steven-dowd.co.uk

I must get the gallery system on the newton-le-willows website up and running over xmas, I turned it off when it started to error a few months ago, and just have not found the time to get it working again, but I will find time over the xmas break.

Have lately been trying a new drug to get my psoriasis under control, psoriasis has plagued me now for about 15 years, most of the time I suffer with over 70% of my skin effected by psoriasis, I have probably spent around 8 months worth, or more, of the last 15 years as a hospital inpatiant because of it. 

Well, all’s changed, recently I have been allowed access to a new drug,  this new (to me) treatment is just brilliant, its self injected, every two weeks, which is a little disconcerting at first, but easy enough to do, a course of the drugs lasts 16 weeks, and I was pretty much clear of psoriasis by the 8th week, and by the 12th week I would say I only have a few small patches of psoriasis, and all this is almost without using topical treatments like Dovabet, 50/50 and the rest of the crap that just ruins your life, which I could quite easily use a tub of 50/50 every other day previose to this new drug.

So I am just starting my second 16 week course, and I have my fingers X’d that all goes well, and that the psoriasis can manage to stay away.

Of course the drug, which I forgot to mention is called Humira or ‘adalimumab’, has some pretty serious side effects, so that even the top few lines of the drug companies own website says

"Serious infections have happened in patients taking HUMIRA. These infections include tuberculosis (TB) and infections caused by viruses, fungi, or bacteria that have spread throughout the body. Some of these serious infections have been fatal."

Its that last word, ‘Fatal’ which worries me loads, Humira seems to have side effect issues which allow certain cancers to develop?  I suppose with the many lifetimes worth of PUVA and UVB/A that I have had over the years, I should be quite wary of skin cancers, but to be honest, it feels so great to just have some normal skin again, I reckon Its worth the risks.

While chatting with a pal yesterday, he mentioned something which I think is a brilliant idea.

Why doesn’t the Council for each area of the UK, each constituency, which sends an MP to sit in the House of Commons buy a property in London, and from then on that property will always be used as the home for which ever M.P. they have elected to represent that Constituency at Government.

In this way, no single M.P. would profit by getting Interest Payments on any personal property, it will stop M.P’s keeping for eternity the furnishings and fittings that they manage to get through their expenses on that personal property.

The Constituency owned London property would be an asset on the Council books/accounts, and all expenses, furnishings will belong for all time to the Constituency.

There would be no home flipping, because they will always have their own home, and have to pay their own home costs, there could be no arguements then over needing a propety in the London area, and the local Council would have full transparency over the costs of housing their M.P. at Westminster.

This afternoon, I have thrown together a Gallery Latest entries Module, this is for installing as a module into Joomla, not as a gallery plugin into Sobi2, its not pretty code, but it seems to work ok, it was hacked together using parts from other components, the Sobi2 Vscroller Module, the Joomla latest News Module and other bits of php from around the web.

It allows you to set the number of colums and rows of images that you want to display ina  block, and set the width of the module, each image links through to the details page of the particular Sobi2 entry.

heres a link to the file

Mod_Sobi2_Latest_Gallery.zip

Backup your site and database before you even think to use it, I have only tested it on Joomla 1.0.15 with Sobi2 from v2.8.7.2 to latest v2.9.0, this only works if you have Joomla with Sobi2 Component and the Sobi2 Gallery Plugin installed.

Try it, and if you hack at it and improve on it, please send me a copy of your update.

I don’t know why, or how, but something very odd has happened in the last 24hrs concerning a post a made last week about Cuil and the spamming of web page input forms

All the cached pages of that post, which were in Google have disappeared

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site:steven-dowd.co.uk

The day after I made the post, I spoke with friends and pointed out that it was already the top result for a search in google UK on the words ‘Cuil Spam’ and it was like that for a few days, they did the same search as me, and saw the post in the results.

Then suddenly, all reference to the blog post I made for Cuil Spamming Webpage forms pages have disappeared from Googles website, yet every other post from the last few years, right through to yesterday which I have made on this blog still exists in Googles cache.

Its as if someone at Google is covering up the Cuil Spam websites story, by deleting all reference to it from the Google cache.

I can think of no other reason for the cache cleansing than some person or policy at Google aimed at cleaning the Cuil search results of certain reported problems (or hacks) on behalf of the Cuil websites, ex Google employees.

A Cuil Google Conspiracy, or old pals act to get certain Cuil stories removed from Google ?

Steven Dowd

PS..

A Few minutes after posting this, I checked Google, and this post was top result for the search term ‘Cuil Spam‘

Here’s the screen shot of that, this time if the cache gets cleaned, at least I will have a photo to prove it.

Quite a few years ago, while confined to my bed with a serious back problem, and bored to the point that you would even read the instruction manual for a VCR, I was handed a nice thick book to read, 700 pages of story called ‘Hidden Empire, THE SAGA OF SEVEN SUNS’, I was captivated by it, couldn’t put it down, ended up reading the whole thing over the next two days, only to discover at the last page, that it was book 1 of a multi-volume series, and now I just had to have the other books, the Earth Defence Forces and the Ildaran Empire just couldn’t sit around in space and wait, I needed the other books now!

One by one relatives sourced me the other books in the series, and I started reading, book, 2, 3, 4 5 arghhh! book 6 and 7 where not even written yet.. I was leaving the hero stranded, treading water in the one sea on a water world, and the next book wasn’t even written…

A year later, the eagerly awaited book 6 was released, and I was first in line to get a copy, having pre-ordered many months before with Amazon. Knowing the publication date, and expecting the delivery, I speed read through the first 5 books, to get myself back upto warp speed, and on delivery morning eagerly awaited the postman.

The book arrived, and I immediately started reading.

Everything worked out for the heroes, and the whole story moved on loads, then I ran out of pages, and looked at the publication date for book 7 … sh*t, I have to wait another 12 MONTHS!

The time passed, and again i placed a preorder with Amazon, and again, knowing the arrival date of the book, i speed read through the previous 6 books, and then the morning of the delivery arrived, and I started reading.

12 days later, i finished the book, i just couldn’t get into it, Book 7: The Ashes of Worlds, it just doesn’t flow like the other books did, it was almost boring, to be honest, if this had been book one, I wouldn’t have even bothered to finish it, the whole book to me at least read like it was written by a man who was totally fed up with the whole story, who was looking for a way to just get it ended, it was like a film that was going great, but someone realised it had reached the 1hr 28min time point, and they had to get it finished by the 1hr 30min mark.

I feel the last book, a total disappointment, not written with the enthusiasm of the previous ones, and having the feel of a film that ends oddly, or the hurried script rewrite of a weekly TV episode that one of the stars gets sacked, and the story-lines get re-wrote to kill them off in some off-screen event, because the actor was sacked and the final departure couldn’t be filmed.

All the story threads of the Saga of the Seven Suns all get finished, nothing gets left unanswered, but some of the concluding events seem almost laughable considering the effort that obviously went in to planning the complex story-lines of the previous 6 books, it may have been better to close the saga over two books, but this would have meant an 8th book, and the authors contract was most likely only for the seven.

Having taken the time to read them all, and then laid out the cash to buy the series, which isn’t a small amount to buy all seven books, I am regrettably unimpressed by the concluding volume.

There’s loads of hype around about the ‘new’ cuil search engine, everyone seems to be saying how good it is, how different etc, but I really do not like it, and I am not sure that its bots are very website friendly, they ran wild in my websites about 18 months ago, disregarding totally all that is in the Robots.txt, so much so that I ended up adding the complete range into iptables to save my server from continued hassle, at this period ‘Twiceler’ cuils roaming website scraping bot was still in training, at least thats what i was told when i emailed Jim (Jim’s the guy who keeps track of Twiceler, when he’s not busy with his horses.) asking what the f*** he was doing to my server

The cuil search engine is now alive and kicking and it seems they have changed the name from the original version of cuill to cuil, but I still don’t really like it.

So… The last week, I have been hit by spam into webforms, spam comments etc, but oddly it’s all been cuil related.

Why would anyone want to spam ‘for a search engine’?

All the spammed links have been coming into my sites from US based open proxies with no x-forwarded ip’s, the form fields, address box’s and details sections are being prefilled with crap and the main content item is then spam for the cuil search engine written in bbcode

[b][url=www.cuil.com]New Search Engine[/url][/b]

I can understand spammers that post spam links for gambling sites, drug sites or even spamming xxx site links, but who and why would anyone bother to spam website forms with links to www.cuil.com

I’m baffled, maybe Jim’s horses know?

Well, anyone that knows me, will be aware that I hate putting things political online, but the last few days I have been watching the news, and listening to the details of the proposed truckers fuel protests, and I have to wonder why its only the truckers, why private individuals everywhere, all vehicle owners do not also do their bit, so that any result of the protests will not just be confined to commercial diesel, so that petrol price comes down as well.

The fact that today the prime minister is meeting with Oil representatives just amazes me, they want to try to get the oil companies to drop their price, totally missing the point that its the TAX that is too bloody high that’s making the price of petrol so high.

If the tax was halved and the oil companies get the same price as now for their oil, then everyone would be able to afford it, why the hell is petrol taxed as much as it is, and then, VAT is added, onto the already taxed price, so we pay 17.5% VAT TAX on the TAX.

If we were in France, there would be rioting on the streets at such high fuel prices, especially when 2/3rds of the cost is directly due to the Government controlled TAX.

I thought it was ridiculous when Petrol went above 85p per litre, now its 115p per litre, and the Americans I speak to online, are complaining to me that their petrol is too high, and its HALF our price.

OPEC should state an international TAX rate, and they should limit supply to any country that tries to cash in on their population by taxing more than a prescribed rate, then every country would have a fair and universal price for fuel.

This last two weeks, I have been watching a newly found website, which I personally think is going to be the next best thing since Google,  I have watched it grow from an original idea with no direction, into a unique and very clever system, that although it still has not yet fully developed either its purpose or direction, It already has the feel of something that’s going to be super big, Infact I said a few days ago, that I would not be surprised if someone like Google ends up buying out the idea, because it really is pretty unique, and there isn’t much of that on the web anymore.

So what is it?  well its http://therarestwords.com

The site is hard to explain, I think its basically best described as a wikidictionary, or wiktionary if there was ever such a word, If you do not know what a wiki is, then you will not understand, so it is best described in none net terms, as a dictionary of words that you write your own descriptions directly into.

But its lots more than that..

To a website admin, its an opportunity to get links back into your own website, for the sake of a few minutes of your time, doing some simple, and i must say relaxing word descriptions.

But its lots more than that..

It offers admins the chance to see who else on the web, has a page with same content wordage, and maybe not even a same subject website, but one using a percentage of same wordage as your own website, you can then see what needs to be altered in your own site to make it unique, but also helps find words that still bring visitors interested in your site subject matter, and combinations of such words to help filter the traffic to those who will find your site the most use.

But its lots more than that..

It offers the admins the opportunity to look directly at competitors websites, or similar suggested sites, and to judge exactly what the different wordage in their content is, that maybe makes the difference to getting those 5 extra Google places

But its lots more than that..

As yet its a little raw, I suppose you have to be an admin or a little geeky to fully appreciate it, but its a wonderfully refreshing new idea, I have no idea who the person is that is coding the site, all he has stated is that he is Russian, which since i have a googlable history of mixing with anonymous Russian Warez Bears, Its kinda appropriate

But its lots more than that..

And its getting better every time I look … Oh,  did i say it’s –  http://therarestwords.com  and to read all about the project and the development of it, you should visit http://rarestblog.com

I am glad to be able to say that my daughter has been selected to participate in the Oxford Access Scheme Ambassador Programme being run by Oxford University, she is one of 37 school children from her age group, from around the UK, apparently around 5000 children from different schools applied to join the scheme, and the 37 successful applicants will represent their Schools as Ambassadors for further education, the programme consists of  four years of residential and one day events leading up to university application, which can be for any university, not necessarily Oxford, she attends St. Aelred’s in Newton-le-Willows. It was the first time that St. Aelred’s had applied and put forward any of their pupils, so I am sure they are as happy as my wife and myself that our daughter got selected

There is a full website that gives all the details, CLICK HERE, from that I have selected the following which describes the programme and its purpose

"The Ambassador Programme is a four-year programme designed to support its participants (Ambassadors) throughout the remainder of their secondary education. The Programme aims to work with both the Ambassadors and, through them, their peers with their post-16 choices. The Programme hopes to encourage the Ambassadors to apply to a university that matches their potential. In addition, the Ambassadors will serve as ambassadors for higher education in their school, helping to inform their peers about the options available to them."

We are invited to attend with my daughter and one of her teachers from St. Aelred’s to the introductory event at Oxford University in December, will tell you more about it after that..