The number 666 is so decorative, it looks like a trio of little pigs’ tails. (Cue for a fairytale) Is that why it’s the number of the beast?

I have to do a 666 post before midnight or I’ll change into a pumpkin. (Cue another fairytale).

Although, being something of a pedant, I can’t really see 06/06/06 as a legitimate candidate for the day of the Beast. It’s really 06/06/2006, well 6/6/2006 even. This number is mainly remarkable for being one of the few dates in the year when British and American dates collide and are correct in both systems. If you’ve ever had to deal with spreadsheets where the data has been imported in one date format and you’ve found half your dates get rejected and almost all the others are wrong, you know what I’m talking about.

I have worked out a solution for this. Try to stop Excel (we name the guilty here) from trying to parse the dates itself, first. Insert 4 columns next to the column with the duff dates. In the first cell of one column, type =month(reference the first cell in your duff date column); in the next column put =day(reference the cell etc); in the third put =year(etc, are you beginning to detect a pattern?)

Now, concatenate* these in the fourth column, using

=the cell address with the day in &”/”& the cell address with the month in &”/”& the cell address with the year in

This cell should now hold something like =b2&”/”&c2 &”/”& d2 The cell display should show a date. If you are lucky, it will be in English date format.

Copy all four cells down until you can see a correct date for every date in your range, in the fourth column. Select the lot, copy them then paste the values over the existing formulae. You can now delete the columns holding the original dates, the days, months and years. You will be left with a column of dates in English format. Apply English date format as well, if you need to. (Even if it’s not applied and the dates are displayed in American date format, they are still correct English dates, i.e. 15/11/06 is seen as 15th November not an invalid date that’s trying claim there are 15 months in that year)

(Obviously, reverse the day/month order to change English dates to American. Start saying rout for route and Baysil for basil, while you are at it)

I hope you are impressed. This blog is not just a pretty face shamelessly trying to get higher in the blog reading stakes by picking out words from Technorati’s top searches. As you see, we also provide a public service.

* Concatenate is computerese for joining strings together. It really is a word. Yes, I was just showing off.

Need I say anything about Heather Mills except that she shares a first name with my good self? Would this constitute gossip central or even gossipcentral? :-p

Is she playing in the World Cup? Almost certainly not. Well, I was going to say something flippant there about her probably reduced capacity to score goals in a football match. However,this blog has already blotted its copybook in terms of its callous flippancy, reference Haditha posts apology, so I will pass up the opportunity to make it even worse.

Snort is completely great for finding out what your network is doing. If you want to obsess over every wierd packet passing through your bandwidth, snort’s your program.

And without any due modesty, I would refer you to my introduction to using it on www.sci-tech.co.uk(specifically http://www.sci-tech.co.uk/snortguide1.php)

This guide is the latest in a series on detecting malware, viruses and trojans. The articles are mainly aimed at people with limited specialist knowledge or experience but who have normally working brains. That basically means people about two hours behind me in their experience of network intrusion detection – that’s why it’s a newbies guide. I am certainly a pure amateur myself in this.

The snort guide tells you how to get it and how to use it – very briefly in both cases. If you have any questions or want to contribute your own views or experiences, please email us at sci-tech.

The shameful bit aside I have to report a certain degree of success. There was a comment. Archaeoastronomy, I salute you – despite being pretty well unable to spell your blog name properly – and thank you for your good advice. Your blog is really good, as well, as we’ve already said here.
That was not the royal “we”, by the way, it referred to the collective writers of these blog pages.

This encouraged, and with my conscience appeased, I will have another stab at more of the same. I reserve the right to be as flippant as before but this time I will try and avoid being flippant at the expense of massacred people.

However, when I say a certain degree of success, this has got to be mightily qualified. The pages didn’t actually appear in Technorati lists. Agreed this may turn out to be a major stumbling block to the whole scheme. My new plan of attack is therefore to limit the references to one or two at a time. Here I will talk about gossip central. Just don’t tell me there is a serious subtext to that. (There is probably a US TV programme or something with that name but you will have to bear with my ignorance if you want to extract any reading matter from this page.)

Gossip is dull when it’s not malicious and evil when it is.

The one thing that makes it even remotely compelling is actaully knowing the unfortunate person that the gossip is about. Gossip about people you have never met is just a story with a very short narrative and rarely has a decent punch line. I can’t even begin to guess why there are dozens of publications that contain nothing but “gossip,” produced by publicists, about people that you have not only never met but who you would cross the street to avoid if they weren’t celebrities.

The gossip consists mainly of whether they are too fat or too thin. If you are unlucky enough to know anyone who obsesses about their own weight like that, you probably steer well clear of them. If you really do know someone who discusses other people’s weight/cellulite/ clothing choices in the sort of prying and judgemental detail that the magazines discuss z-list celebs, you have probably already injured them in some excruciating way. If not, why not?

And if you actually spend your own cash on these magazines, why not buy some of the Guest Publications featured on Have I Got News for You instead? Mattress Manufacture News or Lawn Ornament Collectors’ Monthly would easily outstrip the readability of Heat magazine and would give you a much-needed new interest.

I’m sorry to have to admit to being not just shameless in trying to get some blog visits but also horribly callous, not to mention poorly informed.

When I threw in the Haditha, Loretta Nail and Clay Aiken words, I was just treating them as words. I wasn’t even thinking of what they referred to. While this blog yields to noone in terms of superficiality, this was really going too far for common decency. If you were offended, you were completely right.  I was offended myself when I thought about it.

All of which means, that I will report on the succcess or otherwise of the shameless venture in a separate blog, next.