I think the quality of spam is actually declining. Today I’ve had a number of spam messages that have completely scrambled content - just a mess of shattered and mixed random characters and html. How is that going to sell me something?

Other spam messages that could have tricked me into opening them ruined their chances by appending random text to the otherwise valid looking subject. How gullible do they think people are?

If someone tried to sell you a mortgage after pretending to be someone else, would you buy it? It’s difficult to believe that anyone would, but judging by the number of these messages, it must be working - spamming has costs, and if it didn’t make money, it wouldn’t happen. There must be an awful lot of stupid people out there.

Best spam sales pitch of the week: “Pete, make money in your underwear!”

I certainly don’t believe that.

A great example of what’s possible with cascading style sheets (CSS).

Link: CSS Zen Garden

Click on the “Select a design” links and see the style change.

I’m still in the angry and opinionated CSS Revolutionary Brigade: good web page creation should involve minimal Flash, minimal graphics, tables for tables and not for layout, pure valid xHTML for content, multiple CSS for decoration, and lots of RDF metadata. Big sites should generate dynamic HTML based on clearly separated content. GIFs should be replaced with PNGs. Sites should degrade to work with text-only browsers and screen-readers. URLs should be “cool” and well designed.

Phew.

Of course, I don’t actually manage to do most of this. :-)

Most people on the planet think it, but few politicians are brave (or foolhardy) enough to actually say it.

Link: Livingstone’s Bush jibes savaged

“The bears were smart ó they did their breaking and entering at night, and the caretaker wanted nothing to do with encountering multiple bears alone in the dark.”

Bears rarely eat server rooms in the UK. Another benefit of my line of work.

Link: Alaska bears destroy hotel doors, eat floor

2,000 mainly positive responses to proposed national ID cards

                +

5,000 mainly negative responses to proposed national ID cards

                =

2,000 mainly positive responses

Link: NTK: Hard News

Andrew Orlowski of The Register is fast becoming the Julie Burchill of Internet journalism.

Plasticbag.org’s Tom Coates argues that Andrew Orlowski, dedicated scorner of blogging, is really nothing more than a blogger himself, and a bad one too.

If you want almost infinite, typically nonsensical Burchill rants on demand, try the The Julie Burchill Random Recycler.

I’ve often stumbled across references to “Northern Soul”. I knew that it was a musical genre popular in the North West of England and that it heavily influenced the early house music scene in Manchester. I didn’t actually know what it was.

Thanks to a £5 compilation CD from Sainsburys, ‘Northern Soul Memories’, I now know what Northern Soul is: not a genre, more a massive playlist of the most funky and danceable old Motown style soul. Not made in Wigan, but played in Wigan.

It’s very good, and nothing at all like the trashy “soul” that dominated the charts during the 1980s. “Double Cookin’ ” by Checkerboard Squares reminds me of Lemon Jelly, and ‘Quittin’ time’ by Kansas City Playboys starts off sounding remarkably like a drum and bass tune.

Given that I’m still working out what Hippo actually is, it was quite tricky to explain it in my Sourceforge project application. Here’s my attempt:

“Hippo is a content management system with an emphasis on microcontent and metacontent. Hippo’s focus is on community information sharing, and by default it is configured to act as a community portal. It is not another Slash/Nuke clone. Hippo’s greatest influence was Metadot.

Hippo is built around the concept of “Hippolet” objects. Hippolet objects are responsible for Hippo’s “backend” and handling mundane tasks, but also for handling the presentation and processing of content. Hippo is extended by installing additional hippolets.

At this stage there are hippolets for presenting XML blocks and RSS files, but hippolet for dozens of other content types are planned. All parts of the application can viewed in the same way, from DB modules to the page rendering engine.

Hippo is built around the REST concept and should produce valid xHTML. All layout is done by CSS. Hippo should (hopefully) be easily extended in the future to use email, Jabber and SOAP interfaces too.

Hippo exports information in a number of different formats, and has an easy to use permissions system to allow information to be shared between users, or limited to private use.

Hippo is written in Perl, and currently depends on Apache, MySQL, Mod_Perl and and an increasinly large part of CPAN. It should run on any UNIX system.”

The name “Hippo” is derived from the original project name: “Home/Intranet Peer Portal” -> “H/IPP” -> “Hippo”. Much nicer.

Featuring the famous Floozie in the Jacuzzi and a daring rescue.

Link: Baywatch

I don’t understand the ‘City of the Seven Lamps’ bit, but the map and painting are interesting.

Link: Percy Main History