This story at the BBC is really scary, but not too surprising. Three-year-old dies from obesity.
Dr Sheila McKenzie, a consultant paediatrician at the Royal London, told the Health Select Committee: “In the past two years one child at the age of three has died of heart failure secondary to extreme obesity.”
The shocking case was highlighted in a scathing report on obesity by MPs which says too little has been done to tackle the epidemic.
It was only a matter of time…
Yay! It’s finally here! WordPress 1.2 is finally out in the wild. Matt and the guys have done a great job on this. There are a huge number of new features. Go get it while it’s hot!
I’m not sure what today’s new virus is, but this evening I have returned to one of my email boxes to find I have 5144 unread emails for a total of 340MB! There seems to be a new virus emailing 64, 65, or 67KB emails to various made-up addresses at zed1.com. The problem is that it mails 25 copies of each one! As is normal for these things the from address is also faked, some of which are made-up zed1.com addresses too. So then I get 25 rejection messages from various other people who have received it!
This is probably the first time I have actually felt a little cross about these viruses. I normally don’t bother. I never get infected — I use Mozilla and have never yet executed an attachment received in an email; and though I get, on average, 5 to 10 pieces of spam or viruses or virus rejection notices every 10 minutes (my email client poll time), 24 hours a day, Mozilla’s spam filter takes care of most of them, and I teach it about the rest.
Todays is a pain for a change because Mozilla is far too slow at handling large mail folders. 🙁
I’ve just updated my CDDB dump page. That page is quite literally a dump of the CDDB files created by my favourite CD player (Notify CD Player). This little player sits in the taskbar and plays CD’s. Quite simple like most of them. The nifty thing about this one I like so much is that it puts the details of the currently playing song in the title bar of whichever window has focus. I love that! It gets it’s details from freedb.org and stores the data locally so it doesn’t need to go to the network again. This local data is the source of my CDDB dump page. A quick grep and a couple of regex search and replaces in epsilon and nearly 700 files are converted to an unordered list.
After sorting and de-duplicating (again in Epsilon), the list is down to about 628 CDs . There are probably another 10 or so duplicates in there and 15 or so that I don’t actually own but have borrowed at some point. Plus I have CDs which are not in the list (I can see at several to my left now!). If you want to see what they look like here is a photo of the collection I took a couple of months ago. It has grown since then!
W00t! I have been accepted as an editor on the Open Directory Project (ODP) (AKA DMOZ).
My category is Arts: Music: Styles: Dance: Radio and I have already started editing: Clearing out a couple of dead links and approving some recommended ones.
I am particularly pleased with this news: I remember DMOZ starting up as a project way back when Netscape acquired it and thinking I really should get involved… Here I am 5 plus years later and I finally found the inspiration and motivation to actually do it!
I’m another year older today! Happy birthday to me. 🙂
Thank you to everyone who gave me cards, pressies, or just good wishes. Thanks to everyone who came round for tea and a big thanks to Jan for putting on a ‘good spread’ 🙂
I got some great things: Superbad The very best of Blaxploitation 70’s movie themes & funk soul classics. Can you dig it? I got Justified by Justin Timberlake. Yes I know! But I actually like lightweight R’n’B pop sometimes. I also got Bob Dylan – Unplugged DVD. I am really looking forward to watching that. I’ll have to watch it on my own though, as no-one I know likes Bob Dylan 🙁
I got various tokens, cash, and other pressies too.
I know when you get to my age birthdays are not as big an event as they used to be, but I really enjoyed myself today.
Poop! I’ve just followed a link to a slashdot article only to discover that ‘my’ IP has been banned!
Either your network or ip address has been banned from Slashdot
…due to script flooding that originated from your network or ip address — or this IP might have been used to post comments designed to break web browser rendering. Or you crawled us with a rude robot, especially one that doesn’t understand RFCs very well…
I know that NTL, my ISP, recently changed their transparent proxies so that they stopped giving out originating IP addresses. So a quick check, by pointing my browser’s proxy setting to another NTL proxy, had slashdot’s server give me the page. So I know that it is the transparent NTL proxy server that has been banned not me!
I’ll have to email NTL and see if they will contact slashdot.
Update: It’s seemed to be resolved now, without me getting round to contacting NTL. I guess there were a few people affected and someone else got in touch before me.
A bunch of SEO professionals and amateurs have set themselves a challenge: Get top ranking on Google for a nonsense phrase: Google Contest.
Things are already heating up. Just one of the forums discussing it has some lively conversation: Nigritude Ultramarine
Story from slashdot: How To Get Googled, By Hook Or By Crook
