tptb dragoon

Unexpected errors

I just got this:

Error

An unexpected error has occurred processing your request

Now what? Not very useful. Poo.

Using Firefox is like...

Using Firefox is like having an American Express Card in the UK. You go to use it, you want to use it, you know it can't hurt and probably makes sense to use it....but all too often it gets rejected. Sometimes it gets rejected nice and clearly e.g. We don't support your setup, other times it just stops sites from working. I am beginning to despair.

Your mileage may vary of course.

Invalid validity

I was looking at car number plates on reg-transfer's site and managed to get the delightful message:

Sorry INVALID is not available!Click here to search again.

and no, I hadn't actually typed in the word "invalid"

A Quick Fix

Add 512Mb of RAM to the existing rather paltry 256Mb. 5 minutes start to finish. What a great feeling. Comfortably expensive (my 2 year old Dell has RAM that they no longer make/support), easy to fit, instantly satisfying. Wonderful.

How to Mess up a Home Network

1. Leave the room.
2. Return an hour later.
3. Notice the ADSL router upsdide down on the floor.
4. Blame the cat.
5. Nothing works.
6. Kick the cat.
7. Think.
8. Notice two of the port lights pulsating in synch with each other
9. Call the Wife.
10. Ask if she plugged anything in.
11. Listen to the explanation of a cable that she tripped over and just "plugged back in". A cable note, that was only plugged in at one end.
12. Reverse the operation of numbers 6 and 9 above.
13. Remove the cable from port 4. Port 2 light goes out and the others work just fine, thank you very much.
14. Tell the whole world about it.

Still Under Construction

Looking at my stats I notice a lot of apparent links from some random German website. The odd thing is the page deosn't exist and the main site (as linked above) says it is under constrcution. Reassuringly it also informs us that it will be ready on the 6th of August 2004. So, not too long to wait then.

Tired of Spam Entries

I have finally got fed up with the spam postings I get to this site. To fix this I have had to upgrade to the latest version on Movable Type which is the blogging software I use. After a few user errors on my part it is now working. Unfortunately the SPAM blacklister I use doesn't work and needed upgrading. But the documentation says it won't work with this latest version of the blogger. The other option is to remove it - which I think I have done ok. But that hasn't fixed everything.

The upshot is that you may not be able to post comments for a while until I work out what's wrong...

UPDATE: You can post now and I will moderate and approve later. The TypeKey feature doesn't work for me though. I have emailed Funky Dave to see if he can help.

LAST UPDATE: It all appears to work now. This means you can now not post comments to older entries (to reduce the spam I get) and I have to moderate your postings. However if you go to www.typekey.com and get a key (it only takes a few seconds) I can authorise you to post directly to the blog.

Brain Teaser

A lot of us like a little puzzle so those nice people at GCHQ have set us one.

Take a look at it then we will continue. Ready? Good. Now I wasn't sure where to start with this so I wouldn't bother but Chris did and came up with most of the solution but not the final answer. So we need your help. So as to not spoil it, this will continue in the next section - don't read on if you want to try it yourself. Oh and if you want to know how he got this far I will post that in a few days' time as well.

Chris thinks the answers are:

1 From: The Bible, The Book of Joshua (Chapter 2)
2 From: The Gold-Bug
3 From: The Adventure of the Dancing Men
4 From: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
5 From: Intelligence Services Act 1994
6 From: The Code Book

and apparently there is a concealed 6 letter word in them.

The answer could be "secret" if you take one letter from each of the above but that is a bit tenuous. That's assuming the above is correct of course but we are fairly certain about that - I'll post Chris's ingenious method in a few days time.

Any suggestions?

Remember CB?

Hey Good Buddy, crank your handle. Massive ariels on your house and on your car/van. Crap reception, lots of gear being nicked. I see that someone is trying to start the craze all over again:

Date Error

Aside from the odd inconsistent date formatting, can anyone decipher when precisely this Dane is on holiday? I received this on the 6th May.

I'm out of the office on 07-05-04 to 13.04.04 due to public holiday in Denmark and I will have no access to my e-mail.

I guess it's simply the 13th of May but it's odd that it arrived before he'd even left.

More Undertaking 2

You might recall that someone thought I was the undertaker. My latest reply was:

Nothing's up Joy. Quit with the silly questions!!

And she sent me an aol e-card

More Undertaking

I mentioned that I had received an email asking if I was The Undertaker. The response was to say "yes". The reply has come

HI UNDERTAKER
SO WHAT'S UP WITH THE OTHER ADDRESS WHY YOU JUST COULDN'T GIVE ME THIS ONE . I MISS YOU AND I MISS OUR FRIENDSHIP. I'M GLAD THAT WE CAN STILL COMMUNICATE UNTIL THEY MAKE UP THEIR MIND WHAT TO DO ABOUT YOU.
NOW JUST TO MAKE SURE YOU'RE NOT PULLING MY LEG. IF YOU ARE REALLY THE UNDERTAKER WHAT COLOR IS YOUR HAIR AND WHERE DO WE WORK.
JOY

My response this time needs to be more cunning...

The Undertaker

I received an email overnight, the contents of which are:

HI
I'M LOOKING FOR A FRIEND
ARE YOU THE UNDERTAKER
IT MAY SOUNDLIKE A CRAZY QUESTION BUT IF YOU ARE IT'S NOT

Added information: I don't know who the sender is and I am not the undertaker. Of course I am going to reply for the hell of it, however I am undecide as to precisely word it - any ideas?

Search Me. Again.

An earlier entry examined why soem people were mistakenly coming to my site. I have cleared up the spelling mistakes, lowered the level of content (if that's possible) but the stats keep on rising. This month there isn't a runaway winner though. Previously I have lots of people looking for Benny from Crossroads and Stan Boardman. Might have been the same people/weirdos looking for all I know.

This month searched are good though. Top of the list is

"dog in a bottle"

OK hands if you know why someone would search for that. I see no hands.

My favourite search was the one person who simply typed in the word "rubbish" and got to my site. Fantastic!

Other ones I am confused about are "bonka" and "figging". Any ideas?

There are at least 4 entries searching for Splodgenessabounds or their songs which pleases me as well as "jump, you fucker jump" for all you Derek and Clive fans.

Keep it up, you're doing a great job whoever you are.

Voice Message

Dontcha love technology? I have a voice mail service on a mail account. I don't use it don't know the number you call to use it. I don't know what message you get when you call it. However, I do receive messages such as this one. No, I don't work for the water board and can't sort out her "kidneys" or whatever the problem is.

Oh and I deleted her number so you pervy types out there can't ring her up and pretend to be the waterboard. That's my privilege.

Anticipation, Suspense, Action

Don't you just love anticipation? If not, then wait till you have read this. Oh sorry, you probably don't want to wait. Hey, don't click away now... Oh well.

I have been trying to work out if my blog would get less hits if I did nothing, or did more. As it happens my posting rate has dropped off recently but my hits have increased. Weird. Google stopped its crawling around my web bits for a while as well but it's back as well.

I notice some of the guys I work with have been trying this experiment. They have been doing less and less, barely breathing in fact let alone turning up for work. And the amazing thing is that their productivity has improved! At least, they make fewer mistakes.

Have I Got News For You?

If you have watched that program, you'll know that they have guest publications which consist of obscure magazines from which they take article headlines. My wife bought me the following one. For a laugh. We obviously don't get many laughs round our way it seems.

The clue as to what the magazine is all about, is in the name of course. Now, we would probably pronounce this word as "roota" but the Americans, god bless 'em, say "rowter" i.e. "row" as in the argument. In fact we, in this instance, pronounce it the same way.

See if you can guess what it's actually about then click on the link for more... Goodness me, this is fun isn't it?

And the answer is...

And no, I don't own a router.

It's a knockout

You''ve all heard of Google. Well now there is the adult only version Booble. It's got its knockers but, hey, that's probably why people visit it.

SPAM Glorious SPAM

A comment has been posted on an old entry The
bubble's burst which is about an inflatable bouncy castle that has it's air pump switched off (possibly not one of my greatest entries but hey ho). That was six months ago and suddenly someone has posted this spam:

"I'd be happy to answer anybody's questions on these topics."

Of course the accompanying URL was spam. Why don't they post to the recent articles?

What's Your Homepage?

I have 3 computers and each has a different homepage set on the browser. On my laptop it is www.tptb.co.uk. On my desktop machine at home it is www.betfair.com as I used to do a fair bit of betting on there - actually I have just got back into it and I'm a few quid up this month but ask me again in a few week's time. At work it's my company's website www.astra.net.uk.

I hae just had a look at Ryan's (my 10 year old's) computer and he has changed his homepage to www.cheatsforplaystation2.com. Nice one.

More Danger

This time it's mobile phones and petrol stations. When you fill up you're told to turn off your phone for safety. But is it simply because they can mess up the metering systems on the pumps or can they really cause an explosion. Here is an extract from a posting on a list I'm on:

"I get all my science information from "Brainiac" on Sky one. They doused the inside of a caravan with *a lot* of petrol and left a mobile phone inside. When they rang it nothing happened. So they put in a dozen mobiles and tried again. Still Nothing.

So, they ran a long copper wire to a place where they got a bloke to move about a bit in a nylon shell suit, who then touched the wire and blew up the caravan in a most satisfyingly spectacular manner.

In my opinion, therefore, mobile phones are far less dangerous than nylon clothing (that's true on *so* many levels, isn't it?). However, I've never seen a warning about nylon underpants at a petrol station."

Makes you think. Doesn't it. About the dangers of nylon clothes.

The Christmas Day Conundrum

Will I blog on Xmas Day? Will you read it?

Answers later this week.

Meanwhile Christmas begets New Year which begets resolutions. I have an early one:

NYR 1. I will cancel my gym membership

This will save me £45 per month and cause me less irritation for not using it.

Light Fantastic

I can't claim that any of my pictures on here are better than a rating of about 6 out of 10 although I recall a picture of organic carrots that I like quite a bit. You can search for random pictures on here (there is a link on the right to this and other little tools as well).

However, for some really good pictures, check out the Sensitive Light blog.

Search me

The second most popular search code that people use, and inadvertently trip over this blog with, is "liberty wiress". Firstly, how come that finds this blog? Well on the complete month of July 2003 page I refer to "liberty" in one entry and "wiress" in another. I meant "wireless" when I wrote that but never mind for now.

So if you are one of these people and come across this entry can you please tell me what you are looking for? Because you are not alone. Nearly 9% of searchers coming to this site do the same. I love stats, donlt you? I have gone searching for "liberty wiress" and have discovered:

i. Simplex Wiress and Cables have been buying Third Liberty Bonds.

ii. There is some Windows software or something from Liberty Alliance which creates a Wiress Desktop - another spelling mistake?

iii. JCB International are in Liberty Square Bulding, Wiress Street.

Google gives just these 3 entries plus mine. Except I have now fixed the page so that will disappear soon but this page will appear in it's place.

Or maybe these are all spelling mistakes? Certainly typing in "liberty wireless" produces a lot of results.

So, the challenge is to come up with a popular spelling mistake that will drive traffic to a totally useless blog entry.

Guess Who?

In a rare game of hide-and-seek we find someone looking for the golden snitch and someone hiding underneath the desk

But who is it? Read on...

Yes it's your friendly techy Roy! Who would have guessed?

Through the keyhole

Imagine a nasally whining american voice - LLoyd Grosman in fact. "Who'd live here?" etc. Of course it's our friendly technobiker Alex. What a tip. I am sure it's a health and safetu matter. Just think what his mind must be like.

Links

I am running a stats program and tells me interesting things like which sites are linked to my blog. Today I noticed www.freenudecelebrity.net/paris/ was there. I have no idea why. In the interest of research you understand, I logged on to see if I could see a link but there was nothing to be found. Strangeness indeed.

Cooking up Trouble

As you may recall I have been programming and I am doing this on my laptop so I can continue on the tube in the mornings. Programming is a very time consuming passtime. My programs often have loops that go on forever but I can always tell - these loops cause the processor to work very hard and so the fan turns itself on to cool it down. What a clever little feature that is.

Technicians

Wonderful people technical guys. Take Alex for example. Please. He's got this nice light for his bike with rechargebable batteries. He couldn't find his charger (like someone would steal that?) so he went in search of a replacement from the stock room and, because it had the right fitting, he plugged it in and set fire to it. Never mind the voltage, just zap it. Unfortunately I haven't been able to bring you tht nauseating smell of burnt electrics but if you want to try it out just contact me and I 'll Alex to come round and fix something for you.

Programming blues

Accountancy is an inexact science which may be a surprise to some of you. It seems obvious that figures should be manipulated acording to a precise set of rules and a provable result achieved. In practice this doesn't work as the "rules" can be interpreted in many ways on occasion. There is a similar story to programming whereby I am writing little utilities for this blog and that means I am using a windows machine, a unix machine and maybe 5 or 6 different packages at times. Regardless of any bugs or transient problems that may be present, what really screws life up is me. Yesterday's little problem was that I worked on one piece of code and a piece of code elsewhere stopped working. It took me an hour to fix it (avoid the problem) and then I slept. This morning it 2 minutes to discover the real cause - which was a single space. A single lousy space. Well, I haven't programmed in many years and I can see how things have really come on in the programming world - except in this example of course. Still, it remains immensely satisfying to me to write code so I shall persevere.

Big Nosed Ugly Guy

Wel it could be me, some say. There are a few photos of me in some of the entries so you can be the judge. As it happens the real www.bignosedugly.com (BNUG) is in fact another Blogging Brit. I signed up to the web ring primarily to join in the comaraderie of being amongst fellow saddos and, of course, in order to artificially raise my stats. Incidentally that's why I posted that article on Pop Idol.

The Blogging Brits is a webring and, by a bizarre facially enhanced coincedence, there is a link from BNUG to me.

Disappearing World

I've been playing round with a logo but unfortunately MoveableType insists on rewriting the styles.css file when an entry is added or changed which means it keep sdisappearing - sorry about that.

Meanwhile I have added a couple of random selections on the right hand side for you to play with.

Coding fun

I used to be a C programmer. Technically I probably wasn't that good but I coded some reasonable sized systems and made a living out of it as a Director and Shareholder of a small company (Demon Systems Ltd which begat an ISP well known in the UK Demon Internet). As regular readers know, I recently moved this blog onto my own dedicated server and which is complete overkill but a Fun Thing to do. I have been learning a bit of html, FreeBSD, php etc. along the way. Part of the process is to improve the enjoyability of this blog. I know, I know. Its hard to believe isn't it. Just bear with me please...

Alternatively just tell me to SHUT UP in a random way. Each time you click on the link you get a random wav file - there are only seven at the moment so you will get some repeats. All contributions greatly received - mail me grahame at tptb.co.uk. An easy upload method will come later...

A new home

Moving home can be a traumatic affair and this is equally so when moving blog. This blog has been hosted on www.funkypancake.com/dragoon since it's inception earlier this year and my sincere thanks go to Dave "The Glove" for encouraging me to get started and for hosting it. His has also given me a lot of help in moving it so more thanks to him.

So why move? Well I have wanted to set up a website for tptb.co.uk for a while and, being a bit of a closet techy, I thought it wuld be interesting to have my own FreeBSD box to play in so that is what I have done. Not without help you understand - this time my thanks go Chris "The Pedicator".

So what changes? First off nothing much but this will give me the opportunity to put the originals of all photos up so you can look at them in more detail. I may try a different blog package or even write my own...although that last suggestion is a little way from being realisable.

The one thing that won't change is the standard of the content. How low can you go?

If you want to run a blog on here you can contact me and I'll probably sort it out in exchange for a beer token or two.

It's War!

I am not a great fan of war and the reasons that they are caused by are an emotive subject. However, there is no denying they have happened or are happening. I mean we went to war with Iraq apparently to get rid of those invisible weapons of mass destruction then that Tony Bliar added the word "Programme" and said we were looking for that. And oh it was really for humanitarian grounds in fact. So that's OK, you just stand there while I shoot you and I will justify my actions later. Moving swiftly on...

Here's a good thing to try: Go to google and type in "french military victories" and then press "I'm feeling lucky". That's about right.

The Imperial War Museum is fab. Here are my two Likely Lads standing besides a 15 inch shell that goes in these 50 foot cannons that were in service 90 years ago.

There was plenty more to see...

I love this shot through sign which says "DO NOT STAND ABOUT HERE. Even if you are not hit somebody else will be".

However cunning our Cabinet Office were during WW1 and WW2, their techniques have not been passed down to the janitors. This piece of semtex razor duct tape didn't worry me - I easily urinated over the top of it. Now, if it had a sign that said No Man's Land that would have been different.

The Spitfire! It's the perfect plane. Glorious!

And it gets better. We can club together and buy one.

Symbiotic osmosis web experiment

How did you get on with over the past week? I haven't posted anything, as all you regular returners know, but I just sat cross-legged at the keyboard and let the feelings flow from me up the ADSL and on to the web page. Did you enjoy the picture of the guy sleeping on the settee? What about the story of Oz? Please let me know.

13 Nodes - a Guest Entry

Hi Grahame,

Just did a Neotrace to your blog site. You are 13 nodes away from me (Paris). Worse still, the intelligence of the internet is amazing. Node 8 is in Inglewood California. So node 7 = UK, Node 8 = California, node = 9 = UK. Now why don't you blog this?

Because I have got a life? Apparently not. Ed.

Mladen MATIJAS

Broken links

Dontcha just hate them? Pedicator's blog now comes up with "Fatal error: Call to undefined function: query() in /opt/www/pedicator.net/data/main.php on line 41" which is perhaps divine intervention as it's crap anyway or just typical given his day job which I won't tell you to spare his blushes. Sod it, why not? Amongst other things he programs php.