I wrote back in 2006 about AVG’s crafty tactics to get you to part with money you didn’t need to part with and it now seems they are at it again.

Last night I logged into my Windows box and was greeted with a pop up from AVG saying that version 8.0 is now available. I know this to be true because I recently grabbed a copy from their website to install on my new laptop (which I have yet to write about here). The thing is though, if you clicked any of the links in the pop up, you landed yourself directly at a check out to buy the full version 8.0 security suite. There was no link to the free version anywhere, unlike the last debacle where it was merely hidden in a next to impossible to find location.

In the end the only way I could find a link to the free version was to actually go directly to free.grisoft.com and click on a series of links there. It simply wasn’t possible to get at it through their pop up reminder or the resultant pages. Now obviously I understand that they need to make money, but they do that through their corporate sales and other such deals. Surely they don’t need to be so under-hand as to dupe home users who are legally using the free version into buying the next version “in order to stay protected”, when there does in fact exist a free next version which will do just the same? If they really are losing money then they should stop releasing the free version altogether.

Whats to bet that customers who are duped into paying for the next version then later realising that they could have got it for free won’t be given refunds? Its simply not good enough.

I’m now running the development version of Calendar 1.2 on my publicly visible development server. You can see it running on Lara here. Comments are of course welcome, those who suggested features will no doubt spot some of them in action. Two screenshots are shown below to give you an overview of the new admin panel which you are not able to see on the development site.

Some keen eyed viewers will no doubt notice from what is visible that only one feature, “Event Categories”, as mentioned in one of my previous posts, remains to be implemented. Its close folks

Looks like I’m not suitable for a career in IT because I can’t read paragraphs in 2 seconds flat and answer questions on them in an online test. But oh yeah, thats right, you need to be able to do that when you’re working with low level programming and mathematics don’t you. Sure, I can read. Sure, I can assimilate information. Can I do it before you can finish saying “Jack Robinson”? No. What do you think I’ve spent my last 5 years doing? Reading Shakespeare? For fucks sake.

Recently we have had some high winds here in Leeds and it has caused many bins that were left out on the street after collection to be knocked over onto their sides. In some cases they have been pushed along the street during particularly strong gusts, impacting with passing cars!

The point of this article though is to comment on what I saw when I happened upon a bin that had been knocked over when I was returning home from the shops one morning. As I glanced at it I noticed that against the green background of the bin there was a solid, circular, black disc under the lip of the bin, completely unnoticeable unless the bin was on its side as in this case. The paranoid cynic in me thought “Good Lord, thats an RFID chip that is! The bastards are tracking what we throw away!”. I dismissed the notion as absurd but when I got home I couldn’t resist the temptation to do a little googling. To be frank I was shocked with what I found.

Turns out I wasn’t paranoid at all, they really *are* planning on tracking what we throw away, how much and how often and storing it all in a central database! The installation of a chip is an indication that they are either doing it already or planning on doing it in the near future. I also inspected my own bins and found chips to be present on both of them.

I have collected some links on the issue and have made some brief comments on them. It turns out that this been around for some time but unlike many things of this nature this one seems to have slipped under my radar.

• “Bin Bug” - The basics from Wikipedia
• “Is your bin bugged?” - A quick blog post from someone who felt compelled to check their bin for a bug and after not finding one, found some pictures off the internet showing what the bug looked like, where it was situated and what it looked like after a removal.
• Removing the bin bug - A quick how-to for removing the bug.
• “Another day, another bin bug” - A writer removes another bug after a replacement bin was delivered to replace one he had previously removed a bug from.
• The Great Bin Bug Revolt - A councilor who helps the neighborhood by driving round removing bin bugs

Does your bin have a chip? Did you know your waste disposal habits were being tracked? How do you feel about this? If you have any comments on this article or the links I’ve provided on this matter then please leave your comments below - I’d be very interested to read them.

Any Hyde Park resident in Leeds will have noticed that it has become almost impossible to walk down a pavement recently. This is due to lamp posts being replaced and the area surrounding old posts being dug up to make way for the new ones and the associated cabling. This has resulted in barriers being placed around these areas meaning the only way to get passed is to walk into the road.

Normally this wouldn’t be a problem as it would only have been short term but unfortunately it seems that the work was started just before the recent high winds and hasn’t been resumed since. The work was presumably stopped because of the risks of the posts falling in the wind as they were erected.

What I want to know is when are we going to get our pavements back? Taxi drivers and others drive damn right dangerously and I can’t be the only one who feels nervous arbitrarily stepping into the road ever few paces without knowing if I’m going to get mowed down, particularly at night.

If there was going to be a delay in completing the work, why was it started and why could they not make good the pavements with some special boarding or something? To think the price some are paying in council tax it is shocking that the council get away with this type of thing. Council tax payers see no value for money what so ever.

Could facebook finally be making some progress on implementing the things that us bloggers have been requesting for ages? I’m talking of course about the recent addition to the site of e-mail notifications that actually contain the text of what they are notifying you about.

Until recently you would get an e-mail saying you had a message, but not the message content. My attitude? Ignore the message. Clearly the individual messaging me hadn’t bothered to look at my profile and observe the text written there which says I prefer e-mail. Problem is this is a little harsh as the person had done nothing wrong as thats how they preferred to communicate. It was facebook’s fault for not realising that bridging the gap between message content and e-mail content could make such a difference, connecting those who wished to communicate through e-mail and those who wished to communicate through facebook.

Perhaps such people might be in for a reprieve now however, because when I get a new message notification from facebook, the text of the message and who sent it arrives in my inbox. This means that I can hit reply on my e-mail client, select the sender from my address book and place them in the to line, compose my reply and send it. Job done. I don’t have to login to facebook. Obviously it’s not quite perfect as now they get the reply to their e-mail and no longer can use facebook, their preferred communication medium. Maybe this will be fixed soon too.

Facebook seem to finally be recognising that not everyone is or indeed wants to be chained to their web browser. Bravo.

It escaped my attention until today when I purchased my return ticket for after Christmas from Stevenage to Leeds that the London-Leeds service is no longer operated by GNER. This certainly hadn’t been a very well publicised change and I guess there was no reason for it to be.

It must be said though that personally I felt GNER ran a very good service. Their trains were comfortable, they operated service on board in a very traditional manor and were one of the first UK operators to enable Wi-Fi on board all of their trains, a boon for technical people like myself. I know GNER weren’t without their critics (including those who claimed they were consistently late running, although I never personally found this), but I will miss them.

The service is now operated by National Express East Coast

Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of spam from users on facebook concerning this “social networking site”, Yuwie. The spam and the Yuwie site its self promises a cut in advertising revenue for all users who sign up. The problem though is two fold. Firstly, people are trying to solicit sign ups using spam which I hate. Secondly, its a complete and utter scam.

While it might be true that some users are being paid by Yuwie, what the site is banking on is that users who sign up don’t read the terms and conditions and such. If an individual contemplating sign up was diligent enough to read these texts its unlikely they would go near the site. The crux of it is what every user who signs up permits Yuwie to sell their details to anyone and everyone, this is effectively what Yuwie are paying you for the privilege of doing. This can be bad enough when you just provide your name and e-mail (think of the SPAM and the e-mail marketing hell) but with Yuwie you are providing all the details that you would to any other social networking site.

This includes but is not limited to, name, address, telephone number, mobile number, e-mail address, photos, friends names and e-mails, messages and personal preferences on subjects such as music, film and their personal life. Pretty shocking huh.

On first inspection of the terms and conditions you might think that what I have just said is untrue, but look carefully at the following extract:

Yuwie will not disclose personal information to any third party unless we believe that disclosure is necessary: (1) to conform to legal requirements or to respond to a subpoena, search warrant or other legal process received by Yuwie.com, whether or not a response is required by applicable law; (2) to enforce the Yuwie.com Terms of Use Agreement or to protect our rights; or (3) to protect the safety of members of the public and users of the service

The first sentence is fishy from the off. Necessary disclosure is usually that as required by law, but note that the statement is not if the law dictates it is necessary but that if “we believe” it is necessary. This could in fact be any reason they so choose.

Reading further on looks like they’ve made it alright again by giving some numbered points, but note the caveat on point 1). Essentially they are saying they will always cough up details to law enforcement on the slightest whim, even if there is no actual legal requirement to do so.

Point 2) includes “protecting our rights”, making no indication as to what those rights are. That could be a right to make money for instance thus justifying the sale of your details.

Point 3) is probably the most reasonable one they have, and yet it still has holes in it as it makes no reference to what they might be protecting people from, and besides it is difficult to protect users by providing their details to others whom the users have not consented to their details being given.

Bottom line is, as I said at the beginning, this site is generating huge amounts of spam on social networking sites and in the blogosphere generally and as such is deplorable. Further more it is a complete privacy scam aimed at the personal details of all those who sign up. I don’t believe any of my readers would even contemplate signing up, but I do think they would appreciate being shown how devious companies are being these days with data provided by users. Data security and privacy can only get worse so long as companies like Yuwie continue unchecked.

In a recent web browsing session I came across some superb blog posts from Ann Merrill on the Chornobyl exclusion zone and her visits to it. These postings served to remind me very much of the dangers we face in the use of nuclear technologies and how much respect they deserve from human beings when dealing with them.

As I looked through the images and read the descriptions I suddenly gained a very real feeling of what it would be like to wake up and walk outside a couple of weeks after all out nuclear war. Its really rather harrowing to say the least.

The following blog posts are most apt in detailing what it is like inside the zone and how the effects of the nuclear disaster are still very prevalent today.

• A Visit to the Exclusion Zone
• Chornobyl Travels
• Radiation Reconnaissance Mission in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone

I would like to thank Ann Merrill for sharing her experiences on these visits in such superb detail on her blog. This kind of writing is why blogs are so important. They open up areas and issues to people who would never have hoped to gain such a great insight into them. Those who listen to Radio 4 might be interested to know that Ann made an appearance on Woman’s Hour. You can listen to the program again via the link at the top..

I’ve had many people contact me since I launched my Calendar plugin to wordpress.org asking if it is possible to change the day the week starts on from Monday to Sunday. Now obviously I’m aware that some people do start the week on Sunday, but I had never realised quite how many people this was until the use of my plugin became widespread and I must say I’m still really perplexed as to why.

The working week the whole world over is Monday through Friday, with Saturday and Sunday being affectionately known as the “week end”. This being the case, how can Sunday be the start of the week on a calendar when it is one of the days that constitutes the week end? Surely it is a contradiction in terms? Visibly this would make the week end split up at opposite sides of the calendar.

Due to demand I will be allowing users of the next version of my Calendar to change the day the week starts on but in the mean time I’d very much like comments on why some might start the week on a Sunday. Any financial, economic, religious etc. reasons with online references to further explanations would particularly helpful.