I’ve changed from soon-to-be-dead-maybe delicious to hopefully-not-going-to-die diigo.

You should notice hardly any changes other than link update posts will only appear twice each day. If I’ve set it up correctly.

Just renewed the hosting for this site for another twelve months.

So you have another year of links and the very very rare update. Look! Here’s one! Make the most of it!

I’m sorry to say that grayblog has been hit by hackers. They inserted some malicious code on Tuesday afternoon. If you have visited the site between then and now, I suggest you run a scan for malware.

I’ve now blocked FTP, changed the FTP password and removed the malicious code from all the changed pages.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused. Hackers = evil bastards.

Well, the RSS feed is now fixed, so hopefully those people who never the visit the site will now be reading something. Unless they unsubscribed in the months that it hasn’t been working on the basis that grayblog was dead. Ho hum.

If you haven’t unsubscribed, then you’ve missed loads – the tenth birthday post, lots of links and, um, er, well, that’s all really. Must do better.

The RSS feed for comments is working.

The RSS feed for posts is not.

Mystified.

UPDATE: I’m trying the WP forums (fora?) – no good. But I have some help on the 34SP forums, so we might get somewhere with this.

FURTHER UPDATE: it seems to be working now. So hello again to all the RSS readers – maybe say hello?

It just goes to show how much attention I pay to this thing. I’ve just installed WP 3.01 and noticed that my RSS feed is dead (403). Turns out that it has been dead for nearly six months since I last upgraded and I’m at a loss to understand why.

Any clever chaps who can help out?

For reasons known only to technical wizards (i.e. not to me), yesterday’s tenth birthday post didn’t appear in the RSS feed (unless you know otherwise). I think it may be because I posted it retrospectively (wanting to be clever and make the post time the same as the very first post, ten years ago). Anyway, for you RSS readers (both of you), now you have a reason to actually visit the site so that you can read it.

Now, where’s my coffee?

Cod philosophy from a four-and-a-half year old boy.

Today is the tenth anniversary of grayblog. A great deal has happened over the last ten years, in terms of this blog, in terms of my life and in terms of the wider world. I’ve started a business, met an amazing girl, got married, started a family, had some adventures, had some good times and some less good times. Some of that has been recorded here, a lot has been left out.

grayblog has turned from a diary, verging on a confessional for catharsis, into more of a linklog these days, with sporadic bits of content and the odd recipe. It’s not as good as it used to be (they all say that) and readership is but a fraction of what it once was (hi Gordon, hello Dave, good day anonymous RSS readers), but I keep paying the bills on it and I keep the project ticking over. Maybe, one day, I’ll dedicate more time to it (a redesign might be in order at some point – and perhaps some more content. Hmm, actual content. Maybe even a revival of radio grayblog or the passport project. Who knows? But don’t hold your breath.)

Blogging in general has also changed. When I started out, most of the UK bloggers knew each other on first name terms. Some of us even met up for beer and vodka jellies. I’ve made a few friends along the way and quite a few more acquaintances. Now, thanks to improvements in technology and a general acceptance of putting your life online, just about every Thomas, Richard and Harold is at it in one form or another, even if nine-tenths of them can only muster 140 characters at a go, a path I’ve studiously avoided to date. We’ve seen “social networking” in all its glory come along, which surely is only a form of what everyone has done through history (you know, talk to people, make new friends, use networks of contacts to improve or change their lot, or just to call in favours) but brought up-to-date for this internet age. Blogging in the form that this blog has generally taken will, I suspect, been seen as a phase that communication passed through, rather in the way that stone tablets or papyrus have passed by. Where once this was cutting edge, now it is has-been, a relic of a past time. No reason to stop, though. Not yet, anyway.

Yeah, I’ll keep this going. There’ll be more stuff to write about, from things to do with business, travel, food, drink, current affairs, cats (it is a blog, after all), the weather, Sussex County Cricket Club, Brighton and Hove Albion, music, science, nature and, well, stuff. Life throws up things which are thought provoking – lately, most things thought provoking either come from the mouth of a certain four-and-a-half year old boy or are related to the rather pressing issue of the mortality of our own parents (you’ll have spotted links to various charitable organisations specialising in some rather unpleasant medical conditions). How my concerns have changed over ten years! That said, I’m still up for a beer if anyone asks me. And assuming I can arrange Tom-sitting.

So, there you have it. grayblog. Ten years of tripe and drivel, with a few pictures and some links. Thanks for reading. Stick around, if you will.

I once wrote the following on this blog about Brooke, having read an article she wrote about autopsy on Barbelith:

As it turns out, that’s not half of what you wouldn’t have guessed!
I rather suspect that the media storm is only just beginning.

This post seems to live on, with good comments going on. Maybe I should write more food posts….

I’m thinking about pulling the plug on Radio Grayblog. Judging by the records, it is getting less than 50 hours per month of listening time. That’s an average of one person a day for little more than an hour and a half. Or three people a day for only half an hour each. Or 30 people logging in and listening to one song before they switch off in disgust.

With the USD/GBP exchange rate shifting about, it now costs me around £125 per year to run it and times are hard. I can probably think of better ways to spend that money (on a dozen new CDs, for example).

Also, half the reason I set up Radio Grayblog was so that I could listen to my music whilst in the office. That was back in the days when office and home were nearly ten miles apart. Now, office and home are not much more than ten feet apart. Turn the stereo up loud enough and I can sing along. Alternatively, I can just take a CD or three out to the office (no evil MP3s here!).

So, give me some good reasons why I shouldn’t pull the plug.

Hmm. Looks like the del.icio.us publishing thingy is borked again, after successfully publishing one link only. So it’s time to look for an alternative solution.

Thankfully, I see that Gordon has linked to this one. However, it requires WP2.5, so it looks like I must finally get around to that upgrade that I’ve been putting off for, well, forever. It would be helpful if I actually read anything – this plugin posts things to del.icio.us from your WP blog, not the other way around. Look, I was still in a meeting at 12.20am this morning (yes, you read that correctly), so I’m not firing on all cylinders this morning, ok?

Anyone else having problems with the del.icio.us blog posting tool (the one built in to del.icio.us)? It hasn’t posted for a week, which means you’ve missed out on three or four exciting links. I’ve rebooted it, so hopefully it might work now.

Well, there’s a funny thing. For the first time in at least five, maybe six years, I made it to a meeting of blogging types organised by Gordon and featuring an impressive collection of bloggers, some known from years past, some from their writing and some new to me. It was, undoubtedly, excellent. Links to at least some of the attendees as soon as I’m not blogging from my mobile.

UPDATE: I knew that, if I waited long enough, someone else would do the hard work and link to all the attendees.

Apparently, this blog has turned boring in 2008 (so says my wife). It seems that posts about my new laptop and bag are not exciting enough (my new phone will be delivered tomorrow, so there’ll be another subject to discuss! And my laptop case (along with the plants) have been delayed and will not arrive until Friday, which means I won’t get my hands on them until Monday).

So, in a probably futile attempt to change the subject and make reading more interesting, here’s a recipe (serves two):

INGREDIENTS

• 1 whole fresh squid, cleaned and prepared into tentacles (separated), wings (cut into strips) and mantle (cut into rings). See here for a good step-by-step guide to cleaning and preparing squid if you haven’t done it before – it’s not that difficult. You should look for a squid that will yield around 225g/8oz of useable flesh. Our local Morrisons has an excellent fish counter and is our preferred source, but you might know a better place near to you.
• 1 pepper (capsicum for our overseas friends) – I used yellow, but red would do. Cut into small pieces.
• 1 red chilli, deseeded and finely chopped
• 12 or so baby plum tomatoes, halved
• juice of half a lime
• 1 head of pak choi, divided to individual leaves
• 275g/10oz pack of fresh (not dried) fine egg noodles. If you only have dried, prepare them as normal but drain them from the water when they are not-quite done
• Olive oil, black pepper, salt

METHOD

1. Heat a wok over a high heat and add about two or three teaspoons of olive oil.
2. Throw in the pepper and squid. Toss about until the squid is just beginning to “catch” on the pan.
3. Add the chilli and lime juice. Toss for another minute or so.
4. Add the tomatoes and noodles. Keep tossing in the pan or else the noodles will burn. Reduce the heat a little if necessary.
5. For the last thirty seconds or so, place the pak choi on top of the pan just so that it wilts a little (not too much – you really just want it warmed through without becoming soggy).
6. Season and serve.

Low fat, healthy, tasty. And not too expensive either (we got our squid for three, er, quid).

Yes, once again we come around to the annual grayblog end-of-the-year introspection. I know you’ve been looking forward to this for at least, oooo, twelve months?

Firstly, let’s look back and get the resolutions thing out of the way. At the end of 2006 (the archives are over there, on the right), I said I’d carry on improving the things that I had starting improving in 2006. But who has time for that? The garden isn’t finished, I haven’t done enough exercise and the writings here have become ever more sparse as the year has gone on.

So, do resolutions have any value if they are so easily broken/ignored? Comments welcome on that subject. And, given my obvious feelings on the value of resolutions, you can set as much store as you feel is appropriate in the following:

• to write here more frequently (not too hard)
• to take more exercise (we now have bikes which spend far too much time locked away)
• to keep my office in a more tidy condition (also not hard)

What else can be said about 2007? Well, at a professional level, things have generally improved through the year. I don’t think it’s a huge secret that I wasn’t terribly optimistic about the prospects for my business late in 2006 and was feeling pretty demoralized. Things have improved markedly since then and whilst it is still tough going, the light is clearly visible at the end of the tunnel and, if all goes to plan in 2008, I might be able to talk about my business and the “P-word”* in the same sentence without laughter. To a large degree, I’ve been carried along by the faith shown in me and my business by others around me – my backers and my clients. Even my bank has been supportive (although I’ve yet to ask them to dip their corporate hand into their corporate pockets for me, and hopefully won’t need to). The one person who keeps me from believing too much of what they say has been Hels, who frequently questions me and challenges me to test what I’m doing and show that things truly are going the right way. That is a good thing and has encouraged me to look hard at the business and the direction that it is going in. And I’m happy with it right now.

2007 has also seen us seriously (VERY seriously) looking at emigration to the Netherlands (or possibly just inside the Belgian border). Ultimately this plan has been shelved – we have decided to stay close to friends and family. We also can’t really afford it at this stage – if my business was making more money and we hadn’t been so crippled by not selling Hels’s flat for so long, then maybe it would have been different. Note that I say that the plan is shelved, not abandoned. It’s something that we will keep at the back of our minds and may return to in the future. And our love for Maastricht is undimmed, as you might have guessed from the number of Dutch-related del.icio.us links that I post.

The year has seen its usual bunch of travelling, this time including trips to the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy and Poland. I didn’t get to a few destinations that I had in mind for lack of time and resources, but the opportunity is not lost, merely deferred. I do promise to stick some photos on here somewhen of some of the places that I/we have been to this year – feel free to nag me to keep to that promise. Highlights of this year’s travel for me included:

• San Pellegrino in Alpe, Italy – breath-takingly beautiful and wonderfully peaceful (although I suspect it might be busier in high season)
• Hamburg, Germany – drinking cocktails whilst standing in the rain on the morning of my birthday
• Warnemünde, Germany – bobbing about in a launch on the Warnow river with Hels and Tom
• Kanne, Belgium – getting the “I could live here – this just might work” feeling
• A12, Netherlands – driving from Gouda towards Zoetermeer and marvelling at the sodium-lamp orange mist with enormous wind turbines looming darkly out of the gloaming and wishing my camera was handy
• Tiercé, France – having possibly the best cheese board I’ve ever had or am ever likely to have in “Sarkozy’s restaurant”
• Przydworzyce, Poland – driving through the woods and seeing locals who had gathered mushrooms offering them for sale at the roadside, often only a single punnet-full

Travel plans for 2008 are subject to change, but look likely to include Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands (no surprise there), Switzerland (2008′s first for me – 2007′s was Poland) and Italy. Maybe Spain. And maybe Ireland and Poland. Too many places to go to, for both business and pleasure, and too little time and money to do them all.

Of course, the true highlight of 2007 has been watching Tom growing up. He is fantastic, a life-changing element of existence. He continually amazes and surprises us. It’s impossible to feel down when he’s around. I’m looking forward to more in 2008. And more of married life with Hels, but I’m going to stop on the emotional family gushing now before your keyboard gets covered in vomit.

What do I think 2008 will bring? Goodness knows. If there is one thing that I’ve learnt, it is that you can never tell what the future will bring. I think politics and the economy will both be fascinating in 2008 (and might finally push crappy nonsense “entertainment” out of the headlines a little) although the ride might be a bit bumpy. My business will increase in strength and stature. Family life should continue to be splendid, particularly as we have settled on our home here for the time-being and should have fewer disturbances to routine (famous last words). And I might knock-up a decent duck à l’orange or two.

Thanks to the regular readers who keep coming back here – I know there must be at least half a dozen of you still braving the digital elements to come here. Happy, peaceful and prosperous New Year to you all.

I’ve been asked to meme. I think this breaks a rule somewhere, but the flesh is weak. I hope it is painless.

1. There are some sweet pea seeds on my table – they are a heritage variety that I grow and propagate every year from self-sown plants. They should be in a paper bag, but where do you get paper bags these days? Shops are hopeless in this regard, addicted as they are to plastic. I think I may have to use an envelope.

2. I’m currently drinking a cup of black Earl Grey tea. I only have milk in my tea when someone else makes it and doesn’t ask if I take milk before liberally applying the bovine lactations. And I only have tea other than Earl Grey when there is no Earl Grey available unless, of course, I’m having a mad day and treating myself to some Darjeeling or lapsang souchong.

3. I have discovered that there is more to vodka than meets the eye. Of course, it probably isn’t sensible to put vodka in your eye, although a quick search of Google reveals umpteen people who are prepared to try it.

4. The above thought reminded me of a link I saw Darren post today which provides top tips for new bloggers. Amongst the tips is this: “If you spend a little time searching before you post, you can probably find your idea well articulated elsewhere already.” Which has probably sent my already weak blogging mojo into hiding completely.

5. I am thinking of getting a new phone as my old phone has a nasty habit of switching itself off at random. But I’m concerned that all the latest models of the candy-bar variety (my preferred phone format) are perfectly rectangular and therefore very difficult to grip. Have these people never heard of ergonomics? I’m quite tempted by the Nokia E51 though.

6. I have never been a Venture Scout. I was in the Cubs though. Dib dib, dob dob.

7. Are we there yet? I’m not a fan of memes and have generally avoided them. However, I’m sure I’ve done more than a couple in the seven years (seven? really?) that this blog has been going. So I will not damn them entirely as somebody would end up searching the archives and I’d end up being hoisted by my own underpants.

8. Right, I’m off now to light the fire.

British nuclear weapons were enabled and disabled by a bike lock key. How very British – just as it should be.

Three Gorges Dam causes geological deformation. No surprise really – the weight of water is bound to have this effect.

Graybo updates Amazon wishlist. Christmas is coming, geese need fattening. Or just send cash:

…could probably be an appropriate new subheading for this website, but hey-ho. I could bore you with all the usual stuff about being time-poor blah blah blah, but you get enough of that on other sites.

However, in the meantime, here are a few things that I’ve been pondering:

• are standards in education and general knowledge so poor these days that a crew member (in catering) on a ferry between Dover and Dunkerque really doesn’t know where the Netherlands are?
• is the proliferation of carved pumpkin usage in this country the result of an increased belief in evil spirits associated with an increase in secularism or merely the by-product of the Hallmarkisation of every other day of the year?

[..insert long post about being very busy here..]

Anyway, whilst you ponder how busy I am, rush out now and get some Wyborowa Exquisite vodka – if you thought all vodkas were the same, then this will open your eyes to a whole new world of drunkeness. It’s very smooth with a distinct hint of vanilla. And, apparently, it is made in a small bath. Hmm.

And it comes in a funky Gehry-designed bottle. Yay!

More content to come soon (yeah, right), possibly including posts on the following topics:

• tours and trips of the past year, possibly including photographic highlights
• on Polish motorists
• a rant on politics
• Tom update
• a post about food
• Ruralville news

You could even vote-me-up if there is one of these you particularly want to read.

Just to keep Matt The Bakiwop happy, here is a genuine update:

• I’m working like a mad thing at the moment. I haven’t even had time to update my work weblog, which is bad. Work is generally busy in a good way, though, so things are quite good. Just don’t mention the Germans.
• We’ve been travelling a bit lately and I owe readers some photos from recent trips. So far this year we have been to Angers/Nantes, Utrecht/Maastricht/Aachen/Namur, Hamburg/Rostock and I made a solo trip to Vlaardingen/Aalsmeer. There have also been a few UK-based days out and there are some photos from those too. When time permits, I’ll upload some.
• On the domestic front, I’ve been working on developing the front garden (although progress has been in fits and starts and has stalled again lately – I need to get the footings out for the retaining wall, but time constraints and the weather both conspire against me) as well as getting the side and back gardens looking good – I’ll try and sort out photos of that too.
• I bought Hels a bike for her birthday and this has spurred me to sort out getting my bike restored after having left it in a shed for six years following the spectacular failure of the derailleur whilst bombing along the Avenue de Chartres in Chichester in 2000. Following a suggestion from Kate, I’ve taken it to Baker Street Bikes in Brighton for restoration and should get it back on Wednesday. All I’ll need then is to add a child seat for Tom and we’ll then be able to go out on family cycle trips (although bike mounts for the roof bars on the car would be good and I think I’d like to have the chance to dump the child seat so that I can get a few miles in on my own terms too).
• We’ve started doing a bit more work to the house – currently, we’re remodelling the bathroom. Not a major change, just new paint, new taps and a new shower screen. We’re also eyeing the conservatory combine harvester (shhh, don’t tell Dave), which needs some major work – we’ve spied a couple of rotten timbers, which isn’t good. Repainting of the kitchen is also scheduled in for “somewhen”.
• Tom has taken to refusing to go to sleep in the evening. We’ve just had him up for a 9.30pm snack, which he took whilst lounging in front of the telly in the living room – he has the makings of a good couch potato.
• Finally, it’s the Garden and Art Event at West Dean, near Chichester, this coming weekend. I organise it. I’m seriously hoping that the weather improves considerably between now and then.

More updates. Soon. I promise.

…just very, very, very busy.

If, when using WordPress, you get error messages that look like this:

WordPress database error: [Can't open file: 'wp_comments.MYI' (errno: 145)]

…then your database has become corrupted. Don’t panic. Either contact your hosting provider or go to PHPMyAdmin and repair it yourself.

I learnt this today.

I’ve got some strange issues with this site, but I can’t fathom if they are WP or 34SP problems, or even a problem with the database.

Whenever I try to edit the recent posts, I get a 404 after hitting “save”. Sometimes I get a 404 when trying to view the site or the wp-admin pages (which sounds like a 34SP problem, although they promise me that there is no known issue with the server – I’m on Holly, for those who are also on 34SP). The RSS feed works only intermittently. And del.icio.us (I hate those dots!) is having problems with the automatic daily posting of links, sometimes getting a 500 error and sometimes not posting to the correct category (27). I’ve disabled and uninstalled Bad Behavior. I’m running WP 2.02. I’m confused.

Any ideas?

UPDATE: see the comment thread for more.

• Tom was one yesterday – it’s been both the longest and fastest year of my life (and Hels’s too, I think it is fair to say - and, by definition, Tom’s). We celebrated with cake, balloons and a trip to a farm. There shall be further celebrations at the weekend.
• We had snow last night. Up to six inches of the stuff is forecast to fall tonight. That should make for an interesting commute for Hels in the morning. Tom was non-plussed when I introduced him to the stuff this morning. His face simply said: "cold. wet. yuk."
• I’m in Germany at the moment for an enormous trade event. I’ve just had dinner in the hotel restaurant, which was eye-wateringly expensive. At the next table was Michael Heseltine. He was not wearing a loin cloth.
• I really need to update this site more often. Sorry.
• This site and my email (including work email) have been down for most of the day due to problems at 34SP. Apparently, the aircon failed causing the servers to overheat. I couldn’t help thinking that, on the coldest day of the winter so far, opening the window would soon solve the problem.

Hooray me! This week, I’ve completed and sent off not only my tax return, but also Hels’s.

In addition, I’ve done a shedload of work. Rah!

For some reason, my email is taking ages to come through – the arrival is about two hours behind the actual timestamp. Craaazy 34SP, I suspect.

• I will finish that unfinished post that has been lurking in my Drafts folder since, oh, August. It has pictures too.
• I will finish that redesign that I started. I know you can’t see any evidence of it yet, but I promise that it will be good. Very good indeed.
• I ordered some CDs a while ago for some friends to bring over from the US. I ordered them on 28 December. My card was charged on 29 December. It is 16 January today and they have still not arrived and my friends fly today. The company concerned is not responding to calls or email. UPDATE: the CDs arrived the day after they left. So they are now being FedExed to catch up with them as they work their way eastwards (visiting clients across the US), which largely defeats the object of having them delivered to their office. Ho hum.
• I ordered a replacement remote control for my mum. The company concerned sent a non-original replacement (they didn’t make that clear on the website) which was not compatible (mum’s telly is a video-TV combi and this remote had no video controls). They didn’t respond to emails. I’ve just called them and they didn’t once apologise for sending the wrong item, could not explain why my email was not answered (didn’t even attempt to find out) and did not offer to pay for the return of the incorrect item. The operator managed to convey a sincere feeling of not giving a stuff. That company is AV UK Limited and I heartily recommend that you avoid them.
• This site is being a bit flaky lately. 34SP insist it isn’t them, but I can’t imagine where else there might be a problem.
• I’m up to my eyes in work.
• Tom will be one next week – send money.
• If I get another one of those Harris Exploration Hits Gold spam mails, I will scream. AAAAARGHH!

It’s that time of year again. Last year, I made five resolutions. I have made a good start on the first one, although it is a massive project and has taken much longer than anticipated, not least due to distractions of the Tom kind. The second I failed on miserably. The third hasn’t gone too badly, although it has improved of late. The fourth, well let’s not go there, shall we? – only 186 posts this year, including this one – not good enough. And the fifth one I’ve done reasonably well on – I’m certainly a lot happier on that score than I was this time last year.

So, for 2007, I’ll continue the good work where the good work has started. Beyond that, I haven’t really got that much that I feel I particularly want to resolve to do – there is plenty to keep me occupied.

2006 has been a year like none before it, entirely due to the arrival of Tom. He has, as I expected, changed life totally and for the better. In addition, we’ve had a lot of travel (I’ve been to Ireland, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain and Hungary this year) and there is more planned for 2007, with trips to Germany, France, Netherlands (naturally), Portugal, Poland, Ireland and Italy on the cards. 2006 has also seen us starting to make new long term plans. We’re not yet sure if they will come to fruition, but the notion of emigrating doesn’t look beyond the realms of plausibility. We’re also much closer to finally sorting out our finances, which has to be a good thing and has implications for all areas of life.

New Year’s Eve this year will be spent with friends, eating and drinking too much whilst (hopefully) Tom sleeps. Then I’ve got to wind myself back up in to work mode after an extended Christmas break – which, when I wasn’t being ill, I’ve enjoyed and was much needed, particularly as I’ve spent nearly the whole break at home with Hels and Tom, undoubtedly a good thing.

Happy New Year to all grayblog readers. Keep coming back if you like this sort of thing.

A few weeks ago, I installed Bad Behavior on this site. This prevents malicious access to the server, thereby preventing comment spam and other nasties. It works in a different way to Akismet in that it doesn’t allow the access in the first place, thereby preventing a long queue of spams from forming that need to be moderated (either manually or automatically).

I’ve noticed two things. Firstly, whilst Akismet is still active, it is now picking out less than half a dozen spams per week. This will disappoint Rodney who was looking forward to the next pie spam chart, I’m sure. At this rate, it will be a very long time before another 50,000 spams make it to grayblog.

Secondly, the number of access attempts blocked by Bad Behavior (hate that spelling) has declined dramatically and rapidly since I first installed it. During the first week, over 7000 malicious access attempts were made on this site – which shows where the gazillions of spams were coming from and must have been putting a bit of a strain on the server (and adding to my bandwidth bill). By the second week, that figure had halved. I’ve just checked the figure again and, in the last seven days, there have been just 416 malicious access attempts. This implies that by preventing access and returning an error code to the malicious server, I’m actually deterring them from even trying to access grayblog – clearly the spam servers learn where they get 404s and 200s so that they don’t waste resources (clever chaps, these spammers).

Conclusion: I recommend Bad Behavior whole heartedly. I think I may install it on my other (work) blog.

Good news or bad news, depending on your point of view – I’ve just renewed the hosting or this site for another year, so you have at least another twelve months of this.

Apologies to everyone who has noticed that this site has been crawling to a standstill lately. I’ve been suffering from runaway trackback spam (if you don’t know what that means, nod, smile and move on to the next post). I’ve tried a couple of fixes but have just installed Bad Behavior, which seems to have fixed the problem even without a "u". I was getting a POST trackback.php request once or twice every second which, needless to say, was grinding my server to a halt. This should also fix the problem with the feeds, which should now be more reliable.

Keep me informed by the usual means of any problems that you find.

Sometime in the next day or two, visitor number 250,000 will come by this site. My advice: hit refresh repeatedly until it happens.

Sometime during the night, Akismet caught the 150,000th spam comment to be sent to this site.

The last 50,000 have taken 104 days to arrive, compared with 95 days for the previous 50,000 and 139 days for the first 50,000. In the last 104 days, an average of 480 spam comments have been submitted each day, which equates to one every three minutes. If it wasn’t for Akismet, I think I would have given up on blogging by now.

Six years ago today, I started this site with a post that included the question "what am I doing with a blog?"

I’m still waiting for an answer.

Don’t panic. Travel, workload and other stuff will preclude writing new content for this site for a little while, plus delay the long-awaited redesign.

But things are good.

Some of you may have noticed some oddness here. I’m working on it. Expect great change.

Today, Akismet caught the 100,000th spam comment sent to this site. The first 50,000 took 139 days to arrive, whereas the next 50,000 were posted over just 95 days – so the rate of spamming is increasing, in spite of the fact that not a single one of these comments has been published.

Over the last three months, 527 spam comments have been posted on grayblog each day, on average. This equates to one new spam comment every 2 minutes and 44 seconds.

There is a lot that I should be writing about here at the moment, but time pressures prohibit me from doing so. I’m travelling to the Netherlands this week, so if you’re lucky you might get some airport blogging.

In the meantime, here is a current playlist (aside from several CDs that are getting a lot of rotation time):

• Lupe Fiasco – Kick Push
• Amerie – One Thing
• Hird – Love Again
• People Under The Stairs – The Dig
• The White Stripes – Blue Orchid
• Ladytron – Soft Power
• Go! Team – Ladyflash
• OMD – Sealand
• Curve – Coast is Clear
• Bass-O-Matic – Fascinating Rhythm (12" version)
• Editors – Munich
• Jazzanova – Bohemian Sunset
• Ladytron – Fighting in Built-Up Areas
• Neotropic – Under Violent Objects
• Siouxsie and the Banshees – Dear Prudence
• Zombies – Time of the Season
• Amon Tobin – The Lighthouse

Willfully eclectic?

I’ll try and update at the weekend, possibly including exciting pictures of The Front Garden Project, which is now well and truly underway.

Hmmm. The banned cartoon post was the 6000th post here, and I only just noticed.

I’ve really been neglecting you readers lately, haven’t I? Umm, well, sorry. But hey, I’ve been somewhat busy lately:

• Last weekend: up to Stafford with Tom to spend the weekend with Jo and Bob. Excellent time had by all.
• Last weekend and this week: much concern about SiL, who has been really quite unwell. But she seems to be making a steady recovery, which is good.
• Tuesday: an all-day meeting with my New Zealand sub-agent, who is in the country at the moment.
• Wednesday: a day out with H to the Chelsea Flower Show. We dressed in our finest summer clothes and were subjected to repeated heavy showers, with the result that we looked like a pair of muddy drowned rats. But it was worth it. Not sure that it is worth paying £35 a head to get in, though, particularly when you have to sit on the floor to eat your sandwiches and drink your tea because the catering facilities are so inadequate. They were absolutely awful when I last went ten years ago and have only improved marginally.
• Thursday: catching up in the office.
• Friday: to Chichester for a haircut and to distribute publicity materials for my event coming up at West Dean at the end of June.
• Saturday: Charlie and the Peet came for lunch – a thoroughly relaxing and wine-filled event.
• yesterday: up early to go to Heathrow to meet some American colleagues of their plane, collect plants, deliver them to a nursery near my parents and then join my parents for Sunday lunch and some plant talk.
• today: dozy sleeping and much talk of "we really should go for a walk" and "the lawn needs mowing" or "I really must start on the front garden", but it’s chucking down with rain (between burst of intense hot sunshine) – that’s my excuse, anyway.

There are many, many things that I really should find time to write about, but I’m not sure when that will happen. If you’re very lucky, I’ll provide you with some photos, as a picture is worth a thousand words (or several thousand, if your usualy verbage is as poor as that which generally graces these pages).

…just very busy. More soon.

Following some silliness over at Gordon’s site, I’ve finally updated the support grayblog page.

Apologies if you found this site to be out of action this morning – it was offline for about ten minutes whilst I upgraded to WP2.0.2. I’ve upgraded my work site too. Yay me.

I have Akismet installed on this blog. Today, it caught its 50,000th spam comment since installation. That’s 50,000 spams in just 139 days or 360 spam comments per day – one every four minutes. Which begs two questions – if everyone used Akismet, would spam commenting stop? And how does anyone survive *without* Akismet?

I’m currently redesigning my work website, moving the whole thing across to WordPress and using the Pages feature to generate the non-blog content. So far, it’s been a mostly enjoyable experience, with only the discovery that forms break TinyMCE to spoil the party. I’ll let you know when I launch it.

Meanwhile, I notice that there is a WordPress security update. How tiresome. Guess I’d best get it.

In other news, we had a builder pop round this morning. He actually turned up when he said he would. Amazing.

Look! Look! Working archives! Yay!

Very large amounts of gratitude should be directed towards Mr Pete Dot Nu. He’s a lovely young man.

I’ve been invited to be interviewed on Radio Kent on Saturday morning (Radio Kent being rather imprecisely named as it covers a not inconsiderable part of Sussex). The Pat Marsh show is doing a feature on blogs and blogging between 11.15 and 11.45 and wanted me to chat on that subject, but I’ve declined the invitation as I’m keeping my diary clear in case I have to take H to the hospital at a moment’s notice (the baby being due to arrive any day now). But it might be worth listening to – I hope they don’t focus too much on the geeky and egotistical aspects of blogging and talk a little about their value for information and community (two factors which have always been and probably always will be sadly lacking from this site!).

And we all remember the issue of Computer Active for 3 May 2001 that featured this site, don’t we?

For the first time since 1986 (I think – understandably, my memory is a little hazy in this regard), I didn’t go out for New Year’s Eve. Although we had tickets for the cheesey disco at The Pub Next Door, Hels and I are full of a particularly unpleasant cold, so we decided to stay in and in fact retired at 9.30 – ridiculously early. Having said that, I do feel better this morning, so perhaps an early night paid off.

Today we have spent the morning tidying the house in preparation for the arrival of the parents for NYD lunch – a suitably low key way to spend the day.

Of course, you’ll all be expecting a review of the year. Well, here it is:

• trip to Essen
• trip to Angers and Honfleur
• stuff you don’t need to know about
• announcement of the result of the stuff that you don’t need to know about
• trip to Maastricht and Bruges
• trip to Devon
• three other trips to the Netherlands
• other not very exciting stuff

In general, 2005 has been a year of consolidation and was always going to struggle to live up to the excitement of 2004 – but there has been excitement enough for us. Both home life and work life have been successfully consolidated, although we’d like to have more money coming in in both areas. And, thankfully, 2005 has generally not featured much in the way of bad news, certainly not anything that I’m still dwelling on now.

As for 2006, clearly there is one event that is going to dwarf all else. Becoming parents is going to change our lives in ways that we probably have yet to even imagine. I think we are reasonably prepared for what is coming – certainly from a practical point of view, we have pretty much everything under control (all saving the final touches to the nursery).

As for resolutions, I’m not a huge fan of making promises that I know I probably won’t live up to, but here goes anyway:

• finish the garden. This is a major project that could take weeks or months, involving relocating our car parking area and moving large quantities of soil by shovel and wheelbarrow – but it will radically improve the look of our house.
• get some learning done. Not sure what yet – something towards my MCIM or Chartered Marketer status would be good. Perhaps some language learning. I’ve even been thinking about learning shorthand.
• really get on top of business. There have been moments this year where my business has led me and I’ve not been leading the business – clearly that must change, although I think I’m ending the year in a much better position to that which I started it in.
• to update grayblog more regularly, probably with more photos. And hopefully not just of the cats or the baby.
• to take more exercise and lose a little weight. We eat healthily in terms of what we eat, but fall down on how much we eat. Which in itself is not a problem, but when coupled with my increasingly sedentary lifestyle has resulted in a noticeable bulge. This year, the bulge will go and probably by means of increased activity. Doing the garden will help that.

Crumbs. That’s enough for one year!

Anyway, happy new year to all of you who come here regularly and particularly to those who are good enough to comment. Blogging remains good fun, both writing and reading, so I fully expect to still be here in another twelve months. I might even fix the archives!

Meanwhile, go and check out the good news at Uborka.

I’m now running WP2.0 which seems to have cured the Akismet problem, but still leaves my archives in a dysfunctional state. I’ll see if I can find time to have a go at them again – it’s been a long time since they worked properly.

WordPress 2.0 has been launched, along with a complete redesign of the wordpress.org site. But the support forums are not functioning correctly, so I suggest that you hold off upgrading until things settle down a bit.

Last year, my Israeli clients all seemed to make a point of sending me emails on Christmas day, as if to say "Ha! Makes no difference to us!". It’s not a tradition that I wish to see encouraged.
So, having put together our quiz for the family for tomorrow (goodness knows why we have to do this sort of thing – I’d rather eat loads of food and then sit around being bloated than have to entertain people), wrapped all the presents (there were lots – and I only had to do the ones that I’m giving to H, as she has taken care of gifts for everyone else – delegation is the name of the game), stocked up the food and fuel stockpiles in case of unexpected snowdrifts (60% chance of snow on Monday and Tuesday could render Ruralville isolated if the gritters don’t make it out to us on Bank Holidays), we’re now fully prepared for whatever the next few days throws at us.
Expect quiet here for the next few days (though you probably won’t notice much difference from normal) except for automated posting of the quiz here tomorrow (can’t do it today in case the in-laws read it). Whatever you’re celebrating, I hope you have a good time.

Notice that everyone is on their last day at work today? You can tell by the way that they are doing nothing other than sending ecards to everyone in their address book to give them something to do until the Christmas sherry is opened at lunch time (bought from the discount bin at the Co-op, no doubt). So far I’ve had five and, thankfully, only one of them was musical. Mind you, that’s two more than the number of actual cards that I’ve received and one of them wasn’t even made of card!
In other news, go over to Scaryduck and give him a well-deserved HONK. I think I might have to make some sort of New Year’s Resolution about finally getting around to doing something about upgrading my existing crop of post-name letters (from ACIM to MCIM) and adding to them (with the words "Chartered Marketer"). This will mean study and evenings in seminars, but it will be worth it – one of my competitors has the upgraded version of my letterage and I want to be seen to out-do him.
And in yet other news, I see that the WordPress 2.0 will be released on Boxing Day. I feel a festive upgrade coming on, which might resolve the issues with the non-functioning archives and the malfunctioning comments. On the other hand, it might make no difference at all.

Hmm. I’m having problems with the Akismet anti-spam plugin for WordPress. It won’t let me review comments and I know from just before it went belly-up that it was screening out Brian’s comments as spam (clearly not the case). I’ve emailed the plugin author to alert him, but no news yet.
Anyone else had the problem of not being able to review messages? I’m using Akismet 1.12 on WP1.5. When I go to the review/moderate page, I get this error message where the list of messages should be displayed:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: get_post() in /var/www/vhosts/grayblog.co.uk/httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/akismet.php on line 253
Ideas?

I’ve updated the graybiography. I need to fix that CSS problem though.
That’s about as close as you’re going to get to content for the timebeing.

I’m pleased with the Akismet anti-spam plugin for WordPress. So far:

• 1512 spam comments blocked
• 1 false negative
• 0 false positives

Recommended.

I’ve just installed the new Akismet anti-spam plug-in for WordPress. I’m not sure that I like the way that usage is conditional upon signing up for wordpress.com and downloading and using Flock – but it looks like it works. It’s cleared out nearly 4000 spam messages from the grayblog archives at the time of installation. Since then, I’ve been upstairs and taken a bath. In that time, it has detected and quarantined more than 150 new spam messages. Yikes.
Admittedly, most of these messages would not have come to my attention previously because my use of the WordPress blacklist feature actually picked out the vast majority of spam that I was receiving, but occasionaly something was getting through, and usually in large quantities at one time. This seems promising and I’ll report if there are any major new developments as I use it.
(Another thirteen in the time it took to type this – thank goodness for the auto-delete feature, which clears out any comment in the moderation queue that is more than a fortnight old).

A new and worrying variant of comment spam has hit my site this morning – just a single spam comment so far, but it was sufficiently unusual for me to look at it closely before hitting the "delete" button.
The spam itself contains the usual "I think your site is great" crap and a link, telling me to scroll half-way down for a recipe. Now, this is the sort of thing that I might do, but I usually check that the link is not to some pr0n or cas1n0 site before clicking, particularly as the link has come from a stranger (and consequently went straight to moderation for me to review).
In fact, the link is to a legitimate weblog, specifically to this post. As you can see, I’m not the only one to have experienced this.
It seems that the comment spammer is trying to pollute comment spam blacklists by getting valid websites blacklisted. This would have the obvious consequence of rendering blacklists useless and reducing the value of anti-comment spam tools and plugins. This is a worrying development.
You can read more about it at The Net Is Dead. The advice is to carefully check comments left at your site and do not blacklist legitimate sites and URIs.
Personally, I find this all immensely tiresome. I had reduced the problem of comment spam to a minor nuisance, but now I’m back to getting 50 to 100 comment spams per day. This is not why I have a website – to wage a constant war on idiots is not why grayblog is here. A more timid soul might throw in the towel in the face of all this crap. It seems that waging this war is the price I must pay for subjecting you all to my words and pictures.
Some might argue that it’s a fair deal!

I’ve been away on holiday, hence the long pause in postings. There will be photos and details in due course.
In the meantime, this site celebrated its fifth birthday last Thursday. I know I said that I was going to organise something special, but it didn’t come to pass. So have some cake instead.
Please note: I did not say that I would provide the cake. Come on, do you expect me to do everything?!

September 16th will be this site’s fifth birthday, making it one of the longest-running British blogs.
Unfortunately, I shall be away from the laptop that day, so will not be able to post amazing, witty and entertaining blog-birthday anecdotes. So I’m going to open the floor to regular readers to write something on that day. I’m also hoping that, in addition to writing amazingly amusing stuff for this site on that day, they might also look under the bonnet and figure out why the archives *still* don’t work.
If you want to be in on the act, let me know by the usual means.

Please note that, from now on, comments may only be left by those who have previously posted a comment to this site. If you have not previously posted a comment, any comment that you post will be held in a queue until I can check that you are not an evil spammer.

I see visitor number 200,000 passed by here sometime in the last few days. That’s nice.

…being as it is mainly made up of pathetic excuses for the lack of any fresh content. I could tell you that I’ve been up to my eyes in work. I could tell you that I spent last week in the Netherlands and Belgium (Maastricht – great place – who knew?). I could tell you loads of things. But would you believe me? And, even if you did, would you find it an acceptable excuse for the shoddy state of grayblog?

Tim Yeo says that there are too many potential candidates for the Tory leadership. The BBC estimates that there are "at least eight candidates". One commentator in the Independent at the weekend put the figure at eleven.
Under party rules, in order to stand for the leadership a candidate must present a petition bearing the signatures of twenty MPs. MPs may not sign the petition of more than one candidate. There are currently 197 Tory MPs. 11 candidates. Do the maths.

One day, I might just have time to write something here when I’m not

• running around to meetings
• travelling around the UK or other bits of Europe
• sorting out the garden (there may be photos, but I don’t think that you believe me on that score any more)
• sorting out boring stuff related to Hels’s flat sale
• trying to catch up with my piled-high in-tray
• sleeping
• doing any one of a million and one other things.

I know I’m not unique in being busy, but it is getting in the way of blogging at the moment.

Still alive, but away from the PC or a connection a lot lately. Normal service will resume shortly, you’ll be dismayed to hear.

In other news, the idiot who pulled out in front of me on the A27 on Friday evening whilst driving a lorry carrying gas cylinders and who then proceeded to give me some tattooed gesticulation out of the window, will find when he goes to work tomorrow that it doesn’t pay to do that when in control of a vehicle with your employer’s telephone number on the back.

Very very busy and also likely to be away from my PC for much of this week, so expect quiet.
The plant fair at Pashley was very successful – thanks to everyone who turned up. I got slightly sunburnt, which considering that the original forecast was for rain was quite an achievement.

Taking up BT on their broadband upgrade offer? I have, and now surf twice as fast as I did yesterday – if I was nearer to the exchange, I’d be going twice as fast again.
But, if you do, please note that you need to change from PPPoE to PPPoA. If you don’t, you’ll be sitting looking at your PC all day, wondering why you have no broadband connection. Not that I know anyone who did that, of course.
It would have been useful if BT had alerted users to that in advance.
And I have no idea what PPPoE and PPPoA stand for. Or what it means.

It’s been quiet here lately. I promise that I’ll try to write more soon, as well as post some photos from a few recent outings.
In the meantime, please note that this Sunday sees the twenty-second plant fair at Pashley Manor Gardens to have been organised by yours truly. Your attendance will be appreciated – there will be cake.

Expect quiet here for a few days whilst I visit Dutchland.

Thanks to Gordon, I seem to have kicked the .htaccess generation into gear on my WP installation, by CHMODing to 777 then back to 666. I shouldn’t need to do that, but there you go.
Naturally, all this has done is reveal a whole bunch of other problems. If I modify the permalink structure, .htaccess updates, then I get an internal server error if I go to the home page or the WP admin pages. So, apologies to those people who have been trying to look here today and have had error messages.

I’ve taken a look in my server error logs and I notice two things – firstly, when .htaccess updates, the following error is generated:

[Fri Apr 8 11:48:45 2005] [error] mod_gzip: TRANSMIT_ERROR:32

Secondly, when I try to call a page, the internal server error caused is as follows:

[Fri Apr 8 11:52:37 2005] [alert] [client 81.130.49.105] /var/www/vhosts/grayblog.co.uk/httpdocs/.htaccess: RewriteRule: cannot compile regular expression '^?p=category/(.+)/feed/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$'\n

So, these leads to the following questions:

1. what is a transmit error:32?
2. what causes it?
3. how do I prevent it?
4. is it related to the server’s inability to compile the .htaccess file?
5. is there something I can do to make the file compile even with the transmit error?

There is nothing in the WP Codex on this (at least, nothing that I can find) and nobody seems to have raised a similar problem in the forums – so I have opened a discussion here. One user states that he/she had the same problem with the compile error and resolved this by deleting the permalink entry from the database via their server’s database admin, and then going to the admin page and resetting it on the permalinks screen. I’ve tried that, but it does not solve the problem.
I’m out of my depth on this problem, I must admit. And my tax return has arrived through the post this morning (joy of joys!), so my mood is not great at the moment. Time for coffee and toast, I think, before I get back to the PFE accounts.

Use WP? Post links to Amazon (UK, US or any of the others, for that matter)? Then you need this plugin.

• comment notification doesn’t work. It’ll send the notification to any address other than graybo@grayblog.co.uk – totally mystified by that one
• monthly archives not working – totally mystified. This is, in my estimation, the most serious fault. If I can’t remedy it, I may look at an alternative CMS. Ugh. May be related to the next problem.
• pretty permalinks not working. Related: .htaccess not updating, in spite of being CHMOD 666. Totally mystified.
• still haven’t figured out how to get previous and next page links at the foot of the index page and, by extension, the archive pages. This is due to me not knowing enough/any php.

Bah.

I’m stumped. I want to put "next page" and "previous page" links at the foot of each page. I know I should be using posts_nav_link. Where should I put it? My current code looks like this:
[the main body of the grayblog page]
</div>

<div class="sidebar">
[the sidebar part of the page]
Help?

Incidentally, I’ve turned off the anti-spam plugin that I was using because it was generating false positives. Fingers crossed.

I’m told that all these posts about my WP woes are boring. Sorry.
Anyway, following advice and suggestions received, I’ve employed a plugin and some new code to fix the category archive pages so that they now display 500 posts (setting it to 999 posts caused a server timeout). I’ve also added links to the previous and next posts, as well as the home page, to each individual post page, which should make Gert and Brian happy.
Now I have to add some code so that when you get to the foot of each page of 500 posts in the category archives, you can click a link to view the next 500 (yes, a couple of my categories have that many posts!).
I have also yet to resolve the non-functioning date archives. Suggestions on that one would be very welcome.

I’ve found a new problem – the category archives only show the most recent posts when called, and not the entire history of posts in that category.
UPDATE: that’s due to some missing PHP from my index.php file, code that was not required under the old version. Bad update instructions, methinks. I’ll need to figure out what code is required and add it, but it needs to generate "next page" and "previous page" links.
No solutions to any of the other problems yet, and I’m getting increasingly fed up. I’ve asked 34sp.com to check the status of the AllowOverride in my httpd.conf file, but I’ve not yet had a reply from them.

The only outstanding issue is related to the archive links not functioning. I think this may be related to .htaccess not being updated by WP, even though it is CHMOD=666 and mod_rewrite is available. As a result, I can’t use fancy permalinks. Others have the exact same problem. I think that this might be caused AllowOverride being disabled in the httpd.conf file, but I don’t have access to that file on 34sp.com in order to check. I’m also concerned that setting AllowOverride to all would create a security hole (although I’m happy to be corrected in my assumptions by anyone that knows more than me).
Suggestions?

I’ve fixed the problem with the categories links not working.
The categories link list is still in the wrong order, though I believe that I’m using the correct PHP script to call them in alphabetical order.
The month archive links are still broken.

Well, the latest is this – the comments are working and the style sheet now shows up on the individual pages. Good-o.
However, the list of categories in the sidebar is no longer in alphabetical order.
Moreover, the links to the categories or archives only take you to the front page, although the URI displayed is correct.
And I still have to insert index.php/ in every URI, in spite of having mod_rewrite on 34sp. I’m confused and tired and more than a bit fed up. Suggestions would be very welcome.

I’ve just done the WordPress upgrade to 1.5. Things are a bit weird – please be patient and I’ll try and resume normal service soon.
UPDATE: comments are down. This, I know for sure, is due to the fact that I have separate style sheets for the main pages and for the comments pages, and now they use a single template – or something. Either way, something is borked. If you want to talk to me, then email.
FURTHER UPDATE: No, I was wrong about the cause. The problem is to do with the permalinks. Now to fix it…
FURTHER FURTHER UPDATE: Comments are still not working. There was a problem with permalinks that now seems to be resolved (I’ve had to prefix all the page links with index.php/ – surely that can’t be right??), but the comments are still not working, even though I’m using the two php scripts supplied with the classic theme (a recommendation made in the forums). I’m feeling mildly frustrated.

Two new header graphics – hit refresh endlessly until you see Hels’s shades close-up and "…grayblog…" daubed on the roof of St Paul’s, Fathers4Justice-stylee.

I now have a Gravatar and I’ve implemented gravatars in the comments. I was slightly concerned that Gordon’s didn’t show up, but that is because he adds anti-spam text to his email address when he comments. Any comments or suggestions on the formatting of gravatars in the comments will be welcome, although as I have struggled with this for the past half hour, you may get short shrift.

Some of you might have seen the header graphic for this site that features Treacle. There is now one featuring Monty. Go on – waste your day hitting refresh until it shows up.

You already know that I have an amazon.co.uk wishlist here.
You can now view an RSS feed of my amazon.co.uk wishlist here.
You can get one yourself by going here.
I got the idea from here.

For WordPress fans – the new plug-in seems to be working. I’ve had no new spam comments (since I reported the spammer that was spamming this site – they did not seem to be on the blacklist) and no reports of false positives. Yay!

I’m having comments spam problems again (anyone who reads my comments RSS output will have noticed them). So I’m using this WP plugin to prevent proven proxies from posting comments, and also to check for links in comments to known websites that sell or advertise the things that are usually promoted in the comment spams. I’ll let you know how I get on.

For those that read this site using an RSS feed, I’ve added a padding   to the title line as I had heard from the Uborkans that the three full stops at the beginning of my title were breaking the feed in some readers. I’d be grateful if someone could let me know if this makes any difference. I’m rather fond of my three full stops (not really a proper ellipsis), so I don’t really want to remove them. However, if it continues to be a problem, I may replace them with a couple of …s.

…for the extended outage here this morning. 34SP were upgrading the server and it seems to have taken longer than planned. Normal service resumed now though.

…for comment spammers: if you want to leave a comment spam, don’t put it in the most recent post as it is a bit, well, obvious.

Whilst using SiteMeter to check the browsers that you all use to read this (IE 6 – 68%, Firefox – 22%, Netscape 3 – 1% – you poor thing!), I spotted one of those sidebar ads for eBay.

Umm, say what?

Well, I seem to have conquered the worm, with no new problems with it. I do still seem to be eating bandwidth though, and I’m not sure why – 0.9GB since yesterday tea-time compared with around 2.5GB for a whole month recently. So I’ve set robots.txt to prevent bots from looking for files that no longer exist (thereby creating an unwanted 404), although I can’t believe that that is the whole problem.
Thank goodness I checked my Hotmail and picked up on the warning from 34sp that I’d exceeded my bandwidth allowance, otherwise the bill would be spiralling out of control by now. There must be other people who haven’t checked their mail over the Christmas period who will be in for a shock when they next log in.

I’ve just received a traffic warning from 34sp – it seems that I’ve had more than 9GB of traffic this month compared with my limit of 3GB, and so should expect a bill for about £9. Hmm.
Would backing up my databases in two formats (two enormous files) have caused this? Previously, my traffic had been around 2GB and increasing by about 10% per month.

EDIT: looks like the Santy C worm. I’m working on a block.
FURTHER EDIT: this site is under attack. If you use WP or any other PHP script, you need to protect NOW. Go here.
YET FURTHER EDIT: I’ve implemented the .htaccess edit recommended by "thepete" in the forum linked above. I’ll monitor it tomorrow and see what has happened. I think that WP has blocked all the bot requests but has served a lot of 404s. I also seem to have been serving an enormous number of 404s to bots that have been looking through my old MT archive files (so, if you have links to my old MT generated pages, they will no longer work as they have been purged). I’ll keep you posted.
EDIT THE FOURTH: the edit of the .htaccess file has not worked. I’ve had more than 2GB of bandwidth eaten last night. So I’ve added some lines to the top of my index.php file as recommended in the first post in the forum thread linked to above. I’m really keen to fix this, as every GB of bandwidth costs me £1.50 and the money is being eaten at a frightening rate, so any suggestions are welcome! I’ll report back on the success or otherwise of the latest change.
EDIT THE FIFTH: the latest attempt seems to have worked completely, and my bandwidth consumption has dropped dramatically. Hurrah!

Everyone seems to be caught up in Best Ofs and Top 100s at the moment. Not one to be left out, and lacking ideas for original content at the moment, I felt that it was time to have some Best Bits of …grayblog… 2004, just in time for this site’s fifth Christmas.

Best Game of 2004
Top Dog – originally posted 13 December. Without doubt, the game that I played most this year.

Best Amusing Link (not game) of 2004
Making Fiends – episode 11- originally posted 13 September. The Making Fiends series has been consistently brilliant, and this was probably the best of them all.

Favourite Political Rant of 2004
Howard’s Wrong Way – originally posted 6 October. Apart from the Boris bit at the end, I think most of what I said still holds true (in fact, the Boris bit actually illustrates what I said about trust).

Best photograph of 2004
Tempted as I was by this one, I eventually decided on this one instead:

- originally posted 4 November 2004. This picture has lots of memories for us both. I’m going to try and take more photos for this site in 2005.

Best cat named after me
Graybo the Cat at Uborka.

Any suggestions for other categories?

The latest on the cat name poll (scroll down a bit to vote) is that Nipples is in the lead (oh dear), with Sprout and Rommel following in second and third. I’ll keep the poll going until Friday, when I’ll declare a winner. However, at the moment I feel the approaching force of the wifely veto if Nipples wins.

Hmm. For some reason, WordPress seems to have stopped notifying me when new comments are posted here. I’ve checked all the admin settings, and it is all set to notify me at my usual address. I’ve also checked my spam settings to ensure that the emails are not being killed. Any ideas?

There is a bug in versions of WordPress above 1.2 which could result in you or a user unintentionally (or intentionally) causing your site to crash. There is a simple fix here. I think it has been sufficiently well-publicised now that we need not be secretive about it – just tell any WP users that you know that they need to implement the fix as soon as possible.

Apparently.
Of course, some of us have been doing this blog thing for quite a while now.

Thanks to Ian for the tip-off, I’ve now installed Kitten’s Spaminator. Let’s see if it effectively kills off the spam comments.
If you have a problem posting a comment, let me know by e-mail and I’ll see what (if anything) I can do.

It looks like the spam commenter has returned – 15 this morning, so he’s clearly got a workaround for the anti-spam measures I took. I’ll have to look into some of the other anti-spam measures available to me.

The great thing with WP is that hacks and plug-ins are encouraged. I’ve just implemented a nice little WP hack by Wellard that seems to leave normal functioning intact, but should stop the comment spams, at least for a while. There are other plug-ins and hacks that I can deploy, so if this doesn’t work, I’ll try them.
Honestly, you’d think that running a site would be easier than this. If only people wouldn’t keep trying to butt in on my space.

I’ve just (belatedly) upgraded to WordPress version 1.2.1, an upgrade that apparently resolves a minor security flaw and also smooths the login process. As you’d expect from WordPress, the upgrade took about three minutes and appears to have been utterly seamless.

Whilst trying to delete unwanted comments, I’ve accidentally deleted some comments that were wanted. Oops. If your comment was amongst them, feel free to post again. Comments are "on" again for the moment.

670 comment spams in 11 hours is beyond a joke. When they are arriving at the rate of one or two every minute, it becomes more than you can cope with.
Consequently, the comment function for this site has been disabled. I might re-enable it in a few days. Sorry.

I’ve got a WordPress problem, although not a major one. I’ve recently been swamped by spam comments, all of which have correctly been filtered out for moderation. However, it is now filtering all comments for moderation, including the legitimate ones, even though the filter-all option in set to "off". So your comments will not appear immediately, only after I’ve approved them. I am investigating.

Still struggling to catch up. There will be updates. And pictures. I promise.

I’ve killed the spam. Having run Spam Guardian on the grayblog server for some time now, and having refined the settings based on the result of over 2500 messages passing through, I’ve now set it to "drop" all messages that it considers to be spam. Suddenly, my inbox is very quiet, but it should mean that I won’t have a gazillion junk mails waiting for me when I get back from the honeymoon.
So, if you send a mail and don’t receive a reply, you’ll know why. However, I think that is extremely unlikely unless you put lots and lots of links in the body, this being one of the criteria for assessing the spam-ness of a mail.

Hmm. Firefox renders grayblog with the sidebar in Times New Roman. It should be Verdana. Something is wrong somewhere.
And it puts an annoying mouse-over thingy to tell me that RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication.
AND it only remember the last dozen sites in the drop-down address bar.

I don’t think I’m going to be a fan. That’ll irritate Gordon.

Just occasionally, this site generates some fabulous feedback. Check out the latest comment added to this post.

I uploaded three new header graphics today – there are rather a lot now, so it may be some time before they appear when you visit here (unless you sit hitting refresh all day long), but they are entitled bubbleplastic, polycarbonate and lamp.
I get quite a kick when the one with Hels’s eyes comes up, particularly when I haven’t seen her for a day or two.

Talking of the fact that this is one of the longest-running blogs in the UK, I note that it is, in fact, grayblog’s fourth birthday today.
<insert introspective comment on the nature of blogging here>
Sounds like a good excuse for cracking open a couple of beers from the fridge when I get home.

In Germany. Too busy to write here, but having a good trip. Would recommend Münster to anyone for a holiday visit. Incredibly tired. Trying to sort out stuff at home too. Finding it all a bit hard, but coping, and enjoying the positives. More next week.

I’ve been having problems with comment spam (you won’t have noticed, as they are all deleted upon arrival). From now on, you will be required to enter a name and email address when submitting a comment. Additionally, any comment containing more than three links will not appear until it has been manually approved by me. Hopefully that will solve the problem.

Worked until 10 tonight. Off to Germany Sunday. Expect continued content drought.

See this? €
It’s a euro symbol.
If you’re reading this on Mozilla/FireFox, you’ll know that.
If you’re using Explorer, it may well look like a box.
Poxy Microsoft.

Now that I’ve nearly got the settings right for Spam Guardian, I’m really pleased with it. I’ve had the filter sensitivity set to "5", which has screened out around 80% of the spam mails. Some are still getting through, though, so I’ve increased the sensitivity to "strict", which has a scalar equivalence of "4". If this correctly tags all the unwanted mail, then I’ll get it to delete the mails at the server before they get sent to my inbox – but only after a trial period (perhaps a week) of simply tagging the offending mails, just to be sure that I’m not going to screen out anything that I actually want to receive.
Exciting, isn’t it?

For those sitting on the edge of their seats, waiting for exciting news about my software tribulations, I can now report that I have successfully solved all the problems with my form using Phorm, which I rate as excellent. I have also tweaked the settings on Spam Guardian so that it is now tagging about 80% of incoming spam with the filter set to "10". I’m going to alter it to "9" to see if we can increase its sensitivity.
More exciting news as reports come in!

I’ve signed up for the new spam and virus filtering service at 34sp, which has already nipped one virus in the bud. However, I’m having problems finding a suitable level of sensitivity for the Spam Guardian filtering engine. I tried 75 and that filtered nothing. I’ve now set it to 50 and will await results. Anyone else got experience with this? If so, what level have you set? I know that it will take a while to tweak, and I’ll need to set up a lengthy "white list" of safe addresses, but all advice is welcome.
If I get it working well on grayblog.co.uk, I’ll deploy it on plantsforeurope.com too.

Too busy still. Spent most of today driving. Now have long forms related to flat sale to complete. Most likely will go for beer shortly.
No drama to report, so move along.

I’ve just been looking at Eva Herzigova’s breasts in the "Bra Loggy" header of this site (click refresh until you see it if you are not familiar with it), and wondered if I should replace them with a photo of Hels’s cleavage.
If I did so, what would be my likely life expectancy?
(We do, of course, already have Hels’s eyes. But you knew that, didn’t you?)

Once upon a time, there lived a man who maintained a website known as grayblog. This site contained his ramblings and musings, a few links and (very infrequently) the odd item of interest to certain other sections of mankind.
I just wonder when I’m ever going to find time to get this site truly up-to-date. There seems to be a shedload of things to write about, but no time to do so. So apologies all round.

Apologies for the general lack of content at the moment. As I am sure you can understand, I’m a bit submerged at the moment, not only with sorting out property sales, but also with regular work and social events. I’m off to Ireland later this week for a flying visit, and we also have an appointment with the vicar.
But added to the list of things that I need to write about are

• Neil and Emma’s wedding
• Charlie and Pete’s barbeque
• property sale update

Hels is not very well, a combination of virus, stress and overdoing it. Like me, she has a busy week ahead – somehow we have to fight through it.

There’s another new header. Click refresh until you see it.

How meta is this?

• house hunting
• to do lists
• synchronised swimming
• yams

Note: I may not actually write about all of these things.

Apologies for the continuing quiet here. I haven’t forgotten that list of things that I said I’d write about, and can now add the following:

• the house martins (not capitalized)
• going to church
• Fahrenheit 9/11
• John Lewis at Bluewater

Apologies for the long and unplanned outage yesterday. Holly, the server that hosts grayblog (and grayblog mail) at 34sp went "pop", but has now been repaired. Things should be as close to normal here as they ever get.

Three new headers from photos taken in the Netherlands – hit F5 enough and you’ll see them.

• Boomkewkerijmuseum
• Dijk
• Horizon

I am home. Well, actually, I’m in the office. I have more work than you could believe.
At some point, I will write on the following subjects:

• flat sales and house purchases
• driving in the Netherlands
• plant factories
• Charlie and Pete’s wedding
• other miscellaneous subjects

In the meantime, please amuse yourself in whatever manner you feel is appropriate.

This site includes 17783 links, internal and external. That’s an awful lot of links. Of these, about 450 are broken, mostly links to sites that have now ceased to be.
How do I know this? I used Xenu’s Link Sleuth. Be warned though – to scan all the links on my site took the Sleuth a couple of hours.

Sorry for being quiet – mostly due to work pressure, but also because I stepped out of life for a few hours yesterday to spend some time with H.
Normal service will be resumed shortly.
Visitor number 150,000 passed this way at 11.45pm yesterday, having arrived here by searching yahoo.com for "47kg propane". Hmm.

No time:

• Up at 5.30am today, home at 10.30pm. H off to US for conference for over a week. West Dean at the weekend. Oxford today. Mad. Hectic. Too much to do, too little time. Gah.
• UKIP. Gah. Consider this – next election, Tories biggest party, but not sufficient for a majority, so form an alliance with UKIP. Fate worse than death.
• LA Fisheries – best chippy for miles
• Mmmmmm beer
• Visitor number 150,000 should call in sometime next Tuesday – watch the counter.

I’ve just upgraded WordPress from version 1.02 to version 1.2. The upload took about 2 minutes over my broadband connection. Then I used the built-in upgrade software – that took about 25 seconds to execute.
Which rather knocks the spots off of the last MT upgrade that I did.

This site now runs on WordPress. If you see anything that is broken, please let me know.

I’m still sorting out the archives at the moment, and there also seem to be some CSS issues which need fixing. Give me a few days and I’ll get there. I also need to sort out the comments template.

General comments:

• install WP in the same directory as your blog if you want an easy life
• the five minute install certainly works if you are starting a completely new blog – in fact, if you’re a little web-savvy, I reckon you could do it in four!
• it is possible to run several blogs from one database using multiple installations of WP, in spite of what some of its detractors will tell you
• the documentation isn’t bad at all
• importing MT entries is a doddle
• it’s free, and that has to be a good thing

Overall, I’d definitely recommend it. It took me about three hours to do the transfer from MT to WP, including revising the templates so that they look something like the site that you are used to.

UPDATE: I’ve been trying to get a gizmo going so that, if you should try to follow a link on another site that goes to the permalink for an old entry, you get pointed towards its new home. Unfortunately, it seems at the moment to point you to entirely the wrong entry. I am, as they say, working on it.

This site may look a little odd for the next few days whilst I change CMS. Bear with me.

I agree with Vaughan. Which is why I expect to convert to WordPress this weekend.

You lucky people – five new header graphics, all based on photos I took in Lisbon. Of course, you haven’t seen the Lisbon pictures yet, but hopefully you should get to see them by the weekend.

Having spent too long this evening deleting spam comments from this site, I’ve noticed that the spammers tend to prefer just a handful of posts to leave their messages at. Consequently, I’ve decided to shut down comments at just those few posts.
So, if you find a post in the archives where comments are prohibited, you’ll know why.

I’ve been working on completing the archives on this site, and have made further revelations about the MT problem. It seems that MT is not rebuilding the monthly archives. If I edit an individual post in a particular month, then it rebuilds that month’s archive, but if I select "Rebuild monthly archives" in the rebuild menu, it doesn’t work properly.
I’m not sure that this will ever be fixed – I’m hoping that the upgrade to MT3.0 (whenever that may be) might fix all this.

1219 days.
5000 entries.
One hell of a lot of words.
Lots of inanity. Occasionally boring. Sometimes controversial. Very rarely amusing. Often personal.

It’ll be interesting to see if this site makes it to 10000 entries.
Actually, that’s probably a lie – I doubt that it will be interesting at all.

33 spam comments in 20 hours. If this continues, I’ll be forced to disable the comments function across the entire site until MT comes up with comments registration.

I’ve tidied up the individual entry archives. They don’t look quite right, but I’m too tired to figure out what I’ve done wrong. Either way, they’re a hell of a lot smarter than they were.

As is often the case, I’m far too busy to create interesting content here today. If you’re lucky (?), there may be something later, possibly this evening. I was going to do a round-up of coverage of the UK EU constitution referendum from other English-language newspapers around the world, but I’ve not had time yet.

In the meantime, I’ve got a German coming to visit later today, at some indeterminate time. Just don’t mention the war.

You should now see a different random header graphic each time you load this page. There are ten different graphics, five that you’ve seen before and five that are completely new. How exciting is that?

It comes to something when, as I check my overnight emails first thing in the morning, I discover that the spam left in the comment boxes of this site outweighs the general spam email by two to one. In particular, I’ve now blocked three IPs in the series 213.91.217.xx, namely 13, 14 and 15, which were being used to send large numbers of messages promoting online drug stores. If you run MT or some other commenting system that allows you to block IPs, I suggest that you block these three pre-emptively.
The next version of MT will feature a system whereby users must register before they can leave comments. I’ll be adopting that as soon as it becomes available.

This site is now running on the most recent version of Movable Type. If I’m really lucky, the upgrade will have fixed the annoying gremlins.

UPDATE: nope. Sigh.

Over the weekend, I received around twenty comment spams at this website. Whilst I was tempted to disable comments across the entire site as a response to that, I decided not to, not least because sometimes there is some good and erudite discussion in the comments boxes, such as there has been in the last few days in response to my piece entitled Inadequate. Having said that, I object to being called a wanker just because someone is incapable of expressing their argument clearly.
So the comments remain, for the time-being at least. Thank you to those that use them well – you make maintaining this site very enjoyable.

As regular readers will know, I’m something of an admiring of Indian actress Aishwarya Rai. So I can’t tell how relieved I was to receive a comment to this post. Seems authentic and believable. Must be true.

Hmm. grayblog is ranked number two on MSN for sneaky pictures of Jordan and Peter Andre.
Popular culture. I’m your man for the latest on celebs everywhere. Oh yes.

I’m not even sure that anyone can read this. Anyway, thanks to Vicky for her suggestion – this is a test to see if it works!

UPDATE: Vicky’s suggestion does seem to have fixed the comments problem, so you should now be able to leave comments as normal. If you experience problems, please let me know by email.

Oh, and I realise that this must be very boring for most grayblog readers, but these technical difficulties are making it quite difficult for me to keep the site updated, and I’d really love to resolve them.

OK, I’m beginning to quantify the symptoms of the MT problem more accurately.
I have started a thread at the MT support forums here. Please, anyone who is an MT buff, go take a look and add anything that you feel might help me. Thanks.

I’m still experiencing MT problems. It won’t post properly (always comes up with a DNS error), rebuild properly (ditto) or allow comment posting properly (same again). I’ve tried a rebuild which has been unsuccessful, so now I may have to resort to the MT troubleshooting pages. Guh.

I’ve got a Movable Type problem. When I post a new entry, when it sends the pings I get a "can not find server" error and it all grinds to a halt. Ideas? I’ve switched pings off – let’s see if that makes a difference.

Comments spam. Plumbing new depths.
In other shock news, a BBC reporter has found this site and left a comment. Will fame follow? I’ve got a better view of Tunbridge Wells than their webcam at the moment.

Having said that 34sp.com were doing a good job on my hosting, this morning I am unable to download mail due to a server timeout. I’ve just sent them an email to request support – let’s see how quick they are at fixing it!

I’ve tidied up the template a little – the archives have moved further down the sidebar, so that the projects and current listings are nearer the top.

OK, I’m officially fed up with comments spam. Today there have been seven new spam messages posted, all advertising drugs to aid sexual dysfunction.
Anyone know of a good spam-blocking measure for MT? Blocking IPs is akin to shutting the door after the horse has bolted.

A couple of housekeeping tasks: the graybiography has been updated in look and content, and the long-absent support page has been revised and restored.

Looks like I have a bit of problem with someone spamming my comments. I’ve deleted five this morning, all from the same IP address (now banned), all with a link to a site offering pills that would, supposedly, enlarge my parts.
I’ve heard of an anti-spam gizmo for MT, so if this continues to be a problem, I may install it.

Apologies for the lack of content here – I’m incredibly busy, and also being distracted by this. Plus I’m getting ready for this weekend’s Danish excursion.
Normal service will be resumed. Somewhen.

I’ve amended the comments gizmo so that you can now leave comments without giving an email address, which should be a relief to those concerned about spam.
Of course, I’d still very much like you to leave your name and site address, and perhaps an email address too.

If you were paying attention to the old design, you will remember that it featured a pull-down menu of music related website links. I plan to reinstate this feature on a separate page, as well as redesigning the other pages (like the graybiography) so that they match the front page. All in good time.
One of the ideas I have had for the site is to add a page of food (and drink) sites, as the epicurean is something of a passion for me. I’ve got some ideas for links – I’m thinking of purveyors of your finer foodstuffs more than links to Tesco and the Co-op – but if you have any suggestions, you know what to do.

Sounds like there are problems viewing this site in Mozilla. I’ll try and work on it over the next few days, but I’m up to my neck in work and life at the moment, so free time is at a premium. I will crack these problems, though. I promise!

A quick straw poll. As some of you may have noticed, I initially designed this new look on a 1280 x 800 resolution screen. The first wave of comments made clear that a lot of you do not work at that resolution. So I’ve rejigged things so that it works fine on 1024 x 768, which I believe is a much more common resolution setting. However, anyone on 800 x 600 will probably need to scroll left-right to see everything due to the width of the header graphic.

How many of you are on 800 x 600? And, if you are, is it a huge problem to scroll back and forth?

Still tweaking the layout. The archives still look ugly. The comments should now be readable (please let me know if they are not), and the front page shouldn’t need any left-right scrolling (yeh?).

This is more difficult than it looks. I should be working too.

Comments welcome on the new design, by the way. It needs some tweaking yet, but feel free to say something nice about it.

I’m back.

Apologies for the mess. The builders have been pretty untidy, it seems. The archives look like a bomb has been let off back there. Don’t look unless you are of strong constitution.

More soon, including a proper update on what the hell has been going on around here lately.

This site is on semi-hiatus.
No particular reason. It’s just that I’ve got other things on my mind. And I want to enjoy life for a while. I may post here intermittently. And without warning. I may not post at all. Who knows?