Its not often that spam gets through my gmail spam filters but this one did, and its quite ingenious:
Whats clever about it:
It uses my name, and my nickname at that to make it sound more personal
It comes from a real sounding name “Bruce Thomas”
It looks exactly like a standard forward email
The attachment contains the name PDF
It contains the “No virus found in the incoming message” text from AVG
In short it almost got me, when you are short of time and briefly glance at a mail you may look over things and download and open an attachment without thinking about it.
Went downstairs to the first floor carpark this morning to grab my bike for my morning 15min cycle into work to find that all that remained was this:
First time I have ever had anything stolen, all they left me were a few tattered remains of my bike lock as souvenirs of happier times. Looks like my journey to work got that bit longer
I have always been into the scene but from a distance, some of the stuff is ameturish, some is a programming marvel (the 4k,32k,64k comps) but this is just plain beautiful. Its a demo (all code) from ASD (look them up on youtube if you want more from them) called Lifeforce, enjoy!
Been messing about with Sound Cloud recently, just seeing what all the audio related fuss is about and I must say its quite good. I have uploaded some of my mixes up there (not all of them as there is a size restriction on the number of uploads). I have also gone back and edited some of my old posts as the links to my old mixes no longer worked (thanks for Richard Davey for spotting that one.
Anyways, here are all my mixes done in release order (Tracklistings can be found in the post):
Thats it im angry enough with this site to actually write a blogpost about it.
Im sure if you are technical individual you have come accross this god awful site countless times. Over and over again you type in a query your problem into google, something like “php upload The connection was reset” a perfectly legitimate question and one that probably has been answered on a forum before. You then go through the google results and more often than not you come accross something like this:
You read the title thinking, oh this sounds promising, may be the same problem im having. You click it and then are presented with this:
Its at this moment you start to get that little suspicious sensation that you have been on this site before and have ended up being totally pissed off but any remember why. Anyways, you read the text, great, sounds like it is similar to my problem, so what were the suggestions of how to fix it? You scroll down imagining the answer to be down a little..
Umm.. hmm this doesnt look like its a forum post reply.. looks like a whole nother big list of problems, perhaps I should scroll down a little more…
Ahh these look like the responses to my question… oh wait a min they arent… hmmm so what are these? they look like more questions. So whats going on here then? There seems to be no responses to the original question, no link to the original post, nothing, so what is the point in this site and why does it rank in the top 10 of many many google search queries?
Well it seems like all it does is spam the internet with totally useless pages that google seems to rank highly, basically its SPAM and bloody anoying spam at that.
I urge everyone who has come accross this site and come to the same conclusion to report this as spam to google using the the following link:
Had my first proper real-time wave today and although I was a little skeptical at first I must admit it really worked very well and surprisingly was actually alot of fun!
Im honestly not sure whether it will take off and become the ‘next big thing’ or not, but I hope so! I would love to write all my blog-posts, emails, msn conversations in one convenient place and have realtime updates an backups.
Anyway, if you are lucky enough to be in the preview add me mike.cann@googlewave.com and we can have a chat about it
EDIT:
As a quick edit, i have just installed a new plugin for wordpress that lets me embed google waves, so if you have google wave you should beable to see the following wave in full:
FoodScanner is an iPhone app that lets you scan a barcode and it then tells you about its nutritional info. Whats frustrating is that I had this idea over a year ago, the idea was that you scan an item, enter how much of it you ate, then the app keeps a running daily total of the amount of GDA of calories, fats, salts and more.
I didn’t chase it up as although I knew it possible to read a barcode from an image, it would of been difficult to tally the code to a specific item as each store has its own identification numbers.
Ah well, im sure now the idea has been proven we will be seeing Tesco, Sainsburys etc bringing out their own “measure your nutritional input” iPhone app!
Michael is a Professional Flash Developer currently based in Manchester UK. His passion is all things programming, particularly Games and Particle Systems.