Well, the trip was a great success – we had a lovely time and, most importantly, she said YES!

Here’s a couple of photos – more on Flickr.

• BBC: Cheap laptops provoke Mac mayhem
• Met chief tried to stop shooting inquiry
• Guardian Online: Apple hack
• Guardian Online: Back to the fold
• PC World: Reading (and Writing) Blogs

• The Register: Cockney suits abuse f**king email
• Guardian Online: Utter Rubbish
• Joho the Blog: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Infocom Game
• Business2Blog: Outsourcing Blogs (and Splogs) to China
• Guardian Football: Scholes makes it easier for Eriksson

Great collection of hints and tips for Gmail users here, as linked to yesterday by John Naughton.

As reported in The Guardian: I’ve never read a book, says Posh.

I would have thought that should anyone have actually wasted their time considering this issue, they would have assumed that was the case anyway?

Baby, Scary, Ginger, Sporty and Bookish probably wouldn’t have had quite the same ring to it. Despite penning a 528-page autobiography charting her rise to the top, Victoria Beckham has admitted that she has never read a book in her life.

The revelation emerged in an interview with the Spanish magazine Chic. Although the issue in question has yet to the hit the shelves, details were leaked to the Spanish press over the weekend.

“I haven’t read a book in my life,” Beckham confesses. “I don’t have the time.” However, the 31-year-old former Spice Girl does shrug off suggestions that she is a philistine. “I prefer listening to music, although I do love fashion magazines.”

She also admits that having given birth to three boys – Brooklyn, six, Romeo, two, and six-month-old Cruz – she would like a daughter and could imagine “painting her nails, putting on make-up and choosing clothes” with her. Beckham also said she was not jealous about the attention paid by other women to her husband.

“I know what other women think and I say to myself ‘He is very good looking, he dresses very well, he is great with children and he has an enormous heart’. I am not jealous and when people look at him, I think it’s because he’s great.”

Her library-dodging confessions may come as a surprise to fans impressed with the literary style of her autobiography, Learning to Fly.

In the book, she recorded how seeing the film Fame encouraged her to seek stardom. According to the blurb, “A line from the theme song stayed with her – ‘I’m gonna live for ever, I’m gonna learn how to fly’. With this amazing book she gives us the chance to fly alongside her on her journey from lonely teenager to international star…”

Will start having a post with various links I have come across which don’t necessarily need any further comment from me. Rather than have a link per post, I will save them up during the day and then post when I am finished. There won’t necessarily be a post like this every day, but they will provide a fairful useful (for me) guide to what I’ve been reading about.

Without further ado, here’s today’s links:

• BBC: How the Wikipedia principle can transform the information age
• BBC: Web trade threat to rare species
• Palimpsest: Metro: A Literary Whodunnit
• Guardian Online: Life in the fast lane
• Guardian Online: Return of the hi-tec hunger
• Guardian Books: Mystery man

The Blogger Buzz blog announces a new tool for Blogger – an extension for MS Word that allows you to write and post entries direct from the word processor. Cool. It’s been imaginatively called Blogger for Word.

Saw this on Slashdot:

An article over at BoingBoing discusses what appears to be a viral marketing ploy appearing in a Wikipedia entry. Quote: “Someone has apparently abused collaborative reference site Wikipedia in a viral marketing campaign for a BBC online alternate reality game.

The BoingBoing article states:

…In fairness, it is also possible for any individual unaffiliated with the BBC (or an employee acting without network approval) to create a Wikipedia entry on their own. Comments on the Wikipedia “talk” page for this entry, however, suggest that a related entry for a fictional band called “Boy*d Upp” were added from someone operating inside the BBC’s network.

So, some questions: is a person (or persons) acting on behalf of the BBC responsible? What will happen to the entry, if it is indeed a bogus publicity entry? How often does this sort of thing happen?

One thing I do know: Wikipedia tends to be hastily self-correcting. Bogus or erroneous information of any kind doesn’t tend to last long there.

Further updates state that:

The corresponding discussion page now includes mea culpas from persons responsible for two of the bogus entries. One of them, “Jon_Hawk,” identifies himself as someone unaffiliated with the BBC who just digs the game.

Please do not use my edits to slander the BBC. If this were part of a viral campaign, the grammar of the article would almost certainly be better. I suspect the article would have been created at the same time as the game started also. Jamie Kane was mentioned on several blogs on Friday – did not one of you consider it was created by someone who reads such things? I’m nothing more than a student. I’m sincerely apologetic for purposefully omitting the true nature of Jamie Kane.

But the other, “MattC,” identifies himself as a BBC employee:

I created the Boy*D_Upp page from inside the BBC network on Friday evening after stumbling across the Jamie Kane entry linked from the Pop Justice forums. My action was in no way part of an orchestrated marketing campaign on behalf of the Jamie Kane project team nor was it intended for my page to be attributed to the BBC, which has been implied. It was nothing more than common garden vandalism for which I am sorry.

I take two things from this. One: traditional media organisations need to be careful how they use the new methods wikis and blogs present to promote their own output, as credibility can be lost fast. Secondly: community sites such as these are very quick to spot spamming, marketing and suchlike, and are very quick to stamp down on it.

Over on Palimpsest we have had a couple of issues with authors falsely reviewing their own work. We have come to be pretty good at spotting this sort of thing, and once exposed, these people tend to disappear very quickly. Those who populate the ‘net are pretty savvy people, it would appear.

Just as I upgrade WordPress, another new version comes along!

Had a lovely trip to Ellesmere this afternoon for bike rides and a picnic. Took a couple of photos – some of which are over on my Flickr page.

 

My blogroll has always been accessed via BlogLines, though it has recently fallen behind since I started using FeedDemon. So, to get things updated quickly, I exported my FeedDemon list of blogs into an OPML file, which I then imported into Bloglines. And it works!

This afternoon, I ‘designed’ a quite frankly rubbish link icon for this blog, in the style of the little rectangles one sees on many blogs, including this one. Here it is:

The font is Jason Kottke’s Silkscreen, perfect for this kind of small scale work.

Just noticed from the phpBB site that version 2.0.17 has been released. Hopefully this will solve some of the security problems we have been having over on Palimpsest, where various web robots have been brining the site to a standstill, creating multiple database sessions as they plough through the site.

Nice profile of Tim Berners-Lee, ‘inventor’ of the World Wide Web, in today’s Guardian:

There are, according to recent figures, more than 35 million web users in the UK today. More than 15 million British homes have internet connections and, thanks to faster broadband technologies, we are living in a radically different world from that which was predicted.
The world wide web has changed millions of lives in little more than a decade. For some it has changed fortunes as well: this week was the 10th anniversary of what is widely acknowledged as the beginning of the dotcom boom – when the web browser firm Netscape floated on the US stock market before ever turning a profit. That sparked a technology goldrush that has transformed modern communication. And while much of the boom was hyperbole, one rock solid fact remains: none of it would have happened if it was not for Tim Berners-Lee.

Sir Tim, named last year as the greatest living Briton, is rightly heralded as the godfather of the web. It was he who, as a physicist working in Switzerland, turned the internet from a disparate collection of academic and military computer systems into an international network. Without his input, arguably, the world would be a far duller place. The global village would still be under construction, technology would still be the preserve of an elite, and revolutionary companies such as Google, Amazon – and even easyJet – would not exist.

Links:

• Tim Berners-Lee page at w3.org
• Wikipedia entry

Went on a course today (in Bristol! 3 hours drive! Still, beautiful scenery) to have a look at Snap, a piece of survey (as in questionnaires) software.

It was a good course, and introduced all the various elements pretty quickly. A couple of things annoyed me though. Firstly, the fact that the tutor had to go through the rigmarole of informing us that when using the software, ‘variables’ mean ‘questions’ and ‘code labels’ (or something) mean answers. How ridiculous. Why not just call them questions and answers in the first place? I mean, I know what those names mean, but it doesn’t really matter.

Secondly, it’s the fact that it completely ignores loads of the keyboard shortcuts many of us take for granted. Fair enough, ctrl-c, -x and -v do as you would expect, but then these are almost written in stone. But what about inserting a page-break? Ctrl-enter, as in Word and about a billion other apps? No way. Ctrl-S it is, I think. Barmy. Does Ctrl-A select the whole document? Nope. It inserts a frigging column break! Gah. Delete a whole question? I would go for ctrl-backspace, but no (that doesn’t seem to do anything). Ctrl-Y does the trick. Eh? And while I am at it, while they use the standard Microsoft icon set for the various toolbars, why did they decide to use a green tick sign for save, rather than the little disk everyone else uses?

Overall, though, apart from these things, Snap seems fairly competent. Being survey software, it is effectively a stripped down database attached to a stripped down stats package. But it works.

This from BBC News:

A South Korean man has died after reportedly playing an online computer game for 50 hours with few breaks.

The 28-year-old man collapsed after playing the game Starcraft at an internet cafe in the city of Taegu, according to South Korean authorities.

The man had not slept properly, and had eaten very little during his marathon session, said police.

Online gaming in South Korea is extremely popular thanks to its fast and widespread broadband network.

Games are televised and professional players are treated, as well as paid, like sports stars.

Professional gamers there attract huge sums in sponsorship and can make more than $100,000 a year.

The man, identified by his family name, Lee, started playing Starcraft on 3 August. He only paused playing to go to the toilet and for short periods of sleep, said the police.

“We presume the cause of death was heart failure stemming from exhaustion,” a Taegu provincial police official told the Reuters news agency.

He was taken to hospital following his collapse, but died shortly after, according to the police. It is not known whether he suffered from any previous health conditions.

They added that he had recently been fired from his job because he kept missing work to play computer games.

Good grief.

This piece from today’s Guardian:

If you’re up to date, podcasting – an automated way of making audio files (such as radio shows) available to download – should be old hat. The latest spin-off from this technology, said Ellen Lee in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, is Godcasting.

According to Lee, Godcasts – “religious and spiritually themed podcasts” – have become “the most popular use of the new online technology since it debuted less than a year ago”. They “range from a daily dose of Scripture to a weekly dose of the Bible translated into Klingon”, continued Lee, who explained that “the vast majority are Christian-based, but they also include New Age, Jewish and Buddhist podcasts.”

is along rather similar lines to this entry on the BBC News site, last Wednesday:

Thousands of people have downloaded a Suffolk vicar’s sermons after he posted them on the internet last month.

The Rev Leonard Payne, Vicar of St Nicholas’ Church in Wrentham, said the response had been overwhelming after he posted them on the Apple iTune store.

“We were stunned. Within a short period of time, over 2,000 people had downloaded one of them,” he said.

At one point demand for the sermons was so great they had to change servers, Mr Payne said.

The church in the small rural parish first developed its own website where the sermons could be accessed.

It was set up so people who could not attend church could download and listen to sermons at home.

Have put in a new photo to the header – one from my trip to Cambridge, squashed, filtered and generally fiddled with. Still a little way to go, so forgive me for it looking, er, a bit shit at the moment…

Finally got a desk for the laptop to go on last weekend, which meant that I could get a mouse at long last too – after all, there isn’t much point in having on if the thing is on your knees all the time.

It has made using the PC a far, far more enjoyable experience. Touchpads are alright, but they do get pretty tiresome after a while… Eight quid well spent!

Am upgrading to version 1.5.1.3 of WordPress at the moment, so sorry if anyone encounters any bother…