It's Windsurfing time!

Been a while since I last had a chance to post something on there - but this is a doozy.

Check out this fantastic video from YouTube:



The group is called The Surfers, and I am going to have this playing on my iPod the next time I'm out windsurfing on my board. This is so bad it's awesome!

You can check out some more of their hits at Last.fm

EmTech inanity

Bit of a break from posting, been pretty busy - but I had to share this. Dan Lyons (of Fake Steve Jobs fame) has hit the nail firmly on the head with his latest post covering a panel at the EmTech conference.

He's nicely summed up what I've been telling investors and boards for the last 18 months - why do these people not get it?

My first reaction was that in the greater scheme of things (economy in free fall, war in Iraq, global warming, energy crisis, not to mention the old reliables like cancer and poverty and AIDS, etc.)this challenge of finding a good restaurant seems like a fairly trivial and unimportant problem for our big geek brains to be trying to solve. If I were funding these guys I might go home scratching my head about what those kids are doing with all of my millions. Maybe there is a point to what they’re doing,but honestly, what great problem are these companies trying to solve? Sitting there watching this spectacle — watching these guys unable to simply explain what they do and and how they are going to make a business out of it -it was staggering to think that someone has entrusted these people with very large sums of money. But someone has. I weep for those people.

(Via Real Dan Lyons Web Site.)

And why are work shy slackers *still* getting funding for mediocre faff that adds no value to the collective human race, doesn't solve any problems - and, worst of all - will never make any money?

Attack of the Cock Copter

Some protesters wave around banners. Some have some more spine and throw some eggs.

In Russia, they have more balls. They heckle with giant flying dildos.

Yes, chess grandmaster turned dissident politician Gary Kasparov was giving a speech in Moscow when he was harassed by a remote controlled flying dildo.

After the attack was thwarted, Kasparov joked "I think we have to be thankful for the opposition's demonstration of the level of discourse we need to anticipate. Also, apparently most of their arguments are located beneath the belt." An audience member shouts back "Finally the political power shows its face!". Kasparov's reply?

"Well, if that's its face..."

Will we see Secret Service agents taking a cock for the US President? I can only hope so.

Here's the full video of this harrowing thrust against democracy:

Promoting small websites or finding out about large ones

In doing some poking around to research the background behind a domain, I came across three websites which all offer similar tools. Depending on how you choose to use them, they can either be used to carry out some background research on competitors, or to promote your own small website or blog.

AboutUs.com

AboutUs asks you for a domain or website URL, and then wanders off and retrieves information from the site. It analyses the site contain, and pulls back a summary, related domains, other sites linked to, and information about the domain itself.
The interesting thing about this is that AboutUs presents all this information via a Wiki, which can be edited and update by the site owner, or by visitors.

Check out this example page for Finance-Portal.co.uk

DomainTools.com

DomainTools uses a whois lookup to pull back registration information about a domain, as well as the server it's hosted on, and any other relevant sites. On top of that it also retrieves a site's rank from Alexa and Complete.com. Most interesting though is the analysis DomainTools does on the homepage content. As well as counting the number of internal and outbound links on the homepage, it works out the relevancy of the meta description and site title against the homepage content. Create a free account to get access to more tools and goodies.

Compare the Finance-Portal.co.uk page against the one for AboutUs.

BuiltWith.com

BuiltWith works in a similar vein to AboutUs and DomainTools. The difference with BuiltWith is that it's tools are more concerned with the optimisation of a site, and the technology and software used to build it. BuiltWith will report on things like the advertising systems being used, the scripting framework, the analytics and tracking software being used, and so on.

Get a flavour of what's available with this report on Finance-Portal.co.uk

Taken individually, these are all interesting and useful tools. However, when combining their reports together, they can be used to fully map out the web presence for a given domain. Equally, they can produce powerful pages and reports which can be used to promote a small site or blog.

Give them a go and try them for your sites.

Cyanide and Happiness

If you haven't come across their cartoons and animations, your life has a gaping void in it. Luckily for you, it can now be filled!


Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Spartacus is probably their best animation yet. Enjoy!

TRON's lightcycle scene - in stop-motion animation

French filmmaker Freres-Hueon has recreated the epic lightcycle battle from Tron in fantastic stopmotion form. Using cardboard cutouts to replace the computer graphics, and the entire scene is re-enacted in all it's glory.

Feast your eyes on this gem:

Tron
by freres-hueon

Utterly fantastic. Head on over to http://www.gltron.org/index.php and relive the fun for yourself. There's an IRIX binary available to, to give your SGI workstation a proper workout.

Ling from LINGsCARS on website promotion

I've known about Ling's Cars for a while. Not only is the website pretty awesome, but Ling also has a Zil 131 truck with a fake nuclear warhead strapped to the back. I've been a big fan of Zil and Gaz trucks for ages, so that's how I first came across Ling and her site.

Ling has a fantastic post on her blog at http://www.lingscars.com/blog/?p=2412 where she goes into detail on how she builds awareness of her website. This should be required reading for anyone who's trying to get traffic or raise the profile of their site - it's not all about PPC and Google Adwords.

Well worth a read, and I can highly recommend subscribing to her RSS feed as well.

Home Secretary in ID Card database security gaffe

Home Secretary in ID Card database security gaffe: "

Unhackable? Up to a point, minister

Security experts have rubbished claims by the Home Secretary that databases for the controversial National ID Cards will be 'unhackable' because they are being kept off the public internet.…

"

(Via The Register.)

When will the current Government learn the lessons from IT gaffe after gaffe? Jacqui Smith's speech is well worth a read through, just to understand how badly the Home Secretary and the Government are trying to mislead votes over the ID cards scheme.

For an even more complete takedown, read the thorough dissection at the excellent SpyBlog.

How is this legal?

So I was reading a report in Management Today detailing HMRC's involvement with a Lichtenstein 'Deep Throat' mole.

For some background: Lichtenstein is a tiny country in Europe that exists purely as a tax haven. A number of years ago, an employee of a main bank there stole some account details.

Let's be clear here - he stole them. These contained information including balances, transfers, and other account details for a number of very wealthy account holders, who had Lichtenstein bank accounts for - surprise! surprise! - tax avoidance purposes.

Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC) have bought this list, and are now using it to conduct tax investigations against a number of people.

What exactly seperates HMRC from any other criminal organisation at this point? There was no moral outrage here, the guy wasn't a whistleblower - he stole people's bank account details and has been trying to sell them to the highest bidder. He'd already sold them to the German tax authorities for £5m.

Given HMRC recently lost personal details (including bank account information) for 25 million people, it's clear how little they value personal information - at least, the public's personal information. Their automated systems also recently screwed up and they sent out hundreds of 'missed payment' penalties to businesses across the UK. Bear in mind, these weren't 'friendly reminder' notices, these were 'we are taking you to court because our system says you didn't pay your taxes 3 years ago' notices.

Try getting a Freedom of Information (FoI) request carried out by HMRC. The double standards here are breathtaking.

Grab the full Management Today story at http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/newsalerts/article/786024/mtsweek/hmrc-cash-liechtenstein-deep-throat/?DCMP=EMC-Daily%20News

That Sharia Law comment controversy in full

Wing Commander ship blueprints

I can remember being blown away by Wing Commander when it came out. That, and having to save everything I earned from my holiday job to get a 386. Tough times.

If you have fond memories of tackling the Kilrathi in your trusty Hornet, then you'll be pleased to hear that high resolution blueprints for all the Terran ships are available for your download and printing pleasure.

The Wing Commander Combat Information Centre have 1600x1100 blueprints of all four Terran ships - the Hornet, Scimitar, Rapier and Raptor.

Or you can grab the entire blueprint pack. Although it's a monstrous 42mb, it does have the blueprints at 5000x3300 resolution.

Get those printers warmed up!

MiFare RFID vulnerabilities exposed

Great video presentation from the recent CCC in Germany, highlighting flaws and issues with the security around Philips' MiFare RFID tags (as used on Oyster cards ;-)

Renting out a holiday property? Check out The Villa Place

Just chatting to a friend of mine, who has a nice villa in France. He actually only spends a couple of months a year there, and rents it out the rest of the time. We were talking about ways to manage property rental for holiday villas via the Internet, and he gave me a heads up to an interesting new site that has just launched - The Villa Place.

They've got a really slick frontend for choosing where you're interested in, and you can browse for property via location, drilling down from a global map. If you have a property you want to rent out, you can register, then upload photos, link to reviews - it's pretty comprehensive.

It's pretty impressive stuff, and a great example of how far we've come since the early dark days of static HTML listings from estate agencies.

Check them out at http://www.thevillaplace.com/

Technorati Tags:
holiday villas, the villa place, holiday rentals, vacation villas, estate agents

That's got to suck

Taken from a 2005 Africa Geographic article titled Shark Detectives. Click through for a larger image and some more great pictures.

Awesome.

Creepy creepy pope

Big hiatus as I've been caught up with various projects - a nice backlog of interesting things to post.

For starters, though, here's a fantastic picture of The Pope.

Is it me, or does he look like Emperor Palpatine? Can't you just see blue lightning shooting out of his fingertips?

The picture itself comes from a Daily Mail article detailing how the Pope will be bringing back exorcism squads to battle Satan.

The Clone Bishop Wars, if you will ;-)