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June 28, 2005
Google Earth
Google have just raised the bar again. Released today is Google Earth. Starting with a view of Earth from space you can zoom into anywhere on the planet, and then tilt to see it in 3d and then pan and then zoom and then find places and then.......
Its like Nasa's World Wind but with a much much smaller download. With a good broadband connection its fast, very fast.needs a reasonable specc'd machine with a decent 3d graphics card but wow, its brilliant....... even some good imagery of the UK , mainly London..
Some cities in the US have 3d buildings that can be added as an additional layer to make tilting even more exciting.
Absolutely fantastic. Well done Google.... oh and its free......
Posted by weaver at 10:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 23, 2005
Surf's up!
After last week's spam attack, I'm really wary of high hit counts on the main web site. Starting yesterday, the hit count doubled and then trebled today.
Suspicious. After a little digging on the stats, I've found that the bulk of the hits are coming from one IP address. I checked the 3 main areas where users can add directly to the site; the forum, the guestbook and the events diary, all appears normal. Hmmmm.
Thinking cap. I have an IP address causing the increase. lets do some detective work. Resolving the IP address reveals that the ISP owner of the server generating the hits is NetLinc.
Worry over. NetLinc is the Lincoln Council's managed schools education network. I can only assume that a school or class somewhere, possibly even Metheringham Primary, has finally discovered the macla site. This is a good thing.
I warmly welcome them to our humble site and I hope they find everything they are looking for and maybe even provide some feedback on their experience.
Footnote: I note that netlinc's home page loads fine in Internet Explorer, yet fails to load in Firefox. Such a shame.
Posted by weaver at 10:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 21, 2005
National Treasure
An undemanding romp through all that Americans consider part of their heritage (as seen by Disney). Not as bad as I expected but not good either. Very, very cheesy for most of the film. The basic plot is a rich man's treasure hunt, taking in a myriad of US East Coast tourist haunts. One improbable clue leads to the next improbable clue. Sean Bean plays the obligatory English baddy in an understated kind of way, Diane Kruger provides the eye candy, Jon Voight & Harvey Kietel take the money in minor supporting roles and Nicholas Cage just hams it up all the way through. Not at all believable as a treasure hunter. All the best lines are had by his sidekick, Riley, played by Justin Bartha.
One for the kids on a wet Saturday morning - 4/10
Posted by weaver at 10:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
A storm of compulsive story telling, with 6 interlocking narratives spread over a wide time line, all done in different styles. Each story is about man inhumanity to man on differing scales and its resulting effects. Vivid characters with compelling storylines, its a fascinating weave that only jars when the first narrative stops in mid-sentence, half way through the story. The rest of the time it works brilliantly. The 70 odd pages of futuristic pidgin were hard going but the author was on a roll by then.
A good thought provoking read. Recommended 4/5
Posted by weaver at 10:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 17, 2005
Massive Attack
Trawling the logs for the community site , I noticed that over the past fortnight traffic had rocketed and the guestbook had suddenly become very, very popular, despite having only a couple of entries over the same period. Also noticed a suspicious increase in the spam emails in the macla email box.
A quick check on the guestbook and all seemed fine. It's got an image verification script to prevent scripts from spamming the entries. Dig deeper. There's about 180 entries in the guestbook. Somewhere in the middle, about 50 entries had the comments spammed, in a really large way. It took almost 2 hours to manually cleanse the guestbook - all the while my resentment was growing. First at myself; having protected the entries from spam, I'd inadvertently left a back door through the comment field for the spammers, and thenmore accurately at the spammers for potentially ruining the macla experience for every one who visits the guestbook
Solution:
1. Apply a password for all comments. - implemented - limits who can comment on entries
2. Change some default variables to hide the guestbook scripts from the automated spam harvesters. - implemented.
3. Wait and see and hope I don't have to close the guestbook permanently - fingers crossed
Posted by weaver at 12:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 08, 2005
A magical day....
... just continues to get better. And now for the cultural slot.
BBC Radio 3 are running a Beethoven Experience season and as part of the celebration that are making all 9 of his symphonies available as mp3 downloads, licensed for personal use. The first 5 are up there now. Grab them while you can as they'll be removed after a week. (Broadband connection advised). The next 4 will be avialable at the end of the month.
I hope this proves to be a success for the BBC and that they do the same for other classical composers. Good use of the license fee. Well Done, or should that be Bravissimo!!!
Posted by weaver at 11:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Downs and ups
On and off, I've spent the past couple of days trying to upgrade a friends PC from Windows 98 to Windows XP. Should have been a simple straightforward job. Ran into a few snags. He has loads of data that he wants to preserve so our next step is to burn the data to DVD. There's also been a couple of other snags that I've not seen before, but with a bit of perseverance and a following wind, we should make it.
A few weeks ago, a work colleague handed me a standalone Linux CD of Knoppix. I was impressed that Linux seems to have reached a level of maturity that I decided to build a machine just to play with the various Linux distros. The bits arrived today and I'm now the proud owner of a new Linux machine running (at the moment) Fedora. This weekend's task is to network the machine. I look forward to an exciting summer of exploration.
Talking of summer, today's been our best summer's day so far. An absolutely glorious day, guaranteed to make even the most miserable geek smile. Roll on the hosepipe ban
Posted by weaver at 10:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 04, 2005
Smoother process
With a change in Parish Council Clerk has come a change in the format of the Parish Council Minutes.The new clerk also produces them in a more user friendly format
I now receive a copy on a floppy as a word doc. This makes cutting and pasting to a web page so much easier than scanning the printed page. Thanks to Jenni & Pete for setting this up.
Now, if we could only encourage Jenni into using email, it would be even smoother.
Posted by weaver at 11:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 01, 2005
More spam
Another 80 or so spam comments to deal with today. I've resorted to locking down the comments on this blog to registered users only, which will effectively kill participation. Trackbacks have already been disabled. Why should legitimate users have to go through extra hoops just to keep out the spammers?
The continued spamming has made me lose faith with blogging in general and Movable Type in particular. Having to deal with it on a daily basis is becoming tiresome and not why I started the blog. Perhaps its time to move on.
As my old gran used to say - 'Life's to short to eat peas.'
Posted by weaver at 12:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack