universal-and-abcomie-scalabl

Universal and abcom.ie - Scalable Shilling

I post to a popular Irish bulletin board, Boards.ie. In recent months, like many high-profile forums, it has had a big problem with shilling of Universal Music products. Shilling is the act of pretending to be a customer, and giving a positive testimonial. In Universal's case, the shilling is paid. Article by a Boards admin on the subject here. So, giant company participating in dubious advertising tactic.

On the other end of the scale, we have abcom.ie (page rel="nofollow"ed, as I know some of you do worry about this sort of thing, even though in practice my blog has minimal influence). abcom.ie is a web design outfit who will provide frankly (in my opinion) pathetic four-page websites for the princely sum of 500euro. Now, someone on boards asked about web design. A poster posted back saying that he'd recommend abcom because they did such a good job of designing winedirect2u.com (guess what tag?). When someone posted that that was less than impressive for 500euro, he posted a little defence of it; this aroused my suspicions a bit. So, I had a look. The registrant info for that two pages is the same, the email addresses given on the pages are ian@something in both cases, and the telephone numbers given on the pages are the same. The poster in question had only four posts; one of the others was advertising a naturopath's site which, on further inspection, turns out to be another abcom creation. Naughty. User banned and posts deleted now, though :)

For more fun with boards scammers/shills, see here for the adventures of perfumeireland.com, a particularly disgusting example of the genre.

The thing is, many people are prepared to regard this sort of thing as harmless. It isn't. When someone recommends a product to me on the internet, I would hope that they are giving an honest recommendation and not lying about their connection to the company involved. There's nothing wrong with advertising, as long as it's not disguised as the opinions of real people. Hopefully, Universal in particular will find that this sort of thing damages their image more than it gains them sales. It is, after all, but one small step from email spam.

schols-over-and-dumped-ish

Schols over and Dumped-ish

Schols finally finished. Not sure how well I actually did; I greatly doubt I got them. Foolish to try in the first place really... Never mind... I have a few days without college; back on Monday.

And the guy I was kinda-sorta going out with these past couple of weeks seems to have given up on me by just cutting off contact. I can't blame him, to be honest, but I'm surprised and upset; I didn't really have any sign of it. I seem to drive people away...

lets-do-the-time-warp-again

Let's do the Time-Warp Again!

The clocks go forward one hour tonight, here. Just to annoy us, and confuse innocent video recorders. Helpfully, they do it at 1:00AM. Still, could be worse; apparently Iran will refrain from using Daylight Savings Time between, and only between, 2006 and 2009. Why? Who knows?

Also, from a UK peer: "Supposing some unfortunate lady was confined with twins and the first child was born 10 minutes before 3 o'clock British Summer Time. ... the time of birth of the two children would be reversed. ... Such an alteration might conceivably affect the property and titles in that House."

Indeed.

yahoo-transport-for-jabber

Yahoo Transport for Jabber

Jabber is a decentralised, open-source instant messaging system. I maintain a Jabber server for my college's Netsoc.

Now, Jabber can interconnect with various other messaging systems (it can also very neatly interconnect with other Jabber systems; Google Talk is an example). There are transports - programs which make a link - for MSN, AIM... There's also one for Yahoo instant messenger, but it's only available for jabberd1.4; we use version 2. Now, it is POSSIBLE, apparently, to run jabberd1.4 with the transport, itself interconnecting with the main jabberd2 server. Messy and unpleasant, though. It turns out that there's an alternative.

XMPPPY is a Jabber interface for Python, and it turns out that the CVS version (and only the CVS version) comes with a fully-functional, though completely undocumented, Yahoo transport. To use it, get the CVS following the instructions on the site, install XMPPPY (the version IN the CVS), and go into the yahoo-transport directory. There you will find a file called transport.ini; it contains the normal Jabber settings. Put in yours, and run yahoo.py, and you're away! You may also need to open port 5050 outgoing on your firewall.

argh-sick-again

Argh, sick again

I've spent this weekend moping round the place with some manner of bad cold. Yuk. Hopefully it'll go away before my next exam.

more-phonexpo

More phonexpo

Remember this?

The person in question was good enough to post a lovely link to his new service, www.onlineunlocking.net. Since all links posted in comments automatically have a rel="nofollow" (which stops search engines treating them as links for page ranking purposes) added to them, this would seem to be of limited use. The service itself is interesting; he sells unlocking codes for mobile phones. Since he's making money out of it and the server's in the US, he would seem to be on very thin ice with regards to the DMCA, which bans circumventing such measures.

Anyway, I'll do my customary stalk I do when people irritate me with comments. :) The message was posted, rather bizarrely, through an NTL proxy in Luton (NTL does transparent proxying), of all places. Whether he's using the Luton proxy instead of the Dublin one (which would of course be faster) through incompetence, because of some odd issue on NTL's side, or as a feeble attempt at indirection, I don't know.

He got here through a listing in an aggregator. He then proceeded to have a good poke about, and posted those two comments. (One is a smilie, the other is a link to the aforementioned site). Rather oddly in this day and age, he uses Internet Explorer.

Oh, he seems to be in some way associated with the blatant boards.ie ripoff boardsie.com (guess what rel tag?).

His history on boards really is great fun, if you're ever bored. :) He's one of the famous problem people, and 'phonexpo' is one of the very few non-naughty banned words (the only other one I can think of offhand is 'boardsie.com'.

Interestingly, the CRO's record for his business number says it was dissolved in 2000. How odd.

scientology-tastic

Scientology-tastic!

The makers of South Park are standing up to famed crazy cult The Church of Scientology. (Some vague dispute involving an episode containing Scientologist Tom Cruise. Many celebrities are members of crazy cults, for some reason). Good for them! Scientology tends to attempt to walk all over high-profile critics. Probably not these ones, though. :)

schols-snow-and-spammer

Schols, snow, and spammer

Schols exam actually went okay in the end, I think.

It was snowing today, which was a novelty.

Some filthy spammer cretin (http://www.phonexpo.net/ (rel=nofollow-ed, obviously), George Murray/Patrick Murphy ) decided to revisit boards.ie, after a bit of a hiatus. Lovely. These people make me sick. (Oh, he also threatens people on boards.ie, and has little temper-tantrums when things don't go his way. Awh. Nice example here)

argh-schols

Argh! Schols!

I've got my first exam tomorrow. I'm really not sure why I'm doing these; I'm going to do horribly badly. I felt like I had something to prove at the time; for once I wanted to do well in something. I'm horribly aware that I've basically made a mess of college (like I made a mess of secondary school, and indeed like I made a mess of my life in general.) This probably wasn't the thing to choose; I hate exams.

So, no relief from my deep-seated inadequacies.

It's too late to pull out now, which is probably just as well. If I'd been sensible, though, I'd have three weeks off now!

i-love-the-register

I love The Register

Ariane 5 launches; doesn't explode.

oooo-er

Oooo-er

The load of the Bytemark machine my UML system sits on is going through the roof. Just backed up stuff as a precautionary measure; very high load had preceded hard disk failure on other of their machines before...

blog-awards-thingy-bebo-and-s

Blog Awards Thingy, Bebo and Schols

Remember I mentioned I was nominated, by loons unknown, for the Irish Blog Awards thing, a while back? Now, I didn't make the shortlist in my category, as expected. Anyway, the actual awards are/were on tonight. I considered going, but decided against it in the end; I find such things quite intimidating, and I doubt I'd enjoy myself very much. And in any case I don't have any sensible clothes right now. Good luck to anyone involved, tho!

Now, Bebo. Bebo is one of these online community things. It's great fun. You can make quizzes to see if your friends know anything about you. It's also a design nightmare. The most recent profile you've visited is stored in a cookie, and lots of things are based on that. So, if you click on someone in someone else's friends list, think the better of it and try to go to the next page of the list, you'll get the second person's list. How... sensible. Strange, really; good idea, but the design is really AMAZINGLY bad. Also one of these closed systems, no outgoing links. Balkanisation of the web and all that. For anyone interested, this is me.

And Schol exams next week. Not sure how well I'm going to do. Not even sure why I'm doing them, to be honest. I sort of feel inadequate about not getting them last year, though. Which I realise isn't terribly rational, but I need something to distract me from my all-around mediocrity.

busy-busy-nasa

Busy, Busy NASA

There seems to be liquid water close to the surface of one of Saturn's moons, and they've managed to get an orbiter to Mars without losing it!

not-sure-how-i-should-feel-ab

Not sure how I should feel about this...

I just heard, from a pseudo-reliable source (I wasn't there myself, unfortunately) that the guy I was going out with a while back, who I really liked, and who dumped me by email, was with a guy who is, even by my own low standards, really not very good-looking, and also not very nice. Hmm. I suppose it's a good thing, in a way; he obviously wasn't just dumping me 'cause I was ugly and/or unpleasant. I would have thought he could do a bit better, tho.

I really hope neither of them see this :)

power-generation-in-the-comfo

Power generation in the comfort of one's own home!

The idea of people using wind turbines and solar panels at home to supplement their power usage is growing in popularity. Not a bad idea in itself. The British energy minister, among others, is installing one. More worryingly, however, plans are afoot to make it possible for householders to sell power back to the Grid at a fair price. Again, on the face of it, doesn't sound like a horrible idea. And as long as people doing so stick to clean energy sources, it won't be. But what happens when people, particularly people in remote areas, start to figure out that they can make a bit of money by, say, running a steam boiler off of cheap coal or similar? It will undoubtedly become very difficult to regulate; when generation is confined to large plants those plants can at least be policed. It is also a stopgap measure which will lead people away from the real issue - that we need new sources of sustainable power.

pseudo-science

Pseudo-Science

Seen in the paper, in an article about a chartered chemist who has become a "Reiki" (crazy alternative medicine thing) practitioner: "She points out that quantum physics can explain vibrational healing practices such as Reiki". Er, okay, yes. It also compares this "therapy" to "other forms of vibrational energy" used in medicine; those would be ultrasound, radiation and laser. I don't really think newspapers should be allowed use words like 'quantum'.

back-from-waterford

Back From Waterford

Back from Waterford now. Was fun. Not really much to say right now. Feeling stressed. Going to gym.

waterford

Waterford

I depart for Waterford in a matter of hours. Should be interesting; I've never been there before. Will be offline, then, till Sunday :) Argh! In less than 12 hours, I have to give a talk on USI's horrible procedural motion system. Yuk.

the-merchant-of-nuremburg

The Merchant of Nuremburg?

It's normal for children going through school to learn a play or two of Shakespeare's. My little brother's doing The Merchant of Venice.

Now, that play comes across, on first glance, as rather anti-Semitic; that's not really surprising, as it was written in an England where Jewish people were banned, and would be until the time of Oliver Cromwell. I'm not interested, here, in the argument over whether the play itself is actually anti-Semetic. What I'm interested in is that we are handing this superficially anti-Semetic play to children who may never have encountered a Jewish person (Ireland has a very low Jewish population) and who may not even really know what a Jewish person is.

Anyway, as I was saying, I read my little brother's essay today. They were given the task of writing a newspaper article contemporary to the play, describing the events. Now, as far as I know, my brother is not taken to marching around the place wearing silly clothes and shouting about white supremacy. And yet, the piece he produced would fit into the BNP's newsletters quite nicely.

So, should this particular play be taught at all? Should it be taught, prefaced with a warning, and a bit of context? It wouldn't be hard to describe the situation with respect to anti-Semitism in Europe in the time it was set. One thing I'm fairly certain of is that it shouldn't be taught as it is.

blogs

Blogs

Two of my friends have just started blogs.
Mark
Ronan

Besides the eccentric software used (iWeb for Mark, Google Pages for Ronan), I am worried that I am falling behind in the pretence and grammatical craziness stakes, blogwise.

Both are quite fun (the blogs, not the people).

stressy-stressy-stress

Stressy Stressy Stress

Hmm, currently rather stressed about Schols, among other things. I may end up getting schols, and failing third year, at the rate I'm going. Slowly going mad, in fact.

Going to Waterford at the weekend, for USI LGBT conference. Should be my last USI thing. Could really do without it at the moment...

As it's lent as of the last hour or so, I'm going to make a vague attempt at giving up on chocolate and other Naughty Foodstuffs. I want to be a bit skinnier. Wish I believed in this God person, really; an eternity in hell would be a good incentive. Of course, if he/she turns out to exist, I'm going there anyway :)

Also, was looking at Facebook, a college community website thingy. It's really rather awful. I spent most of the time resenting pretty people of my acquaintance, something I am apt to do due to my own unprettiness. Actually, new rule. From now on, you must be at least this ugly to read this blog. That way, I won't have to resent you (Probably. I know a few very ugly people going out with hot people. They get extra resentment). It's hard work, you know :)

I HATE PHP. Please, oh please, will someone ban it?

I was reading a book on electrical engineering today, for schols. It contained, in its forward, the amazing statement that as of 1970, US electrical engineers are adopting SI units. This begs the question of what they used before. Were nuclear power plant outputs measured in horsepower?

I've mentioned this before, but Bright Young Things is really a very good film. The music at the start ("Sing Sing Sing") is particularly fun, and also features in a Nintendo 64 game involving drums. Have also been listening to things like "Just a Minute" off BBC's website. Also Saturday Night Fry. Great fun.

By the way, take all the stuff about resenting people above with a large pinch of salt. I'm not actually quite that bitter and insane. Yet.