5 useful Firefox plugins

For reasons that are too long and tedious to recount here, I have had cause to rebuild my Lenovo T61 laptop many times over the last month, using a bewildering range of operating systems, Linux distributions, live CD’s and dual boot configurations.

During this time, gparted and an external USB 500GB disk drive have become very close and reliable friends. In fact, I have only lost data once and, inevitably, that was due to my own stupidity.

Sky channels back on Virgin Media

Rejoice ! After 18 months, Rupert and Richard have ended their standoff and the Sky channels will be returning to Virgin Media.

Now, I wonder if some kind soul could fill me in on the last 18 months of ‘Lost’.

ignorati

Occasionally, I commute into London on South West Trains. I normally listen to music or podcasts during the half hour commute into Waterloo.

Whenever I buy a ticket at the station, I always pause the music and remove my earphones. This is for two reasons:

1. I need to be able to communicate with the person to purchase my ticket.
2. People behind me in the queue may not want to hear ‘Serve the Servants’ by Nirvana.

Last Monday morning, I joined a short queue to buy my Travelcard and removed my earphones as usual.

covert operations with Surrey Traffic Police

Surrey Traffic Police should run a recruitment campaign with the tagline

‘Join Surrey Traffic Police and see the world.’

This would appeal to young men who fancy the glamour and travel traditionally associated with the Armed Forces but are slightly wary of losing their lives in Iraq or Afghanistan.

In August, I hired a car mid-way through my holiday in Venice to drive to the foot of the Dolomite mountains and also took the opportunity to visit Lake Garda.

Ince on Celtic

Although I will always associate Paul Ince with the phrase ‘big time Charlie’, I do think the Blackburn manager talks a lot of sense.

In particular, I think he was correct in his assessment of Celtic’s display at Old Trafford on Wednesday night in the Champions League. Apart from a few early promising moments, I think the gulf between the two sides was embarrassing.

In fact, when I first tuned in to watch the game, initially I thought I had got the dates mixed up and I was watching United playing Norwich City in the Carling Cup.

Grauniad switches to full text RSS feeds

18 months ago, I reviewed the online editions of the leading UK newspapers and the various syndication options.

At that time, all the newspapers only offered partial text feeds which, in my opinion, is understandable but unsatisfactory.

So I was pleasantly surprised to read in ReadWriteWeb that The Guardian has broken ranks and now offers full text RSS feeds. It will be interesting to see whether this increases subscribers for The Guardian and whether the competition will be persuaded to follow suit.

floating on air

During a ritual purge of ‘Inbox’, I just discovered the following email

Years ago, in a different life. I worked as an Oracle DBA for a dot com in deepest Clapham.

For reasons that now escape me, the CEO managed to get a discounted rate so we could all lie in complete darkness in a flotation chamber listening to whale music with joss sticks burning.

Performance was pretty bad and the backups never got done but we were all completely relaxed about it.

Read more

Mike Ashley reverse 914 scam uncovered

From the desk of Mr. Ashley. Good day. Private message to you.

I know you don’t mind me contacting you by this means since we have not met before this time. My name is Lord King Glorious Michael ‘Haway the Lads’ Ashley.

Recently, my Uncle’s (Sir Robert Robson of Gateshead) will was read and to our joy and relief, he has kept the sum of $8 milion USD in trust for the upkeep of the beloved Newcastle Footballing Club.

review of Habari 0.5

Introduction

Habari is a blogging platform, created back in January 2007 and in the subsequent 18 months, the software has matured and version 0.5.1 was recently released.

Originally, I downloaded and experimented with Habari late in 2007 but it wasn’t until February 2008 that I finally took the plunge and migrated my blog from WordPress.

Installation

Habari requires PHP 5.2 (or higher) and PHP Data Objects (PDO). If your hosting company can’t meet these requirements, think about switching to one that can. Habari also supports multiple database types:

Web 2.0 relationship scorecard

• +1 for a ‘friend’
• +5 for a ‘follower’
• +10 for a blog comment
• +25 for a blog contact
• +50 for an email
• +100 for a photo
• +250 for a NSFW photo
• +400 for an audio conversation
• +99,999 for a hot steamy IM session
• +1,000,000 for sharing a pint