An article in the Register today points out that searches from Google can end up with empty Trackback articles in the results list. The article blames the inventors of Trackback and similar technolgies for this phenomenon. I think they’ve missed the boat here. Surely it’s a result of Google’s search technology not being good enough? Google became the number 1 search engine because their “PageRank” technology resulted in better search results than their competitors. Now, their technology is inferior for the current state of the web, and so I think that they need to innovate or lose their crown to another search engine that can deal with today’s web.
Straw calls Id cards a likely "debacle"
As you may or may not know, I’m not a fan of Jack Straw as I find him smarmy and wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. However, according to The Register, Jack Straw understands the issues surrounding Blunkett’s ID cards. More accurately, I suspect he’s worked out the cost in terms of votes, but that’s good enough for me if we end up kicking the stupid idea out.
Leah's Party
We spent the weekend up with Jen & Tim and it was Leah’s 4th birthday party yesterday. We went to a place called “Smiles & Faces” which is a big room with a climbing frame/ball pit/slide/lots of fun place. Leah seemed to have a really good time, as did Jon.
Today, my mum and Jen cooked us a really nice Sunday lunch which went down a treat. The journey home wasn’t too good, we left at 3pm and got home at 7! Four hours to travel 130 miles!
Quiet
very quiet here in the office – only Tegan, Paul and myself in. Might actually get some work done today!
There is a God!
“The Terminator star also warned fans he would have "no time for movies".”
His movies have been getting worse, so I don’t think I’ll be missing any future one…
Arnie
Does anyone else find it fascinating that Clinton was damned for having a consensual relationship with a woman who is not his wife and Arnie can be elected after having sexually harrassing many women?
Iraq goes GSM
According to The Register, the mobile networks in Iraq will be GSM. This is good as all the surrounding countries use GSM and having the US CDMA standard there would have have been a nightmare for the users.
Nice to see a sensible decision made for a change.
A Bright US senator?
Norm Coleman wants some due process to be added to the RIAA situation.
Nana & Sam
Nana(Jacky) & Sam are visiting us today mainly to see Jon. With a little bit of cunning, Jacky also brought round some boxes that Georgina was storing at her mum’s so we had to accept them. They’ve gone into the garage with all the other boxes. One day we will sort them all out!
We went out for Sunday lunch at the local Beefeater. It was quite a nice lunch with large portions, and reasonably cheap. Jon behaved himself very well too and a good time was had by all.
CMS System
I’m currently setting up another site separate to the-allens.net for the software I write. I thought that rather than coding all the pages, this time I’d use a content management system instead. The only criteria I imposed was that it must be free, not impose a “box” layout and produce a site that is “search engine friendly”. By this I mean that all pages are accessible using urls without a ? in them as Google and other search engines don’t spider pages with ? in them. After a bit of searching, I found Drupal and Xaraya. I’m giving Drupal a go first as it appears a more mature product, but we’ll see.