My hatred of spammers increases by the day. The latest trick I’ve seen hitting my mailbox is spam that looks just like message failure reports. Messages from “Mail delivery subsystem” with a subject of “Returned mail: see transcript for details”. This is so annoying. Or would be, but luckily I use SpamAssassin to clean my mailbox for me. Every so often I check the “spam” folder to see what it’s caught, and that’s why I’ve seen all these “Returned mail:” spam. SpamAssassin works; but how long before the spammers get the upper hand…?
Month: May 2002
England’s World Cup Squad
Well, the squad has been announced and as usual there are a few surprises. The squad is:
Goalkeepers
David James, Nigel Martyn, David Seaman
Defenders
Wayne Bridge, Wes Brown, Sol Campbell, Ashley Cole, Martin Keown, Rio Ferdinand, Danny Mills, Gareth Southgate
Midfielders
David Beckham, Nicky Butt, Joe Cole, Kieron Dyer, Steven Gerrard, Owen Hargreaves, Paul Scholes
Forwards
Robbie Fowler, Emile Heskey, Michael Owen, Teddy Sheringham, Darius Vassell
For me, one of the bigger surprises is the inclusion of Teddy Sherringham – I didn’t expect him to make it this time, not at 36 years old. I’m also slightly surprised to see so many defenders named, but I’m sure this is a good thing. I’m pleased to see Owen Hargreaves included as he has impressed me the few times I’ve seen him play.
C’mon you England….
We ve been watching
We’ve been watching the UEFA Cup Final this evening between Feyenoord and Borussia Dortmund. It’s been one of the dirtiest and cheaty matches I’ve seen for ages – players diving all over the place, a Dortmund player sent off after 32 minutes, 2 penalties – one to each team. And to cap it all there is a hoarding that says “Fair Play”, yeah right.
ve been subscriber to
I’ve been a subscriber to Wanderlust – a travel magazine designed for more independent travellers – for about 4 years now, and today I’ve been catching up on the last few editions. The first I read was the 50th edition, and had an article of 50 things to do in New Zealand – by my calculation we achieved 5.5 of them when we were there. Must try harder next time :-). They also had a small article saying that they’d relaunched their website. I’ve just been for a quick look, and it is much better than it was, being able to look at the events section is really handy. Well done Wanderlust.
ve just finished reading
I’ve just finished reading The Salmon of Doubt. I’m not much interested in unfinished novels, but it was great to read some Douglas Adams one more time — and actually, the bulk of the book is a collection of magazine articles, newspaper articles and interviews.
”
The annoying thing is there’s not going to be any more, what with him being dead and all. I’m so glad I saw him speak. I thought it was at the
Turing 1990 Colloquium, April 6 1990, held at the University of Sussex campus (which I went to and got the t-shirt). But I think it was more likely to have been the
Computers And Writing conference, also held on campus on March 23, 1991. I don’t think I would have gone to that conference, but I guess I would have found a way to get in to see Douglas Adams talk. From what I remember Adams was supposed to talk about user interfaces, but twisted it into something from Last Chance to See. And yes it was very entertaining.
The Zvon Character Search
The Zvon Character Search is one of those really useful geek sites that I can never remember the name of, or the address of. Okay, so it’s not going to be of interest to many people, but if you ever code xml it might just be of use as it gives the codes for entitys.
Hopefully now I’ll have a good way to track it down everytime I need it 😀
Poor old Tivo it
Brighton Festival kicks off
Brighton Festival kicks off about… now. So many things on, but we’ve only just started to get tickets. That’s because the festival web site is horrid. It’s not just the usability of the site and the missing features (let me get this straight: I can’t book on-line? Hellllooo?), but it’s that it doesn’t have all the information that the printed guide has. So we waited until the printed guide came out, and we’re using that. Shame.
ASP Upload Components
A bit of a geeky blog this one. Today I’ve been researching Upload components for ASP to use in the project I’m working on at the moment. Ideally I want one that does the following:
- Uploads a file from the client’s file system, directly into the database
- Can upload all types of files, not just images
I had a quick discussion on BNM about this, and also consulted 15 Seconds.
I decided to try ASPUpload first, as this was recommended both by BNM and by an ex-colleague of mine. I got this working pretty quickly, but it doesn’t seem to be able to present me with the Mime Type (i.e. image/gif etc) and so isn’t very useful for handling different kinds of binary data. I know that I could code around this issue, but I’d rather it did it all for me really.
My next thought was to try SA File Up, a product I’ve used many times before. Unfortunately their evaluation copy expires on 1 May 2001, that’s 2 days ago – helpful.
Attempt 3 was ABCUpload. On the plus side, this is a free product. This took a bit longer to get to work, as the help documents are not as comprehensive as ASPUpload. Hidden, on the Object Reference page I found the property I was looking for – MIMEType. Woohoo! But alas, it only seems to be able to work out the Mime Types for images so, PDFs etc are out of the question. And more annoying still, it won’t even upload the damn things. Bah!
Attempt number 4. The last of the BNM recommendations. Dundas Upload. Another free offering. The examples don’t seem to cover saving to a database, but a more thorough hunt through the documentation found it hidden away. This component has a ContentType property, and seems to insert pdfs, excel spreadsheets as well, so we might just have found our answer. Hurrah!
Coff Well as well
*Coff* Well, as well as the local elections yesterday, there was also an election in Hartlepool for their new town mayor. The winner was H’Angus the Monkey, the Hartepool United Football Club mascot… Read more.