Snap!When a colleague and I sent almost identical emails simultaneously, our instant reaction was to shout “SNAP!”
looking in various dictionaries both paper and online, this use of the word doesn’t seem to be defined. There are dozens of uses for this heavily overloaded word, but not this one so here goes…
Snap interj. — An exclamation made when two independent events are perceived to be the same. Derived from the children’s matching-card game where the word us used to claim a win.
Bulk eMailDo you send bulk eMail? Are you sure? What about the coffee rota or the minutes of the Squash Club committee meeting. I am not talking Mega Company marketing circulars here (that’s David’s job) but the little things that go to a modest number of people—this is addressed to you.
When you make up the circulation list, whether in an organised address book list or an ad-hoc list just typed into the field, DON’T put them in the “To:” or “Cc:” line—Use “Bcc:”! (blind copy). As there ought to be a “To:” address, make that yourself—it will confirm that it went out ok when you get yours back.
This is first of all plain courtesy as not every one wants their eMail address to be widely published and they gave it to you on the assumption that you would look after it. But secondly, if any one of the machines belonging to the people on your circulation list is compromised, then all the rest of you will be bombarded with spam.
WordPress 2.7+ CommentsAs I mentioned earlier, I upgraded the version of WordPress used on this blog last night. I did the Church website some time ago and it was easy but this one was much more complicated. The difference is that this one accepts comments and the commenting system in WordPress was completely revamped for version 2.7.
This is a screen shot from my development system using the Default theme.
Here I have set the Discussion Settings to say
Break comments into pages with 10 comments per page and the last page displayed by default. Comments should be displayed with the older comments at the top of each page.
As you can see from the first line there are 11 comments on this post and below is a link back to the earlier ones and the 11’th one in full. It looks ok but, as I will demonstrate in a minute, they have hidden the underlying problem.
I happen to think that comments need to be numbered. It is my choice but I consider it necessary both as a visual clue so that readers can tell immediately which posts are the most recent and what order to read them, and also so that the discussion can refer to earlier points unambiguously. The generated HTML for the clip above (edited and wrapped) is as follows
<h3 id="comments">11 Responses to “Wordpress 2.7”</h3>
<div class="navigation">
<div class="alignleft"><a
href="http:// … /wordpress-27/comment-page-1/#comments"
>« Older Comments</a></div>
<div class="alignright"></div>
</div>
<ol class="commentlist">
<li class="comment byuser comment-author-sandpit bypostauthor even
thread-even depth-1" id="comment-24">
Here you will see the initial heading, the “Older Comments” link and, below that, <ol class="commentlist">. They are using an ordered list which should have item numbers for every <li> that follows, but they do not appear. They are being suppressed by the CSS style sheet using .commentlist li {list-style: none;}. Now if you want comments numbers, as I do, the instinct is to remove this suppression but that is not good enough (disregarding the work to get the layout to look right) because this comment will be numbered 1. because that is what <ol> does, not 11. as it should be. Every page will be numbered 1. to 10. Worse still, if I had set it to display newer comments at the top, they would be numbered in the wrong order.
The solution is to use a fantastic little plugin Greg’s Threaded Comment Numbering which solves this and other even deeper problems.
This is not really a complaint but it is a job half done. They have brought a lot of interesting controls forward into the admin interface for the average user to be able to control commenting, but the back-end code to handle them properly is not there. You can switch the feature on but you need a lot more skill to get it to work. I saw a comment from an experienced developer on the forums saying that WordPress is moving so that functional customising is moving away from themes, which are relatively straight forward to hack, to plugins and widgets which are more difficult and best left to the experts. If that is the case then they need to consolidate so that features such as this are either fully built into the base-code or left to plugin developers but not half-and-half.
Facebook AdsI have had a bunch of posts piling up waiting until I could update WordPress (which I did last night) so here is another one.
I have created a Facebook account, mostly to see what it is all about and see if I can use it to progress my genealogy research. That has been quite successful but in passing I have noticed that the advertisements down the right hand side of the profile screen are dominated by “Get Rich Quick” ads. They are all very similar in style with titles like “My New £1,000/day Hobby” and are mostly advertising a system using Google Adsense. The way this works is that you allow Google to put adverts on your website or blog and you get paid if your readers click through to the advertised site. It is certainly a legitimate way of earning and it is possible to make money doing it—BUT you need a very popular web site to make much. To get a very popular site you need lots of good content and that takes time and effort (and skill).
I strongly suspect that what these Facebook advertisers are really selling is a book or software supposed to help you reap these enormous gains. Information about running an Adsense program is readily available for free online (just read them with your brain switched on) and, anyway, you will probably find that the supposed income from the schemes are faked anyway.
P.S. The linked technique above can be used to fake any web site so just don’t trust screen shots!
Virgin Media PricingAbout this time last year, as a foot note to a post about Traffic Management, I remarked that I had been overcharged and how that was resolved.
We take what they now call “Broadband Size L” with “Phone Size M” which is a bundle which offers 10Mb/sec internet (and comes close to achieving it), a phone line and free calls at weekends. We don’t use the phone enough to be worth taking any of the other packages. At the time I made the complaint, the published price was £16 + line rental (for a 4Mb/sec service). When we originally signed up the cost was £25 + line rental (and only 2Mb/sec I think) so the way they “fixed it” was to put a £8 rebate on our bill—not quite right but close. As I reported, they also gave me the £5.50 “new customer discount” which I wasn’t expecting but was, none the less, welcome.
On the last bill received this second discount expired so we are now paying £17. In the mean time the advertised price for this service, after all introductory offers have expired, is £14 + line rental, so we are now paying £3 a month too much. I am going to contact them again and this time I am going to try and get the base price changed, not just discounts applied
This is reminiscent of how the banks pay interest on old savings accounts—unless you keep moving your money into the latest accounts, the interest rate dwindles to almost nothing. And we know how popular banks are at the moment.
Update: Later the same evening I rang them—they are completely bonkers! As before, trying to convince the customer service department that the price is wrong is only good in as much as you get forwarded on to someone else. Not that there was anything wrong with the customer service girl, just that it was beyond her script. After being forwarded to another nice girl who had more latitude I discovered that the prices on the web site are assuming that you want to use ebilling (which we don’t do at the moment) so that would add another £1 onto the expected cost—still £2 too much though. She acknowledged that it was far from clear on the site and they have already asked for it to be made clearer.
It was at this point I discovered that her department was called Account Retention and is clearly there to persuade existing customers not to leave. After having discovered that the services we had were the ones we still wanted, she made an offer of £22.20 including the £11 line rental. This was not only a lower price than I was asking for (£3.80 less), but doesn’t bear any relation to any published offer. I sort of think that they make up the figures on the spot. The only string, once again, is a 12 month contract which is what she is there for. Again I have no problem with this as, at that price it is a good deal. And I was proved right—they work the same way as the banks—unless you complain they will continue to rip you off.
Sub-primeI came across this little cartoon which explains what the crisis is all about (there is a part 2 as well).
Now the naive bit—the toxic assets, the sub-prime mortgages are people’s homes. They need somewhere to live. So if they default due to lack of employment or whatever then the houses now belong to the government (having bailed out the banks). The government announced a short while ago that there was a shortage of rental property—well there they are then!
Ireland’s most wanted
Ireland’s police have been searching for an elusive foreigner wanted for 50 or more motoring offences but seemingly able to alter his/her appearance and address. This was finally resolved when it was realised that “Prawo Jazdy” was not his name but just means “Driving Licence” in Polish. I wonder how many cases that solves on the PNC here in the UK?
No Airmail
Seen on the Gloucester Road for the last few months.
BankersFor Christmas we received one of those tear-off daily calendars and this particular one is called Forgotten English about obscure ancient words. Below each definition is a short (vaguely) related article. With the discussions in the news about the responsibility of the heads of the banks, the one for last weekend was very appropriate.
clocking-hen
A sum of money put out to interest in a bank. Aberdeenshire. —Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary, 1898–1905Feast Day of St. Meingold,
a patron of bankers. American presidents have long held misgivings about the country’s banking system. In 1816, for example, Thomas Jefferson wrote to his old friend John Taylor, declaring: “I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.” In 1836, Andrew Jackson disbanded the second federal bank, remarking, “The bold effort the present bank made to control the Government…[suggests] the fate which awaits the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution.” Later, speaking to the bankers, he was more blunt: “You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the eternal God, I will rout you out,” which he did. Even auto entrepreneur Henry Ford is said to have cautioned, “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
© Jeffrey Kacirk
Migrating to Mac (Part 2)When I wrote Part 1 last April, I promised an update in a few weeks—well I forgot.
My continued impression is that the hardware is excellent and I am now very comfortable using the machine. Even my worries about the Mighty Mouse have, so far, been unfounded, though I do have to clean it fairly often. I discovered that the “not quite full screen” problem was only for certain applications and Firefox in particular was fixed with a later release.
The problems with Time Machine and sleep mode have meant that I have given up using the sleep facility altogether and now shut the machine right down every night. The regular updates keep rolling in and I continue to be surprised how many of them require a system reboot.
The number of applications regularly using the VMware Windows guest has reduced to three (Family Tree Maker, MediaMonkey and EasyWorship) and I am now using Crossover for WaveCorrector. For others I have found native applications and the number of these becoming available is increasing as Apple’s market share improves.
To the details. I have omitted areas where there has been no change.
As a consequence of loaning out my Windows system, all data has been transferred and, except for a small panic when I lost some very old files, it has all gone smoothly. The next thing I will need to do is look at upgrading/enlarging the NAS as it is almost full. I would really like one that supports TimeMachine if that is possible. I would also like to find out what Bonjour is all about.
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