Simon Hammond Blog

…is out. I’ll take any excuse to ditch MSN messenger and, as excuses go, Trillian is an excellent one. Not had time to evalute it properly but it definitely feels like it has more useful features and less gimmicky ones.

For example, one optional feature is to have any words found in wikipedia underlined in green. Roll the mouse over this and the relevent entry pops up for on-the-spot enlightenment. I predict MSN will include this feature (to Encarta) in a couple of years time, if they are smart. It sometimes give interesting results. Did you know the ‘hehe‘ is a tribe of chiefdoms of Tanzania?

Just in case you are not familiar with Trillian, it’s a multi-messenger; it works with MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ and AOL, tying them all together with one neat interface. Give it a spin.

Tags: web by si
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Nasty jolt this morning as the purple mermaid website was hacked. Some bot from script-kiddies exploited a known hole in the phpBB to overwrite all php and html files with a ‘you b33n defaced’ type message.
Well Done, Aviators!

My own fault for dragging my feet with my security updates I suppose. Thankfully I was able to return the site to normality with the hour although a fresh install of phpBB and Gallery is in order.

Tags: rant, self-referential, web by si
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Sweet. Just noticed my Google page ranking has gone up to 4/10. This means if you search for my name on Google I come out ahead of all the other Simon Hammond’s. Hurrah!

To celebrate, I’ve streamlined and generally cleared the crap out of my front page.

Apologies for the abysmal pun in the title.

Tags: self-referential by si
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The Guardian has listed 100 websites it considers to be cream of the crop.

It’s a good list for the must-haves, including gmail (your email, invite required), flickr (your pics), del.icio.us (your links).

I’m still not sure about orkut which seems to be a good idea but poorly implemented. Woefully missing is audioscrobbler, an occasionally shaky but immensely useful way of finding (and streaming) new music based on an automatically generated profile.

With so many services it can be a real pain remembering different usernames. not to mention passwords. I’ve settled on sixball for this sort of thing. Better than si_p_ham75…

Tags: web by si
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