Fuddland

Entries concerning goings-on in the World Wide Web.

This category also has the following subcategories [number of entries in brackets]:

• Links [40]
• Web Design [4]

We interrupt the tales from Jiuhua Shan to bring you this annoying piece of news from Flickr:

Users in China can’t see images

Since around 12:30pm (Beijing time) on June 7th, users in China have been unable to view images on flickr.com.

Our technical staff have looked into this and determined that it’s not a technical issue from our end. Evidence suggests that our image servers are being blocked for many users in China.

Fingers crossed it’s just a temporary measure. Coincidentally—or perhaps not—Blogger-hosted weblogs have also just become unavailable again.

Long-time readers of Fuddland might be aware that I tend to support Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day whenever it comes around. In the past this has been in the form of sponsored commenting, donating an amount to the charity based on the number of comments I receive on Red Nose Day.

This year, due to living in a foreign country and suffering complications of bank accounts and general relative skintness, I decided on a different tactic to show my support: I waited until someone else had a genius idea, and then proceeded to wheedle my way into it.

Thus, I’d like to wholeheartedly recommend to any, all and more of you reading this to make one, several or indeed nine purchases of Shaggy Blog Stories.

A collection of 100 short humorous pieces from the UK blogosphere. All profits from the sale of this book will be donated to the Comic Relief charity. Contributors include Richard Herring, Andrew Collins (BBC 6Music), Emma Kennedy, James Henry (TV’s “Green Wing”), Abby Lee (Girl With A One-Track Mind), Catherine Sanderson (Petite Anglaise), Zoe McCarthy (My Boyfriend Is A Twat), novelist David Belbin, Anna Pickard (The Guardian), and a diverse selection of some of the UK’s most talented bloggers.

Should that list of well-known names not be enough to encourage a purchase, then perhaps the tingly news that the sixty-fourth contribution to be found within its pages is from this very weblog. In the interests of intrigue, I’ll not be telling you which of the 1,656 [including this one] entries I’ve written over the last almost-five years it is. [Oh okay, one clue: it’s not the one you’re reading now. That narrows it down a bit.]

For full details of all the contributors, and more of the story behind its creation, I’ll point you in the direction of the book’s brainparent and masterminder, Mike Troubled Diva. I’m chuffed to bits to have made the final cut, but even if I hadn’t, I’d still be pimping this book like … I’m sorry, I’m just far too English to finish that sentence. Just go and buy it, and I’m sure you’ll be chuckling at at least 99 of the stories.

Okay, I know they don’t really want people to access certain websites, but really: causing an undersea-earthquake to sever fibre-optic cables that deliver non-China-based sites is a bit much.

Internet access has been mind-crushingly slow—think pre-28.8bps-modem days, if you can imagine such speeds. It’d have been quicker for someone abroad to print out the pages and then hand-deliver them by bicycle. Thankfully, because so many big businesses were affected, repairs have been given the utmost urgency, and things are getting back to normal after initial worries that repairs “could take months”.

Interestingly, I’ve searched a few news sources from the UK and haven’t found much fuss being made about it from abroad. Did it make the front pages anywhere?

Continuing my occasional reports on internet access in China: within the last week or so, the restriction of access to the English-language version of Wikipedia from China was lifted—whilst this is good news for me and other users who were previously forced to access via a slow proxy service, I’m left wondering what exactly changed sufficiently for the block to be removed: was a sensitive article removed or extensively edited? If so, was the information it originally contained right, or inaccurate? [The Wikipedia page about this whole issue doesn’t have any of the answers.]

Just like Tom Coates, recently this domain has been hijacked as the return path for some spam email messages. If you’re visiting here because you’ve received some spam purporting to be from [random string of characters]@fuddland.org.uk, then it wasn’t me that sent it, so please don’t shout at me. There’s absolutely nothing you or I can do about it beyond ignoring the messages and praying that something very heavy falls onto the spammers’ computers [and then bounces onto their feet].

Back in March I reported on certain restricted groups of websites [specifically, weblogs], blocked from viewing in China unless you used alternative means. At some point—and I can’t be certain how recently it was—someone somewhere decided to lift part of the Great Firewall, for I can now directly view Blogger-hosted [that is, *.blogspot.com sites]. Wordpress-hosted sites remain unavailable, but for whatever reason, no-one whose weblog I read is hosted there, so it doesn’t affect me at the moment.

For the record, here are a few sites I would like to be able to view but currently cannot [directly, or even at all]:

• BBC News Online. For some bizarre reason, this is the only member of the *.bbc.co.uk family that I cannot view—for example, I can listen to BBC News via the Today Programme Listen Again feature, but even the above alternative means cannot help: the BBC News site is simply unavailable. Access to other major news sites, such as The Guardian and The Times, is unrestricted, which makes things all the more peculiar. It’s particularly annoying because every weblogger and his/her mother links to BBC News stories on a daily basis and I can never read what they’re comenting on.

• Wikipedia. By ‘eck it’d be handy if this was directly available, but at least I can still get there indirectly, and Answers.com is unrestricted.

• Technorati. Not something I use all that regularly—I’m more intrigued as to why this weblog-tracking/searching service is completely unavailable to me.

Anyone got any sites they’d like me to test, in the interests of research? [Nothing too subversive, I don’t want to trigger too many warning flags!]

Here are a couple of small problems I had whilst upgrading to Movable Type 3.3, the solutions of which I’m putting here in case anyone else has similar troubles:

• During the database upgrade process, the error message “Categories must exist in the same blog” means that, for some reason, one of your subcategories has a parent category in a different weblog—the most likely explanation for this is that your database has gotten a bit screwed up. The solution is to either:

  • restore your backed-up database, then use the previous MT installation to change the parent category;

  • edit the database table mt_category directly, using phpMyAdmin or a similar tool if your host provides it.

• If, after rebuilding your weblog, you find that all your weblog entry pages are giving a 500 Internal Server Error message, it may be due to MT setting their permissions to 666. To remedy this, delete all MT-generated content, add the following lines to your mt-config.cgi file and rebuild:

  UploadUmask 0022
UploadPerms 0666
HTMLPerms 0666
HTMLUmask 0022
DirUmask 0022
DBUmask 0022

coComment is a new service that allows you to keep track of any comments you make on weblogs; it’s currently in the early stages of development and needs a bit more tweaking to make it work perfectly with the most common browsers and weblogging platforms. Here’s how to automatically allow anyone signed up to its services to keep track of comments they make on MT-based weblogs.

Read the rest of “Integrate coComment with a default Movable Type installation”…

Despite being on the other side of the world from my registered home address, I decided to enter myself in Egg’s prize draw by completing their latest customer survey—if I do win the twelve bottles of wine, I’m sure they’ll keep until I’m back in the country.

Along with the usual questions along the lines of “Egg provides fantastic service—agree/disagree” etc., was this gem:

I would like to know the people that work for Egg socially,

to which the possible responses were “yes” and “no”. It was this question that I hesitated the longest with—if I chose “yes”, would that not imply that I’m quite a lonely chap who would love nothing more than to go out for beers with the hoopy froods from Investments? On the other hand, if I answered “no”, would I have immediately been subjected to a series of emails from disgruntled employees, demanding to know precisely what my problem with them was? Or worse, years from now, would I be getting on famously with an attractive woman at a party, ignorant of the fact that she worked for Egg until I revealed my name and she threw her drink in my face and stormed off muttering, “Wasn’t good enough for him back then, probably not gonna be now…”?

[Over-analyse? Me? Never!]

Filed under “I shoulda sorted this out ages ago but it became a priority for me so I finally got around to doing it” was finding an easy way to guarantee that I’m always sending emails over a secure connection, regardless of how I’m connected to the network [whether directly dialled-up to my ISP, plugged in to someone else’s network, or over an unsecure wireless connection].

Perhaps it’s not common knowledge, but generally, when connecting to one’s email service provider using a client such as Thunderbird, Eudora or Outlook, the usual and default set-up is to send the username and password in plain, unencrypted form—anyone listening-in could simply read off your details and have complete access to your account. This is very Not a Good Thing. So the ability to always guarantee a secure connection, at least when sending messages, is quite a handy thing to have.

Why can’t you rely on your own ISP to provide you with a secure connection when sending emails? Most ISPs claim that sending is “secure” because you can only send messages via their [SMTP] servers if you have connected directly to them. But this is no use whatsoever if you’re not dialled-up to them, such as on an unsecure wireless connection, but you still want to send emails.

My solution: use Google’s secure Gmail server. All you need is a Gmail account and to be using an email client capable of establishing secure connections—Opera’s M2 mail offers this facility, as do Thunderbird and Outlook, and probably almost every other modern piece of email software. [It might be called “SSL” or “TLS”, or just a plain old “secure connection” in the settings.]

Read the rest of “Secure sending of emails, wherever you are”…

I’m interested in Flickr’s new Interestingness ranking algorithm, and what goes into the secret sauce beyond the obvious things.

Currently my two most Interesting photos are Pianorama I and Dark Sky on a Sunny Day; although it’s a close-run thing, the latter has more views, more comments, and has been favourited more than the former. Moreover, some of the comments on Dark Sky are from people on my contacts list, whereas those on Pianorama I are not from a mutual contact. [Flickr says that part of a photo’s Interestingness relies on the relationships between the user and the commenters.] So why is Pianorama I ranked higher?

In order to both reduce the amount of packing I’ll need to do when I move house, and to raise some extra pocket money [my grant ran out in March and there’s no teaching over the summer], I’ve offered-up quite a number of old videos, CDs and DVDs for sale on Amazon Marketplace, ones I’ve rarely—or in some cases have never—watched. I was quite surprised to find that whilst the CDs and DVDs are shifting pretty rapidly, no one wants any of the videos, despite them being only a quid or so each. I suppose the general decline in VCR and video cassette sales means that only rare [i.e. unavailable on DVD] items would be sought after.

Also, people are really bad at leaving feedback ratings; of the twenty-two people who have purchased one of my items, only three have bothered to give me a Seller Rating. Happily, I received top marks from all three, but it’d be nice if every one of the twenty-two took a few minutes to show I’m a reliable Seller—I bet if they were unhappy with the products they’d be straight online to give me a negative rating.

I’ve dropped the musical baton twice now: once from Cathy and now from bsag. It’s just that I don’t do memes, never have done. In fact, this entry is the first one to ever mention the word “meme” [erm, just now, since I wrote “memes” in the previous sentence] on this site [quite possibly because it’s a silly word that I want to rhyme with “hem” rather than “dream”, but perhaps more to do with an innate rebellion against anything which overtly influences what I write about]—given the predilection that weblogs have to memes, this is in itself achievement for one that’ll be three years old this Saturday.

So, sorry chaps for not divulging-on-demand the musical content of my PC—and now I can’t even write an entry along those lines for the next few months, for fear of completely contradicting myself.

Cutting to the chase: I’ve knocked up a PHP script which takes any Flickr photostream RSS or Atom feed and makes a Flickr “badge” out of it, with some extra bits thrown in to make it all worthwhile.

Download the script. Updated version available. Edit it and fill in the required details. Upload it to your server. Cross fingers. [You’ll also need MagpieRSS. Grab it, extract it, stick it somewhere on your server. No need to change any of its settings. Just remember where you put it so you can tell the Flickr script. Oh, and create a writable directory for the cached feed.]

Read the rest of “Use a Flickr feed to include any photostream on your site via PHP and MagpieRSS”…

Take 50 images from Flickr with the same tag, average them into one image and the results are—remarkably—some rather pleasing abstracts. This one is made up of photos with the tag ‘eye’.

Check out the rest of the set. [Via Stuart.]

At the time of writing, according to MSN UK Search (Beta), I am the second most relevant David in the world.

Let’s see if I can knock that Appleyard chappie off the top spot. Who do I have to sleep with?

[Link to horrendous Bill Gates image via Neil]

What with my blossoming interest in “proper” photography, I’ve opened up a flickr account to see what all the fuss is about. So far, I’m impressed: it’s very easy to upload a photo, add a title, description and a few tags [keywords which associate similar photos], and let flickr handle the thumbnailing and database stuff.

If you so desire, you can keep track of my new photos either by visiting my account page, or subscribing to one of the syndication feeds:

• RSS 2.0

• Atom

But I’m going to see how things go with its integration into Movable Type, to get photos to appear as new entries here. If I end up using flickr to its fullest, I’ll probably upgrade to a pro account, but perhaps I’ll make do with only 10Mb worth of uploading a month for now. Any flickr users out there got any top tips?

My Gmail address has never appeared on any webpage.

It’s never been used to sign up for anything.

It is, in fact, known to and used by only a handful of people, all of whom I am sure do not work for, nor have they ever worked for, nor do any of their family members work for, an organisation in the business of collecting email addresses for passing on to spamming organisations.

So why are there fourteen twenty-seven unsolicted emails sitting in Gmail’s Spam folder, offering me the best software that also doubles as a Rolex watch which is better than V1agracodin?

[Of course I know it’s probably because they just send out billions of emails to common-names-and-perhaps-a-few-digits@gmail.com and see which ones don’t bounce. I wish someone would decide if Lycos’s screensaver is legal or not.]

Yes yes yes, the whole universe is abuzz with the news that “blog” was the most looked-up word last year, according to lexicographers Merrium-Webster, most taking it as a sign that the word has been accepted into modern language and blogging is mainstream.

But me, I’m hoping that the reason that “incumbent” was the second most looked-up word is that, like me, the rest of the world can never remember if it means the guy currently in office or the guy who was in office but has just lost the election. It’s the former which is correct, but the word has this look or feel of misery and dejection about it which always makes me think it means something worse; I can’t quite put my finger on what word it reminds me of though.

Perhaps the explanation, if you can call it that, is that whenever I see the word “incumbent”, I get an image of Mr Snuffleupagus from Sesame Street. Welcome to my brain.

There’s major geek excitement buzzing around the internet at the moment, due to the Spread Firefox campaign. The deal is, the Mozilla Foundation want its users to contribute at least 30 USD to fund a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, promoting the browser. In return, the user gets their name printed in the ad.

Now call me an old cynic if you will, but this seems like a fairly lame way to spend users’ money. Think about it: which would you prefer? To give a company $30 and have them put it into research, development, or wherever they saw fit in order to improve their product, or would you like to give a company money and be guaranteed that they’re going to spend it on nothing but advertising. Sure advertising is important, but to allocate all of a users’ contribution to that cause isn’t a good use of their donation.

It’s actually quite a cunning ploy by the Mozilla Foundation: they’re playing on the “Me too!” phenomenon that we saw with Gmail accounts. A wave spreads over a certain proportion of the internet-savvy users out there, a virtual murmuring of “Hey, I’ve contributed to the Spread Firefox thing, have you? Oh you should, you get your name in print and everything.” Big deal. If anything’s going to make me ignore a full-page ad, it’s squillions of lines of tiny print. And contributors who also encourage ten others to donate get the utterly meaningless status of “Community Champion”. To quote Tim from The Office:

It’s a title someone’s given you to get you to do something they don’t want to do for free—it’s like making the div kid at school milk monitor.

Oh wait, they do get a t-shirt. Woop-de-do. But the ad isn’t actually the thing: the wave is the thing. The campaign gets reported in a few places, and suddenly almost everyone knows about Firefox, with word-of-mouth taking care of the rest. The wave cost nothing and reached far more potential users than a newspaper ad could ever hope to. Savvy.

If we ignore the cynicism above and assume that they genuinely wanted to take out this ad to reach [only] the readers of the New York Times and convince them to switch to Firefox, then there’s another aspect to this whole business: can we still consider Firefox to be “free” if it makes these kind of requests? I realise anyone can download it and use its full capabilities without paying a penny, but that’s not the whole deal, for me. There’s no disputing that a dedicated team of programmers put together a very good browser without ever charging for their time or effort. That’s not the path they wanted to go down, fair enough. But then they realised that, if they actually want to promote their product, some cash might be quite a handy thing to have. The idea of asking for contributions to an advertising campaign struck; this is somehow more palatable for a user to swallow than asking for an outright payment for using the product at all [recall the outcry when Six Apart moved from one business model to the other—Mozilla aren’t going to make the same mistake]. It’s almost a form of emotional blackmail: “we won’t charge you, but if you really love us you’ll send us some money”. And of course, if you’ve already contributed to the ad campaign, you can always make a general donation—especially if you’d like your money to go towards improving the product and not just telling a relatively small potential user-base which “free” browser you’re a fan of.

In case you were unsure, the rhythm and emphases to use when saying the URL of Google’s new Froogle UK site are exactly the same as the second line from the fourth stanza of W.H. Auden’s classic poem “Night Mail”:

Letters of  joy from the girl and the boy

Froogle dot Google   dot co   dot U   K

As reported by BBC News Online, the Ask Jeeves search engine has had an overhaul, both of its website and the engine which powers the searches, with a fancy Flash animation introducing the new features.

It seems appropriate for my first question of Jeeves to be: what is the possessive form of “it”?

Although I’d read about it earlier in the month, Lyle reminded me today about Odeon Cinema’s complete lack of understanding regarding accessibility issues when it comes to website design.

The backstory goes like this: Matthew Somerville coded a very nice, accessible portal to the Odeon website, which provided cinema times and the like but without all the unnecessary Flash and other scripty rubbish. He’s done the same with the UK National Rail timetables and a couple of other sites, and they’ve all been lauded for their obvious benefits.

Sadly Odeon’s lawyers didn’t see it that way, and threatened Somerville with legal action unless he took his site down; fair enough he was using copyrighted images, trademarks, etc., but they claimed he was illegally [or, at least, immorally] storing users’ data. Somerville states that he did no such thing and merely passed the data straight on to Odeon’s own database through their usual channels. Nevertheless, Odeon wanted the site down and so it’s gone. I don’t think that’s a particularly clever way to go about their business—or to put it in Lyle’s more apt words, I was keffed off with this bunch of arse—so I dashed off the following email to their contact address.

Read the rest of “Access this, Odeon Cinemas”…

Did you know Sellotape don’t want you to link to their website without their prior permission? It says so right on their copyright page.

Shame they‘re not so ‘net savvy to provide a handy contact form expressly for this purpose, or even any kind of online contact form at all. According to their contacts page, some of the other countries in which they operate are emailable, but not the UK base, and it states that the website is subject to UK law.

The only information they provide are addresses and ‘phone numbers. Perhaps they don’t want people to discover their crappy frames-based website, which means that even if they do give their permission, it’s not simple to link to specific pages without breaking the layout of the site [as you see with the link to their copyright page].

Note to Sellotape’s legal team: all cease and desist orders may be communicated to me via my handy contacts page, which is rather unlike the one Sellotape don’t provide. Upon receiving such a request I will of course immediately remove all links to Sellotape’s website, and replace them with links to one of your competitors.

Update: mrtn also commented on this, a whole minute before I did.

Gmail is still in its cliquey, beta, invite-only stages, so of course I wanted in to the party as soon as possible. But who needs to bid for one on eBay or set up a Blogger account in the hope they’ll send you an invite when you can ask your longtime-Blogger-using girlfriend if she’ll kindly send you her Gmail account invitation?

Despite the major problem [for me] that Gmail is completely incompatible with Opera [due to Google’s use of functions specific to Mozilla/Firefox and IE’s Javascript implementations], I’m quite impressed with the speed of the interface and once I become familiar with the keyboard shortcuts it should become even easier to use. It’s certainly nicer than Hotmail and Yahoo!’s interfaces, and after being used to ignoring them on normal webpages for so long, the Google Ads down the right-hand side of the page don’t bother me at all, even if they are tailored to the contents of the emails.

In fact, the issue with Opera may not even be that much of a problem; there are two “workarounds” that I can see:

1. Set Gmail to be the homepage of my Firefox installation and set the Gmail cookie to remember me [it currently only does this for 2 weeks at a time]—thus, since I don’t use Firefox for general browsing, it becomes a de facto “Gmail client” with built-in capability to open webpages from links within emails.

2. The second option seems more attractive: the Pop Goes the Gmail [PGtGM] sits in your system tray and acts as a kind of gateway [that may not be the correct technical use of the word] between Gmail and a variety of email clients, in particular Opera’s excellent M2 built-in email client [which I use at home] and Outlook [which, for various reasons, I pretty much have to use at University].

   I’ve successfully set this up with Outlook, and will be testing it with Opera later on. It transparently copies your out-going message to your Gmail “Sent Items” folder, checks for new Gmails at a user-specified interval and downloads a copy to your local inbox. Of course this means you have two copies of your sent and received gmails [since they will be stored locally as well as in your Gmail account], but the convenience outweighs the extra storage space [and one can always set up filters to make it easy to delete local gmails every now and then].

   This also nicely circumvents the Google Ads for anyone who really has a problem with seeing them. Sadly, during the writing of this entry, PGtGM crashed once, so it might not be completely stable yet.

[Hat tip for PGtGM: Daisy.]

Read the rest of “Look-a-likie”…

Read the rest of “Focus”…

Read the rest of “Prying eyes”…

Read the rest of “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s disabled”…

Read the rest of “Being boring”…

Read the rest of “Audioscrobbler”…

Read the rest of “The BBC hate me!”…

Read the rest of “YaGoogle!”…

Read the rest of “Make your mind up!”…

Read the rest of “Double whammy”…

Read the rest of “Happy birthday Jules”…

Read the rest of “JavaScript highlighter”…

Read the rest of “SSCrabble”…

Read the rest of “Punctuating unordered lists”…

Read the rest of “anna’s travels”…

Read the rest of “abstraction”…

Read the rest of “you say potato, i say pocket”…

Read the rest of “one in, hopefully, a million”…

Read the rest of “bad ‘bot”…

Read the rest of “son of a gun”…

Read the rest of “i’m not playing anymore”…

Read the rest of “shall we bother? nah…”…

Read the rest of “puzzlement”…

Read the rest of “for what it’s worth”…

Read the rest of “socket to him”…

Read the rest of “smarter searching”…

Read the rest of “another friday night award ceremony”…

Read the rest of “what a difference a d makes”…

Read the rest of “the internet is\isn’t shit”…

Read the rest of “more tea, dvd?”…

Read the rest of “now [almost] everyone can trackback”…

Read the rest of “can i take your number?”…

Read the rest of “getting around”…

Read the rest of “cogitation”…

Read the rest of “reason to be cheerful”…

Read the rest of “extra! extra! blog all about it!”…

Read the rest of “as promised, he delivers”…

Read the rest of “i was just hondaing”…

Read the rest of “more fool you”…

Read the rest of “this is where the fun starts”…

Read the rest of “funny ha ha”…

Read the rest of “blog rocking beats”…

Read the rest of “on the verge”…

Read the rest of “funny taste”…

Read the rest of “powers of 10”…

Read the rest of “by the light of the silvery moon”…

Read the rest of “qotd”…

Read the rest of “tick tock”…

Read the rest of “time to switch to spirits”…

Read the rest of “happiness where are you?”…

Read the rest of “protest the protest”…

Read the rest of “inflatable vicar costs extra”…

Read the rest of “well done play.com”…

Read the rest of “don’t think…”…