{George Pearce}

I just got banned from DigitalPoint for 7 days. Any explination? God no. Just a link to some page where some aaron nimocks guy said that their banning everyone who makes a slight discression in the BST forum, or people that have in the past. That’s fair, right?

I’ve got no infraction points. No warnings in the last 5 months. And hey, let’s ban me. Thanks guys.

I’m going to think twice before I bother to go back there, I think.

I just read this over here, MOD has now admitted to losing 650 laptops in the last four years. That’s one every other day. How does the Ministry in charge of the whole countries defence manage to lose THAT MUCH? It stinks of incompetence, I think.

As if that’s not enough, they’ve also lost over a hundred department memory sticks. ‘oh, oops’.

The MoD insisted that its policies were “generally fit for purpose”,

Very fit for purpose. Apart from the matter of the sensitive information lost, think about how much it costs to replace a laptop every other day. Could that money not be spent better elsewhere, maybe by teaching employees how to look after their equipment?

How are we expected to trust them with our personal information for an ID card scheme, if this is how they show us their security?

Morocco 2008 547

Originally uploaded by gspx

I think this is one of my favourite shots of the whole Morocco trip, this is the entire group together, with Toubkal in the background (on the right).
Guess which one is me?!

I decided to upload my Morocco photos onto Flickr, which I got a premium account for, mainly because Flickr is faster, and for $25, means I don’t have to store any images. Plus, I like the bar on the right showing my latest shots.

You can find the Morocco 2008 collection here, the timestamps on the photos are out by varying degrees, my camera was playing up, but they are in the correct order - the last photos, of planes, were taken when we were kicked off at Casablanca, and before we flew in Marrakech.

Okay, I’m slightly concerned. I just made a payment, through Paypal, to Yahoo (~Flickr) for a pro account. Nothing wrong there.

But I just looked at the receipt email thing, and saw this:

Should I be worried? For those that haven’t noticed, look at the history URL at the bottom of the image. I’m starting to be concerned slightly, stuff like this shouldn’t happen to Paypal, right?

As I posted earlier and twittered; I’m back from my holiday in Morocco. I had an amazing time, spoiled slightly by the poor flight back, but everything preceeding that was amazing.

I took hundreds of photos, I’m just sorting them out into the ones worth putting online (I’ll make a full gallery post in a few days, but I’ve put some of my favourites up)

We flew out from T2 at Heathrow with Royal Air Maroc, and the flight wasn’t as bad as I’d expected it to be, the food was alright and the flight was relatively smooth. First night was spent in the Hotel Foucal in Marrakech; which also had ‘not excellent’ reviews, but once again it wasn’t bad.

We had a tour around Marrakech on the Wednesday; in horse drawn carriages to begin with, and then we walked around some smaller streets, and saw things like a tannery (where they make leather) and public bakery. The tannery stunk, don’t ever work or live near one if you go to a country like Morocco. We also saw a chemist, of sorts, there, which sold creams and powders for more or less anything you can think of, and then a bit more. They had huge tubs of brightly coloured liquids around the walls, which gave it a bit of a ‘nutty professor’ feel.

We spent 6 days walking after that, with an additional rest day in the middle, which we spent in a small town up in the mountains. I have a few awesome photos of that place, including of the village store, which was little more than a cupboard in the street. On the last of those days, we climbed ToubKal, starting out at about 4am, it took us 3 and a half hours to get from base camp to the top (about 1000m climb, we started at 3,000 and something metres).

We then went on to Essaouira, where we spent 2 days, exploring the town, spending money and just having fun. The sunday, we travelled back to Marrakech, and went to McDonalds, took photos and saw the souk (market). Monday, we flew home- the flight back was awful. The flight attendant people were rude and obviously grumpy; and they spilt coffee over the guy sitting infront of us. We all got kicked off of the plane at Casablanca with no warning, and had to ask directions twice thanks to lack of correct signs, and go through embarkation again. When we got back on, they happily announced ‘we’ve just sprayed the plane with insectiside to comply with UK laws’ - lovely.

Then 6 hours in a coach back to Wales. Fun. I loved the holiday, possibly the best time I’ve ever had abroad, but I didn’t love the travelling.

I now have a flickr account, which can be found over here. I’m still going to use GP for my photos, primarially, but I’ll upload some of my favourites onto flickr, it means I can use the recent photos that are on the right, which I like, and I can add it to my aggregate. On top of that, I think flickr is pretty cool.

I might make a recent photos like the left to use for GPearce, for the uploaded photos, but as of yet, I can’t be bothered, and don’t really need it.

UPDATE: I’ve decided that I might use Flickr for my photos, and make albums of them here - it saves me uploading them onto my hosting here, which can be temperamental. Plus, it’s only like $25 a year for a pro account.

I fly out to Morocco tomorrow. This will be the last post I make before I come back, and then after that there will be loads and loads of photos.

Basically, any emails sent to me from now on will be delayed two weeks in getting a response, there is an autoresponder on my account; so there should be little confusion.

I leave home at 8 in the morning, and I think I’ll be in Morocco by about 8pm. We’re flying from Heathrow, with whom I can’t remember.

I guess all that remains to be said is bye, I’ll make up for the lack of posts when I get home, I promise.

I was doing a bit of design hacking earlier, and searched the internet (in vain) for a CSS sampler. You know the concept - you type in a hex code, and it tells you what colour you’re using. Well, that’s the second time I’ve looked, so I made my own, as you do. Found here, it does exactly what it says on the (not quite) tin - shows you a sample of any css colour. One huge block that’s fairly unmissable. I might make the code downloadable at some point - it’s really not that complex.

Anyhow, any feedback on it would be appreciated

I took these at sailing yesterday, because I was bored and broke the boat I was sailing. Their not very good, but I thought I’d post them anyway.

I recently read Horus Rising , a book by Dan Abnett. It is the first in the series that I am reading, which follows the Horus Heresy, a civil war that almost tore the Warhammer 40,000 universe apart. The novel is part of a series, in which Horus, the newly appointed Warmaster, rebels against his father, the Emperor. I’ve only read the first book so far, but the rest look to be as good as this one was.

The book itself was excellent, Dan Abnett really is as good as people say he is (not that I ever thought he wasn’t) - the book manages to be funny, dark and very clever, while making all three seem effortless. He manages to make a faceless army of hundreds of thousands seem real, giving an insight into their lives and feelings.

We are guided through the novel by Captain Loken, the captain of an Astartes company. Astartes are demi-god like characters in war armour, and Abnett does an amazing job of portraying them in the book, even for people like me who don’t know a single thing about them (I’m not really a massive warhammer follower, I just bought the book because it was there).

I think this is an amazing book, and one that others even vaguely interested in Warhammer should probably read, as it details the start of an event that shaped the Warhammer we know now.

Info

Pages: 416
Publisher: Black Library
ISBN-10: 184416294X
ISBN-13: 978-1844162949
Link to Buy

A biodiesel-powered trimaran has just completed the fastest round the world trip in a speedboat, breaking the previous record by an amazing 14 days.

Braving pirates, storms and floating logs, the team made it all the way around the world on recycled cooking fat, arriving back at a Spanish port yesterday. I guess this isn’t really sailing, as I categorized it, but it’s close.

It took the EarthRace team 11 minutes short of 61 days to get around, breaking the previous record set by Cable and Wireless Adventurer a decade ago. The team comprises of two Britons, a New Zealander and a Swede, with Pete Bethune, the New Zealander, as the skipper. It is his second attempt.

The EarthRace left on the 21st of April, and immediately ran into troubled waters, the autopilot broke, meaning the boat had to be steered 24 hours a day, and fresh food supplies were left behind.

The EarthRace boat has a clever design, which means that instead of bouncing over waves and slowing down, it cuts through them, maintaining speed, but making it a very rocky ride, and much more difficult to control. There’s a picture I found on the Guardian website below.

I guess all thats left to be said is a huge well done to the crew, who battled massive problems, and still made it.

In 5 days, I’ll be flying out to Morocco. Everything is set now, all the kit is ready, and I’m really, really looking forward to it. I’ve got my camera sorted out, and I’m expecting to have LOADS of pictures when I come back on the 15th. I’m still trying to decide how to make sure GPearce and my other sites stay safe, I’ll probably just lock them down - it’s not like their vulnerable anyhow.

I’d been thinking of setting up some scheduled posts while I’m away, I’ve got some pretty good ideas for that and they could well be interesting. I’m adding a special bit of code to my blog so it shows people that I’m away, although I’ve not decided how to do it so it doesn’t change my page summaries on search engines. I’ll probably put it in the sidebar, thinking about it.

That’s an idea for a new plugin, something which automatically adds a bit of code to your template while you’re away, so that people know. I’ll have to look into that

But yeah, I’m really looking forwards to this, and I hope nobody ruins it for me to come back to by messing with my sites

I was considering this earlier, I’ve seen hundreds, if not thousands of these general freelancer sites, and most of them are failing - the niche is starting to fill up. 

However, what I’ve not seen many of are niche targeted job sites, for instance targeting content creation, article writing or such, and I think they would be popular. If you look on popular forums like Digitalpoint and webhostingtalk, you see a hundred or so posts a day which are after certain services, like content creation - they get huge response. Most people who end up posting on big wide niche websites are unable to find anything anywhere else, it seems to be sort of a last-call.

A niche freelancer site could be to those people what a full on freelancer site is to people with massive projects, and it could be profitable, I think. I don’t think that it should charge for membership, but if you put advertisements on it, probably CPM, then while posters are browsing looking for work, you’re earning a bit of cash - everyone wins

I don’t know how feasible the idea would be, and I’m experimenting with scripting to do stuff like this, but if it works out, I may launch my own.

Yesterday, Ryan Boren announced Wordpress 2.6 beta 1. I’ve just upgraded to it. Among the cool new features are post revision tracking, which I’ve talked about before, and Google Gears support, which is very cool. I think I wrote about that before too.

There is also better support for SSL for the admin area, and bulk plugin management, as well as a bunch of other stuff (you have to read the post to see it all).

It doesn’t look any different to 2.5 (no surprises there) but there are some nifty little new functions, like the theme selector - when you click a theme it previews, like on wp.com, which is definitely cool.

I’m looking forward to the final 2.6.

Today I received the awesome kit the guys at Street Carnage / Tv Carnage etc sent me. I got a tshirt, and a bunch of stickers - a nice gesture from the people I’m currently working for!

The tshirt fits me just about perfectly, which is cool, and the stickers are awesome, although I’m not sure what to do with them yet. You can buy the tshirts from their store, which I’ve been helping them populate and such, and I *think* that the stickers are free (just make a request), I’ll be adding a product for that to the store shortly.

The tee is good quality, too. Always important.

All that remains to be said is a big thankyou to Gavin, the guy who sent the stuff out for me

I’ve become aware of a bug with my Akismet count plugin, which isn’t obvious to most people, but for those who have only recently installed, it breaks, and causes a PHP error if they have no spam caught. This is because Akismet only creates the spam reference that my plugin looks for when it nukes it’s first bit of spam.

For that reason, I’m going to put another line into the plugin, and release version 1.10, at some point in the next week, I hope. I’m also looking at making the actual text customisable, and making it similar and all that. Feedback would be appreciated on this, because with enough work I could make a version that integrates itself directly into your footer, without you having to do anything at all – I might release a branch of the current plugin to do that.

As always, any suggestions would be appreciated.

I’ve been hinting about it for most of 6 months now, that I’m going to Morocco on the second of July. For 2 weeks, trekking. So right now, I’m in the process of packing stuff into my purple bag (see the pics) that I got given by the trip provider. That and a backpack will be what I survive out of for two weeks. It’s going to be great.

I’ve bought all sorts of kit now, walking poles, water purification tablets and baby wipes. Apparently their important for personal hygine - I’m not arguing.

Purple and red bags. Lovely.

We’re going out there with Schools Worldwide, part of Walks Worldwide, and we’re going up and over Twp Cal, the highest mountain in the Atlas range.

I really am looking forward to this.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, a few weeks ago I stumbled on a website offering a Wordpress install, with nothing special added on (no theme, not even basic setup) for $200-300. I was disgusted, and posted about it on a blogging forum I happened to be on.

I think that $200-300 is more than 10x too much to pay for something like that, and if the site mentioned doesn’t even have it’s own permalinks sorted out, what are the chances they’d do yours for you? I used to charge $5-10 for full Wordpress installations, and i tend to help people out for free now - why charge $200-300? As it is, people who contact me generally tend to get my help installing stuff like that for free.

I actually wonder how many naive / unknowing people buy that service from other people for stupid money per month? It’s probably a fair few.

Additionally, those who are making blogs for non-commerical reasons can request the guys over at install4free to help them, free of charge once again.

I don’t think anyone should ever pay more than $20 for a Wordpress install, unless it includes a custom theme.

Less than four hours into it’s download day, Firefox 3 smashed the 1 million downloads barrier, which is reported to be more than the downloads of Firefox 2 on it’s launch day.

There is a widescreen up in the Mozilla HQ which is live (ish) monitoring the downloads, although it seems that with the sheer rate of downloads, there has been some lag.

I downloaded FF3 about an hour ago, and in my opinion, it’s not changed a huge amount from the last release candidate, not that it’s meant to have. It’s still great, though.

The great thing is, the developers of S3fox have upgraded it to work with Firefox 3! yay.