What has one and a half million hits a year, four thousand visits each day from three thousand unique visitors, daily posts of over five hundred and has twelve thousand members with a monthly bandwidth of about 200 Gb? Is it a shopping site, betting shop or porn merchant perhaps? No, it’s a forum dedicated to the new Honda Civic. Read more

iGate took another turn for the worst recently when the BBC announced they were moving streaming services from Akamai to Level 3 Communications. This latest skirmish is just another in the war between the BBC and Internet Service Suppliers.
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Is it suspicious that just a few laps from the end of the Monaco Grand Prix, the F1 star driving a posh red Fiat drove straight into the back of the Force India car in front, which was beating him? A car which is, coincidentally, also powered by a posh Fiat engine and is normally found lurking around the back of the grid. If Fiat’s star had been beaten by Force India he would have dropped way down this years driver’s championship, below his own team mate, probably to end up among the mid-field also-rans. One hopes that Force India gets a good discount on their next engine delivery from Fiat. Read more

Just how difficult is it to make a website nowadays? One which conforms to WWW3 standards, avoids browser or operating system-specific commands such as ActiveX and “just works”? Read more

When the temperature outside starts with a 3 you know you have problems. A single digit, Fahrenheit, or preceded by a minus (as is often the case in Montreal and other under-developed parts of the world) means it is what is technically known as bloody freezing. A single digit after the 3, as in the southern half of the UK this weekend, the correct term is bloody hot. Unless you are measuring in the Rømer scale in which case you will be dead. Read more

Brits living abroad usually pine for something from home, often a specific consumable such as Marmite, pickled onion flavoured Monster Munch, Earl Grey tea or a favourite marmalade. Aussies will kill for the last jar of Vegemite, a pale imitation of the real McCoy, even if the canny Kiwi’s have better taste and export an antipodean Marmite to Australia in a bid to re-educate their palates. Read more

All one hundred of you, known spammers that is, because on May 3, Spam will be 30 years old. Let’s hope they won’t get to their 60th. Read more

We never realised how useful an ftp server could be until we had one each, back when ISPs issued users with a block of IP addresses so that every computer on line had its own unique address. That was in the days of System 8 and 9 when Mac’s Users and Groups permissions settings were a lot easier to control and seemingly more robust against foreign intrusion. A simple piece of software was all it took to get ftp up and running. It was easy to understand and gave us each the flexibility to offer a space for files to be sent that were too large to email. Or to make work available for clients and service bureaux to download. We had two ftp servers running, one each, and used them extensively. Read more

That is indeed, a good question. After all, it is long since we suffered the outrageous billing that added to the fortunes of Business Serve who neglected to actually supply our email. We were forced to take up arms against the sea of troubles our last supplier, Bulldog, put us through and luckily our credit card company refunded the money we had been overcharged. So why on earth do we want to switch broadband supplier this time? Read more

We have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit ourselves to online purchases, for fear of treachery. As a remarkably prescient person nearly said.

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