May 2005 Archives

I noticed this morning that the Dominion Post had an item about how Vodafone's free TXT offer was overloading their cell network on the weekend. Messages came in twice sometimes, or hugely delayed. At one point I got a collection of 7 messages at once.

But rather than cancelling the offer, they threatened to suspend the service of anyone abusing the free weekend TXT offer, without really defining how many TXT messages constitutes abuse. I'm still mostly in awe of anyone who can type proficiently enough on those damn keyboards to send more than a half dozen messages.

Of course some phones have "predictive" TXTing, where you press buttons and it tries to guess what you're trying to type. I had a go of this recently and wasn't impressed - typing 2663 (COME) resulted in it predicting I was typing "BOND" (At least it got one letter right!). There ensued much cursing and backspacing.

There's a page devoted to links to sites of Marvel comics workers, one of whom is named "Mel Bush". I'm fairly certain it's not the same Mel Bush that the Mel Bush page on my site is about, because, for one thing, that Mel Bush is a fictional character and unlikely to be drawing comics for Marvel. The proprietor of that site doesn't appear to have checked and gone ahead and linked anyway.

Not that I'm going to complain about getting links, but if you're going to link to a page, at least check that the page is what you think it is.

For some reason I'm completely unable to load anything on that domain - I presume they've blocked all traffic from Xtra for some reason, because I always get a timeout. Google's cache is a wonderful thing.

For a long time I've been reading newspaper comic strips like Ballard Street and so forth on a site called creators.com. However recently they've started running adverts for smilies which somehow over-ride FireFox's popup-blocking and popup anyway. I've tried comics.com, but they appear to be running the same adverts.

Are there any web sites out there which:
a) carry newspaper comic strips (hopefully the ones I like to read), and
b) will respect my desktop configuration and not bombard me with popups?

I could probably read them through BlogLines or something, but I feel guilty reading them that way.

Level: AS-Confexia
Type: Assault
File Size: 40.9 MB
Rating: 9/10

Description: A vast ruined city.

Tonight I wrote a wee program* which scans the tetrap.com site mirror I have sitting on my hard drive, grabs all the external links, and checks said external links by doing a head request. Thusly I can locate and fix any dead links.

Dead links are a big problem on the web. Putting a link on my web page is a risk, because at some point in the future that link has a high probability of going "dead" (the page is gone), redirecting, or even redirected to a porn site. As a surfer, it's annoying to click on a link looking for some information, only to find the page has disappeared, so as a webmaster, I make it a practice of checking my links semi-regularly to make sure they all work and go where intended. Since tetrap.com is pretty large, I have to use a link-checking program...

Which caused me to ponder another question: Why do webmasters have to check their links independently? It seems to me that search engines have already done all the work. They've crawled my pages (so they know which URLs I'm linking to) and they've crawled the pages I'm linking to (because that's what search engines do) so it follows Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc, already know which of my pages have dead links on them. Wouldn't it be nice if one of them provided some easy way for me to get this information so I don't have to go checking the links myself?

Given the high percentage of pages out there containing dead links, such a service would probably be well received...

* So if you got any funny hits on your web site from "tetrap.com link checka", that was my 1337 programming skillz.

Silent "Piano Man" poses British beach riddle

LONDON (Reuters) - A smartly dressed man found wandering in a soaking wet suit near an English beach has baffled police and care workers after he refused to say a word and then gave a virtuoso piano performance.

Ever helpfully, Yahoo! News doesn't provide a photo or even a link to the site they mention, so here's the item on the NMPH site. Meg thinks he may be some sort of promotion or some such.

Apparently Coca Cola is launching Raspberry Coke in New Zealand. There's even an auction on TradeMe to win the first bottle. Ooookay...

See also: The Verdict.

Construction of the new Pak 'n Save in Lower Hutt is coming along nicely.

As the bounding fence was at a bit of an angle, this was taken rather awkwardly holding the camera over a wire gate and looking at the LCD screen at the back.

Yup, it appears the local Subway has taken horseradish sauce off the
menu, along with red wine vinaigrette. So now as well as mustard-less
meatball subs, it's horseradish-less melts...

Bummer!

On the upside, apparently Caesar dressing is coming back...

(This was Subway Watch. Next up, the Burger Show!)

Vodafone here announced last week that SMS text messaging would be free on their cell network on weekends until March next year. I won't be surprised at all if they announce they're cancelling it next week, as this evening their network seems to be heavily overloaded. Ten minutes of typing on the gad-awful cellphone keyboard, and then I get an "SMS is not sent!" error.

It somewhat does demonstrate why TXT messages cost as much as they do (20 cents currently)...