Three-year-old dies from obesity

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…

Viruses Galore

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. :-(

CDDB Dump Updated

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!

DMOZ Editor

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!

Another Birthday

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.

IP Banned!

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.

Google Contest — Can you get top ranking for Nigritude Ultramarine?

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