Teh Webolg

Well it was all very passive wasn`t it. Had a look at some of the bloggy tools out there, but nothing really suited the glorious blue.. purple.. whatever colour it is.. of headstaggers. So I wrote a little comments thing. Of course that won`t make sense when the site moves to bright red with navy blue text.

Comments are open for 28 days from a message post, which should be loads of time to get 1 comment from somebody out there - probably plugging a porn site or something.

HTML is filtered out, so remember to hit that preview button to see what`s going to get posted. After that, stuff sits in a pending queue. As the site gets in excess of 3 million hits per day, I don`t want the site to be promoting spammed web sites as I sip champagne on the French Riviera.

Oh.. I meant 3 hits per day, not 3 million.. sipping tea in front of the telly. Ho hum.

On a less boring note, there`s some new Jim stuff on the way, and another rant brewing about that cunt Blair. Bet you can`t wait.

Yes indeed! Jim`s back to do battle with those music stealing bastards wot have nicked his songs for PROFIT.

Today, Monsieur Branning brings you:

Brain Damage - stolen by Pink Floyd
Just - stolen by Radiohead
When The Sun Goes Down - stolen by Arctic Monkeys
Vatican Broadside - stolen by Half Man Half Biscuit
There There - stolen by Radiohead
The Dark Is Rising - stolen by Mercury Rev
River Man - stolen by Nick Drake
Port of Amsterdam - stolen by Jacques Brel (and Scott Walker)
Personal Jesus - stolen by Depeche Mode (and Johnny Cash)
Oxygen - stolen by Willy Mason
Dream Brother - stolen by Jeff Buckley

Always remember - if you`re stealing JimSongs, he`ll come `round your house and punch your ticket, even if you call it a winky.

Here`s an e-mail I received via the web site:

"Hello there, we are writing to you to express our delight at the sweet shop thing.

First, you should know that we are pretty awesome. Secondly, one of us has met Gary Barlow. Thirdly, we just bought some clothes over the internet. We can't afford them. We used our overdrafts. Fourthly, there are a surpisrising amount of calories in bread so we try not to eat it but we do enjoy feeding our housemate with it. She lives under the stairs. And we are students with lots of spare time to enjoy your donkey porn. We suggest "dinkey porn" instead. Maybe involving gnomes? Or some tiny pixies or maybe scottish kelpies?

Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated."


How very queer indeed. Still, they`ve met Gary Barlow, so all is not lost. Anyone care to explain what a kelpie/kelpy is?

Haven`t posted a rant in the webolg in quite some time. Or posted anything for that matter. Life is busy. Busy little bee. Anyway, time for a small rant at google.

Always valuing the value of valuable bandwith, I run a squid proxy at home to cache the world in case it`s needed on another machine on the network. Anyway, tonight I was having a look at the squid log files and noticed something vaguely interesting after googling for Bruno Brookes. In the squid log was the following:

x.x.x.x - - [26/Jan/2006:21:39:43 +0000] "GET http://www.radiorewind.co.uk/bruno_brookes_page.htm HTTP/1.1" 200 39607 TCP_MISS:DIRECT

For the uninterested, or non-squidded, it`s essentially a timestamp, a URL, and a file size for something that`s been downloaded. But did you actually want to download the file, and whatever cookies may have come with it?

Odd, thought I, as I hadn`t visted this site, and furthermore had absolutely no interest in visiting this site (I`m sure it`s a great site and all). I tried googling for some other stuff, and yes, the top result of the google was almost always pre-fetched, unless the search term was a bit ambiguous. Almost always. Why almost always? Why not always? Why ever?

No offence, but if I happen to be searching for bikini babes, I don`t particularly want porn (if that happens to be #1 match) pumped down my ADSL. In fact, I don`t want anything pumped down my ADSL without asking for it. What`s next? It`d be interesting to see people dragged to court for goodness knows what only to say `sorry guv - Google made it download, guv`.

I`ve tested this in Firefox 1.5 and IE 6 (ew), and so far it`s only occurred within Firefox; looking at the HTML, prefetch links are embedded, and only within Firefox. Is this another way to artifically drive up revenue by supposedly increasing traffic to sites without users even knowing? It`s bloody shady if you ask me - god knows what people are downloading without knowing.

Google - grow up. It`s not big, and it`s not clever. Let people click on your search results through choice, not to keep your share price at a stupid level. The prefetch attribute was never intended for this purpose. It was intended to allow prefetching within a site you`ve already elected to view, and we (the users.. rarrrrrrr) shouldn`t have to cock around with browser settings to disable out-of-the-box functionality. We also shouldn`t have to go clearing out cookies every 20 minutes in case some nasty little git has put 1000 trackers in a page - or worse, for example a z3r0 d4y xpl01tz LOLOLOLOL for firefox. Also, despite what google reckons, "the destination page will load faster than before" is complete bollocks. It`s already been downloaded at standard download speed. If anything, it slows things down if you`re not interested in search result #1

edit: having chatted with a few people it seems this functionality has been used for ages.. doesn`t mean it`s right though! time to try for #1 google matches and whack a few megs of shite in the file for prefetching...

/nips off to disable prefetching in firefox


here`s google`s positive spin on their mis-use of the prefetch feature:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/features.html#prefetch

I`d link to the page, but it`s probably already been downloaded to your cache, and below a quite interesting bunch of posts on webmasterworld - you`ll need to click the URL once you get there

I totally forgot. I made a little site with sexy celebrity vital stats; it can be found here.

It includes (so far):
Bernie Clifton - sexy sexy Bernie
Bruno Brookes - beautiful Bruno and his melt in the mouth voice
Dustin Gee - devilishly handsome Bruno
Eddie Large - exceedingly good cakes looking Eddie
Lennie Bennett - luscious Lennie with his lips of steel
Paul Shane - perfect Paul, Master of Bovis
Russ Abbot - ravishing Russ, and his syrup of figs

You know you love them - just try not to make a mucky mess.

The galleries are as slow as a slow thing on slowing drugs. I`ll have to re-write the code, maybe this week if I get a chance. Apolomogies for that!

Update: I`ve rejigged some of the code, and as soon as a page is generated, it should now be cached properly, so things should be a whole bunch faster. Famous last words.

Jim Branning, star if the silver screen, television screen, and record industry has risen like a really annoyed phoenix from the flames of indigestion and re-issued some more songs that were shamelessly stolen:

California Dreaming - The Mamas and The Papas
Forever Autumn - Justin Hayward
Golden Touch - Razorlight
How Soon Is Now? - The Smiths
I Predict a Riot - Kaiser Chiefs
Jacqueline - Franz Ferdinand
Lazy Line Painter Jane - Belle and Sebastian
No Surprises - Radiohead
Somebody To Love - Queen
Stumble and Fall - Razorlight
We Will Rock You - Queen
Welcome To The Machine - Pink Floyd

and finally, Paranoid Android has been remastered in sstteerreeoo

That`s what you get for butchering a badly written script off the net.

I`ve updated the gallery and photo pages to make use of Smarty caching; the first time a page on a gallery gets whacked, a cache file will be created so pages will display a SQUILLION times faster. I`ve set these not to expire at the minute, but may have them expire after a couple of days.

Next up, I`ll split the cache files for the various bits of the site into separate directories as 9000000 cache files in one directory isn`t too clever. But that`s for another day.

YOU LOVE IT

I received an e-mail from valued Smiths contributor Omasz, and it appears that a few of his pictures aren`t displaying; I`ll look into this. It could simply be (is likely to be..) spazziness on my part.

Can I just ask that anyone who has contributed and can`t see their own images please get in touch via the contact form and I`ll get it sorted out as soon as possible; also if you`re browsing the Smiths pics and can`t see any of the images, also get in touch. Cheers, me dears.

Update: Joey Deacon here didn`t upload the files when the site was moved. Sorry about that!

From the TfL web site:

"A faster, easier 7 Day Travelcard on Oyster

From 25 September, 7 Day Travelcards will only be available on Transport for London's Oyster smartcard, meaning customers currently using paper tickets can benefit from faster and easier journeys."

First question - easier and faster than putting a ticket in the same machine? Having worked in London for a couple of years, I can confidently say that this is absolute rubbish; using an Oyster card is just as slow as the old fashioned paper ticket. So the question is - what benefit does moving 7 day travel cards to Oyster provide to anyone if not the commuter?

Well the commuter has two choices. Firstly, you can pick up your new 7 day Oyster card and register your details. Alternatively, you can pick up your new 7 day Oyster card and not register your details. So far so good - bit of a no-brainer. I picked up my non-registered card a couple of weeks ago. It comes complete with a tube map, some basic Oyster information, and no privacy statement. Yep, absolutely no mention of what`s stored on the card, what`s not, and what`s done with any of this information that may or not exist.

So TfL is doing away with single day tickets? Are they hell. Who`s going to pay 3 quid deposit on a ticket costing £1.80? So the same equipment will be in stations and used by a fraction of travellers. Good use of investment, and all in the name of easier journeys. Or data collection as we`re all forced to give away just that little bit more privacy.

The Oyster card works by way of contactless chip; wave it over the reader and it gets read. The tinfoil hat brigade of course is up in arms as there`s nothing to stop somebody with a boosted receiver pointing at these cards from a distance and reading whatever is on them. As soon as they`re tied to a name and address, what`s to stop those send to protect us (........) from hiding receivers in bus seats, telephone boxes, and god knows what in order to track movements? It might seem far-fetched, but let`s not let the possibility take hold. Those who say they have nothing to hide may as well leave their doors open, do away with envelopes for mail, and hook their phones up to loud speakers. What do I have to hide? Going about my boring life, that`s what. It`s nobody`s business. For once I fully agree with the tinfoil folks.

Think about it for a second. How many people are now being forced to link up to the TfL database who wouldn`t have previously? A lot of people. Have a look at the Transport for London privacy policy. Blah blah marketing blah blah. Oh look! Disclose data for the purposes of crime prevention and detection. Yes folks, your journey from Camden Town to Turnham Green will be disclosed to the police just in case they might want somebody to arrest (or shoot in the head). God help you if you`re in the wrong place at the wrong time and your details are picked up. This is a country where innocent commuters on buses have their photos plastered across newspapers because they happened to be on a bus maybe at the time an incident took place. Nothing to hide.

Here`s my solution. Pay the £3 deposit for a non-registered card. Should you need to make refund claims (and let`s face it, I can`t be the only one claiming a minimum of 4 journeys a week) put in your form online, and hand back your card at the end of your 7 days. Get your 3 quid refund, and then ask for another card. Yes, it`s going to be a pain in the arse, but what else is there? I`m aiming for 10 cards by Christmas. Firstly it`ll help ensure commuters have some form of privacy, and secondly it should skew the data collected.

Ask yourself why no privacy information was provided with the card.

I`ll keep you posted. I`ll be exchanging my card on Monday.