The Correct Use Of The Apostrophe

One of my pet peeves is the misuse of apostrophes. The
Apostrophe Protection Society explains the proper use.

A funny thing happened on the way to the cockpit

I'm currently reading Air Babylon by Imogen Edwards-Jones and highly recommend it. The missus picked it up after watching Hotel Babylon on DVD (though you can also read the book).

Rather than have me waffle on, read this excellent review from The Guardian and see if it's something you'd like too.

The iPod Death Clock

Last time I checked, the The iPod Death Clock said my iPod would die today. Fortunately it hasn't, so I went back for a second opinion. Latest estimates say it'll croak on 24th November 2007. So come back then. :)

Slow down, all you multitaskers

CNET News.com reports on how you can't do two things at once.

This in particular resonated with me:

"In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites."

The Effect Of The Time Change

Here's another interesting part of my 6am project.

Last night we moved into British Summer Time and the clocks went forward an hour. That means that today's 6am photo looks like yesterday at 5am, and today's 7am looks like yesterday at 6am. This is best reflected in the 6am gallery.

Compare the 6am photo from the 24th March with the one from 25th March.

It's dark at 6am and light again by 7am. There's not many people around that early so why not change the clocks and keep it dark till later?

Positive Thinking

After having dug to a depth of 1000 metres last year, Scottish scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 1000 years and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 1000 years ago.

Not to be outdone by the Scots, in the weeks that followed, English scientists dug to a depth of 2000 metres and shortly after headlines in the UK newspapers read: "English archaeologists have found traces of 2000 year old fibre-optic cable and have concluded that their ancestors already had an advanced high-tech digital communications network a thousand years earlier than the Scots."

One week later, Irish newspapers reported the following: "After digging as deep as 5000 metres in a County Mayo bog, Irish scientists have found absolutely nothing. They, therefore, have concluded that 5000 years ago, Ireland's inhabitants were already using wireless technology."

Animator vs. Animation

Alan Becker has created a couple of cool stick figure animations. Start with Animator vs. Animation and then have a look at Animator vs. Animation II.

Broken Link Checkers

As previously mentioned, I'm looking for an online program that will check my site for broken links, both internally and externally. I've tried a couple now but not got the reports I wanted.

The first site I tried was the W3C Link Checker. Who better to check my site than the masters of the web? The options default to checking a single page, but there's an option to specify recursion, and how deep. It also tells you about redirects (both '401 permanent' and '402 temporary' redirects). Unfortunately it's pretty academic as there's a hard limit of 150 pages checked. It blew most of those checking all the photos in my gallery.


The dead links checker seemed to be what I was looking for. It has a maximum execution time of 45 minutes, which seemed to be enough for this site. Unfortunately, to spider entire sites in that time the response timeout for requests is rather short. Their disclaimer:

The dead link checker can report as a broken link any address if the time to get any response is higher than a fixed limit. The timeout is deliberately short to make a faster analysis. Repeat the analysis if you have any doubt.

The very first link on my site that it found and followed came back as not found:

http://surferbill.com/ 258 links found

Link towards http://www.dead-links.com/ found!.
Maximum documents to crawl in host surferbill.com: 15000

1 visited - 94 in the host - 112 out
http://surferbill.com/gallery/6am 404 Not Found

The occasional false positive might be OK, but this short timeout generated enough 'missing' links that weren't, that going through the report was still too time-consuming.

There's also no way to exclude a single site, so it also tried to follow all the Blogger links built into my posts. Blogger doesn't like being spidered so blocks HEAD requests, resulting in '400 Bad Request' errors. It also (logically) followed the links to delete my posts, and even reported some as 404 Not Found...

http://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=8541327&postID=111900168983833811 400 Bad Request

http://www2.blogger.com/delete-comment.g?blogID=8541327&postID=112895650015539451 405 Method Not Allowed


http://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=8541327&postID=111841173066060753 400 Bad Request

http://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=8541327&postID=113801380150834838 400 Bad Request

http://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=8541327&postID=113691168261357715 404 Not Found

Frustrating. Anyway, I'm still on the look-out for a FREE, reliable, site-wide, (preferably online) broken link checker that will follow internal links recursively and direct external links, so let me know what you recommend. If I don't find anything online I might be tempted to install something that'll do the job.

What Are You Doing?

Twitter exists to answer one question - What are you doing?

You setup an account and log in, then describe what you're up to in 140 characters or less. Update your current activities via the website, SMS or instant message. Add your friends and be kept abreast of what they are up to by 'following' them. Their updates can be sent to you via text message, or simply viewed on the home page.

Set your sleep time and you won't be disturbed by updates through the night either. And if you're the forgetful type, set the auto-nudge feature to be reminded by SMS if you haven't updated today.

Twitter: The Next Big Thing In Blogging(tm), a colossal waste of time, or a voyeuristic stalker's paradise?

All of the above...

Free Online Broken Link Checker

Here's a dead links checker I'm running over my site today, I'll let you know if it's any good here.

Lost Beer from Dharma

Thanks to the kind folks at Insanely Great Tees I spent tonight drinking Dharma beer. :)

The mornings are getting lighter

When I started my 6am project one of the things I expected the photos to show was how the mornings become lighter. Right now the 7am gallery shows just this.

Compare the photo from the 1st February with the one from 1st March.

What a difference a month makes.

Big Brother State

Big Brother State is an animated short by David Scharf about the surveillance society that is building up around us.

Everything you need to know about IPv6

Arstechnica has an article telling you everything you need to know about IPv6. One quote stood out for me:

The total number of possible [IPv6] addresses that this gives us:

340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456

To put this into perspective: there are currently 130 million people born each year. If this number of births remains the same until the sun goes dark in 5 billion years, and all of these people live to be 72 years old, they can all have 53 times the address space of the IPv4 Internet for every second of their lives. Let nobody accuse the IETF of being frugal this time around.

Erm... Wow.

The 25 Most Common Mistakes in Email Security

Pass this link on to your friends and relatives to educate them about the 25 most common mistakes in email security.

iPods Take Over The World

I've just seen a mother and daughter walking down the street together. Daughter was on the left, listening to her iPod with just her left earbud. Mother was on the right, with her iPod in just her right ear. Neither were talking to each other.

Is it just me, or does this bring antisocialism to a whole new level?