Well, we are blogging doggedly – if intermittently – here. However, it’s been a while since anyone gave us any evidence that we get read – like comments and links. So I am going to have a stab at getting closer to the top of some lists by going for what Technorato reckons are the most popular topics and tags. 🙂

So- it’s nice to meet you if you have come here because of this. Please forgive me for the underhand attention-seeking blog behaviour.

I copied these links from Technorati top searches:

Loretta Nall Pirate Bay Clay Aiken Supporting Our Troops Over A Cliff Macbook World Cup Haditha Reboot8 all mean basically nothing to me. Well, the World Cup does but you can probably get better information on thet from the feral cat that’s sitting by my PC at the moment. The feral cat definitely has better information on Loretta Nail, Pirate Bay and Clay Aitken. They sound suspiciuosly like country and western singers. Well Pirate Bay sounds like a new fbrand of White rum falvoured with some plant substance that doesn’t exist except as shampoo ingredient. Macbook- what can I say- Is it the Scottish volume? Haditha- the islamic daughter of Samantha in Bewitched? Reboot8- that’s what happens when everybody in a small office presses CTRL Alt & DElete at the same time.

Wow, this is like shooting fish in a barrel. Let’s move on to the top tags.

• Bush A small tree. Invasive habit. Keep well supplied with oil.
• Microsoft A company that bought up DOS and never looked back.
• soccer This is really called “football”. The s word is basically only used by the inhabitants of a the Northern part of the American continent, who unaccountably use the football word to refer to a bastardised form of rugby in which impenetrable numbers are shouted at random at people who never put their foot to the ball. This somehow stops the rest of the world from being able to use the “football” word online, without fear of being misunderstood as referring to the other “game”
• China This is what you put tea in. It is also used to make plates. There is an incomprehensible use of it in cockney rhyming slang. Note to farmers and toreadors- it is generally considered inadvisable to allow bulls near shops that sell it.
• Iraq This is next to Iran. Or is that before Iran?
• Sex This isn’t allowed on the Internet.
• Iran See, it was after Iraq.
• Would people like Iranian cats as much if their name had been updated when teh country was? Ditto, Iranian rugs.
• Terrorism This is a good reason for giving up every freedom won since Runymede.

There, that was easy. Shameless but easy.

Ok, the rants about magazines doesnt seem like it will ever go away. After a brief hiatus last month (more down to lack of time than quality of magazines) we can return to the proper ranting about how terrible they all are.

This website already has a littany of articles about specific sections of the mainstream magazines, often based on when they (mainstream mags) decide to try and cover what is still (especially in the UK) a niche product – namely Linux.

Now, given that the title of this rant is “Linux Format Magazine,” you may have already guessed which journal is about to come in for the good news… Based on our “sister site” Linux Convert, you can also guess we are fairly on-side regarding linux and feel that it really should be more mainstream. That said, it is not yet there (despite hype to the contrary), and as such needs as much support, development and promotion as possible. Continue reading →

Well, a combination of apology and news update here. The linux convert site has been providing information and advice for people looking to build their own Linux PC since the late nineties and is still going strong. It has looked after transitions from the arcane world of Linux in the past to modern, easy to use distros (no, I wont mention Ubuntu in a good light.. :))

However, over the last few months this site has been allowed to slip. Given the fast pace of change in todays world it is understandable that this site needs constant attention, and currently we havent been able to provide that. As such it is now a little bit out of date when it comes to its main content – the Q&A are up to date though!

Hopefully, this will be resolved soon and a brand new version of Linux Convert will be unleashed.

There was a review in Saturday’s Guardian of a book by a philosopher who disputes the new authoritarianism with regards to childrearing. (Sorry, I’ve thrown it out, I can’t check his name or the name of the author of the article)

However, to the best of my recollection (which the evidence above shows to be possibly faulty) he was taking issue with the supernanny style of bringing up children. I  certainly do so myself, in the strongest of terms. There is clearly a return to 1930s (Truby King et al)  ideas about bringing up babies.  Even worse, now that both parents almost always have to go to work, most toddlers barely see an adult who isn’t paid to care for them, for more than an hour or two a day. If that adult is held in thrall by the emotionally crippling theories of the day, the baby might as well be in an orphanage.

The whole supernanny style approach is based on the belief that professionals are better than inept parents at looking after kids. That’s obviously why kids in care do so well then, is it?

Biological determination holds the centre stage in well nigh every other social theory nowadays.  So why are genetics and mammalian biology miraculously absent from our beliefs about childcare.  Mothers and babies are supposed to dispense with their instincts and pay attention to wherever the childcare pendulum has swung today. And the childcare pendulum is rapidly advancing in the direction of authoritarianism, without even the belief in a shared social project that might have mitigated the 1930s approach. This approach made a generation of parents and babies infinitely miserable – the babies because they were forced to conform to unnatural rules at a pace they did not choose; the parents because they could never live up to the expression of hatred implicit in these rules, unless they genuinely hated their kids. 

The only saving grace was that real people sneakily behaved as human beings in the face of the rules.  What a mercy human fallibility can be.

Current thinking seems to be – Put your baby in a nursery and go to work to buy more and more consumer goods.  Put your school child through endless standard tests that value and enforce mediocrity.  Pressurise your kids from the moment of birth or they will fall behind in the league tables of life. When your offspring  becomes a demanding consumerist nightmare child, who prefers products to genuine attention, who would have expected that?

Deep apologise for failure to rant incoherently. Will put right asap.

Solaris – Img 3,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.

This is a photo I took today in the garden. It has a tungsten filter and the exposure was dialed down to -1.5 so it muffled a bit of the brightness.

Despite all this the imagery is amazing (at least I think so!)

Remember – be very, very careful when taking photos of the sun – NEVER look at it directly.

Rollright Stones – King Stone,
originally uploaded by Alun Salt.

This is an excellent photo of the King Stone at the Rollright Stones. (www.rollrightstones.co.uk for more information).

In this picture the clouds really imressed me – they look great and highten the sense of “drama” around the stone.

The rollright stones are stone circle (along the lines of Stonehenge of Avebury) in Oxfordshire. Unlike some of the more well known circles, there is little in the way of tourist trappings around this site.

Old Wardour Main View,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.

This is the castle from “Robin Hood – Prince of Thieves.” This image shows the main view of the castle and was taken from just to the side of the grotto.

(The grotto would be on your right as you look at this picture).

Overall a very attractive castle, still largely intact as it only saw action in the English Civil War. It is not a “proper” castle – which I arbritrarily designate as one which evolved from older strongholds – as this was built initally as a residence, not as a stamp of Norman authority.

The black and white used for this photo give the castle an old-worldy, eerie, appearance which makes it seem all the more suitable. 🙂

Old Wardour Grotto,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.

This is the “hermits grotto” at Old Wardour castle, built in the eigtheenth century by a local garden ornaments maker (Josiah Lane of Tisbury).

This is a completely artificial cave and it was made from the castle stones and volcanic lava from Bath. The fossils and water courses inside were designed to make the grotto look like a faerie home – when it reality it was just an overblown version of a garden pond. 🙂

Fantastic.

Old Wardour Tower of Sun,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.

This is a photo I took at Old Wardour castle yesterday (3 June 06) showing the main tower pointing into the sun. For some reason I just liked the way the angles and the sun came together 🙂

Like a fool, I took about 768mb of photos yesterday but set the camera date wrong (2005) – as a result all the picture EXIF data is a year wrong! If any one has any idea of how I can mass change the EXIF then I would love to hear it.

This is cool – www.meganwake.co.uk – blogging from an early age 🙂

Not many posts yet, but some cool pictures of a cottage in Northumbria if you are ever interesting in going there on your holidays. http://www.meganwake.co.uk/blog/2006/06/03/holiday/

Does anyone have any idea (a) why MsnMessenger randomises my display picture and (b) how I can stop it?

I got fed up with having odd images as my display picture and decided to put an actual photograph.

The photo was chosen because it was reasonably flattering, but in an odd way – anyone who knew me would know it was me but noone who didn’t know me would recognise me from it. So anyone who accidentally came across it wouldn’t really recognise me if they saw me on the bus.

However, there are about half a dozen pictures in the folder it’s in. Some have been used as my display picture. They would however only be recognisably me if I could be mistaken for a castle, Dolph Lundgren in the Starman film he made years ago, a hindu goddess, a baby wearing goggles or a toilet (and so on.)

Every time I log on, it’s pure chance which will come up, however. Sometimes the picture will change a few times in the course of an evening. Other times it will stay as it is for a few weeks. Rebooting the PC or reloading Messenger seem to bring on a higher than average rate of change but the change isn’t inevitable even if both of these things happen. Nor, as I explained before, is the changing process absent if I stay logged into Messenger for weeks.

That was a gratuitously long-winded way of saying. I have no idea why Messenger does this. It doesnt seem to happen to anybody else I know.

Before you ask, I don’t have Dynamic display selected.

As an aside, I think the new add-in features of the latest Messenger are mainly pesh of the highest order. Some even put loud intrusive adverts for things like McDonalds on and change your Messenger wallpaper. The Knock thing is quite useful. Everything else is nothing but aversion therapy in terms of making me switch off Messenger.

Well, this is potentially a short rant – simply because this months copy of .net is pretty uninspiring. Normally each issue is a combination of random, idiotic, reporting which inflames people enough to rant about it and a massive serving of inspriation – which encourages people to jump on their PCs and try something new.

Sadly, July 2006 does not follow the normal pattern.

Often the web builder section (especially “tricks of the trade” has good, helpful, advice on how to do cool tricks which then inspire people to try them out on their own sites (even worked on Why Dont You which is why there is a Google Maps mashup at http://www.compuskills.co.uk/demo/). Sadly this month expands on the recent trends for each article to be heavily aimed at a particular peice of software (Joomla for example) so it fails to provide the same inspiration.

Overall, this was a lame issue which provided a total of about two hours reading time before it was consigned to the shelf, possibly until the end of time.

Well, as the month draws to a close a new copy of .net magazine appears. Always good for some ranting 🙂 and this month carries on the traditions. I haven’t had the magazine for long so this is an “early stage” rant and that should be borne in mind. Remember, despite my misgivings about some of the crap they vomit out publish I am still a subscriber so it cant be all that bad!

Things do get off to a bad start this month though. Page 11 (first page of content) is where the hits begin. Now I am aware that as journalists the “reporters” for .net should be excused somewhat when it comes to understanding the mechanisms of surveys but even so…

Under the headline “No site, no sales” they have a three column article about how recent “research” shows 85% of people polled would have doubts about buying from a company that didn’t have a website. It goes on to produce dire proclamations backed up with “hard figures” (for example: “67% of small businesses believe it would take ten times longer to create a site than the average” – what does that even mean???) and finishes with the amazing proclamation that “a shop should sell stuff, a club should have membership info and a hotel should have online booking.” Fantastic.

Now the problem with this: The survey was comissioned by 1&1 and surveyed 1848 people. The number of people is acceptable but very low to make a comparison nationally. The big warning sign is the fact the survey was comissioned by a web host which sells online site creators and small business tools. Without going into this too much, from what I can gather the survey was carried out online which increases the disparity.

It seems a reasonable assumption that people confident enough about the web to take part in these sort of online surveys (lightspeed is a good example) would also have a higher threshold for requiring a shop to have an online presence. If I carried out this survey in the local villages where I live, I very much doubt if 10% of people would expect a shop to have a website before they would buy. You dont go online to check out your local newsagent before you buy the paper for example.

The article appears to imply that for small businesses to succeed they need a website. This, while good for business, is not really true. Most small businesses are aimed at selling goods to the local community, and in this situation the website is pointless. No one goes on line to check if the shop 200m away has a website before they buy. I agree that any business wishing to trade on a larger scale should have a website, but even then it is hard to think that 85% of their customers require one.

Ask yourself, when was the last time you saw an offline advert for a company and checked to see if they had a website before you bought. I have never done it. I have checked websites of online companies (eBuyer for a recent example), but they are online so of course they have a website.

To add scorn to their shoddy standards, in the sidebar of the article they “Name and shame” three sites which have “dismal” websites. Apparently SiteMorse looked at the websites for the FTSE100 companies and graded them. As always, Tesco.com gets slated – “zero for functionality” – yet even in the article it says they get hundreds of thousands of online customers. Oddly, the disparity of this escapes the .net journalists.

Instead of slating the site – visions of over paid designers sitting around in berets tutting about the site spring to mind – surely this implies the industry needs to overhaul its “testing” procedures (if there are any… I suspect it is just on a whim). Saying “bad design costs customers” seems true and is logically sound – however then saying the top online sellers have bad design lessens the point drastically. Tescos has an excellent website which hoards of people use for online shopping. I have used it and like it. I find it very functional and easy to use. What are the testers criteria if this real world example of a success is graded a failure?

Can anyone tell me?

Just a quick rant here. Today I was in Boots (the Chemist) and I was looking through the impressive array of non-chemist goods they sell. Out of idle curiousity I wandered to the travel / holiday area and, sadly, found my self comparing brands of insect repellent based on either claims or percentage DEET in the ingredients.

Then I noticed on the adjacent shelf a line of items for keeping you cool in hot weather. Basically they were loads of aerosol cans with instructions about how to use them – simply put spray on skin from about 20cm and allow to dry. Selling for a bargain £1.85 for 125ml, with big signs hyping them up, I was intrigued. Initially I wondered what modern technology was contained in these cans which would rapidly cool people’s skins – without CFC. Then I read the ingredients. A single item.

Aqua.

The pure madness. Spray cans of water going for nearly 10 times the rate they were selling 1l bottles! There were hundreds of these things – and based on the gaps in the layout, lots had actually been sold. Wow. The sheer marketting cheek to sell people cans of water at a massive mark up stuns me.

A sad sign that so many people seem to have bought them.

Now I am aware that some people wont believe me about this, so I searched the Boots website. I cant find the exact product which annoyed me so much (it was boots “own brand”), but this is a similar version which I didnt see in the shop so cant comment on.