London had it’s first flash mob last night which almost ended up a disaster when the shop they were going to visit closed before the mob turned up! The BBC news site has mentioned the event on their front page with details here. Unfortunately I’m blogging this from Crewe library and its taking ages to do anything so I’ve no idea what the pictures look like.
Unfortunately the links to the sites that are mentioned in the article, the Geocities LondonMob and writer Warren Ellis’s blog have had bbc’otted (as opposed to slash-dotted) and are unavailable. Warren’s blog has a static page up, but it doesn’t say that due to bandwidth use he’s disabled the pictures. This seems a bit strange as I would have thought that a writer would want to have people read his stuff!
UpdateWarren left a comment to this post saying that the hosting company had pulled his website. It wasn’t obvious this had occured as normally there is a “this site has exceeded its bandwidth allowance” notice like the Londonmobs site did. Instead his site just shows the text Space.powweb.com and the ip address. I hope he can make arrangements with the hosting company to get the site online -maybe the bbc should provide the extra money to allow it to be hosted for the rest of the month due to the traffic they sent (I assume it was their site that sent the traffic.It’s certainly NOT a good way to advertise your hosting company – by saying “Hey – we pull peoples sites when they get a lot of extra bandwidth and dont explain why”)
After 6 returns to the garage due to the engine saying it needs more oil, with at least three occurances happening the day after the car has been serviced, the garage has finally come to the conclusion that the problem might be due to a faulty oil level indicator……
One of our customers had a problem with their F50 server hanging with a 518 on the LED display when it was rebooted.
Technet has an offline content search on disk1 I have discovered this morning. This enables you to pop disk1 in and then work out which disk you need to get the file/content without installing the technet viewer itself. Useful when trying to work out which cd has Windows2000 service pack 4 on. Its not on any of the 6 cd’s labelled “Service Pack CD 1” etc, but instead its on Augusts Download CD1. Sensible place!
For some pretty awesom lightning pictures take a look at Oklahoma Lightning-Storm Photography by Charles Allison in particular June 24th is a good one
Decided to download the spam from my mailserver on localhost to my mail client so I can clean the mail server up and also take a look at some of the spam. They are getting quite clever now in how they avoid spamfilters. One I saw the other day used the fact that invalid html tags are ignored. So the spam contained a line such as “get y<hello>our ne<world>ws her<test>e” which would get past a spam filter looking for the words “get your news here”.
Been having some weird problems with the wireless in the past couple of days – software says I have a good or excellent signal running at 11mb yet performance to web pages is abysmal yet the wired computer is fine so I know its not the ADSL connection. I pinged my two websites from the xp laptop this morning and got an average connection time of 103 and 92ms for helsby.net and absoblogginlutely.net
However when I pinged from the wired connection it was about 10ms greater than the wireless connection! Like I said in the topic – weird!
I signed up for the Exchange2003 7 day trial of Outlook Web Access. This is touted as looking as close to outlook as possible. The screenshots show what this Outlook Web Access for 2003 looks like.
Had an interesting problem this morning when one particular email client was getting “blank” emails whenever he was sent an email in html format. However, on closer look pictures in the email were appearing for a fraction of a second and then disappearing again. Right clicking on the email and choosing view source showed the html source for the email. Saving this as a html file and opening it in internet explorer 6 (on the machine) showed a blank page. Looking at the same page in Firebird (which I had to download and run) showed the text and picture of the email. A quick look at the properties of Internet Explorer showed it was running without the servicepack1 to it. Updating it cured the problem – emails were now visible again. A very strange problem and one that had me stumped for a while. A search in google showed a few other people with the same problem but no solution – hopefully this post will help others in the future.
Thanks to Jay telling me to RTFM in my previous post on searching the comments I’ve now read the manual and my searches now include comment fields.
This piece of magic was made possible by adding the text <input type=”radio” name=”SearchElement” value=”both” /> to my search form.