I don’t use password managers for security reasons but I sometimes have trouble remembering which login is for which website. Luckily Autocomplete makes life a bit easier.

Unfortunately, there’s one or two entries in my auto-complete cache that shouldn’t be there, usually because I pressend enter before I’d finished typing. Well, here’s how you get rid of them:

• Begin typing to get the list of auto-complete entries
• Scroll down to the entry you want to delete
• Press Shift+Del to remove it

Easy!

I was just on the Microsoft homepage and noticed a news item saying Silverlight is available for download. Out of curiosity I went for a look around to see what was on the mini-site. In case you didn’t know, Silverlight is Microsofts attemp to get some of Macromedia’s Adobe’s Flash market.

The reason they are going after this area of the software marketplace now is mainly due to the so-called Web 2.0. Major websites such as YouTube, Myspace and a whole host of other major sites are using Flash for their content and that has to annoy Microsoft.

The only problem is that the reason these sites use Flash is because everyone has it, around 98% of people on the internet. Microsoft will have to start from scratch with, erm… 0%. It’s going to be months or maybe a year or so before enough people have the plugin installed so that developers will even consider using it to develop content for their sites.

In my opinion Microsoft has got it wrong again, as they usually do when it comes to the internet. Nobody needs or wants another Rich Internet Application plugin and although I’m sure there’ll be extra functionality for IE users and APIs for .NET and IIS, we already have all this technology in one form or another. There really is no need for this - the internet should be built upon open, cross platform standards, not more propriatry software…. like eBooks maybe.

My bet is that Microsoft will do everything they can to use their Windows monopoly to get as many copies of the plugin out there and then try and use that user-base to pull people into becoming paying customers of various bits of software.

Yup, an IT phrase I hadn’t heard before! ‘Digital Life’ is apparently the mixture of photos, mp3s, downloads etc and things like stored logins, messager histories, bookmarks and email that all home users have. None of which gets backed up of course.

I first heard about the ‘Digital Life’ name in a PC Pro article I was reading about the lack of disk imaging capabilities in the ‘Home’ versions of Vista. Personally I thnk this is a good thing since I’m a big fan of trying to get people to learn from their mistakes and nothing makes them take care of their PCs a bit better than loosing everything.

The reason I take this ‘tough love’ approach to fixing the PCs of friends/family/random-people-in-the-pub is because I used to called on to do it EVERY weekend so I now have a new approach:

• When asked what might be wrong, spout techno-babble for a bit and say I’ll go round “at some point”
• Ignore any other pleas for help for two months to make sure it’s really urgent
• Go round and pull off easy to get at files using safe mode or by putting their HDD into my machine (encryption & file permissions on a XP Home machine - don’t be stupid)
• Wipe -> reinstall -> run away before they notice all their apps are gone and so are all their settings

The fact that Vista has a fairly competant backup programme included doesn’t bother me, unless it’s an automated process like virus def updates or a bother-you-until-you-do-it system, noone will use it and all will be as it is now. No backup in sight.

On the possitive side, a clean XP install does get rid of all the spyware and other nasties on their so the average user has a system that works for a week or two. Lets see if this situation is the same after Vista has been around for a while….

I have an unsophisticated backup routine on one of my servers that just tar and gz the /var/www/html directory and then an office server downloads it from a protected directory.

Unfortunately it stopped working a couple of weeks ago so I went to find out what the problem was. After much tweaking and testing followed by a couple of hours Googling, it turns out that it wasn’t an Apache problem but a Linux Kernel problem. Certain kernels won’t allow files larger than 2Gb to be downloaded through Apache.

Since I wasn’t about to start messing around with a kernel upgrade on a production server, I went for downloading the file by FTP instead. Ican’t remember where I found this out, but if it was your site, leave a comment and I’ll credit you (there was more info there than here).

In the past I’ve always been a bit lazy about keeping up with the cutting edge of standards and making sure the sites I develop are using the latest technologies. Part of the reason is because I’m so busy I have to wait until a technology goes mainstream enough that it get wind of it and to not use it would be to fall behind, or when I need to use it go get over the latest development speedbump.

The second reason is that the majority of the customers for the site that takes up most of my time are all in the NHS which used to refuse to get their PCs updated from Netscape 4 and IE5, so I had to be delibrately behind standards-wise.

Recently though, what with the emphasis on security, spam, viruses etc, everyone seems to be moving on to the latest browsers (ok - IE6 & FF1), plus the workload has been easing up a little so I’ve been moving some of the less updated sites from their older layouts to div/css style designs.

While I was doing this I thought I’d nip over to the W3C and find out what was progressing as far as the “next version” was concerned. Turns out it’s called Web Applications 1.0, but everyone seems to be calling it HTML5. I haven’t had chance to read the entire spec (it’s a bit to big), but having a glance around it there’s quite a bit in there that I like.

The emphasis as I see it seems to be on providing tags and elements to be used specifically for certain sections of the page. There are elements such as:

• nav (for navigation),
• article for the page’s main content or a blog post for example
• section to break a page into… sections.

This should help a lot for larger sites when they’re creating templates for different areas of sites and also for SEO as it allows the search engines to identify which areas are considered “most important” by the developer without having to rely on only H1 and Title tags (I know there’s more to it than that - don’t start in the comments). I like this approach and it ahould be very yseful for most of the sites I develop.

The second thing I noticed was there was no tags in there for styling - everything to do with the asthetics of a page can now be left to CSS. Brilliant!

I also notced a few more onWhatever event handlers in there which I haven’t thought of any uses for yet but I’m sure I will over time. I like these as it means that we can develop more Web 2.0 type stuff without having to rely on flash, Java or other such technologies.

All in all, I like the progress thats been made but ordinarily I’d just forget about it now. That is until I noticed this on Slashdot saying that Apple, Opera and Mozilla are pushing for this standard to be adopted. That means that if it is, all the major browsers (apart from IE) will be motivated to get the standard built in, which should in turn push Microsoft to follow suit about 15 years later…

I’ve got addicted to the Mini Pool game on Addicting Games (unsuprising really) but it’s annoying me at home when I’m listening to iTunes and it starts making stupid noises.

The solution: FlashMute. Simple.

I tried to apply to The Trainline affiliate programme on TradeDoubler and got refused for some unknown reason. It’s not as if it was for this blog, my other blog about drunkeness or even the adult goods store. Nope, it was for our NHS training business’ website. Who knows why they would think this was unsuitable to be an affiliate!

I went for a look around for other train ticket affiliate programs but for UK travel, it was pretty slim pickings so I decided to find out if you can apply again to the same program. Turns out you can by setting up another site in your settings… blah blah blah - read about it in the FAQ

Lets see what they say this time. If they say no, I’m getting the bus in a few weeks when I go to Newcastle instead of giving them my money!

Was just reading on Blog-Ed about how Joe has become a finalist in the Guardian competition to make as much money as you can on eBay. What he’s doing is buying broken laptops and doing them up and then selling them again. You can check out how it’s going on Laptop Scrapyard.

When I get round to it, I’ll back up this Vaio at work and if you can sort out whatever’s wrong with the power circuitry then you can have it.