more than - the F9/F11 key trick mentioned below. Using the corners means I can navigate between windows and control the desktop without having to use any keys - just using the mouse.

2003-11-24T23:21:00.000Z

Nifty feature The new version of the Mac OS - 10.3 - codename Jaguar - has a really nifty feature. If you hit F9 then all the open windows shrink to a smaller size, and are re-arranged on the desktop. Then any one of them can be selected, either by double clicking, or pressing F9 again, and presto - that becomes the one on top. Another feature is that if F11 is used, then all the windows are

Specialised searching

2003-11-18T23:42:00.000Z

Specialised searching I've recently mentioned the use of specialised search engines for specific topic domains. The Virtual Search Engine provides search engines for many different domains. There are quite a few other specialised search engines, so I may attempt to make a list of some of these in the relatively near future.

2003-11-18T23:04:00.000Z

Search Engine Relationships Not all search engines are different. This relationship chart may help to explain who's using whose engine parts! You can also explore the chart to find out more about each different search engine, as selecting a chart node produces more detailed information.

2003-11-18T22:49:00.000Z

Re-indexing Re-indexing sets of web pages is a chore which is easy to forget, and some of the search engine tools, such as free versions of PicoSearch and siteLevel don't always do this automatically. Some, such as FreeFind, Hyper-IntraSearch and FusionBot claim to reindex periodically - maybe as requently as every day. There is one which I haven't tried - Google Free WebSearch and SiteSearch -

2003-11-11T17:53:00.000Z

usability Jakob Nielsen has a neat page on usability.

Refined searches

2003-11-10T23:28:00.000Z

Refined searches Have you ever wanted to search just for topics within a particular domain - science, history, literature. Try typing "science search engines" into a general search engine of your choice, and see what comes up. Similarly for history, literature, etc. You might come across scirus or scinet - for example - for science searches.

Office 2003

2003-11-04T08:05:00.000Z

Office 2003 Besides ordering and installing Panther, I also bought and installed Office 2003 on our PC. We got the basic version, but we can add on Access for a modest sum - definitely worth doing I think - particularly as there's some software I want to test which relies on Access. Really it's rather boring - but the big thing for many users will be that it provides a license to load the thing

Mac OS

2003-11-04T07:51:00.000Z

Mac OS - Panther has arrived I bought the latest Mac OS, and it arrived a day or two back. Installing it took around an hour, and - despite dire warnings from others about firmware upgrades, and possible overwriting of files - almost everything seems to work OK. It is a lot faster than the earlier version - I skipped a version, so I upgraded from 10.1 to 10.3. There really doesn't seem to be a

Parallel blogs

2003-11-01T04:10:00.000Z

Parallel blogs One useful idea when making a weblog is to have several parallel strands. For example, a football blog could have a strand for scores, another strand for teams, and a third strand for general comments. The whole thing can be configured with tabs to give a good appearance. For an example, see Lawrence Lessig's blog. Obviously this can be done with careful web site design, but can

Flash idea

2003-10-29T21:21:00.000Z

Flash idea Recently I've been investigating digital cameras - you can see the details over at dave2002. One idea has come out of this which has only a peripheral connection with cameras however. In the last year there have been many small memory cards, mostly based on USB which use forms of flash memory. These are now available rather cheaply, and functionally behave similarly to disk drives.

2003-10-23T04:28:00.000Z

links with image popups Following on from the previous entry, why should links be limited to have popups which are only text? Let's try something different! dave2002 OK - so it didn't work! Why not? It was worth a try, though - so look at the source code to work out what I did - or rather, didn't do.

pop up titles when hovering

2003-10-23T04:16:00.000Z

pop up titles Pop up titles can be quite effective when writing HTML text. Possibly they can be overdone, but in moderation they can certainly be useful and striking. For example, consider the link to the web site dave2002. Don't click on the link, but simply move the cursor over it. Nothing special should happen. This has been done with the code: < href="http://dave2002.pitas.com">dave2002.

2003-10-20T21:29:00.000Z

Lessons ... learned??? The Pitas problems seem to be dwindling now, and dave2002 appears to be recovering - though it's been reset back about a week. I should be able to remake it from the cached version, but it's a tedious business. If you're using another blogging system, such as Blogger, then you can sit back and smile this time, but don't get too complacent - it could happen to you. If you

2003-10-20T10:05:00.000Z

Trouble at t' mill The Pitas problems seem to be on-going. I managed to rescue most of the current month's work by doing a Google search for dave2002 at Pitas, and selecting the cached version. However, accessing earlier months is more difficult - they may have been cached, but accessing them is tricky, since I think the URL is actually mangled somehow when using Pitas, so I don't know how to

2003-10-20T06:16:00.000Z

More on USB ports I haven't done any more investigation of my USB ports following the cable purchase last week, but I did discover that I couldn't get my USB card reader to work reliably last night. This morning it's working OK. It's possible that the hardware works OK for all the ports, but the PC itself has to be switched off when things are plugged in. I don't always do this, and USB should be

2003-10-20T06:13:00.000Z

Pitas problems The problems with the site over at pitas seem to be continuing. The weblog at dave2002 has been unavailable for another day. I hope it returns soon!

2003-10-19T08:40:00.000Z

Compressed images More people are getting savvy about using images on the web these days, so there are fewer huge downloads. Also I think that the compression used in cameras must be smarter, as often the files for a given quality seem to be better (smaller!) now. There is going to be a problem for the next few years though, as the wired world divides into those who have a fast or broadband

Numbered HTML lists again

2003-10-18T05:52:00.000Z

Numbered HTML lists again It's also possible to do the numbering in HTML lists using style sheets (or see also here). In fact the explicit methods are now deprecated - so style sheets should be used.

USB problems

2003-10-15T17:51:00.000Z

USB problems I bought a 2 metre USB printer cable, as I want to reposition my printer. The PC I'm attaching to has four USB ports. I tried it and nothing happened. I checked the plugs were pushed in hard. Still nothing happened. Eventually I tried one of the other, differently located USB outlets. Success! Once I knew that the cable was working, I went back to the original ports, and tried again

2003-10-14T08:08:00.000Z

Useful HTML resource The guide at Bare Bones seems quite useful. In particular it contains information on how to change the number format within HTML lists, and to change the start number, or renumber within a numbered list. There's more on list numbering at EchoEcho The entry point for the site leads to useful tutorial material on CSS, Javascript, and XML, besides HTML.

2003-10-14T05:14:00.000Z

comment on commenting On August 3rd I wrote about how to make comments work with SquawkBox. Seems to work fine, though I've discovered one little problem. If there's an error in an entry heading, and someone makes a posting, then changing the heading will obviously cause the comment to become separated from the entry. Quite a common error when creating entries is to get the capitalisation wrong -

2003-10-14T05:06:00.000Z

Reverse order!! We all know that weblogs are generally displayed in reverse chronological order - latest first - at the top. We could think of this as Write First - Read Last, which is not the way that authors normally communicate with their readers, which is normally Write First - Read First. Sometimes it might be good if readers could control the order in which weblog entries are presented -

2003-10-14T04:56:00.000Z

Using images as hypertext anchors I've already shown how to use images within HTML. The next question usually asked is can one use an image as a hotspot on a hypertext page - a hypertext anchor? The answer is "yes". Suppose there is an image at http://IMAGE.jpg. We know that will show the image. The following will use the image as a button, linked to the site http:/

Special HTML characters (and code examples)

2003-10-13T10:28:00.000Z

Special HTML characters (and code examples) If you've been reading this in the last few days you might have read a few entries which have HTML examples. I thought you might want some information about ways of putting examples into your own entries. If you just simply put something like (1) "This is an example of how to do bold text in a page" then what you will see will be (2) "This

Colour charts

2003-10-12T10:21:00.000Z

Colour charts Usually when people have been tinkering with web pages or weblogs for a few minutes they feel the need to change the colours of text or backgrounds. It can be helpful to use colour names or colour codes with HTML - a little understanding of these is needed. The first thing to do is to use a search engine (e.g altavista, or yahoo or you know who/which, and then to type in a search

More on HTML

2003-10-11T10:10:00.000Z

More on HTML There are some good sites which deal with creating HTML text for use in Web pages. One which is really helpful is HTML Goodies. There is also a book of this, which I have found can be obtained very cheaply at some book sales. Many of us are mean, and try to work with on-line texts - I've been there! However, it is almost always easier to have the book, if you are serious about

Titles in Blogger

2003-10-11T10:05:00.000Z

Titles in Blogger If you are using the free version of Blogger you will probably not get titles in your entries. If you use a tool, such as PowerBlog or w.bloggar you can quite easily use bold lettering, or one of the standard HTML headings. If you don't use these tools, you can achieve the same result by putting a very little HTML in you text entry - right at the start. Write:

THIS IS MY

Putting images into a site

2003-10-11T09:00:00.000Z

Putting images into a site If you know a little html, then just use to insert an image into a weblog page. Most image files used on the Web are in JPEG format, usually with a suffix .jpg, though image files could also be GIF (.gif) or PNG (.png), and there are other formats which are used for image processing, though these are rarely used at present for Web

Which blog site to use?

2003-10-11T08:40:00.000Z

Which blog site to use? There are a number of easy to use weblog sites: Plogger Pitas Diaryland Xanga 20six If you just want to get on with things, and you fancy something colourful, then one of pitas, diaryland or xanga might do the trick. Some users find these easy to start with - and similar comments apply to 20six. The problem with these sites is that they get you blogging - and

2003-09-05T21:03:00.000Z

PowerBlogThis entry is being created with PowerBlog, about which I know very little as yet. I don't know if it will put in titles automatically, or whatever, but it seems a neat alternative to w.bloggar, with perhaps one or two extra features. I'm not sure what it'll do with the "Category" information - which I've set to Blogging for this post. The WYSIWYG editor presumably works OK - I'm so used

2003-08-21T08:10:00.000Z

RSS/RDF Most bloggers nowadays seem to use tools or environments which are richer than that provided by pitas, and this enables them to do some fancier things, such as generating RSS/RDF feeds. Strictly an RSS/RDF feed should not simply have the contents of each blog entry, but should also have some form of entry abstract or resumé. I have been generating my own file by hand, to see how to do it,

2003-08-21T07:33:00.000Z

CSS test file Everything's rather slow these days - first we had hot weather, and now it's a bit more comfortable for those of us who live in the frozen north, though there's been very little rain. Here, at last, is a copy of the CSS test file mentioned in the previous post. Actually it does highlight problems with most browsers, though for some reason the bit of html text which I wanted to fix

2003-08-08T18:04:00.000Z

Long URLs and wrap around I was having problems with long URLs causing layout shifts due to CSS in dave2002. In the end I found several possible solutions, and none of them are perfect. The only one which seems to give acceptable results with CSS and the layout is to use an overflow: scroll command, either within a

section, or in associated CSS. You'll spot the section near the

2003-08-03T13:40:00.000Z

Commenting Systems using Pitas and SquawkBox I've been trying to provide user commenting over at dave2002. I found a couple of systems which looked as though they'd do the trick: squawkbox.tv haloscan I tried Squawkbox first - not for any particularly good reason. My first impression was that it was easy to set up, and I tested out a few comments, which seemed OK. [ You have to remember that

2003-07-19T07:19:00.000Z

Similar Software I saw a flyer for spyremover, so I downloaded it. It seems to work in a very similar manner to spybot-search and destroy, with a very similar interface. The only problem was that when I tried to fix all the problems it found, I discovered (a) I have to register, and (b) registering requires payment of a modest fee. I think I'll stick with spybot-search and destroy for the time

Auto derivation of RSS feeds

2003-07-18T18:05:00.000Z

Auto derivation of RSS feeds There's a beta version of a tool for auto generation of RSS feeds over at blogstreet. I haven't checked which version of RSS it uses, though I have used it on this blog. It sort of works!

URLs in pitas - comment on blog style

2003-07-15T07:44:00.000Z

URLs in pitas - comment on blog style The user interface in pitas doesn't change much. In fact it is an interesting challenge to figure it all out, though most of us manage it given time. One feature which has remained a puzzle until recently is the URL, which also has tags within each entry - see the entry template. Since nowadays at least, pitas blogs are generally hosted at pitas, there seems

2003-07-06T18:06:00.000Z

Useful RSS/RDF article? This article on making an RSS feed seems quite useful, though I don't agree with the suggestion that new users should go straight to RSS 2.x. In case you didn't realise, RSS 1.0 is quite different, and arguably has significant advantages. It seems a bit daunting at first, but heck, it can't be too bad - I got it to work at dave2002.

2003-07-06T17:53:00.000Z

RSS validators I have found that different news readers are more or less tolerant of what gets thrown at them, and sometimes it seems that the RSS/RDF is incorrect. There are a number of validators available, and one which I just discovered which actually detected some problems is the Redland RSS 1.0 Validator and Viewer from Dave Beckett. It took me a while to figure out the problem, but at

2003-07-05T10:57:00.000Z

RSS, New Blogger ... Ah! So it's happened - the blog has been converted to blogger's New Blogger format. Actually it doesn't, at first sight, appear to have caused any major problems - famous last words - and now some of the tools seem to have been fixed so that blog editing now works better in Mozilla and presumably Netscape and Opera as well. Pity about the damage to the Mac based version of IE

2003-06-20T22:30:00.000Z

comments I spoke earlier of problems with CSS stylesheets, and browser compatibility problems. Actually it does turn out that IE was the non standard version, but I must have based my code on an example which worked with IE. The problem was that I did not use the correct comment format within the CSS code. The correct form of a comment inside CSS is: /* This is a comment inside CSS

2003-06-20T14:35:00.000Z

XML issues I'm finally getting to grips with some XML issues. So far I've discovered that IE will parse XML and display it (if assumed valid) in a collapsible tree structure. I've also discovered that (at least for the Mac version of IE - Mac IE 5.1) it doesn't actually bother to check any DTD which is included, so as long as there is a DTD which is syntactically correct, it does not bother to

2003-06-20T11:15:00.000Z

CSS conditions While tinkering with dave2002 I decided to highlight some text for recently amended entries using a style sheet. Fairly naturally I used a class id set to "recent" associated with a text element. While looking at this it, occurred to me that if CSS is extended a bit further, it could have full blooded conditions associated with each element type. Thus, following the

2003-06-17T09:24:00.000Z

css and browsers I've been tinkering a bit more with CSS over at dave2002, and discovered some clear incompatibilities between different versions of browsers. Perhaps the problem could be my source, though I rather doubt it - but more extensive tests will have to be done. What I've discovered is that the a:visited and a:hover pseudo classes do not function properly in Mozilla or Opera, though

2003-06-09T07:24:00.000Z

xml and browsers In the previous entry I mentioned that I'd comment on browser compatibility for xml. So far I've been surprised that most things work with the browsers I've tried - Netscape, Mozilla, Opera and Internet Explorer. The stylesheets for xml seem to work fine, and all the browsers recognise and process xml. The one area where there is not compatibility is in the use of data source

2003-06-09T06:26:00.000Z

xml I've been struggling to get to grips with XML, and only have partial success so far. Perhaps this has been because I have not fully appreciated what it is doing, or what it is used for. As a means of transferring data from one machine to another it is fine, but what seems to be happening is that a whole host of different XML tools are being developed, and there are many different techniques

2003-06-06T21:51:00.000Z

iBlog iBlog is a Mac blogging system, which seems easy to use. First reports suggest that it has some irritating bugs (features) though, and you may need to have a .mac account in order to get it to work. Requires OS X (10.2 or later) to work.

2003-06-05T21:57:00.000Z

Site metering - discrepancies I noticed that the site meters at dave2002 were showing different visitors, at different times of day. It's possible that some visitors slip through - though why? Note also that if one of the meters goes down for a while, and the others stay up, then that will be an obvious source of discrepancy. Maybe this explains the behaviour?

2003-06-05T21:54:00.000Z

Warnings - Blogger updating Francis over in Sweden (June 5) has been having problems with blogger and the new software which is gradually being applied to us. Perhaps we should all be archiving quickly before things go wrong! I recommend that you take copies of all your files quickly, while you can. However, if you really get stuck, you might find that older files can be retrieved using the

2003-05-18T10:21:00.000Z

Compatibility - Connectix Virtual PC (Apple) Connectix have been producing and selling versions of their Virtual PC for years now, and this technology has recently been taken over by Microsoft. I saw a version running on an Apple recently, and it did do what is claimed for it. On text based applications its performance is not noticeably worse than using native Apple software. Where it really

2003-05-18T09:44:00.000Z

Compatibility - Apple Mac Continuing today's theme of compatibility, I'll also mention some features of Apple Macs. In many ways Apple have done quite a good job with the new Mac OS/X, since it does run older programs in Classic mode without all the messing around which is needed for Windows upgrades (see below). However, Classic running on a new machine is very slow when compared with OS/X, and

2003-05-18T08:32:00.000Z

Drat! Drat! Why do I even think of using Web based interfaces such as blogger, when I can use other tools such as w.bloggar. There's just been an error - probably the site is down, and I've lost the whole of the post I've just typed That'll teach me to remember to type CTRL-A, CTRL-C before hitting the post & publish button!

2003-05-18T07:53:00.000Z

Compatibility - Windows XP example I recently tried to load up a CD ROM which had a program written for earlier versions of Windows. The install procedure failed completely using Win XP. Fortunately there was a help desk for the product, so I phoned, and was told that this program was not XP compatible. Grrrrrrrr.....!!! Then it was suggested that I use compatibility mode to see if I could get

2003-05-18T07:33:00.000Z

Compatibility - Cooperative Bank (UK) example Running or installing older programs on a computer can sometimes be a problem. This can also happen if you access a web page which was written for an earlier version of something you need to use, such as your browser, your OS, your version of Java - you name it. This can be a real pain, but if you need to run the program or view the web page you'll

2003-05-17T06:00:00.000Z

Numbers don't add up! Over at dave2002 I've been looking at the site meters (sitemeter, extreme) and also the referrer list due to stephen downes. The numbers just don't work out. There would appear to be many more people using search engines etc. to hit dave2002 than are picked up by the sitemeters. At first I wondered if there was some error in the referrer list, and it was giving some false

2003-05-02T16:48:00.000Z

The stupid thing ... The stupid thing about the webwasher debacle - see below, is that I never wanted to load it in the first place. What I was looking for was mailwasher - which will apparently keep junk out of my mailbox. However, the free version will only monitor one email account at a time.

2003-05-02T11:29:00.000Z

Reminders -w.bloggar The problems which I recently encountered - see previous three posts - have shown me that using tools such as w.bloggar can be very much more effective than using the web based editing interface for blogger. However, the main reason I stopped using w.bloggar some months ago was when it also showed up some problems - probably when interacting with the blogger site. I may now

2003-05-02T11:07:00.000Z

Fixed - maybe! After experimenting with webwasher today I experienced several problems with blogging sites. I did wonder what was going on, and in the end I uninstalled webwasher, which didn't fix the problem, then I rolled my system back a couple of days, which still didn't fix some problems. However, the problem is most likely that webwasher uses a proxy server, so interferes with the web based

2003-05-02T10:50:00.000Z

Problems I'm not sure what's going on here - maybe there is a problem with the remote server - or not. Let's try to clear this up. [There were problems with the previous posting, and these turned out to be quite tricky to fix - see the posting which follows. The previous posting - which had the problems - is now fixed, so you need to know this in order to make sense of the commentary] D.

2003-05-02T08:07:00.000Z

content management A couple of reasons why I thought it might be a good idea to blog are, firstly that if I think I have a good idea or something of interest, then I can write it down, and heck, why not share it with the world (unless it's a really good idea, of course), and secondly, that over time the weblog will build up a collection of articles, some of them useful, which will act as a

2003-04-25T14:09:00.000Z

followup After writing the earlier entry on performance issues I noticed that in XP the Performance tab in the Task Manager also has a PF usage (Page File) tool. This can also be a guide to system performance, as if the PF memory is much greater than the physically available memory, then you could have problems. It's not an infallible guide, however, as virtual memory can work quite well,

2003-04-25T09:54:00.000Z

basic kit Most techies know about firewalls and virus checking, but that only applies to a small proportion of the population. I meet people from time to time who have no idea what a firewall is, whether it's a good thing, and would have no idea how to get one even if they wanted to. Similar considerations apply to virus checkers. If you ever connect to the internet, and most of us do, then a

2003-04-24T14:31:00.000Z

performance issues Generally XP is much easier to use than its predecessors, but it is still not without its own faults. A fairly common fault on earlier Windows systems was programs locking up, or using too much processor time. Often this was sufficient to crash the system, though sometimes using the Task Manager could be used for both diagnostic and recovery purposes. In case you don't know,

2003-04-22T06:05:00.000Z

xml editor? This cross platform, collaborative community xml editor from topologi may be of interest.

2003-04-18T22:47:00.000Z

some more search engines It's not as if there aren't enough search engines in the world, but I keep finding new ones - new at least to me. Newly found include: search hippo, findology, moonmist and ro-list, and unlike some others, these ones seem to work.

2003-04-17T08:37:00.000Z

cheap flights If you book flights for European travel with ryanair today you might find that some of the flights are very cheap, as they are having a one day sale. Some of the flights are effectively free - with just airport taxes added in. A return trip from Luton to Bergamo in Italy, for example, can cost considerably less than £20. To get the flights you want you may have to combine a

2003-04-16T12:43:00.000Z

hotmail policies!!! I think most of us could be excused for thinking that the sole purpose behind hotmail is to ensure the proliferation of spam. hotmail, and its owner, microsoft, profess to be anti-spam, yet how is it that hotmail adopts the following policies: junk mail is filtered, but counts as mail, so eats up user space it is said that email which causes a user mail account limit to be

2003-04-13T20:00:00.000Z

another moon I happened to watch the moon set again this morning, some while after 4am. Unlike the previous occasion which I commented on, when it was almost full, this was a waxing gibbous moon, rather yellow in appearance, and there was no shimmer of light as it set. The link gives a definition for a blue moon, though I actually saw a blue moon once from a car. It was only when I moved my head

2003-04-12T09:05:00.000Z

modern times The previous entry prompted me to comment on our modern attitudes. Computers can now do many jobs very, very much faster than we could do ourselves. However for many jobs they only do part of the job. The consequence of this is that any part of a job which requires human action or interaction is almost certain to dominate. Sometimes this might be handled by a computer interface, and

2003-04-12T08:44:00.000Z

problems I've been having problems with netscape lately. Several times recently the browser has simply refused to load. I have no idea why. Is this another plot from microsoft or another competitor, or a virus attack? Or maybe just an unfortunate interaction with other programs and that dreaded Windows thing - The Registry! I have done the obvious things - run virus checkers, and ensure that

2003-04-04T18:03:00.000Z

useful article? I have previously mentioned that the cheappie magazines webuser and computeractive are sometimes very useful. Currently webuser has an article about wikipedia which is helpful if you've never used wikipedia or a wiki before. wiktionary is similar, though hasn't really taken off yet, as it hasn't got enough users, but if you can cope with the wikipedia interface, then wiktionary is

2003-04-03T08:06:00.000Z

offers you can't refuse I get more and more irritated with companies such as RealAudio, which bundle their software with other useful tools such as the Netscape browser, and then insist on putting up popups which invite one to reconfigure one's system to always use their program over all others. It wouldn't be so bad if there were actually any other option - i.e do you want to use X to process

2003-04-02T22:59:00.000Z

simple blogging! The simplest blogging tool I've found for personal use has to be Notepad - you know, that simple editor in Microsoft operating systems. Just create a new file, put the "word" .LOG on the first line, and after that it will put the date and time into the file each time it's opened. So there!

2003-03-31T03:14:00.000Z

reminder Lovers of classical music in and around London might like a reminder of the concert to be held in Mayfair on Tuesday. Further details are available at dave2002.

2003-03-31T02:47:00.000Z

whatever happened to the pig? Graham Greene has a story in which someone's uncle is killed by a pig which fell from a balcony. The pig was, presumably, eaten afterwards. I have just returned from a visit to Albuquerque, USA, and although it may not be polite to mention it, it's hard not to notice that many Americans are obese. Not slightly fat, as with the typical overfed Brit, but seriously fat

2003-03-24T19:45:00.000Z

more on wikis Over at dave2002 I recently wrote an article about wikis. However, I think I forgot to mention that their originator Ward Cunningham has written a book with Bo Leuf - "The Wiki Way", Addision Wesley, 2001, which is worth a look if you want to know more about these software tools. Actually, checking this out, I discovered that the only things I missed out were the publisher and the

2003-03-21T09:23:00.000Z

software compatibility Perhaps Microsoft and Apple could get together to make sure that Microsoft software sold for Apples actually works properly! The version of PowerPoint which runs on OS/X does not work properly when trying to layout slides in formats such as 2x3 slides per page. The problem seems to be that even though switching from portrait mode to landscape mode gives the appearance of

2003-03-19T08:26:00.000Z

tidying templates I finally decided to remove the non functioning site meters from dave2002 today. One was not functioning because it was a limited period trial, and the other gave up the ghost a few weeks ago, and it seems the web site has all but disappeared. Pity - the Gheo one was quite good, but things move on. I may look around to see if there are any other good ones, though Extreme and

2003-03-15T07:34:00.000Z

search engine listings Anyone who has a web page which they want to promote is likely to want to submit it to search engines or directories in order to get hits. This can be a useful way of increasing traffic, and there are many approaches. Note however that there are many pitfalls and problems with site submission. First, it may not be easy to find the registration details for the search engines