This is a test post , the idea is to verify that I have configured Windows Live Writer correctly to access and post to my blog.
You too can do this if you have Windows Live installed on your PC, I have been using it for some time however when my old laptop blew up , died a death and became defunct I lost this functionality until now that is. Unfortunately all my drafts etc are now on the old laptop,.. anyone know how to get the hard drive out of a busted lappie and recover the data ? LOL
I recently heard about another website that has been stolen from under the noses of its developers, which happens more often than you might think these days. Good ideas are at a premium and if your idea takes off online you are at considerable risk from unscrupulous internet 'persons'.
When a 'lay' person gets an idea for a website they usually go to a 'friend' who knows about these things to get it going, often that 'friend' is not a real life friend at all but rather an 'online' acquaintance with expertise and possibly contacts that the lay person lacks. This is a really good way to get ripped off!
The first thing to remember when developing a website is that without control of the Domain Name you have or own nothing! Register the domain name you intend to use with an independent registrar, DO NOT register your domain name with the hosting company or 'person' as this will leave them in control of it. The second most important thing you need to do is to keep an up to date copy of all code and data that the site consists of. You must have FTP access to the hosting server and update your backup every time a major change is made to the site, any reputable host will have staff that can help you with this. You should also choose a hosting company that is In Your Country of Residence because as a last resort you may need to go to court to establish your ownership of the site.
Be careful who you grant access to! how well do you know the person or persons who are working on your website? If you meet them socially in real life you retain the option to smack them on the nose but if you grant access to an online acquaintance you have no real proof as to who or where they are, and hence NO recourse if they screw you over. The sort of things that they can do to you are possibly; insertion of 'phishing' holes in your site and other unauthorised code. Theft of your data including credit card info, email addresses and IP addresses of your members and visitors. Note that any website is valued depending on the number of members it has and the number of page hits it gets, if your website takes off you could be sitting on a membership/email list some company's will pay a fortune for! And ultimately they could steal the entire site and deny you any further access to it. You are particularly at risk from this type of theft if your host is an online 'friend' and they control the host server, which is why it is always best to go with reputable hosting company in your own country even if this means that you have to comply with restrictive laws and legislation.
Finally: A 'Gentleman's Agreement' is worth only the paper its printed on, i.e. nothing at all. Get written contracts for expensive development work, transfers of ownership of sites and or domain names and know that the most important page on your website is the 'Terms of service' page, get this wrong and you could loose your shirt.
Ian Duncan Smith (Tory) has been put in charge of sorting out the benefits fiasco which affects an estimated 5.9 Million people in the UK including me, I suggest we all get our rotten eggs ready in case Mr Smith gets it wrong!
The important thing to realise here is that people on benefits are living on a knife edge, one miscalculation can ruin the family budget and leave you eating mush and smoking ‘dimps’ for a couple of weeks, or worse in hoc to a loan shark. Most people on benefits would like to work if it were financially practical to do so, unfortunately in most cases it’s simply NOT practical and taking what work is available would leave them even worse off. For example a person on Job seeker's allowance cannot take part time work for the simple reason that they are only allowed to keep £5 per week of earned income while claiming, this in most cases will not even pay their bus fares to their job. So its full time permanent employment for them or nothing.
A similar situation exists for those of us on Incapacity Benefit, we are allowed to keep £12 per week of what we can earn part time. However for the vast majority of Incapacity Benefit claimants full time permanent employment is physically impossible.
Clearly New Labours approach, i.e. bullying claimants into taking whatever work is offered even if it makes their situation worse rather than better is not acceptable, but considering the huge deficit which is New Labours legacy to the UK what can Mr Smith do that will not hurt claimants, the sick, disabled and impoverished?
So we have a hung parliament here in the UK as a result of Thursdays general election. Its now been 5 days and negotiations between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are still underway however talks between Labour and the Liberals have clearly failed.
Personally I have been waiting for this particular circumstance to come about for over 20 years, in fact ever since I became old enough to vote. As a life long Liberal I have always know that this is THE chance for liberals to make a lasting impact in British politics. I am keeping my fingers crossed right now in the sincere hope that this chance is NOT wasted. It has to be the case that Proportional Representation has to be the price for Liberal cooperation in any coalition government, anything less would be a betrayal of the 23% of our population who voted Liberal.
Gordon Brown must go! Mr Brown was not elected to be the British PM, he got in by default when Tony Blair left, and in this General Election the British people have decidedly NOT voted for Gordon Brown to continue running this country. In my view there is no circumstance where Gordon Brown remaining PM could be acceptable to the British People. Even if talk between the conservative and liberal parties should fail Gordon Brown personally has lost the mandate to govern, in fact he never had any such mandate from the people of this country.
So we are living in interesting times, the Conservatives look set to lead the next government, whether in a full coalition with the Liberal Democrats or as a minority government remains to be seen. At present there is still much horse trading being done behind closed doors and hopefully the long term result will not only be electoral reform but also long term stable consensus government of this country.
Just sent the following email, and copy here for your information :
To whom it may concern;
I have just had one of your 'san Marco deep pan pepperoni' pizzas
ref : APR 2010 A 9107 10:11
To say that the thing was vile is the understatement of the century, your 'cheese analogue' is positively disgusting, it made me want to vomit. How on earth you manage to earn a living producing such garbage is beyond understanding. I will NEVER AGAIN purchase ANY san marco product no matter how attractively packaged.
You don't even care enough about your product to put real cheese and tomato on it, I simply can't be bothered packaging the remains and sending it to you for a refund, instead I SHOULD be sending it to environmental health to have it checked for contaminants and to see if it actually contains anything of real food value.
I had to eat 2 oz of REAL cheese just to get the vile taste of your foul product out of my mouth.
Yours disgustedly
a very unhappy customer
I recently installed the current free version of ZoneAlarm, which is for those of you who don’t know a personal firewall application. I had used older versions some time ago and though it could help me resolve current problems,..
The problem I was having was that FireFox was hanging while I was playing Zynga poker, causing me to loose a shit load of play money. Now I was planning to try real money online poker so you can see that I was majorly concerned. Loosing $5000 play money is nothing but when your playing for real money you do not want this to happen.
So I figured that one possibility was that I was being pinged to death, ( Ping flooding in order to deny me the service, see DOS attacks) and decided to use ZoneAlarm to detect and block this.
Sure enough I was getting unsolicited pings etc but no more than the usual background noise one expects these days, however that was just the start of my problems. ZoneAlarm itself became a problem! First of all there’s the usual malarkey in-re configuring the damn thing, then it starts messing with Global hosts, preventing SpybotSD from doing a full immunisation,1078 global hosts could not be immunised until after ZA was removed. Then it hogs my CPU resources using on average 25% of available threads, which led me on to the REAL problem: Spybot’s TeaTimer (resident protection from malware and spyware) was working overtime and chewing vast amounts of memory, why? Because I had too many damn applications running; Messenger, Iplayer, Skype etc. With ZoneAlarm running as well 100% of my available resources were being used!
So I fixed that, but then Windows Live Messenger would NOT connect. I ran a diagnostic, no connection problems. I ran the trouble shooter and it detected a problem with the hosts file but would NOT complete, it hung at ‘key ports’ preventing the fix, more ZoneAlarm interference I expect because again after removing ZoneAlarm the problem magically resolved itself. BUT That not the end of it,..
As a parting present from ZA a windows application window opens on my desktop on reboot after removal, ‘cpes_clean_launcher.exe’ scaring the shit out of me. I googled it and found a guy who couldn’t get rid of it, others who feared it was a trojan dropper but no definitive article. Not even on ZoneAlarm’s own website! Anyways my system scanned clean and ‘cpes_clean_launcher.exe’ did not reappear on reboot so all is well. But its a big thumbs down for ZoneAlarm from me, more trouble than its worth!
