In light of Vince Cables changes to UK copyright legislation I have found myself forced to write to my MP.
In amongst the pages of proposals is the right of the music industry based on suspicion alone to request the immediate disconnection of internet connections without warning or evidence. The internet user will get no chance to defend themselves or see any evidence and unless they pay a £20 fee for the privilege of appealing against their disconnection then they will immediately be classed as guilty.
Many people, myself included, depend on the internet for work and business and cannot afford any risk of the internet being shut off without due process being followed.
FOR THE ATTENTION OF:
Annette Brooke MP
Mid Dorset and North Poole
Dear Annette Brooke,
I read with absolute horror this morning how Vince Cable has launched a sweeping change to the justice system in the UK.
From a system where someone is innocent until proven guilty, we are suddenly introducing a system where everyone is guilty until they pay a fee just for the chance to try to prove themselves innocent when no evidence has ever been presented to their guilt.
The fact that music companies will be able to request that internet users access is shut off, without having to provide any evidence at all and based solely on the basis of suspicion is begging for systematic abuse, especially when we have seen loads of cases of this industry knowingly threatening innocent people in the past. Not only will the internet of users be shut off without a shred of evidence, or warning, which will be devastating to many people who use the internet for work or business, the abused user will then have to pay £20 for the privilege of appealing against being shut off. In no other situation would we consider it acceptable to charge someone to defend themselves when there is not even any evidence of wrong doing.
I urge you to bring this matter up most urgently as this is a gross infringement of human rights. Allowing this to go unchallenged would be Orwellian to say the least.
Yours sincerely,
Sarah Pantry
August 4th 2011 Uncategorized
Well I am not sure how this one has passed me by and how I have never heard of this service before. Launched at TechCrunch on 27th September 2010 CloudFlare works like a CDN proxy network for your site, and not only does it speed things up, it also offers you the ability to survive traffic spikes and protect your site from many types of nasty stuff. It will even enable your site to stay up, when it is down. The best bit is that this is all available for free. Let me say that again Free!
I have added one of my other sites to it as a test and noticed a good improvement in load times and will be carefully reviewing the stats over the next week or so and then taking a choice about possibly moving other sites over as well. So far though I am impressed, it is still early days though.
I suggest popping over to CloudFlare and seeing what they can do for you. If you want more features above and beyond the already great features you get for free then you can pay $20 per site per month for even faster performance, supposedly the easiest SSL ever and some other extras that are not really required.
October 15th 2010 Uncategorized
Welcome back to our look at some of the things that can hold your site back and stop you getting all web traffic and visitors you would like.
If you missed our introduction then please take a moment to go back and review How can I rank better in Google
Anyway straight on with the good stuff. Some of this will mean you need to use a couple of basic simple tools to help but these are all free and 10 minutes with these easy and simple free tools can pay dividends to your site traffic and search engine ranking position. The first tool you will need is part of Google itself and it is the Google Webmaster Tools There is not a serious webmaster alive who is interested in promoting their site that can afford to ignore this free tool. The second is a website spider eg Xenu this is a windows tool but there are hundreds of free web spiders and sitemap generators for all platforms.
You should set up Xenu and register for Google Webmaster tools (GWT) so if you read the appropriate instructions for each of those then come back here we can continue.
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September 20th 2010 Uncategorized
According to tweets by Scott Barnes Microsofts‘ former Product Manager for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Microsoft Internet Explorer development team are intending to make some heavy windows specific extensions to the HTML5 spec for IE9.
“HTML5 is the replacement for WPF.. IE team want to fork the HTML5 spec by bolting on custom windows APi’s via JS/HTML5″
The problem with this is clearly stated in a clarification tweet he made later on.
“To clarify : html5 with ie9 specific Apis could carry 90% of lob wpf/silverlights workload today. But it’s an ie9 lockin though”
So we could see IE9 taking over a lot of what is currently being done in Silverlight, we could also see IE9 living on for another 10 years once applications have been written to specifically depend on these extensions in IE9 much like we see hundreds of thousands of people still locked into IE6 simply because applications were written that depended on IE6 specific functionality instead of being fully standards compliant.
We can but hope that application and front end developers have learnt the lessons of IE6 and shun requiring these IE9 specific extensions in order for their applications to work as required and stick with best practise open standards design and development to prevent a web 2.0 browser still living on into a web 5.0 world
September 10th 2010 Uncategorized
It is quite strange when you take the time to step back from being an experienced developer and have to look at things from the perspective of someone just starting to learn to code.
My partner has taken the decision to learn HTML and PHP and so far is doing very well at it. This has lead to a few questions which I am more than happy to answer, I just have to try and think about how to explain things.
You see after years of development things are just things. A variable is a variable, an array is an array and functions, methods, objects etc. well, they just are what they are. So stepping back and trying to explain that a variable is just a box you can put something in, an array is just a bigger box that you can put other boxes (variables) in and actually thinking about how to explain things can get quite esoteric.
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May 20th 2010 Uncategorized
