If you Google for ‘iTunes’, you get a nice sponsored link at the top that looks like it goes to the official Apple iTunes page. In fact, it does not. It takes you to http://www.itunesgu.info/uk.html (probably best not to go there!). It forces you to sign up to download iTunes. At the very least, it means they captcher your e-mail address/name details. You can even PAY! Yes really. You can pay $11.67 per year for a 3 year membership!?

I dread to think what’s actually in the download.

Google and Apple should really stop this sort of thing - don’t you think? Way to spread the badness around the Internet.

Google offering spam/adware above official downloads

A work colleague coined a fantastic term for code that just isn’t DRY:

Constantly Repeating Yourself - CRY

Not only does it describe one’s reaction to amazingly shoddy code, that just oozes of a developer spending all day using Copy and Paste, but seems an appropriate opposite.

Back to refactoring CRY code with me!

I decided to come back to a Wordpress based blog - hosted at Joyent. The reasons were pretty simple. I wasn’t overly happy with the way that Typepad’s pricing model worked. It’s ok for people wanting a pretty basic blog, but if you actually used it and want to customise it, I think Wordpress is better.

I could have done the whole free hosting on Wordpress.com thing - but I prefer hosting myself.

Hope the few readers I do have like the theme!

We get mice up in our flat a reasonable amount. A block of 50 or so flats tends to mean there'll always be some. Plus, this is London - so you're never too far from them I guess. Being on the 5th floor helps a bit, as they have quite a way to come to get here.

No more commercial breaks! Makes it all worth watching. So this is where the money they saved from giving Neighbours to Channel 5 has gone?

“The BBC has secured the television rights to Formula One from the 2009 season. The five-year deal marks the return of the sport to BBC screens 12 years after ITV began broadcasting Grands Prix. Hopefully they leave James Allen with ITV”

read more | digg story

This is clearly the new, safer, caffeine - for those late night coding/gaming sessions.

“Eerie blue LEDs in truck cabs and truck stops could be the key to reducing accidents caused by drowsy drivers, say US researchers. They say bathing night drivers in the right light can increase their alertness by resetting their body clocks.”

read more | digg story

Leopard’s Finder has a glaring bug in its directory-moving code, leading to horrendous data loss if a destination volume disappears while a move operation is in action.

read more | digg story

I still get agencies trying to ’sell’ me jobs. I wouldn’t mind so much - but my CV hasn’t been “out there” for a very long time. 

I always thought that CV’s, like all personally identifiable data, had to be destroyed when it was no longer useful. So what are these job agencies doing!?

Oh well, suppose I’ll just keep treating them like spam. 

Sorry Mac fan boys. Safari 3 in Leopard was obviously not ready for release. This afternoon - it has crashed on me a total of 7 times.

I can’t seem to narrow down the problem but only occurs after I access a site protected by HTTP Basic Authentication. After that, I have about 30 minutes (depends on whether I continue browsing said protected site) before it crashes.

*sigh* - That and the Expose bug… quite annoying really. I wouldn’t mind - but Firefox has more memory leaks than Vanguard.

UPDATE: Safari appears to be bugged for me when using Privoxy - When I have no Proxy settings set, everything works fine.

This I didn’t even bother to notice - So bit of a noob error.

If you check the WhatsNewInLeopard page over at macosforge - you can see they already built in the patch from the Joyent guys.

I should really have looked before embarking on doing the patch myself.

However - gave me a good insight into how to do it

I also did a quick check and noticed that Python also has it all compiled in too - shame the entry/exit names aren’t the same as the one on Python on Solaris though. They also haven’t included the PHP module that exists (and I have made work on OSX) so you can still grab that on this site.