While browsing through a Pound Shop in Romford yesterday, I found a “Classical Greats” Double CD. Heck for £1, if it’s no good then it is not exactly a great loss.

But I never thought why it was that price until I looked at the case and ahah! This is genuinely as I found it- no photoshopping of the scanned image except to highlight it with a red box drawn round the affected area. It’s from the external cardboard CD box. The inlay for CD 1 is correct on the inside but on the back has the same mistake. The 3rd track is actually by Bizet who appears to have been deleted so all the following names are out by one except for the last.

I reckon the perpetrator knew that “Ride of the Valkyries” was by Wagner and adjusted it, but weirdly added Debussy in to fill the gap. There are NO Debussy tracks on either CD (D’oh!) . He clearly forgot the idiom “When you reach the bottom- stop digging!”

So with a batch of dodgy CD inlays the publsihers could hardly flog this full at full price (I think it was a budget range anyway) and it would have cost too much to reprint so they sold them off cheap to the “Remainder market” or wherever Pound shops buy their stuff from.

Last week I published an article on Averting Global Warming suggesting using a shield in geostationary orbit to diminish the amount of sunlight reaching the earth.

Today I noticed that the Science Magazine website published a similar idea but using the Lagrange Point (L1) which is a point where the gravitational attraction from the Earth and Sun is equal. You can see the 5 Lagrange Points in this image, borrowed from Wikipedia (Thanks chaps- I’ll return it when I’ve finished with it).

Great minds as they say! (“Think Alike”). I think my idea is better though for the following reasons:

• Cost. Cheaper to chuck something into a geostationary orbit.
• Cost 2. Material. Don’t need a ring of material stretching several hundred million miles
• Safety. Get the Lagrange ring wrong and the earth might cool too much.

Who needs Haikus! Can you tell a story in just six words? Wired magazine picked up on this and published a big list. There are some crackers- mainly from writers- who else could write a story so succintly in just six words?

The best theemes derive from “what if” fantasy,

Here are my favourites from the Wired list.

Osama’s time machine: President Gore concerned.
– Charles Stross

He read his obituary with confusion.
– Steven Meretzky

Leia: “Baby’s yours.” Luke: “Bad news…”
– Steven Meretzky

And a few of my own…

Snipped the green wire. Still ticking!
– David Bolton

Time Machine Invented. Time Machine Invented…
– David Bolton

Life found on Mars. Bowie sues.
– David Bolton

Name that tune. Do a Deer.
– David Bolton

To quote Andy Millman (Ricky Gervaise’s character in the second series of Extras). I posted an article on my main website – a DIY EMP generator. It’s purely speculative on how one might do such a thing, and possibly a very silly thing to write about.

EMP is a phenomena associated with Fusion (and I think Fission) weapons that generates a very high voltage (potential difference) and current in a very short space (in a very short time). It was only declassified a few years ago- Wikipedia has more than you ever need to know on the subject. Anything electronic would have a very rough time of it – like being hit by lightning.

Makes a bit of a change from Water rockets!

It’s everyone’s dread that their computer will crash and they’ll lose everything important. For us developers it is even worse. Weeks or months of work could be lost. Of course everyone takes backups (yeah right!) but crashes happen at odd times, perhaps after a weeks solid work just as you were about to backup. Murphy’s Law.

I turned my pc on the other day. Beep. “No bootable media” it said. It was the instant adrenalin rush, like the type of panic you get when your wallet isn’t where it’s supposed to be. The masive sinking feling in the pit of the stomach. Disbelief. “No it can’t be happening to me” followed by some rude swear words.

I have a raid 0 setup. Two 256 GB drives making a 500 GB. The bios said that it wasn’t working. Duh! Unplugged and off with the side of the case. Quick peek in with a torch. Ah, loose power connector. I’ve no idea why but one of the two SATA disk power connectors had come away from the drive. I pushed it back in. Power up. Beep “No bootable media”. Bugger!

My first raid pc. Well nothing to lose- I clicked rebuild raid array. It worked, it recognised the array. Booted. Beep “No bootable media”. Hmm. Back to the BIOS. I have a 3rd drive in there, an IDE and the BIOS had removed the raid from the first boot drive position. Restated it, rebooted and held my breath… Yeah Windows starting up…. Phewww. And nothing lost, corrupted or missing.

The next couple of hours were spent backing up the stuff I’d forgotten about. But I’m only backing up to to external drives which could themselvces fail. So I looked at various online backup systems and tried the free 2Gb storage of Mozy (the link includes a reference link, if you sign up via it I get a little bit free extra storage). Considering the time and effort that restoring takes this seems pretty good. It also runs in the background when the cpu isn’t busy . I’ll have to leave my PC on overnight for a couple of nights as it now has 14GB to send. But for about £30 a year I get 30 GB of backed up storage. That seems a pretty good deal to me.

Not quite sure I should admit to getting 105 on the score. It was above average so I’m happy with that!

So I need a USB cable- a long one as I’ve bought a printer and my old parallel (Centronics) cable is no use. So I visit the Maplin website. Find a USB cable, add it to the checkout, go to register an account and after doing so get this helpful error message when registering.

“XML_CreateCustomer err(X1) occurred. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”

Ah bless. So- lets try live support. I enter this :

Trying to register to make a purchase.
I get this ‘helpful’ error!
XML_CreateCustomer err(X1) occurred. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

and get this
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error ‘80040e14’
Line 2: Incorrect syntax near ‘helpful’.
/chat.asp, line 111

Looks like a SQL Injection error- the quotes round helpful aren’t correctly handled. That’s very dangerous, though its possibly only a chat database. If I was malicious, I could have some ‘Get into Jail Real Quick’ fun but I won’t.

Hint to Maplin. Get your website fixed quick, and add some helpful errors!

Only part time but they are owned by the New York Times. After passing my 17 day induction, mastering the document system and then spending 8 weeks beavering away with C, C++ and C# (More C, less C++ and C# but that willchange), I’m now live at C/C++ and join the ranks of 200+ other guides there.

Well Turbo Delphi and Turbo C++ along with new boys Turbo Delphi for .Net and Turbo C#. No Turbo Java just yet but it is promised.

I bought Turbo Pascal 3.0 in 1986 for £49.95. And Turbo C in 1989. Where did all those years go? There has been a feeling that Borland lost their way since the Inprise episode in 97/98 (when Borland changed name and targetted big enterprises) and subsequently with each year a new version of Delphi/CPPBuilder and JBuilder but very expensive products. Meanwhile Microsoft was busy recruiting Borland’s finest and developing C#.

So the Borland spinoff/oiffshoot named Devco releases 4 new products on Tuesday 5th September 2006 aimed at developers like myself (20 years ago!). There are free versions (aimed at Microsoft’s Visual Express development systems) which seem pretty powerful according to their website but until next Tuesday we won’t know.

I was shocked to find out that it’s reckoned 700,000 children had been fingerprinted at schoolk without informing parents or asking their consent. This may prove to be illegal but it is certainly considered a form of conditioning. All this is just for access to the school library! The risks are that schools aren’t exactly secure places and that the pcs may be hacked to steal fingerprints.

Leavethemkidsalone is a website setup to highlight this cause.