And hot off the press, another fail entry.
I placed an order with Amazon, and received this confirmation email.
Screenshot - Amazon email
I sure don’t remember ordering an ARRAY(0x6b390274), but hey, if it’s free…
Today I signed up for Twitter – not for personal reasons but because I needed it for work. Of course I’ve heard about it in the past as the leading micro-blogging service, but it hadn’t interested me in the slightest.
I have used Facebook since its early days (when you could only get in if you had an academic email address!), primarily to keep in touch with friends. When they brought out the status updates feature, I couldn’t see the point. Even less so having something like Twitter that’s purely status updates.
There are so many ways these days to get content out there and onto the web. But I can’t see the point in many of the newer sites.
Like I said, I use Facebook as a way to keep up with friends whom I don’t see very often. While I was at school, MSN Messenger was all the rage, but now we’re a bit more grown up we don’t all have time to sit on MSN all night. So Facebook is a convenient way to keep in touch from time to time – given that email is only really used for work these days.
But my only friends on Facebook are friends in real life. I don’t meet people through Facebook. For me, it’s just a direct replacement for emailing friends or chatting on MSN. I don’t broadcast my life to the world. I can’t see why they’d care.
Which brings me onto Twitter. I can’t imagine that anyone would be interested in snippets of my daily life. If they’re that interested, they can text me and ask. As I mentioned, I now have a Twitter feed and you can follow me if you want – but I don’t recommend it. I’m not intending to write anything interesting – only to use it for following boring feeds like these from the University of Bristol.
I’m more interested in personal websites, often in blog format. Maybe it’s because I used the web for years before these social, collaborative sites popped up, and the only resources available were traditional websites.
I’ve had my own website for over a decade now, in one form or another. When I was a kid, I didn’t have much of interest to say and there was nothing on the site. Nowadays I have two blogs: this one, mainly for technical articles, guides, reviews and so on; and my photo blog where I publish photos that I have taken.
I’m a geek, and so I have my own server and I run these blogs from scratch using Wordpress. Obviously such an approach isn’t going to work for everyone, which is why I like sites like Flickr. It’s a really easy way to get your work online. I set up my own Flickr page some time ago, before I decided where I was primarily going to host my photos.
As you can see, there’s hardly anything on it and only two comments. I’ve worked a bit harder to promote my official photo blog, which also gives me the freedom to customise it exactly as I want, and here I have had thousands of views of my photos.
I’m not saying that “Web 2.0” is a bad thing – I’m just saying it only works for me in limited ways.
I want to publish my articles and photos in a more traditional format, and I only use Facebook because most of my mates don’t use MSN any more.
As much as I hate Facebook for its annoying apps, there are one or two good ones.
Cities I’ve Visited is one such app that I like. You can add new cities either by scrolling, zooming & clicking, or by typing in a name. I like maps so I find it pretty interesting to see where I’ve been.
The application itself uses the Google Maps API so it’s interactive. Unfortunately the embedded version of this app for blogs is just a static image. You can’t change the zoom level or centre point, which is annoying, since you can see I’ve never been to America or Asia.
One day I might have a go at building my own app for fun. It shouldn’t be horrifically difficult to build a simple, single-user app for having an interactive map with points on it. The difficult parts are making it multi-user, and having a system for adding cities by name (rather than by grid reference).
I could even steal the work of my colleague, who built a map of wireless hotspots at Bristol University.
For some time, I’ve been taking part in Stu’s Tuesday Challenge.
Recently, Stu has had great success with his East Midlands wedding photography business and so doesn’t have time for the Challenge any more.
So I’ve taken over the Challenge and rebranded it the Photo Challenge (so I’m not tied to a Tuesday). I hope the regular contributors on Stu’s blog will continue to take photos for the Challenges. It’s also an ideal opportunity for new photographers to try their hand at some of the challenges and get some feedback.
Why not give it a go?
In the past, I’ve enjoyed reading Photoshop Disasters. Today I was delighted to spot my own Photoshop Disaster in Dorothy Perkins.
Looks to me as though they’ve just chopped her fingers off to resemble pockets.
I’ve been using awstats to collect statistics on visitors to my blog since July 2009. I’m a sucker for pretty graphs, so I’ve made a few 
First and foremost, which operating systems are visitors running?
Operating systems
Good to see a disproportionately large number of Linux users! It’s probably a self-selecting audience to a certain extent though, as many of the posts on this blog are Linux guides or musings.
So what distributions are the visitors running?
Linux distributions
Overwhelmingly Fedora, it would seem. Again, perhaps no surprise as most of the articles here are about Fedora or CentOS.
Should I be worried that some of my visitors are still running Windows 98, Me and NT? Should I be concerned that there are also many hits from Windows 2003 and 2008, the server editions?
Windows versions
And, of course, a chart of the browsers.
Browsers
Unsurprisingly, Firefox blows everything else out of the water. “Others” included Netscape, Konqueror and FeedDemon.
Interestingly, the proportion of Mac users is far greater than the proportion or Safari users – which implies that Mac users are probably running Firefox instead.
I just received my phone bill from O2 by email. See if you can spot the deliberate mistakes. Click for a bigger version.
O2 phone bill
I decided that I need to sort out the way I do my personal calendaring.
Currently I only use my phone’s built-in calendar. I nearly always have my phone with me, but it’s a bit of a pain to enter stuff on when I’m sat at a computer anyway, and carrying all that information solely on my phone presents a huge risk of loss, theft or breakage.
I need some kind of centralised store of information that is able to sync with all the devices and programs I want to use, namely:
Google Calendar seems to be a good choice. It’s flexible and can sync with lots of things.
So I installed Lightning on all my Fedora and Ubuntu machines. It’s a calendar extension for Thunderbird, which I already use. To install it yourself:
On Fedora:
yum install thunderbird-lightning
On Ubuntu:
apt-get thunderbird-lightning
It’s easy to set up, too. Suppose your Google account is joebloggs@gmail.com, then you would…
https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/joebloggs@gmail.com/eventsIt’s a little more work to install Lightning on OS X. You have to download the add-on from Mozilla, and install it in Thunderbird. Same story for Windows.
It’s quite straightforward and there are instructions on the website.
When you’re done, follow the same instructions as for Linux to subscribe to your Google calendar in Lightning.
Setting up Google Calendar on my Sony Ericsson P1i was a bit of a pain, too. The P1i can’t interact with Google natively, I had to set up an account with Goosync to enable this. Goosync talks to Google, and your phone talks to Goosync using SyncML.
But once you have a Goosync account, you can synchronise a lot of handsets with Google calendar.
So first, you will need to set up an account with Goosync. It’s free and very easy. Goosync will ask you to tie your Goosync account to your Google account.
There’s also an option to have the settings for your phone sent automatically to your handset. However this didn’t work for me so I had to enter the settings manually.
Assuming the sync task on your phone has been set up properly, do a test run to make sure it all works.
If that worked, you can now run the sync task whenever you like from within the calendar itself.
That’s all there is to it! Unfortunately there’s no way of making your calendar synchronise automatically at set intervals, but that’s probably a good thing, because you can’t get stung for 3G charges!
Coming soon…
Is it just me, or is this not the kind of error message you want from a company that handles your bank and debit card details?
Error 500 from PayPal
This evening I stumbled across my first web site. I put this together using Publisher 97, probably in the year 1997. It looks rather, uh, dated these days.
While browsing the tree of that site, I also found my brother Oliver’s website, and a site I set up in 1999 about my year 9 class at school.
Frankly I’m amazed it’s still there – I set this site up in webspace provided with a dialup ISP and I terminated my account once we had ADSL – probably in 1999 or so.