You'll Never Find a More Wretched Hive of Scum and Villany

Obi Wan could well have had the yahoo message board for SCOXQ.PK (formerly known as SCOX) in mind when he spoke the immortal line about Mos Eiseley.

If you want a good example of idiocy and grade A lunacy then pop on over and have a read. Just don't take anything said on there at face value.

Somehow the message board has degenerated into a Linux vs Windows flame fest - with each side just as bad as the other. According to one side Linux is the best, Windows is evil. According to the others Linux is broken beyond repair whilst Windows is perfect.

You've just got to hope that no-one takes this collection of pond-scum from the bottom of the gene pool seriously as they aren't doing anyone any favours.

Lets face it, it is entirely possible to run Linux full-time these days without worrying about recompiling the kernel when you reconfigure your hardware. That hasn't been true for nearly a decade (if not longer). Most hardware works as well in Linux as it does in Windows, which is actually pretty amazing when you consider the lack of official support for most hardware (most of the drivers are written by volunteers).

Windows too can work perfectly well for a lot of people. Personally I prefer Linux but hey, horses for courses folks. I certainly don't spend all my time editing configuration files. Linux works for me and doesn't get in the way. Your mileage may vary.

Is it worth getting into a flame war over? Not really. I'm a big fan of open source AND freeware software (something to do with me being a tight-wad) but it doesn't mean that I can't appreciate the fact that there are some pretty good - albeit expensive - commercial alternatives too.

The problem is that it is getting hard to recommend the commercial as the benefits no longer outweigh the costs. I'd guess this is why Microsoft (and other commercial companies) are fighting so hard against Open Source.

Cavern Lander - Tech Demo 1

Over the Easter weekend I've had a browse through the code for "Cavern Lander", which started as an experiment with the RetroRoids code to see how much work it would take to add in gravity effects.

I'd got it to a point where it pretty much worked before a large dose of the curse of the hobby programmer known as "real life" stepped in and curtailed my coding activities for a couple of weeks.

To get myself back up to speed I decided to pick up the code again - and after sorting out some niggling bugs and cleaning the code up further I'd got a stable code-base to build the game on.

I'm not counting this as a proper demo release purely because the game is so early in its development - but as a technical demo to see how a gravity game would work I think it does its job quite well.

The initial feedback has been positive too so I'll spend some more time on the game over the next couple of weeks and see what I end up with.

The game itself plays a bit like a cross between Lander, Thrust and ChopLifter, in that you have to pilot your ship through a series of caves, land to rescue miners and transport them to the blue landing platform at the start of the cave complex.

Currently the main hazard is gravity itself, but the final game should add more features like fuel and gun emplacements into the mix.



For more information (and screen shots) head on over to http://dans-remakes.sytes.net.

Yesterday's Pizza

Here I am, enjoying that "morning after" feeling. Actually I don't feel too bad all things considered, eating the remains of yesterday's pizza has helped me feel a bit more human.

Yes, I was out and about last night, experiencing our Great British "pub culture" first hand.

Its been a while since I've hit the town, and to say it was a bit unfamiliar was an understatement. One thing that I did notice was that at the venerable age of 34 I was the oldest person by a clear ten years in some of the bars (and that is including the bar staff too).

I think that I've finally accepted the fact that I have now officially become an old fart.

Clue number 1: I hated the music.

Clue number 2: I didn't recognise any of the songs.

Clue number 3: I found myself complaining about the price of things ("A drink costs HOW MUCH?!?").

Clue number 4: Realising that I was one of the oldest people in some of the bars.

Clue number 5: Even though the outside temperature was below zero, I was one of the few people wearing a coat.

A night out certainly isn't cheap. I went through around £40 last night. Mind you, ten pounds of that was admission to a nightclub (and cloakroom fees). Having to queue for half an hour to get in was just rubbing salt into the wound.

Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy myself. I'm just glad that my social life doesn't revolve around clubbing these days.

Boxer Hockey

I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but Boxer Hockey is a seriously strange web comic with some amazing art work.



I've been reading it pretty much since it started - and although it is still fairly irregularly published it tends to be well worth the wait.

There are quite a few strips in the archive, so if you haven't already seen it then now is a pretty good time to start.

Fun with a Sun

One of the joys of working in I.T. is the sheer variety of tasks that can await you.

Today I've had the pleasure (ahem) of dealing with a disk upgrade on a Sun A1000 raid controller, connected to a Sun Ultra 60 running Solaris 8.

On paper the job is straight-forward. Simply add the new disks into the array, use them as a raid 5 set, configure a new partition in the new container and adjust the vfstab to mount the new partition at the correct point on the system.

Easy, no?

Stage 1 was started last night. To check how our raid was currently set up we went to check the Raid Array Manager software that comes with the A1000. Not installed. How about disksuite them? Nope. Not installed either.

We couldn't locate the Solaris 8 install CDs but found the Raid Array Manager install CDs so we installed that, and as per the instructions halted and re-booted using "boot -r". And heres where the fun begins.

Now it couldn't see the existing partitions on the Raid, even though the Raid Array Manger showed that the Raid was connected and that the individual drives were healthy.

If you ever find yourself in the situation where you need to see what SCSI devices are attached to your Sun box then this might help.

After halting your box (so you are left at the "ok" prompt) do the following:

setenv auto-boot? false
reset-all
probe-scsi-all
setenv auto-boot? true
boot

Depending on the circumstances you may need to do "boot -r" instead of just "boot". The difference is that "boot -r" will detect and re-create device nodes as needed.

After a bit of investigation (thank you Google) I removed the Raid Array Manager software, at which point "boot -r" rediscovered the existing partitons. For some reason though it has re-named the device nodes for the RAID disks so I still had to edit the vfstab (after creating a backup of the old one just-in-case) before the server would boot again correctly.

So the alternative is to locate the Solaris 8 media and install DiskManager.

I can see why my colleague had trouble locating the disks. In the end I found them in an un-marked cardboard box, on top of a disused filing cabinet, right at the back of our software store-room.

Disksuite is now installed and the partitions are still visible, so we are now ready to try putting in those new disks. . . . .

Taking the Rough with the Smooth - Version 2

This is partly a replacement and partly a follow-up article to Taking the Rough with the Smooth, as the original doesn't really get across what I wanted to say, or more importantly, why I felt the need to say it.

Not long before I wrote that article I'd received my first piece of hate mail. In the couple of years I've been publishing software online (since 2002 in fact) I've been lucky in that the correspondence I've had from users has been positive, even from those who've had problems. So this one came as a nasty surprise.

I'm not going to repeat the email in question, but needless to say it was far from encouraging or constructive. When people contact me with problems, I usually go out of my way to help resolve their issues. More out of habit than inclination I did the same here. I thanked the sender for taking the time to get in touch, explained some of the points he had raised and promised an updated release which would fix another issue that he'd had.

Needless to say I didn't receive a reply.

I didn't feel very good about myself after that. Even though I hadn't done anything wrong (and forgetting the positive things that people had said about the same game) I felt thoroughly de-motivated.

I'm always very nervous about releasing stuff online whether it is a game or a blog entry, so this was a serious blow to my self-confidence.

This got me to thinking. Why am I putting myself through this? What am I getting from the many hours of my time I pour into each game? What gives some ungrateful twonk the right to pull the damn thing apart?

The answer to why I do it is easy. Positive feedback, the thank-you emails, unsolicited reviews on other sites, those are the things that keep the spirits up.

Discovering that RetroRoids is this weeks "Game of the Week" on Games4Mac.dk has really brought this home to me. I didn't submit the game to them. They found it, wrote about it, and linked to it. More importantly, they liked it!

I suppose that is what I mean by taking the rough with the smooth. To get the plaudits I've got to keep on risking criticism, I've also got to learn to be more thick skinned about it.

RetroRoids - Games4Mac Game of the Week

I've just had a nice surprise courtesy of Games4Mac - a German MacOS games site. RetroRoids has been named as their "Spiel der Woche" (which roughly translates as Game of the Week).

Wow! Fame at last!

Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon

There had been a few things that I was going to write about this weekend, but the dreaded "man-flu" kept me feeling sorry for myself and away from my keyboard, so here is a late weekend update of the posts that would have been.

Star Trek: Of Gods and Men - Episode 2

I was lucky enough to get an early viewing of the second episode and, I've got to say, I enjoyed it. I'm still not sure about the shaky-cam look to it as it doesn't really fit in with Star Trek, but that aside it is well worth a view. There will be a full review (with screen captures) later on this week.

Site Traffic Update

Well, far from getting banned from Google (although this site currently has a Google Page Rank of zero) I've ended up with a traffic increase, but not from T2000. In fact, I've not seen a single hit from their site. No, in a surprisingly ironic twist all my additional traffic has come from Google, to some of my earlier posts. And rather than doubling my traffic, it has nearly quadrupled it! I think there is probably a moral there somewhere.

RetroVaders Updated

In another surprising twist I've released a small update to RetroVaders. This was mainly to add a "deadzone" to the analog joystick routines, but I've also converted the sound and graphics formats to help reduce the file size of the game (for the Windows and Linux versions this has halved the file size). Download it from the usual place.

. . .

Now that I'm feeling back to normal again (or as normal as I get anyway) I'll be looking to mix things up a bit over the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned!

Dead and Dying

I was going to post something about the PIN for Google Adsense arriving in the post today, but, to be honest, I really don't feel up to it today.

I've got that wonderfully grotty feeling that my wife sympathetically refers to as "Man Flu". So with that in mind I'm off to take some more flu medicine and sniffle in a pathetic manner, whilst I wait for it to take effect.

Things to do on your day off #1 - Reconfigure Your Network

Around this time last year I invested in a cheap-and-cheerful Dynamode BR-6004 Wireless Router and a LinkSys wireless PCI network card. This was to allow my children to access the internet from their bedroom without me having to run cables through the house.

The downside to this was the built-in four port hub. For some reason there was a noticeable delay when accessing the internet when directly wired in to the hub. This meant that for browsing the web the my kids PC felt faster than the directly wired one.

I'd never found a way around this, but as the actual download speeds were OK it was something I was willing to put up with.

There were some other issues with the router. One of them was that you had to run Internet Explorer in order to configure the modem. FireFox or Konqueror just wouldn't work correctly with it.

None of this was reason enough to ditch it so I've stuck with it, albeit slightly annoyed that the kids had a better browsing experience than I did, and I was paying for the damn thing!

Last week however a colleague gave me a second hand SiteCom WL-025 Wireless Router that he no longer wanted. Although on paper it should be a worse router than the Dynamode one, in practice it works a damn site better. The network delay has gone, network encryption works better (even if it supports less protocols), the web configuration works with Firefox, and the network connection speed appears faster too.

Stranger than fiction

You just can't make this stuff up. Apparently a women in Kansas spent so long on the toilet that her body molded itself to the seat.

From the article:

The case drew nationwide attention after Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple said it appeared the Ness City woman’s skin had grown around the seat in the two years she apparently was in the bathroom.

“We pried the toilet seat off with a pry bar and the seat went with her to the hospital,” Whipple said. “The hospital removed it.”

And they say that men spend too long on the can. . . . .

Rant Time!

Those of us in the UK will be aware of this, but for those of you who are not from our fair land we've just had the annual celebration during which the Government finds new and exciting ways to devalue our currency. This is known as "The Budget."

The tax on fuel has, of course, been increased. This will inevitably cause the price of all other consumer goods to rise too as the cost of transporting and manufacturing them increases.

Apparently this is the Governments way of safeguarding the environment. I guess what they mean by that is that eventually no-one will be able to afford to buy anything and will starve to death. After the population has been reduced enough there will be less people to produce pollution.

Result!

Taking the rough with the smooth

Blogging gives you a whole lot of freedom. As someone who in real life works for a newspaper (albeit in an I.T. role) I can appreciate the fact that as a blogger I have complete control over what I write.

Admittedly there have always been ways of doing this. A couple of years ago I could have started a fanzine which, if I was lucky, would have reached a hundred or so people a month. With a blog I can reach that many people in a day.

It is the same with programming. Back in the day (pre-internet) most of the stuff I created would have ended up either being sold through the small-ads of a computer magazine or via a budget software company. It would have reached maybe a couple of thousand players. Publishing it myself for free doesn't make me any money, but on the other hand has reached many thousands of people.

One of the high-spots of doing this is getting positive feedback, either in comments or via email. I've had my fair share of both, but don't let that put you off telling me how great I am! Someone telling you that your game is one of their favorites, or that they really enjoy reading your blog is the payment that we are after.

On the flip side however are the people who don't like my stuff. This can be damn depressing, but as I remind myself "You can't please everyone."

When it comes to the games I take negative comments very seriously, as long as they aren't just "your game is bad, and you should feel bad". Just telling someone who is giving you something for free "you suck!" doesn't help anyone.

If they tell me what they don't like and why, then it gives me something I can look at improving. Changing someones mind about a game by fixing what they hated about it is the biggest challenge you can face, but can certainly improve the quality of your output.

The same goes for blogging. Hopefully over time you find your own voice, and maybe an audience to go with it. If you take the time to read what people say, and take notice of constructive criticism, then you can improve the quality of your output.

Just remember though, that behind every blog post and every bit of freeware software is a person. Be constructive when giving feedback, not destructive. Who knows, they might thank you for it!

Keyword Frenzy

Hello.

You may be wondering about the large number of keywords for this post.

Well, there is a reason for that.

I'm trying to see if more keywords means more hits to this entry. Usually I'm fairly frugal about how many labels I add to each post, so I'm curious to see if that strategy is a good one or not.

It is worth noting that the most labels you can have is 20.

The results, as usual, will follow.

P.S. - While you are here why not have a look around - maybe you'll find something you like?

SQL Induced Brain Death part 2

I've seen the light at the end of the tunnel, and thankfully this time it wasn't an oncoming train.

I've finally managed to get the correct data out in a usable format and generate the reports that our accounts department required (reconciling the net number of newspapers sold, grouped by route to market and taking into account discounts and returning the correct revenues). The SQL query used is a bit of a beast (and takes half-an-hour to run) but it at least returns the correct result set.

Now I can sit down quietly and have a head-ache!

SQL Induced Brain Death

It isn't too often I find myself praising Microsoft's software, but when it comes to SQL, Microsoft's admin tools reign supreme (although MySQL's tools are catching up).

Sadly, today I've been using Sybase's SQL server, which although it is a good database product, it stinks big time when it comes to the management tools.

So this afternoon has felt a bit like stepping back in time ten years, to a time when all SQL code was written by hand instead of dragging links in a graphical environment, and testing the results meant exporting a text file for another program to deal with.

Sigh.

This makes dealing with complex queries more of a hassle than it needs to be, and accounts for the feeling of brain death that I'm now enjoying.

Not quite a Geordie

Originally I come from Teesdale, which could be described as the place where the Geordie becomes the Tyke, although perhaps you shouldn't say that to anyone living there! In case you don't know the difference, a Geordie is from Newcastle (and the immediately surrounding areas). A Tyke, however, is from Yorkshire.



Teesdale was part of Yorkshire up until 1974 when it became part of County Durham, so I can say that I was born in Yorkshire (more or less) but raised in County Durham.

My home town is a small market town called Barnard Castle, which was originally right on the border between Yorkshire and Durham. The border between the two areas was marked by the River Tees.



Barnard Castle was on the Durham side of the border, directly opposite on the other side of the river is the town of Startforth. Although this is now seen as part of Barnard Castle it was originally an entirely separate town.

The two towns were divided by the river, and the fact that one town was in Yorkshire and the other in Durham, but as far as distance goes, less then 20 meters separated them.



If you are in the North of England then Barnard Castle is certainly worth a visit, not only for the Castle itself (or rather the ruins of the castle) but also for the Bowes Museum - essentially a French-style Chateau in the middle of the dales.



If you want to know a bit more about Yorkshire then hop on over to the official Yorkshire Dales website.

Blogger / Blog*Spot Blues

I'm guessing that you probably heard the wailing and gnashing of teeth that accompanied todays unscheduled Blogger meltdown.

If you check out the Blogger help forum it was full of very annoyed bloggers who were unable to access their blogs or administration areas.

Now, things like this can (and do) happen on any system, and shouting at the people trying to fix it does not help resolve things. One thing that I feel would have helped would have been an official announcement made sooner and in a visible place, such as on the front page of the Blogger dashboard. This would have prevented the firestorm of complaints that followed.

Blogger is a free service (and a good one too) so let's not blow a couple of hours of downtime out of proportion, and give the good folks at Google a chance to resolve things properly.

Template Changing Time

The more observant of you will no doubt have noticed that the look of this site has been changing over the past couple of days.

I've been experimenting with the templates feature of Blogger to try and get something more to my liking. Hopefully I'm pretty much there now, but will be tweaking the current three-column view to try and make it adjust to whatever resolution you are using.

Once I've finished I'll post the template so you can use it as the basis for your own template.

Before I finish, a quick word of warning: some of the more unscrupulous bloggers out there provide templates with their own code embedded into it (so you end up hosting their web links / sign up code). So just be careful, OK?

Blogger Tip #1: Hiding pages from the archive

Sometimes it can be useful to have a page on the blog but not necessarily listed amongst your blog archives.

A good example of this would be a links page. If you look to the left of our site, under the picture of yours truly you'll see a link titled "Blogs of Interest". This links through to this page:

http://half-a-page.blogspot.com/1970/01/links.html

As you can see from the date part of the page it claims to have been written in 1970. But if you look at the sidebar you'll see no posts older than September 2007, which was when this blog was started.

So how do you achieve this? Simple. Whilst creating the post, click on "Post Options" and set the "Post date and time" to some time in 1970. Presumably blogger recognises that posts this early are impossible and so doesn't show them in the archive list, but does allow you to view the pages if you link directly to them.

The Blogs that weren't

I don't know about you, but in the time I've been running this blog (and the ones before this) I've built up a selection of blog entries that for one reason or another remain unpublished.

Sometimes this is down to the post not going anywhere. Othertimes it is just too poor (even by my standards) to inflict on the general public. Occasionally it is one that just missed its time and now would be pretty pointless to post.

So here is a question for you:

Do you have unfinished posts? What do you do with them, keep or delete? Do you ever return to them?

Answer in the comments folks!

After a traffic increase? Some genuine things to try

After the previous two posts you may be asking yourself if it is possible to increase your readership and how should you go about it?

Well, here are some things that are worth trying.

BlogRush. You host adverts of other people blogs, they host adverts of yours. This has brought a slow but steady trickle of readers onto my blog. The good thing about this is because it ties in to your RSS feed to generate the links, the readers you get are genuine ones.

BlogCatalog. A social links site, and a pretty good one too. Join up and join in the discussions and before you know it you'll be hooked. This is bringing in an increasing number of readers and is certainly worth investing some time in.

Feedburner. Strictly speaking this may not boost your regular traffic but it certainly helps with your RSS feeds. If you are curious about how many RSS subscribers you have this will also allow you to track that. As this has been bought out by Google it may well end up integrated into Blogger.

Anatomy of a Traffic Boosting Scheme

"Why post about things like T-2000?" I've been asked.

"Aren't you just boosting their popularity - and your own by signing up for them?"

These are good questions. To get the answer lets have a look at how these schemes work once you have signed up.

Step 1: The Bait

This step is important. If you want the traffic you must make people think that this has already worked for you and brought in millions of hits. You have to lie to get people to sign up via your referral link. If you tell the truth (as I have) you are unlikely to get any extra hits at all.

Step 2: The Wait

At this point you can let the "magic" happen. Providing your sales pitch is persuasive enough and you can get enough people sign up via your referrals link you should see a small boost in traffic. Maybe a dozen or so over a couple of months. If your referrals do the same your traffic will get another, slightly larger boost.

Step 3: The Disappointment

Mathematically the traffic boost should increase with each passing generation of referrals. But wait! You will only be on the list for six generations of sign-ups. The actual sign-up rates are so low (you may only get a couple) that the magic million figures are unlikely to ever be reached even if you follow the rules.

Why? Well, chances are that if you are seriously considering a scheme like this then you are on a low traffic site, probably with less than 50 hits a day. The actual percentage of your visitors who will actually want to sign up via your referrals link is even lower.

If you are assuming that you'll get additional traffic from search engines then think again. Any searches that would bring people to your site are so packed with other people doing the same thing that the chances of anyone clicking on your site are somewhere between low and laughable.

. . . .

So back to the original question. Why blog about this? Well, if you believe the majority of posts on this you'd imagine that you will be gaining millions of readers and making a fortune in advertising revenue. You don't find as many posts telling the truth about these schemes.

At best you may get a small boost to your site, but probably only a temporary one. At worst you could find yourself in violation of Googles Terms and Conditions for Google Ads and have your account closed losing you what little money you have gained.

Still think it is worth your while?

Dramatically increase your visitors - yeah right!

This year I've decided to try and boost my blog audience. Now, I've got to admit that my stats are slowly increasing, but I'd kind of like my daily viewing figures to be in the triple digits or higher.

So I've started looking at ways of boosting my readers. Some of them like BlogRush I've already said about as much as I need to (they don't really do much). Others (like BlogCatalog) actually do seem to help bring some visitors in, providing you actually take part in the various discussions.

Well, here is another way to boost your earnings beyond your wildest dreams: T-2000 Ultra!

Let's take a look at some of the claims, and as it is a free service let's also see how it works.

Explode Your Income!
Boost Your Sales by upto 4000%
And Drive 1 million Visitors to Your
Site Every Month!
All Totally FREE!

Any alarm bells ringing yet? Apart from abuses against capital letters, punctuation marks, spelling and grammar, does any of this sound too good to be true?

Damn right!

So how does this work in practice.

Well, once you've got past the scam-style verbiage (not to mention the poor spelling) there are six adverts that need clicking on, these should be opened in a new window and will take you to someone elses site, but with a black border at the top of the page. After ten seconds or so an "Ad Code" will be generated which you use as part of your sign-up process.

Fill in the six required codes, enter your details (and those of your one-line advert) and click submit. As a side note, all the sites listed were, without exception, Make Money Online type sites. As if I'm surprised.

At this point you'll need to confirm your name and email address again before the confirmation emails are sent to you.

If you can't find the confirmation email then it's probably in your junk folder (take that as a hint folks!).

Now, it could be that this is entirely on the level and that millions of readers are going to land on my site any minute now, start reading my blogs and I'll be an overnight success. If you believe that to be the case (and I'll provide updates to this over the next 30 days) then feel free to click the referrals link below and sign up too. I certainly wouldn't recommend it though.

Warning - Referrals Link - Warning

What are you waiting for? Millions of readers are waiting for you.

As if!

Remember kids: We are willing to sign up for crap so that you don't have to!

Update:

It has been pointed out to me that this sort of thing isn't a good idea if you want to use Adsense on your site. Although you may increase your page views (although I have my doubts about that) any increase would almost certainly end in you loosing the chance of using Adsense in the future. Plus, it would be a bit dishonest now wouldn't it?

So, rather than not blogging on things like this (and personally I think that it is a story that could do with being told) I've taken off all the advertising from this blog.

Once things return to normal (and I'm pretty sure that it won't take too long for that) then I'll consider putting the ads back on.

Just like I did with BlogRush I'll make weekly posts updating on how well (or not) this is doing. If anything amazing happens between then I'll be sure to let you know.

Update 2:

Just to keep track on the stats I've added a statscounter link to the blog. I'm keeping the results hidden (for now) and will reveal the number of page impressions at the end of the 30 days.

Update 3 - 12 hours on:

Well, there has been some extra traffic - all from BlogCatalog. Even then we are only talking about an extra five or six visitors. So from the point of view of people reading this post - great! As far as the extra traffic gained by T-2000 - not so great. No extra traffic at all.

Update 4 - 48 hours on:

There has been no increase to the traffic by having the link etc on the site (although telling people not to click on it probably weights things against me) so I've cut this short and removed the referrals link.

I'll decide the future of adverts on this site later on, but for now remember, as a rule of thumb for any scheme to increase your traffic: if it seems too good to be true, then it probably is!

R.I.P. Gary Gygax

E. Gary Gygax, the father of Dungeons and Dragons, died on Tuesday aged 69.

Its hard to know what to say about someone who has had such a monumental impact on our geek culture, and was instrumental in the birth of Fantasy Role Playing Games.

Without him my early teenage years would certainly have been a lot less fun.

Gary, we salute you.

I have always thought in the back of my mind

Cheese and onions!

The Case for Adverts on Sites

There is a small but vocal (i.e. loudmouthed) section of the internet community that is dead set against adverts on any site. Apparently the thought of getting any money from your hobby is distasteful, greedy and shows a lack of pride and integrity.

Bullshit.

Now, there are some sites out there, a large number of them in fact, that are there purely to make money. I've written about them before, they are a plague on our digital landscape on a par with email chain-letters (send $1 to each of the people on the list, as seen on Oprah!) and there is nothing that can justify their continued existence.

How about for regular sites though. Why do I have adverts on my sites? Simple. It gives people a chance to show support in a meaningful way. It is the equivalent of a tips jar on the counter of your local cafe. If you like the site, click on a link, but you don't have to if you don't want to.

I've experimented with using a PayPal tips jar, which in the time it has been on my main site has yet to garner a single donation, and yet I've had plenty of people emailing me about how they like my games, and thousands of downloads from around the world (even appearing on the magazine cover DVDs), so it's not entirely down to unpopularity.

On the other hand I have had people clicking the adverts on the site. Not many, but still more than the tips jar. Before anyone gets the wrong idea about me somehow making a fortune from this, in the last three months I've ended up with $10 in the old adsense account. At the current rate it'll take a couple of years before I reach the magic $100 for a payout.

So if you want to talk about integrity just remember, I, and many people like me, are giving you something for nothing: in my case my writing (via http://half-a-page.blogspot.com) and freeware games (via http://dans-remakes.sytes.net).

You can read my stuff, download the games and share them with your friends legally and for nothing. Gratis. Free. If, however, you feel like saying "thanks", then there are measures in place to do that.

And that, to quote Stone Cold Steve Austin, is the bottom line.

A difficult subject

I'm going to do something a little different from my usual posts here, so if you are looking for something lighthearted, or about gaming, blogging, or any of my usual stuff then have a look through the archives because. . . . . .

Well. . . . . .

This is going to be difficult for me to write, and probably more difficult for you to read, so consider yourself warned.

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

Still with me?

Ok.

Deep breath.

. . . . .

The year was 1999. At that point my wife and I had not long moved into our new mortgate commitment and were trying to start a family. When I say trying, it is more accurate to say that we'd been trying for a couple of years without any success, so when she finally became pregnant it was the biggest thrill of our lives.

We couldn't wait to tell everyone the news, and spent the time leading up to the twelve week scan on cloud nine. We chose names, started looking at baby clothes, and were looking at a future with a new child, maybe even twins. Who knows?

Life, however, doesn't always go the way you want it to.

"I'm sorry, but we can't find a heart beat."

It only took a single sentence to destroy our world entirely.

What happened next is pretty much a blur. I told the nurse that she was wrong. She had to be wrong. She couldn't be right. It wasn't fair. Our baby couldn't be dead.

I know that I cried.

We were taken to a side room where a midwife explained what was to be done next. I can't remember exactly what she said, but the upshot of it was that we had to let nature take its course, but if it hadn't within the next couple of weeks then they would perform an evacuation to remove what would have been our first child.

I do remember that she tried to console us. She said words to the effect that these things happen, especially early in pregnancy. That there had probably been something wrong with the foetus. That things just weren't meant to be this time. It would be easier to fall pregnant again after, especially in the first few months after the miscarriage.

It didn't really help.

We returned home together and spent the next couple of days in the deepest, darkest despair that we've ever experienced in our lives.

This part of the story does have a happy ending though. A couple of months later my wife did fall pregnant again, and although the pregnancy didn't exactly go smoothly, our first child was born in April of 2000.

A couple of years later, after another not-exactly-easy pregnancy, our second child was born.

We weren't planning on having any more children. And then, last week, we found that she was pregnant again. We took the test twice, positive both times. No doubt about it.

This took a bit of getting used to, but I found that I was actually quite excited about it. We both were.

Then yesterday she had "a bleed". Not a heavy one, as it turned out. Just a few spots. Certainly enough to scare the life out of us both, and have us thinking the worst.

Now this did happen on previous occasions too, so we are both still looking on the positive site that things are probably still ok. A small bleed at this time could just be the embryo embedding itself in the wall of the womb, we won't know for a while whether things are progressing well, or. . . . .

I'm not a particularly religious man, but I'm praying to whoever may be listening that things go smoothly this time.

Read i.ytimg.com

I'm not sure how often this must have been showing in the Firefox status bar, but today I noticed the message "Read i.ytimg.com". That is certainly an unusual message to get.

Visiting i.ytimg.com redirects you to a secure https:// version of the url before giving you an unable to connect error.

Being a typical geek, rather than letting the matter lie I decided to find out what the message relates to. As it turns out the ytimg.com domain is owned by YouTube and I was playing a YouTube video at the time.

Apparently this server is used to serve thumbnail images into the YouTube player (YouTube IMaGe server).

Damn.

Another mystery solved.

Maybe I can make a conspiracy theory out of it? How about this: YouTube is sending subliminal messages via our browsers? Or this one: YouTube is run by aliens who are tracking our browsing habits to learn more about humanity before taking over the planet?

Can you come up with something more outlandish?

Update

If you are receiving the error "Reading i.ytimg.com" but some web pages aren't loading or YouTube videos won't play, then you will need to check your script blocking software (such as NoScript for FireFox) or anti-virus software (like Kapersky AntiVirus) and enable access to i.ytimg.com. Pages relying on it should then load and you'll be able to play your YouTube videos again.

Update 2

Youtube has a number of servers that pass various components into its player, so as well as i.ytimg.com you may see messages relating to s.ytimg.com (and possibly others too). An anonymous reader has posted the following link which returns the graphical "skin" for the youtube player as served by s.ytimg.com:

http://s.ytimg.com/yt/img/master-vfl44411.gif

Another example image here, this time the "upload from mobile" icon:

http://s.ytimg.com/yt/img/icn_mobileupload_29x64-vfl20830.png

It isn't just images either (at least not from s.ytimg.com):

http://s.ytimg.com/yt/swf/watch-vfl43900.swf
http://s.ytimg.com/yt/css/buttons-vfl33583.css

As has been pointed out in the comments, the "read i.ytimg.com" and "read s.ytimg.com" messages are purely a FireFox issue, but the non-working youtube video caused by anti-virus or adblocking software blocking these sites will affect other browsers too.

Update 3

John has pointed out that Google own the ytimg.com domain. The explanation for that below:

Link to original press release


Update 4

Ishino has let us know that Google's anti-phishing API also uses ytimg.com. See http://code.google.com/apis/safebrowsing/ for more details on this.

This is used by Google's HTTPFox Firefox plugin to avoid phishing sites, so you may start seeing messages such as GET http://s.ytimg.com/safebrowsing/rd/goog-malware-shavar_s_(number) or
GET http://s.ytimg.com/safebrowsing/rd/goog-phish-shavar_s_(number) presumably as it is checking the links with Google.