Some writing tips

I’ve spent the past 2 weeks on and off reading ‘Bugs in Writing’ and have definitely learned about some mistakes to avoid in writing. In order to fix these mistakes, it is best to do a lot of your own writing so you can find them and eliminate them. I will try to write a brief note about some common mistakes here. I haven’t asked the author for permission, so I will try to do it here in a very general and concise manner.

#1. Avoid using passive voice. Passive voice just means that when you say something about the world or some event that happened, make sure you identify ‘who or what’ was involved. The ‘who or what’ is commonly referred to as an agent.

For example,

Wrong:
The tea was made.
The program was written.
The computer was dropped.

Correct:
Mark made the tea.
Jane wrote this computer program.
Christopher dropped the computer.

#2. Speak directly to your reader. Never address your audience as the reader or refer to yourself as the author. You should speak directly to your reader. You should refer to her as you. If you are the sole author of a book, use I and if you have co-authors, use we. In addition, avoid using one, as in One should realize … or One has written.

#3. So, So that and Such that. Just remember the following:

So means therefore
So that means in order that
Such that means in such a way that

#4. Two or more. Use the terms between, each other, either, and a couple to refer to precisely two entities; and you should use among, one another, any one of, and several to refer to more than two entities.

I will add some more tips later on, but probably not many. The problem is that I haven’t gotten permission from the author and several of the tips have examples that are best quoted verbatim from the book.

Been too long …

I know I haven’t updated this blog for a while … in fact I frequently abandon it for a few months while I carry on with life’s struggles. Keeping up with my job, finding time to spend with my beautiful wife, all the while attempting to keep current with the fast pace of technology growth.

Starting today, I will try and change that. You see, in order to motivate myself to keep this blog updated I have decided to set myself a goal and complete it. I will keep updating this blog not only with my progress, but will also write about what I have learned as I go along.

So my first goal will be ‘to improve my writing skills’. I have enjoyed writing stuff for a long time now and friends have occasionally told me that ‘you could be a really good writer’. Well I’ve finally decided I should give it a shot.

To be honest, I’ve never been good at grammar, and people find that hard to believe. I’ve simply developed a good ear for what ’sounds right’ based on my perusal of several newspapers, magazines, novels and books over the years. Learning a lot of vocabulary while preparing for my SATs and reading ‘lots’ has really helped.

The first book I’m going to try and read and understand is going to be Bugs in Writing, which I bought several years ago, but never got around to reading. It is written mainly for people who come from a scientific or technical background and hence is perfectly suited for someone like me. Each chapter aims to analyse and fix a single ‘problem’ and you can read each chapter in whatever order you like.

With that, I bid you farewell. I believe my next post is going to be about ‘passive/active voice’. Exciting times indeed

Links for June 3, 2007

Fedora 7 is released!: I really liked the last Fedora release, but I believe it was slightly plagued by problems with some of it’s package management utilities. I have already installed this release and am quite impressed. Wireless now works with WPA out of the box and their new re-spinning feature is something I will try out someday.

XML Parser benchmarks: I have always had my own suspicions of which XML parser model would be faster (Sax or StaX), but I’m glad to see this benchmark done by the O’Reilly folks.

Fear and loathing at Cupertino: Jeremy Allison’s terrible experience while trying to prepare a talk for his Apple WWDC presentation. Jeremy works on Samba, along with Tridge, who they all call “the smartest man in Australia” Jeremy works at Google now. Smart man.

Switzerland Trip

We have just come back from a brilliant trip to Switzerland! The weather was awesome throughout our trip. We spent most of the time in Lucerne, where we stayed at the Hotel Drei Koenig. On our first day we decided to wander around Lucerne’s Old Town and see as much of it as possible. We ended up quite dreadfully tired and in the evening we just went back to the hotel and simply crashed.

We went on a trip to Mount Titlis the next day. Mount Titlis is one of the highest mountains in Switzerland, at 10,000 feet. I must admit to feeling quite terrified at that height. I was feeling quite disorientated.

The next day we made a long hiking trip up Mount Rigi-Kulm. To get to the start of the hiking point, you have to take a cruise along the river, then a trip up the mountains by train, before you get to your starting point. This is the day of our trip which I think we enjoyed the most.

We spent the rest of the trip in and around Lucerne and on the last day we made a day trip to Zurich. This allowed us to catch our flight straight from Zurich Airport back to London. All in all, a wonderful and highly recommended to anyone interested

Passed my driving test!

Wow, I finally passed my driving test about after 3 or 4 tries! It is quite difficult to pass in this country, they can fail you for very simple mistakes like forgetting to turn your indicators off when stopping or taking off.

In any case, I’m glad I finally passed, now I need to learn about cars and what to buy, etc. I’ve just never been into cars, but I feel I might become an avid car enthusiast. I do like to tinker with technical things, the more geeky the better

GLLUG Meeting

I helped out yesterday at the Greater London Linux Group’s meeting, held at my old alma mater, the University of Westminster in New Cavendish street. It was a blast going back after so many years, I met one of my best teachers, Sean Tohill who always had an open mind and a keen intellect. The whole event was organised by Simon Morris.
A lot more people than we had anticipated turned up for this meet! There were easily more than 100 people that showed up. Simon had installed SLED 10 on several desktops there and I got Debian running VLC on a big projector screen, playing a movie in a continuous loop.

A few people, including me, volunteered to give short presentations about certain aspects of SLED, and I was giving a short talk and demo of XGL under SLED. I demoed it to about 20 people and they were all quite impressed with it. Along they way I managed to help out several people with their linux problems.

I absolutely loved this meetup and I hope I can attend many more in the future. There are more details and pictures here.

Windows XP on a Mac!

The motherboard on my server died 2 weeks ago and it’s taken me this long to find a replacement and get the server up and running again. A benefit of changing the motherboard is that now the server is even more quieter than before! It’s all because I took more time to isolate the noisier case fans and to re-install them.

So I haven’t been able to blog for 2 weeks and *so* many things have happened. narf and blanca finally managed to get Windows XP running on a Mac! This is awesome news, especially after disappointing news a while back that Vista will not support EFI either. It seems they have managed to emulate a regular BIOS for the XP on Mac competition. Soon after the announcement, Leo Laporte did a great segment for MacBreak where they install XP on a Mac Mini and that’s the first place where I saw it actually running. A lot of people can now dual-boot their new Intel Macs and have a choice of XP or OSX (and even Linux!). I’ve never seen such a versatile machine! These are interesting times indeed.

Stratford-upon-Avon

 

We just spent a lovely few days in Shakespeare Country. We stayed at the Ambleside guest house and also managed to visit Warwick Castle while we were there.

Stratford-upon-Avon is a lovely small town and we enjoyed several walks through the town centre (it only took about 30 minutes to walk around it). I highly recommend the Bensons and Crabtree and Evelyn cafes there. We ate a lot and had quite a few excellent cream teas. For those who don’t know, English Cream Tea is usually served with scones and Clotted cream (an English specialty), butter and a selection of jams. Lovely stuff

We also went to see a production of The Canterbury Tales Part 2 at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. The performances were quite good, and I left wanting to see the first part but we had to leave the next day. We also spent a lot of time sitting idly by the river next to the theatre, watching the ducks and swans go by. It was a very relaxing experience. We tried to get a river cruise but nobody seemed to be doing any at the time. Perhaps it was too cold at the time.

Nevertheless, we had a great time and we will definitely just go there someday in the summer once again to sit by that lovely serene river and just relax …

As always, I’ve uploaded all the pictures to Flickr.

Yahoo’s new RSS + SMS service

Yahoo has started a new RSS + SMS service, but reading about it, I’m really not sure what I use I would put it to:
RSS + SMS

As Russ has already mentioned, it’s typical use case is not the elite digerati who subscribes to 500 feeds, it is instead useful if you have a more focused feed (let’s say within a company) and want employees to be alerted to certain critical events. The use cases i’ve thought of so far that might work for me are:

- Sysadmins being texted when there are new updates on a server? This is assuming that whoever provides the updates publishes an RSS feed to go along with it.
- Employees being texted reminders from their Outlook or iCal calendars. A lot of online calendaring apps like Backpack allow you to publish your reminders as RSS feeds so you should be able to get alerts for those.
- Any other scenario where someone needs to stay updated on a certain topic every hour or so. I assume you can configure the Yahoo service to send alerts out only every hour or so, so it sends them in a “batch” format instead of 10 updates per hour. This should help alleviate the 50 updates an hour problem.

The only problem I see is that I’m sure people *already* have ways of doing this stuff. I can easily write a script that checks my server for updates every day and sends me an alert or email about it. Granted, Yahoo’s service is supposed to be free, and SMS will cost me, but still, it’s already been done.

When this comes to the UK (if), I’ll probably configure it to send me an alert about system updates for my servers, etc. If there isn’t an RSS for it, I’ll create it.

Microsoft at the PDC

A lot of cool stuff has been coming out of Microsoft recently at the PDC. You can watch the webcast of the event here.

Here is a short summary of some of the announcements, linking to a Channel 9 video of each (if possible):

Sparkle – separating visual components and design of an application from the data representation.

Start.com / Gadgets – nice, clean start/home page which can be extended using “gadgets”. and these gadgets can be re-used through inheritance. The windows vista sidebar will also sport gadgets which help people get to commonly used or needed data or tasks.

Microsoft Max – a kind of a cross between iPhoto and iMovie. allows you to create rich interactive photo albums with slick effects and to export these albums so that almost anybody can view them.

LINQ – a really cool idea of trying to remove the impedance mismatch between object and relational databases. From what I have seen, manipulating XML should be easier. It’s all done in C#. Creating and populating objects after using SQL joins should be easier.

WCF or Windows Communication Founcation (formerly Indigo) – Much more than just another web-services framework, it implements a lot of the plumbing that a lot of developers usually have to manage all the way from SOAP to P2P to some other method of app-to-app or pc-to-pc integration. So if you want 2 machines to talk to one another somehow you don’t have to worry too much about the plumbing going on behind all that communication. At least that’s the easiest way I see to summarize it

One the of absolutely coolest things that Jim Allchin showed off was the ability to increase the available memory of a PC running Vista by simply plugging a USB key in. It’s ingenious and I haven’t heard of anyone doing anything like it unless I am mistaken.

WPF/E or Windows Presentation Foundation / Everywhere. WPF was formerly Avalon, a new way to build rich interactive web / client apps using XML. They showed a very cool Netflix (video rental online) demo that they ran on 4 different machines and it scaled, etc flawlessly: a desktop machine, Media Center PC, Tablet PC and a PDA. Everything being vector based makes this a lot easier. Another cool North Face demo here

A lot more stuff than this has been announced of course but it is good to see at least a few cool things and possibly 1 innovation come out of Microsoft so far! They are pretty gung-ho on security nowadays and let’s hope that Vista finally gets security right (by right I mean a lot better than XP by default). Note that I’m usually *not* very pro-Microsoft, but I do believe in competition, and I hope Apple, Google, Linux et al give Microsoft all they’ve got because it makes things a lot more interesting for the consumer and gives us more choice. That is always a good thing.

PlayLouder MSP: legally share music using P2P!

[PlayLouder MSP](http://www.playloudermsp.com/thenews.html) is a new Music ISP that’s going to be launched in the UK in a few days. They’ve got a brilliant idea that frankly a lot of other people should have thought of sooner. Basically you can freely trade music from the full Sony-BMG catalog on their networks (your own ripped music and other people’s music) and a percentage of your payment to the ISP goes to Sony. They use audio-analysis software to determine what songs are being traded on the network and I suppose that’s how they know how much to pay to Sony. Cory’s got a great and much more in-depth write-up [here](http://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/22/customers_of_new_uk_.html
) at [Boing Boing](http://www.boingboing.net).

For their money, PlayLouder MSP customers get their regualr DSL lines, as well as:

• The right to share any song in the Sony-BMG catalog
• Even if it’s out of print
• In any file-format
• Using any file-sharing software
• At any bitrate

PlayLouder MSP’s customers’ license includes Sony music sourced from P2P networks, ripped from CDs, or digitized from vinyl, cassettes, or radio broadcasts.

WebOS and the future of the Web

[Jason Kottke](http://www.kottke.org) has an interesting write-up about how he envisions the future of the OS and the Web. The gist of his post can be summed up in the following points:

1. The OS can be made irrelevant by people writing for another OS, let’s call it WebOS.
2. People now only need to code for one platform (Java, anyone?)
3. A local web server on the client machine will mean that an app can continue on working even if it’s offline (think local app for Gmail, etc).
4. When users are back online, the app will synchronize itself with its online counterpart. Think adding Flickr pictures locally, and then uploading them.

The OS is still there whichever one it is, but it is no longer going to lock-in developers to only developing for that OS. One of the things Jason is saying is that people will no longer need to write for 3 OSes but for just one OS. This sounds just like “people will no longer have to write for 3 OSes but for just one platform: Java”.

Jason has already outlined some of the problems he envisions with this approach, such as web apps accessing local content on your hard drive. Java applets have solved this problem for a long time by using a sandbox model. The only problem is that these applets have to be downloaded and run locally for them to work. A WebOS app, however, will run both locally and remotely, it will live on your local hard drive and perhaps a sandbox model will help there as well. Are vulnerabilities detected in these local apps any more dangerous than vulnerabilities for remote apps? Perhaps there isn’t much different because at the end of the day, a security hole is the same thing whatever app it affects. However, I suppose a local security hole can do a *lot* more damage than a remote one.

Some other suggestions like: “Read newsfeeds from bloglines locally” sound no different to NetNewsWire, FeedDemon or SharpReader, etc. These are all locally accessible feed readers which, when online, update your subscriptions, etc, otherwise they work fine when offline.

I think, as [Paul Graham](http://paulgraham.com/) said, a WebOS will allow totally new kinds of applications to exist and we don’t know what they will look like at all. So this is definitely an interesting space to watch.
Some great examples of new ways of using the web are: [Backpack](http://www.backpackit.com), [Basecamp](http://www.basecamphq.com/), [Gmail](http://www.gmail.com) and [Google Maps](http://maps.google.com). Another up-and-coming app is [Hula](http://hula-project.org/Hula_Server) which has been open-sourced by Novell and is being actively worked on by many GNOME hackers. If you want to see a demo of how the future of web-calendaring might look like, take a look at [this](http://www.nat.org/2005/august/#Hula-Web-Interface) amazing demo on [Nat's](http://www.nat.org) blog.

In other news, I would love to get my hands on one of [these](http://joi.ito.com/archives/2005/08/25/wearing_firefox.html) [Firefox](http://www.getfirefox.com) T-shirts that [Joi](http://joi.ito.com) managed to pick up from the [Mozilla](http://www.mozilla.org) offices. I have ordered quite a few T-shirts from [ThinkGeek.com](http://www.thinkgeek.com) in the past, and I will order one of these if they stock them someday.

Back online!

Finally after waiting for over two weeks I have my net connection back. We just moved home again and it seems we are too far from the exchange this time to get a 2Mbps connection so we’ve settled for 1Mbps. It’s not too bad I suppose at least it’s not dial-up.

With the bank holiday coming up I hope we do something interesting like our trip to Oxford last time. That was a good day out and perhaps we should do a more scenic day trip like the Cottswolds.

Wikis

I’ve been experimenting with wikis as a documentation tool. The collaborative editing facilities that wikis provide are invaluable when writing documentation or doing analysis / design / requirements work. After I first installed it, I was completely confused about how to use it. This was because I was expecting it to be similar to many web-based content management systems where you create a page for a topic and start writing on it with relevant links added to the body of the text. In this wiki, however, I couldn’t find any way to create a new page on a topic! I was dumbfounded until I read some documentation and realized that you could just create any page you like by simply typing in a link to a page that doesn’t exist and then editing it to add your content!

I’m using MediaWiki at the moment which is the same wiki that the famous WikiPedia project uses. If you haven’t checked out Wikipedia yet, I strongly recommend it. It is fast becoming my choice for looking up information on almost all topics; it’s far better than Google in many cases where you are looking for historical-type information, for example Television.

I came across another really interesting wiki project today called wikiwyg. The idea is that you double click on any of the entries and the entry changes to a full text area complete with a toolbar and formatting options. You can Cancel or Save your changes right there and then. You need Firefox to make it work, though. It’s another example of how everyone is trying to find more and more interesting ways to make the web more interactive and user-friendly, in the spirit of GMail and Google Maps

Trip to Oxford

We had a great time on our trip to Oxford last weekend … I took quite a few pics, particularly of the landscape while on the train but many didn’t turn out so well. The trip itself was great, we took a full bus tour and saw most of the interesting sites, from Christ Church to the Carfax tower and the [Museum of the History of Science](http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/). They’ve got an original blackboard there on which Einstein scribbled some equations for determining the age of the Universe! It’s pretty cool to see that.Overall Oxford seems a pretty small and tightly knit town which is absolutely full to the brim with students. I have never seen so many bicycles in my life! All the campuses and colleges, etc are so close together in a small space that students simply ride their bikes to wherever they need to go. All those bicycles reminding me of China in a way.

I’ve put up the best pictures I could find at [Flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kerneljack). The best thing about Flickr is that you can simply search for all pictures tagged with “oxford” and you will see a LOT more than we got to get; there are just so many people taking pictures and uploading them to Flickr that you can find pictures from almost anywhere.

On Driving

So I’ve decided to learn driving. I don’t fancy the thought, it must be said. When it comes to where I stand on the issue of cars, I don’t think I approve of them. I saw a futuristic hydrogen powered car on [Top Gear](http://www.topgear.com) a few days back and I wish I could buy that right now. Unfortunately only the prototype is available and it cost 5 million to make. They say we should all be driving one in 10-20 years and I must say I can’t wait.

Being completely oblivious to the automotive industry and driving in general all my life (I blame public transport) I find the idea of me contributing to the global pollution rise quite shameful. Do I really need a car, I ask. Unfortunately I think I do. I’ve happily gotten by on public transport so far and my dad used to drive us around everywhere when we were younger but lately I’ve started to realize that having a car around would help immensely with the weekly shopping and getting around and going places in general. The prospect of waiting around for a bus (perhaps in very cold or wet weather) just puts me off the idea now. Well, no turning back now … I’ve already bit the bullet and signed up for my driving lessons …

For those of who you still aren’t familiar with podcasting, a good and simple primer is on the [BusinessWeek BlogSpotting](http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/archives/2005/05/a_little_about.html#more) site. My personal take on it is that podcasting is like **selective offline radio**. **Selective** in the sense that you, the listener, decides what to listen to and **offline** because you don’t have to listen to it live. You can download the shows to your favorite MP3 player and listen to them on the go. **Radio** because the experience of listening to a podcast compares favorably to listening to a radio show.

Of course, that just sounds like any other audio downloading you may have done in the past. The essential difference with podcasting is that it uses RSS so you can **subscribe** to a feed and are notified in your feed reader when the feed is updated. If you aggregator supports enclosures, it can automatically download the mp3 files for you. It’s quite cool when you get used to it and if you have a suitable mp3 player. I regularly listen to podcasts nowadays, and I really love the **[IT Conversations](http://itconversations.com)** podcasts. Listen to the [Dean Karnazes](http://itconversations.com/shows/detail506.html) podcast about the BadWater Ultramarathon. It’s definitely an eye-opener and very inspiring. Yes, it’s not about IT, but still interesting. Go to [PodcastAlley](www.podcastalley.com) if you want to find some interesting feeds to listen to.

Buzztracker

Discovered Buzztracker through Slashdot today. What I really like about buzztracker is that it allows me to see at a glance what the most talked about news items are for today. What it’s really doing is mining Google News and creating links between the geographic locations of articles. It’s quite useful to check out the popular news for the day.

Here is a glimpse of what the map was like today:

* Baghdad (38%)
* Vatican (13%)
* Rome (05%)
* Boston (04%)
* Islamabad (04%)
* Cairo (04%)
* Khartoum (03%)
* Beijing (03%)
* Washington (02%)
* Delhi (02%)
* Kathmandu (02%)
* Mosul (02%)
* Pyongyang (02%)
* New Delhi (02%)
* Moscow (02%)
* Oslo (01%)
* Tokyo (01%)
* Chicago (01%)
* Beirut (01%)
* Jerusalem (01%)

Notice the list associated with this map which is quite useful as an adjunct to the map, showing you more clearly what the picture doesn’t. I will definitely use this from time to time to see what’s popular newswise *at the moment*. The great thing is they publish an RSS feed, which easily keeps you updated within your aggregator of choice.

A Quieter PC

I agree wholeheartedly with Inderjeet [here](http://weblogs.java.net/blog/inder/archive/2005/04/quest_for_a_sil.html) about quieter PCs. I have also rebuilt my old Athlon PC which I had lying around by doing the following:

* Replacing the case for a [special case](http://www.quietpc.com/uk/cases.php#acc6607) designed with noise reduction in mind.
* Replacing the processor heatsink with [this Zalman unit](http://www.quietpc.com/uk/p4cooling.php#7700)
* Replacing the case fans for [these Acousticase 120mm fans](http://www.quietpc.com/uk/casefans.php#acoustifan). They are bigger than the normal 80mm fans hence they don’t need to rotate as fast to move the same amount of air.
* Replacing the power supply for [this one from Qtechnology](http://www.quietpc.com/uk/psu.php#qtechnology)

I didn’t need to replace any graphics card fans as the machine had an older NVIDIA Geforce2 MX card which comes with a heatsink. I was only planning on using this machine as a medium power server so the graphics card didn’t matter to me.

After all this effort, I had a virtually quiet machine! Note that I said virtually quiet because there is still some residual noise but it is so low as to be imperceptible from about a meter away. It doesn’t bother me anymore and that means the exercise was a success

The first comment on that post says to get a Mac because they are quiet and I would like to point out that I recently sold my Power Mac G4 because it was **too** noisy. I know the newer Power Mac G5s are quieter but some people are still quite unhappy with them because they make strange chirping noises. I’m not making this up, I tried hard for a long time to buy another Mac but couldn’t justify the hassle of finding out whether it would be quiet enough for me. After a month, my G4 machine started making rattling noises. At that point I had never opened up the machine and so I had to peek inside and couldn’t figure out why it was doing it. I took it back to the repair shop and as expected they said there’s nothing wrong with it and I had to pay them for doing nothing! I brought it back home and it was rattling again. This is **not** quality. I somehow figured out that placing a stack of books underneath it reduced the noise.

There are definitely issues with Macs as far as noise is concerned. Russell has a [good rant](http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008309.html) on it. What is he supposed to do about it? Nobody is going to fix the noise issue because as far as Apple is concerned it’s normal noise. Check out [g4noise.com](http://www.g4noise.com) for more G4 related noise issues and a petition to Apple to replace the power supply in the older PowerMac G4s. The problem Russell describes about the fans increasing or decreasing their rotation speed and hence noise based on load drove me insane! Whenever I did something slightly heavy on my machine (like going to a certain page in a browser \***gasp**\*) the fans would ramp up. Then they would go down again. It drove me nuts.

Many times on forums people are literally *shouting* about the bad service they got from Apple. Just go to the ArsTechnica Mac Achaia forums to witness this yourself. Do you know what the final course of action is if nobody helps these people? Email Steve Jobs himself! These people have actually had their problems fixed this way too! I mean, I understand that may be a good thing but come on! You’re supposed to get top-notch support from these people if you call the regular support line!

To be honest, though, I really love the Mac operating system but I hope they sort out their hardware problems or at least ensure that **everybody** gets a quiet machine if it is advertised as one. I won’t be buying one until they do.

Finally on Wireless!

I know I’m late to the game, but I’ve finally got a wireless network installed at home. I got myself a Belkin Wireless ADSL Router to replace my current ADSL router. The router itself was easy enough to set up but unfortunately setting up XP to use the wireless network was a nightmare!

I tried so hard to make XP use my wireless network to no avail. Due to some bug in the Service Pack 1 release of XP, it was continously creating some kind of bridge for me between all my networks. I had to figure out that I don’t need the bridge and once I had that sorted I tried to get wireless working again. I couldn’t get it to work with WEP encryption and so I opted for the WPA-PSK method which I’ve read is better as it fixes some older attacks which WEP was vulnerable to.

For those interested, I tried the using the network without encryption in linux and it worked straight away! What a surprise and a breath of fresh air! I’m using Ubuntu Linux nowadays by the way. It is a Debian based distro which has it’s own packages which they update around every six months or so. It’s heavily GNOME-based but looks quite good so far. Sleeping the laptop and other ACPI-related stuff doesn’t all work yet, but that’s pretty much how it is with all new Centrino-based laptops nowadays so I’ll just have to wait probably about a year or so before all that is sorted out in Linux (I mean done for me automatically without recompiling kernels, not that I mind the occasional kernel recompile )

Spyware removal guide

Great guide at Ars Technica here about the best tools for removing Spyware from your computer. I already use Ad-Aware SE 6 and it gets a really good score so I’m happy.

Never heard of the SqueezeBox before. Very interesting.

I completely forgot to post about the Regent Street Apple Store opening in London last weekend. I wish i could have gone, but I would have had to queue all night in order to ensure I got a goody bag (worth £700). I will go soon anyway, and here’sa good summary of what went on there

Tracking everything you print?

I’ve got to check this out on my own printouts, it’s interesting: Color Laser Printers Tracking Everything You Print.

It’s not new, but it’s getting noticed: Jordan writes “Yahoo! News is
reporting that several printer manufacturers are now and have been for
some time embedding (nearly) invisible serial numbers in every document
you print with their color laser printers, allowing law enforcement to
track any such document back to the printer which printed it. The
technology, ostensibly created to track down money counterfeiters, was
created by Xerox about 20 years ago. A Xerox researcher says that the
number-embedding chip lies ‘way in the machine, right near the laser’
and that ’standard mischief won’t get you around it.’”

I have suddenly gotten a surge of mobile mania in the past few days. I bought a Sony Ericsson T610 a few days ago and though I really like the phone (it’s my first GPRS phone) I really wish I could have gotten something better. I will soon try and switch from pay-as-you-go to a contract with either T-Mobile or Orange, which will allow me to get much better, newer phones, plus an option to pay a fixed amount for a certain amount of GPRS usage. As it is right now, I’ve tried to use GPRS on it a bit and it really eats up money like no tomorrow. I wish we had unlimited GPRS here in the UK at a cheap rate like in the US and elsewhere

I’m thinking about getting a iPaq handheld and a WiFi access point so that I can surf wireless on the PDA. I used to do a little blog reading on my older Clie, so I think it may be OK reading websites on it, but I’m not sure. It will certainly be useful when out and about though, I can use my bluetooth phone’s GPRS connection if I can’t get WiFi access.