I have found a public transportation system worse than the Parisian RATP. In total there are more lines affected than non affected.. : ]. It's totally out of control this Underground.

These are photos of the Transport for London website..

(to get from here to there I might just book a flight.. .... euh, that is if the travel agency doesn't go bankrupt and BAA doesn't go on strike* at the same time (as another volcano ash rainfall ?). ... .. gosh it's not easy getting around in this country.)

I just read a sad piece of technical journalism from Charles Arthur for the Guardian. I'll resume his rant; he blames p2p (file-sharing) usage for the new "no more unlimited mobile networking" policy that apparently O2 is moving into. He cites an O2 blog post which actually makes no mention of this.

According to the very imprecise graphic 97% of the users consume less than 500MB a month, the average would be 200 and 0.1% use more than 690MB. In short, very very few people tend to exaggerate IP (data) usage. If that caused any real nuisance to the network that would mean that either the operator's network is insufficient and/or they do not have the knowledge to implement simple QoS regulations (example: slow down the speed when network usage goes up so that all traffic can be on the move). So what is the real deal here ? Why are operators no longer happy to offer unlimited data for a fixed price ?

My conspiration theory is as follows: Now that you can access the Internet via your mobile device you can trade limited "text messages" (SMS) for unlimited text via realtime chat (irc/msn/aim/icq/etc) or email, you can trade phone calls for VOIP (skype, etc). And all this being on The Network (Internet) means that there is no difference between local and long distance communications. This is precisely, in my opinion, the real part where the operators may feel cheated. Users can escape the overcharges of calls and text messages not included in their plans, and why not even get a minimal call/text deal and just go for the unlimited mobile internet.

In reality the very few who actually do use p2p networks (illegal or legal btw) are not a real nuisance for the network, they are instead, AS USUAL, an excuse to change policies, pricing and laws. In this case, it's actually a "technology journalist" ranting about this, as if 0.1% of the data/phone users stole directly from his pocket.

Oh, and one more thing, I'm pretty sure those statistics include users who bought the mobile Internet dongle thing, you know the 3G usb device intended to connect computers to the Internet, in that case it's more than normal to go over 690MB in one month..

If you are reading this there are chances you already know how to use the Interweb, when you are given an address (url, webiste link, etc) you know how to get there the proper way. However, so many people, and I mean many many many just get it completely wrong. So I thought maybe an image could help explain.

As you can see, when you have the actual address for a site you don't need to use a search engine to find it, you already have it, you may enter it in the "address bar", that is the bar on top circled in green. That is one of it's main uses, the other being that it indicates where you currently are. Would you lookup in the phone book a number you already have ? So why do that with an URL ?

Today I notice a new bot called "turnitinbot" crawling my site and not for a new search engine.. this one is different. There is a new site called turnitin.com which sells a service to students and schools to prevent plagiarism, the idea is that students submit their work to Turnitin who then verifies it against their databases. According to the Wikipedia/Turnitin page the databases are composed of:

• content from, books, newspapers etc
• already submitted work to Turnitin
• anything submitted to "other" sites like GradeGuru
• etc etc
• Result's from spider crawling

For me this whole things seems very dirty, the only small part I can do is add this to robots.txt User-agent: turnitinbot Disallow: / I don't want people to take credit for my work but I even less want a company to push the education system into their control and make big money out of it. Is Turnitin paying you or me for our work ? No. Are they making money out of it ? Yes.

For those who submitted their work to GradeGuru and are regretting it, please understand that when you submit content to a third party you should always read and agree with their terms of service, I'm sure they mentioned that one day the free service will benefit themselves alot more than yourself.

Actually, here goes Article 14 from the Terms of Service http://www.gradeguru.com/sps/communitystandardmessagenlu.htm?tandc=tandc : Proprietary Rights in GradeGuru Content. GradeGuru does not claim ownership of the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you may post to the GradeGuru Services. By posting any Content on or through the GradeGuru Services, you hereby grant to GradeGuru a non-exclusive worldwide perpetual license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute all or part of such Content on and through the GradeGuru Services and through GradeGuru and its affiliated entities, other off-line services and products and to charge for access to and/or use of Your Content. This license granted by You to GradeGuru to use Your Content (including that supplied prior to the version date of these Terms) includes (without limitation) the right for GradeGuru supply Your Content to providers of anti-plagiarism tools at our discretion, so that such providers may, amongst other things, check the integrity of Your Content. I was going to put the important/shocking part in bold, but then I figured the whole article should be bold, emphasized and blinking...

Today I realised something was missing, an image on my site (from an external source) wasn't showing up in my browser. I'm using Iceweasel, but not only, so I check with my other browsers, Arora, Icecat, Konqueror, no issues there. I switch off NoScript, reload, nothing. I realise via Firebug that there is a "display: none" on the img tag... . AND THEN, someone points out that it's AdblockPlus that did that.. .. . .

My point is, many years ago I ditched Windows and one of the many reasons I talked about was I don't see the point in having a system that requires so many addons and such just so I can safely and comfortably use my computer and today, when I opened the Addons window in Iceweasel and I saw how many addons I had (one's that deal with security and anti-add/spam/etc) I realised that I am going through a Total Fail Moment™. I am running Microsoft Iceweasel with Norton Anti Advert, Zone Alarm Flashblock and Kapersky Noscript...

I am afraid of objects that are "protected" by "security".. . untill I confront my fear of such I will just have to avoid purchasing them.

You know those lists that determine what IPs should be blocked from mail servers ? Well, maybe the idea at one point was interesting (maybe not)... . I realized today that I'm again on a couple of lists, nothing major, I realized this because an email I tried to send was blocked. After investigation it appears that these would be the among the different reasons:

• Dynamic IP (which is not true of course)
• Someone on the same netblock sent a "bad" email .... in November !!!
• A server on my netblock bounced an email
• I bought a can of SPAM and I'm sure they know about it

Some of those lists are like "Minority Report", like aspews.org who base their list on "preventive" action, meaning you don't have to have done anything wrong to be listed.. It's like when you get stopped and searched just because you're... .. you know. read more about apews and it's origins

But people are allowed to use lists, of course.. . feel free... however you might want to compare, oh because some will require payment for delisting (or a huge amount of time), some don't care.. . so be careful if you do use lists, you can compare them if you want, and/or check if/where your IP is listed

If you are using Spamassassin you may edit "/etc/spamassassin/local.cf" and add:

Yah, basically I just decided that I HATE THOSE LISTS, they are just there because people are to lazy to properly configure their servers, many don't even respect the basics. I noticed that many mail servers, and I'm talking about corporate mail servers don't even know how to properly issue the "HELO" command !!! So I'm currently testing a couple of settings, if you have Postfix you can also try:

It's amazing how much crapmail is rejected before being sent to any filter or mailbox lookup, and this is just because the proper BASIC configuration hasn't been met..

Another tip from workaround.org (please follow this link for full implementation info):

This feels alot better, so much cleaner is the postqueue and happy I am. As for the list guys/gals, I'm sure there are plenty of them with very good intentions and such but they can still go screw themselves because they contribute to enabling crappily configured servers to function and disabling legitimate emails from properly configured mail servers... . Of course this does not change the fact that my emails might still be unjustifiably rejected by mail servers using RBL/DNSBL but at least I'm not a part of it..

One MX at a time.

LOLOMG !FAIL.. I'm sure this door was put there because it was cheaper than a window...

I just read about this project to "save mysql" from the dirty hands of Oracle.. At first I thought "oh a cute little lolcat site" but then I thought "how is it that Oracle can buy out MySQL ?"

So I go to Monty's blog and go through a bunch of explanations and such, I almost cried a bit. I mean the guy has spent the last 27 years working on this database server.. To be honest since I saw the URL "helpmysql.org" I sensed something I don't like.

So I finally made it to this very good question on Monty's blog

Dude, you gave MySQL away, I mean you SOLD it. You gave control over it to someone else. Now if you want it back maybe YOU could make an offer to SUN... and for that you could make a page "pleasehelpmebuymysqlbackbecauseisoldeditlol.org"

Well, still, thanks alot for all your work and all, MySQL does rock and I'm sure MariaDB will be even kewler.. In the meantime I might just switch to Oracle.. . (just kidding). As sad as I'd be to see MySQL be pwned by Oracle I wont sign the petition.

I came across this website called thespoof.com, they have articles that are supposed to be funny. To be fair I only read one article.

The thing is they boast about how on this super dooper website you don't need to sign up to rate an article, now that is really nice as I am tired of all those sites that want you to create an "account" before touching anything.

Okay, my opinion is this article is not funny, so I try to give it 1 star, but oh wait look at this !!

It seems you they don't like getting only one star (or two stars), the minimum vote is 3 stars ! Way to go guys, I'll assume that's all part of the spoof.

Sometimes you take things apart so many times that one day you realize that when you really do need to take that pc apart to really fix it that a screw is screwed... On my little innocent "netbook" (i dislike that word) I waited a while before I decided it was time to bring out the big tools and sort this one out once and for all.

Basically I took the drill to the screw, using 2 and 3mm shanks I drilled "carefully", the goal being just to drill out the ring part of the head. To my surprise the screw came out on it's own before I was done...

I now can set aside - temporarily - the idea of buying a replacement.. instead, I'll need to get replacement parts, but that's another story.