Monthly Archives: January 2005

Comment spam vs nofollow

More comment spam hitting us at the moment, but curiously the comments don’t seem to have URLs with them, so I’m not sure what the point is. They’re all purporting to be from non-English-speaking e-mail addresses, and many in broken English, with a generic compliment about how marvellous your web site is. Odd.

Meanwhile, Google have come up with a new <rel=”nofollow”> attribute for links to help fight comment spam. And they’ve got a bunch of blogging heavyweights to back it, too, including the MT/TypePad, Blogger (duh), MSN Spaces and the WordPress gang, which might well cover a good proportion of blogs running today.

Now, W3C ratification, anybody? Oh pah, who cares?

Introducing the message exchange

The company I work for is called eVision, and their main product is called MessageXchange. (See what happens to your spelling when you’re looking to find a good .com address?)

It’s basically a B2B message broker… messages go in, messages go out, and in the middle they get conditionally routed and transformed. The upshot is you can set up to hook up a bunch of systems that use completely different types of message… one system’s PurchaseOrderCreate in a fixed-length FTP’d batch file can happily go along as another system’s PurchOrdReq XML HTTP message.

The clever bit is in the monitoring, letting you see what’s pumping through the system at any time. And the fact that the whole shebang is configurable through a web interface.

It started out as a software package… well, not exactly a package, not in the MS Office sense, but a system you’d plonk on a Windows server or two and away you go. I haven’t been directly involved, but over the past year they’ve rejigged it as an ASP… a paid hosted service, that is, so that if you don’t want to run it on your own boxes, you pay to access it on fully maintained servers instead.

At the same time they’ve expanded its reportoire to cover a lot of the new and emerging XML standards such as ebXML and RosettaNet. As well as some of the more ancient, creaking standards like EDI.

Handy stuff. The whole B2B area must surely grow, it’s a no-brainer for reducing the cost of commerce. Will be an interesting area to watch. In fact I might get one of the guys to expand a bit on some of these topics…

Excel to VB bug?

From my limited testing (I had to find a workaround pronto) seems to be some kind of bug when using VB6, ADO 2.7, ODBC text driver to read from an Excel spreadsheet. Recordsets with date fields come in with the dates encoded as integers. This is normally no problem, as you can use IsDate to check if it’s valid, then CDate to convert it to a date.

But what I’ve found is that IsDate has stopped working… that is, it’s stopped returning True for field values that can be converted to dates, eg CDate works. Whether this is something to do with the new year, or a new version of something on my machine, I haven’t yet figured out, but I ended up writing a wrapper IsDate function that just tries the CDate regardless, and returns a False (eg not a date) if it errors.

An initial dig in the MSKB found nothing about it, but I’ll do some more exhaustive digging and try to get a definite answer later. The answer being, I suspect, “Switch to VB.Net, you luddite!”

Is Flash the new Java?

For a while back in the 90s, it seemed like Java would be the last word in interactive web pages, animations, etc etc. Every second web site had some kind of irritating Java applet animated banner.

But it’s faded. In its place we have Flash. It’s not quite write-once, run-anywhere… but it is write once, run on PC, Mac, Linux and Solaris. Which anyway you look at it is just about all of the browser market.

Java still finds a home on mobile devices, and for server development, but is becoming less common on web sites, particularly since it stopped being bundled with IE/Windows.

Perhaps Flash has the upper hand because a lot of web development with heavily interactive content (particularly advertising) is driven by graphic designers and multimedia people rather than programmers, giving Macromedia an advantage over Sun.

Now, if only there could be a ban on developing complete sites in Flash.

Partition Magic won’t merge

So, how did I go with Partition Magic?

Eventually got there. At first I tried to merge my full D: partition with my adjacent empty E:. It didn’t want to do it, kept giving me an error message:

Partition Magic error

I freed up 125Mb or so on D: drive, then tried again. Same error. Was I seeing things? It was saying 121Mb or so, wasn’t it? Not 1.2Gb? I freed up more, eventually having some 450Mb free. Still no go. Frustration.

So instead I deleted the empty E: partition and then resized D:. That worked a treat, but I’m still not clear why merging didn’t work.

I also converted the FAT C: to NTFS while I was mucking about. That worked flawlessly.

In conclusion, PM seems pretty good, but some doubt (at least for me) about merging partitions.

The Most Basic Guide Available To Downloading Television Shows With Bit Torrent

A little while ago Jennifer de-lurked to ask about downloading television shows so she wouldn’t be at the mercy of our networks.

What follows is a completely non-exhaustive, unofficial, as basic as you can get guide to getting what you want on your telly, when you want it.

What You need

First off you need a broadband connection.

You can do this on dial up but when you are dealing with files about 350MB you won’t be answering the phone for a very long time. If you don’t have a broadband connection yet go to Netspace and tell them ‘caffeine’ sent you.

A Bit Torrent client.

BitTorrent is what makes this whole thing possible. I’m not going to explain how in detail, you can get that from the BitTorrent Introduction page. Put simply you get bits of the file from different people and in turn you share the bits you already have with other people. You can see that the more people accessing file, the more choice of downloaders you have and the faster it should go for everyone.

Bit Torrent is free. Don’t pay for it. You can use the original BitTorrent client from www.bittorrent.com but this tends to confuse people ’cause nothing appears to be installed after you install it. There are other clients around – Bit Comet for Windows and even Mac users (Hi Rob and Rob) can get in on the action with the Java based Azureus.

Torrent files for each episode.

The shows are downloaded via torrent files. These tell your client where to start looking and how to share your download. These torrent files are listed on web sites and here Google is, as always, your best friend. Googling ‘torrent desperate housewives‘ should return you a list of pages with torrent files for Desperate Housewives.

What I Use

So what do I use? I use Bit Comet as my torrent client and do most of my searching on www.isohunt.com to search for shows or go straight to www.tv-swarm.com or www.tvtorrents.tv and search from there.

How I Do It

This is the simple part. Once you’ve installed your client and found the show you’re looking for you click on the torrent file link. Your client should start up and then, after a few seconds, start downloading and sharing at the same time. It’s that simple.

Things I’ve Found

The show names. I always go for those marked HDTV_LOL – these are great qualities .avi files, wide-screen and around 350MB per episode (42 minutes of show time). I still have no idea what the LOL bit means but they always work for me. One I downloaded had some obscure sound format that needed a codec, which all became too difficult so I downloaded a different file. I think most are encoded with mp3 so Windows Media Player plays them no problems.

Those marked HDHR are High Resolution files and look stunning – but are twice the size and hence take twice as long to download.

Some are encoded with surround sound too, just look at the file name and it should be obvious which ones these are.

Variations in download time
This is the killer. Some files have taken 14 hours to download, and just last night one took only 4 hours. The time taken depends upon many factors from how many peers (those holding the file to download) to net traffic, to which way the wind is blowing. I’ve found it really helps to download new episodes the day after they are aired, when demand is greatest. Older episodes – even those a month or so old – can take significantly longer to retrieve.

As for old old shows, such as the first season of Carnivale that screened in 2003 in America yet is only getting it’s first airing here, you can almost forget it.

Watermarks
Most shows ripped (or capped) from television will have the network logo watermarked on it. Ads are always removed and sometimes end credits can be missing too.

Sharing
Don’t leach. Make sure you keep the torrent available for as long as you can – remember there are others like you probably wanting the same episode and the longer you keep it open, the more people can share and the better (quicker) it is for everyone. BitTorrent depends upon many people sharing the same file.

And that’s pretty much it.

In summary :

  • Get a bit torrent client
  • Find a list of torrent files
  • Download or click on the torrent you want
  • Open this file, or it should open automatically
  • Download, share and enjoy

Oh yeah, you may want to invest in a DVD burner for your PC so you can watch them on your television.

This is how to write a job ad

*************** Job 2 ***************

Title: IVR Developer (Visual C++ and SQL)
Location: Melbourne
Advertiser: eQuus IT Resources
Date Posted: 11-01-2005
Description: IVR Developer with Visual C++ and SQL development experience required to earn $70-$100K with fabulous company in futuristic undersea laboratory*.
Get the full details of this job, here :
http://it.seek.com.au/jobmail.asp?jobid=4478466
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iPod Shuffle

Not the mini-mini-iPod, oh no. And not the iPod Lite. Or the Tiny iPod. No, it’s the iPod shuffle, a new model with just 512Mb (A$149) or 1Gb (A$229) of space.

Though I notice Apple’s AU web masters appear to have just copy/pasted from their US site… the Alt text for the advert proclaims “from $99” … anybody going to try and take them up on that?

Apple, Mini Wow

Apple have released a great machine that shows their keen grasp of marketing and user based technology – the Mac mini. I can see myself getting a base model version to use as my iPod machine and for the Mac’s wonderful media applications while keeping my PC as my work station. It’s a fantastic idea Apple, well done.