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Further Debunking the "Melaleuca Scam" Myth

Mon, 2 Nov 2009 17:48:50 +0000

When I wrote Melaleuca - Not the scam I was told it was I thought I'd pretty much got to the bottom of things. Melaleuca is a product range that happens to be quite good, people abuse the name to gain traction, the end.

I was wrong.

It seems that there is a second tier of people who want to believe that Melaleuca is a scam. People that thought they could get rich by wishing hard enough.

Is Melaleuca a scam? No it isn't.

Could Melaleuca make you rich? Sure.

Will it happen while you are in bed. Nope, not ever.

I will be going to a meeting with a man who last month made �82,000 with Melaleuca - it took him 18 years and by all accounts he worked hard and smart.

Melaleuca, for those that do not know, is a product that allows you to earn commission by introducing customers. It is sold direct to the customer by mail order. Melaleuca is similar to MLM in the same way that a train is similar to a car.

But is Melaleuca a scam? Hardly.

What is a scam is any person's claim that any product, ever, will get you rich by tomorrow afternoon. It's never true online.

If however you think getting rich is just a matter of luck I might have a prince in excile that is interested in sharing his vast fortune with you...

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Reformatting badly formatted text.

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:38:58 +0000

I don't know about you but between PLR text and email press releases I often end up with text so misshapen that I can barely use it. NucleusCMS (the way I use it) is set to convert new lines into BR tags sot hat the articles I publish are well formatted - this breaks totally when email adds in a newline every 80 characters.

Enter Lord Matt's PLR Formatter. Past in mis-shapen text and when you press the button the text in the box is regularly formatted with a line between each paragraph and excess line breaks and other pointless stuff is taken care of.

It's free to use and I hope you find it useful.

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Melaleuca - Not the scam I was told it was

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:51:30 +0000

I've been looking into a Company called Melaleuca, Inc and normally at this stage readers might expect me to start jumping up and down on the aformentioned company. Not so fast however - I'm starting to see a company getting bad press all the wrong reasons.

I only started to look harder after ordering a few bits and bobs from a friend. But you know me I like to look at things good and hard. What I found was that the allegations of "scam" was not such a simple story and was flimsy at best.

The first clue that this might not be as simple story was the number of adverts available for the keyword "Melaleuca" and the percentage of those also advertising for the keyword "Melaleuca Scam" - without exception they were selling a competitor product.

If you have to run down the competition to get a sale then you are already on loosing street buddy.

Background

Melaleuca is a loaded term. It's a plant, a number of companies and goodness knows what else. Here is a quick background on the company. I have used two main sources for this - the wikipedia [link] and a sales rep for Melaleuca, Inc from my locality (Thanet). After all I had to try out this envirnmentally friendly washing powder for myself.

What is Melaleuca

Melaleuca oil is better known as Tea Tree Oil. The Wikipedia introduces it and says that Tea Tree Oil (melaleuca oil) is a clear to very pale golden hydrophobic essential oil with a fresh camphoraceous odor. It is taken from the leaves of the Melaleuca alternifolia which is native to the northeast coast of New South Wales, Australia. The oil has beneficial medical properties (including antiseptic and antifungal, antibacterial action), and is also believed to have beneficial cosmetic properties.

Melaleuca as a company

There is not just one company that are known in short as Melaleuca in some way. The lessor known is The Australian Essential Oil Company (also known as the Melaleuca Company) this was started in 1993 and is a wholesaler of 100% pure Melaleuca oil. The other company is called "Melaleuca, Inc" and is more often known as "Melaleuca, The Wellness Company".

This is the company with the "scam" reputation that is not, in my opinion, deserved.

Melaleuca, The Wellness Company - History

Checking out your friendly Internet encyclopaedia (wikipedia) I have read that Melaleuca, Inc was not always a good guy. Back in the mists of the 80s a company started in America called "Oil of Melaleuca, Inc" it was a Multi-Level-Marketing operation with all the morals of a hungry spider.

Fortunatly for the world (so the Wikipedia tells us) back in 1985 the company was taken over by Frank L. VanderSloot who dissolved the previous company, created a new marketing plan to support consumers, immediately launched an initiative to bring the company's product line into compliance with FDA regulations, and started this new company under the name of "Melaleuca, Inc."

From then Melaleuca, Inc. have never looked back. Melaleuca, Inc. has diversified to carry a range of products that are certified organic and Kosher certified. They have a range of cosmetics that according to a Lady Doctor in my area fantastic. I don't know the first thing about make up beyond things found in a theatre but apparently we are talking about as good as or better than leading brands at shops own brand prices.

So Melaleuca scam? What's this about?

To be honest I was surprised when I was told that there might be a body of work suggesting scamming. I hate scams (as you probably know) and set out to take a look.

Melaleuca breaking norms

One possibility for the allegations is that old favourate - sour grapes. Quoting from the Wikipedia again Melaleuca has been outspoken against the abuses inherent to multi-level marketing and the damage they can cause.

This does not sound like a scam company to me. By contrast, Melaleuca does not allow inventory loading (a practice used by many multi-level marketing companies encouraging them to purchase sometimes thousands of dollars worth of inventory), limits the marketing chain to 7 generations, and prohibits "breakaways" (another practice commonly found in multi-level marketing).

What I am getting here is that Melaleuca, Inc has been shaking things up a bit. Some people are not liking it. Possibly because the snide practices of the past are being replaced by what appear to me to be more ethical ones.

Melaleuca and the Preferred customer

To be a sales executive one must also be a Preferred customer. There is a small fee (�19 in the UK) which I would imagine filters out time wasters and a comitment to purchase a minimum ammount each month. In return the Preferred customer gets between 10% and 40% off of the retail price.

This seems like a good offer for company and customer. Melaleuca are assured a level of customer orders and the customer gets a discount. They also get to retail and to reffer new Preferred customers (who may or may not be interested in the business side of things).

The wikipedia tells us In order to earn commissions from one's customers, marketing executives must produce a minimal number of 35 product points per month (the equivalent of about $45�55 each month) to remain an active Independent Marketing Executive. This in turn qualifies the Preferred customer to receive a 30%-40% discount off the regular purchase price of their personal product purchases. (Which is what I just said).

Melaleuca vs Fake sales

Wikipedia continues Melaleuca also does not require its marketing executives to maintain an inventory. One of the ways (as I understand it) that MLM companies can appear to be more successful than they really are is by forcing reps to maintain a high stock level. If that was me and this Melaleuca came along and upset my apple cart I might feel threatened too.

While Melaleuca do offer a deal (the Preferred customer status) which has a minimum order level this is in line with normal household usage and appears to me to be a win-win situation. I can see why people take the offer - it looks good.

Melaleuca and the scam free extras

Still quoting the wikipedia The company also offers their preferred members an opportunity to earn up to 10% of their monthly product order back in "Loyalty Shopping" dollars. After earning $100 in Loyalty Shopping dollars their first five consecutive months, new preferred members are allowed to redeem their earned Loyalty Shopping dollars towards products. The same is true in the UK but with pounds.

The Melaleuca scam reports themselves

So what's the problem? I spoke to my local Melaluca guy and got him to give me the full sales talk. I wanted to know how it all worked and I wanted to know details.

How Melaleuca should work (scam free)

My friend (who I'm going to call Bob Smith) was drawn to Melaleuca because of the ethical aspect of the business. Bob has been a Christian a short while and has a very strong ethical streak. In fact all things being equal Bob would like to be spending profits helping other people.

Bob told me that he loved the fact that in order to progress as a Melaleuca rep you had to help the other reps you recruited to also progress. He told me that an executive is capped at an earning limit unless he helps to develop those he has recruited.

He spoke a lot about spending time with people and making sure they realy got the idea behind Melaleuca. Mentoring them if they wanted to run it as a business and supporting them in doing so. Bob also showed me the full colour guide which strongly suggested that one should carry out follow up meetings with any one you refer. It will soon be clear why that is important.

Not MLM

Melaleuca, Inc. try to distence themselves from the term MLM (Multi Level Marketing). The reason being is that they see themselves as Preferred customer fasilitators and bill themselves as Direct Marketing - this is because customers are able to buy directly from Melaleuca.

In this is Melaleuca is more like an enhanced affiliate program than an MLM company.

The scam claims

Let's start with the Top 10 Google Results for "Melaleuca Scam" and I'll show you what I mean.

Why Melaleuca is a Big, Fat Scam" By melbel (hubpages.com)

This page [LeapFish - they really were pushy.

What went wrong here was that this executive was not taking the time to make sure that people realy got the idea of Melaleuca and it's products. She just wanted to sign people up as fast as possible. The sales person was not taking the time to sell the idea - just grabbing the money.

What happened next was Melaleuca's only failure in the story. Melaleuca has over 2,500 traditional employees and one of those was clearly a tit head.

I imagine that this sales person was doing very well on paper and so had the ear of the company and so when melbel and her mum complained they did not have a good customer experience. Not at all.

Is this evidence of a scam named Melaleuca? No, I don't think so. Might it have looked that way? Yes it might.

What did Melaleuca do wrong?

There should have been some form of process for flagging up aggressive executives that are hurting the company. Bob (not his real name remember) told me that Melaleuca were extreamly defensive of their good name and so should extend this to a readiness to be liberal with the complimentry goodies and a hard slap for aggressive sales persons.

Melaleuca - Scam or Legitimate Business Opportunity - Melaleuca Honest Review By Joshua Valentine (ezinearticles.com)

This article [link] is 396 of keyword rich review. It concludes that Melaleuca is not a scam. It ranked second in Google.

Melaleuca Fraud or Scam? by Someone (corporatenarc.com)

This page [link] is very hard to read being white text on a black background (when will people learn). I was also irritated by the extreme use of prejudicial language in the article - sure you have an opinion and all but this guy or gal was trying to sell their opinion - hard.

Okay enough personal gripes. The short version of this article is that a group called MomsWIN were dropping the Melaleuca range. Don't even get me started on the sexist language inherent in this group's name...

I Googled MomsWIn and found that there was a Ripoff Report page binding MomsWIN and Melaleuca together. Again I see a story here about a group hard selling and Melaleuca's one weakness in not ensuring a good customer experience.

In my opinion if you have a product you can belive in then if a customer is not 100% happy to have purchased from you your reation should be to give that money back so fast it doesn't even touch the sides. I'm seriouse - if you don't love my product I don't want your money.

At the 2.5k employees mark this has slipped. With amazing growth comes a greater difficulty to care for customers. A good sales rep should be there for you to harass the upline and the company until lots of people (all the way up) are insisting that the company follow through - and that's with an indifferent company - with one aiming for the ethical high ground (such as Melaleuca) that much pushing should rarely be needed.

Why do I not trust this article?To this writer everything is a scam. The featured articles all contained the word "scam" when I looked. It seems to me that this writer is very good at ranking for keyword +scam.

The Google ads filling the pages are a testament to the fact it is profitable.

In short though this is an angry young blogger (AYB) style blog with no actual evidence and a story that makes me think MomsWIN LLC might have been kicked from Melaleuca for aggressive sales not in line with company policy if only for not being clear that they were not Melaleuca (I could be wrong, YMMV, etc).

That said I did find references to MomsWIN being a scam here. As I say - I could be wrong but I think the real culprit is MomsWIN here.

Melaleuca Complaints - Online scam! by Abedy

This is a true story of a scam but not by Melaleuca [link]. What has gone wrong here is that the sales man has once more been bad. In this case they have been using the Internet to market things and in an hours phone call repeated denied the requirement for a Preferred customer to maintain a monthly order.

The sad thing here is that Abedy was not only hurt in Melaleuca's name but Melaleuca was hurt too. It seems to me that the MLM industry has a lot of bad people in it and it is going to take time for Melaleuca to make a difference. We can only hope that they survive the false scam allegation long enough (which is likely given that they are still very profitable).

www.melaleucablog.com/ by people

I have no real idea what Google is doing listing this site. I'm not sure this is an official blog but I could be wrong.

Is Melaleuca a Scam or Legit Opportunity? - Melaleuca Review by Hassan Ajmal (articlesbase.com)

This [link] is another article that is keyword rich but realy does not take us anywhere new. On the question of "is this a scam?" it concludes From the research I've done so far, I can say this seems to be a legit opportunity.

The article goes on to question the quality of using this form of plan to make money verses other make money online methods. I think that this is about as broad as it is long and have no comment.

Melaleuca Scam

This is outright mean marketing. This page [link] is a list of articles that never talk about Melaleuca or Scam and yet tag their articles "Melaleuca Scam" - what scam? Please tell me.

In my opinion this is SEO spam.

Are You Sick & Tired Of The (Melaleuca Scam)? by Prosperity Leads Matrix (kewego.co.uk)

This [link] is a scam in and of itself. The reason for this (badly written) attack that doesn't say too much is to sell another make money product. Any product that needs to sink that low is not worth the investment. Avoid! Do not do business with Prosperity Leads Matrix - that's my advice.

Is [Melaleuca] A Scam Or Legitimate Business Opportunity? (video)

This video [link] didn't like me and failed to play. The presenter in the video could try to say Melaleuca is a scam or he could conclude that it is okay. He does have something else to push - I could see that much.

What did I lean about Melaleuca and scams?

I conclude that there is no scam in sight. A lot of less-than-reputable people might be trying to make it look like there is some sort of scam to sell products that are not likely to be very safe but I can see no validity in their claims.

Overall I was so impressed that I have chosen to become a customer with a view to sharing this product with my friends and family. Ideally enough to make a small profit (as if being greener and saving money was not enough anyway).

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Setting up a website

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:00:00 +0000

Most people who want a website call for a web designer. Woah there guys! If you are building a house you don't get the interia decorator or the landscape gardener to do that for you, do you?

No hold off on talking to any designers until you have a framework to hang that design on - otherwise the designer will be billing you a heck of a lot for doing all the things you could have done for free. Design should not be an ongoing job.

A website is made up of two parts:

1. Domain name
2. A server
3. (Optionally) additional software.

The name allows a user to type www.example.com/somepage.html rather than 45.89.99.27/www/~user/sompage.html which you have to admit is not exactly freindly. Worse yet if I change server the address might become 120.22.22.99/var/www/acc/u/~user/somepage.html which is just silly. I recomend my own service for domain name purchases if only because I think it's a good quality offering and I know you will be safe to purchase from me. If you have a need for a new domain visit Lord Matt Domain Names and have a look round.

The second half of the story is the server. This could be a blogging service like blgoger.com which provide a very basic pre-branded name (example.blogspot.com), basic "hosting" or a dedicated server. The price of each option is different and it is up to you to sellect what is ebst for you. I use these guys exclusively (I do well out of the pound to dollar exchange rate and they are not so big that they can afford to be crappy to you (like godaddy seem to think they are)).

Now the server can be set up to serve HTML pages (and XML, and pictures etc) on request. This is fine and dandy but to really get anything out of a website you want something active. That's where software comes into it.

Most hosting accounts and all dedicated servers offer some form of scripting language. The one you want is PHP (ideally PHP5 or later) and at least one MySQL database. Dedicated servers have the entire MySQL service to themselves but shared hosting customers are sometimes limited to one or two.

With this added advantage you can set up every kind of website you can think of. Realy - everything that comes to mind is available to you.

You can have a look at over 200 PHP solutions at http://php.opensourcecms.com/ which gives you a good feel for what the default installation is like. I highly recommend NucleusCMS for blogging and I use it extensively. However take your time and see what you like the feel of.

If you don't want to maintain the technical stuff yourself take on an appropriately skilled geek (such as myself) to take care of all that for you. Otherwise once it is all uploaded and the basic setup done you are almost home and dry. Or at least in the changing rooms and vigorously toweling yourself off.

All that remains is to make the design your own (this is where the web designer comes in) and to start adding content (otherwise what was the point?).

Job done.

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YoVille stalls at 75% and other Facebook game problems.

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 22:02:14 +0100

If you are a regular at facebook (or MySpace) then you will be aware of Zynga who make a range of the most popular games on facebook.

Cafe World, Mafia Wars, Pirates, YoVille, Farmville, Roller Coaster Kingdom and others.

You may be unlucky enough to encounter the dreaded stops at 75% error. This happens when for no readily apparent reason YoVille or Roller Coaster Kingdom can't connect tot he server. The Interwebs is full of people asking what has gone wrong and no one having an answer.

However I found some "support" this one called "I can't connect or keep losing connection to Yoville!" is the place where I first learned of port 9339 which Zynga love to use for their games.

There is some reasonable advice on seeing if you can reach that port. The long and the short of it is Zynga blame your firewall for stopping you opening a socket to the right port number.

They suggest trying telnet and seeing if you can use the port - if not talk to whoever makes your firewall.

It's not helpful and worse yet just misdirects us from the fault. Trust me I've been all over my ports and opened sockets so wide I'm feeling like a windows user here.

Fortunately for YoVille and Roller Coaster Kingdom fans Zynga moved and tried again with this effort called "Why does YoVille not load past 74% or gets stuck on 100%".

They first blame users for having "too many items" but say that it all still works... yeah I didn't quite follow what that had to do with anything. Next they suggest that Flash and/or Java is out of date.

Being an Ubuntu user I know full well that everything is bang up to date. Skip it.

Then they suggest uninstalling flash and reinstalling it and then they tell you to "remove the application" and then log out of facebook adn then clear the browser cache and then close the browser and then start it up again and then log back in and re-add the application.

So, let's see - they blame

your firewall
your sockets
you
your plugins
your browser

Let's test this then shall we.

I close Prism and use firefox and... the problem remains. Okay so that's the browser and the plugins and the cache all tested. (Unless we want to blame the Mozilla engine itself).

So let's go into the guts of Ubuntu and disable the firewall just in case. Linux shouldn't need a full firewall because it is secure to start with but let's assume nothing.

sudo ufw disable

Right it is now off.

Still broken - next please?

Oh yes ports not open - so I open a few sockets like this:

sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -d 0/0 -s 0/0 --dport xxxx -j ACCEPT

Where xxxx is a port number.

I managed to open a whole bunch before paying closer attention to netstat and realising that the internal socket numbers were never the same from one attempt to the next. So short of doing that a shite load times - say a ten or twenty thousand - they would have to lump it.

Everything else is able to listen on a port whenever it wants to so what is making this flash implimentation so "special" and why only on YoVille and Roller Coaster Kingdom? After all Cafe World and Farmville work fine for me.

This is when I spot that the target address is 74.217.69.152:9339 (that's IP 74.217.69.152 using port 9339 on the server on my PC it was using 50145 - but this changes everytime.

A few more tests and I can see that YoVille is connecting to IPs of the order 74.217.6?.xxx:9339 using fairly random looking local port numbers. From what I can tell it uses the first socket to load config and then the next two sockets to connect and play and some how this is where the rot sets in.

The netstat output showed me that I was seeing a series of orderly disconnects (TIME_WAIT) and a decent connection ESTABLISHED but even so something was going wrong.

The connection was good but it was not being used very well. I could see that I was not blocking the connections as loading was happening but something about the way Zynga like to connect for live play was not working in this case.

I wondered if NAT (Network Address Translation) was keeping me from abusing my time with YoVille so I wanted to do a little port forwarding - what my router calls Virtual Servers. The probelm is that the port number Zynga is going out on changes every time and I can not keep up.

So I tried establishing a DMZ (De-Militarized Zone) to my PC (removing the NAT from the situation and dropping a bunch of protective layers). However I ended up with a FIN_WAIT1 situation and the broken disconnect stoped the config file from loading.

In other words I had just tripped the connection up and broken it. That'll hang about until reboot and what was worse YoVille was now reusing the "open port". Thus the config file would never load.

What I did was switch to Roller Coaster Kingdom which has the same problem and turned out to be called on an IP range starting 174.129.xxx.xxx but even with a DMZ the same hang situation was going on. However I spoted that there was a socket open to the same IP as started the loading but port 8080. The internal socket number (port) was slightly greater numerically than the 9339 stuff so I imagine that it opened after. If that is true then Zynga sis not just clone some core from YoVille to Roller Coaster Kingdom or if they did they changed a few details.

This 8080 socket was sat in SYN_SENT which is, according to the general guide to geeky things, part way through a TCP handshake (the opening of things). Which means we are hanging out for a SYN/ACK from the server and it has not arrived.

Reasons include firewall (what there is was disabled), router or NAT issues (DMZ took care of that) or something else.

I'm going to choose something else and suggest that Zyanga need to check out the way they have configured their servers.

Given that YoVille and Roller Coaster Kingdom can both establish connections and YoVille can load config data froma server and given that Cafe World, Farmville and every compettitors game seems to work fine the chances are that Zynga have cocked something up.

Judging by the stony silence aside from the comic misdirection I would say that Zynga have no idea what the problem is. Which leaves a whole bunch of people (including me) unable to play.

If any geeks want to pull me up for calling a spade a shovel or suggest things I've missed then please feel free to take the comments section and fill it with meaningful text.

If you have read this far and also have similar problems feel free to say so too. The more well tested a bug report the more expensive looking ignoring it appears to the game maker.

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The [LeapFish / Scam / ePerks / ben behrouzi] rap sheet.

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:22:54 +0100

It seems to me that people want to read about LeapFish and the CEO (benny boy). While LeapFish.com has only sent about 24 visitors* to my site in the last month (that's less than 1 a day) compared to Googles 7k visitors and Bings 1.2k (it's been a slow month) yet of the top 100 refering keywords to LordMatt.co.uk this past month I see three entries for SoapDish:

12th "leapfish scam"
15th "ben behrouzi"
37th "leapfish"

Given the keywords that these have had to compete with they have scored very highly. Clearly people want to know about LeapFish and LeapFish.com is not satisfying this need. What is a blogger to do?

The only answer, it seems, is to go back to writing about LeapFish and the fact I do not like the founder at all, not even a little bit, no sir, can't stand him...

(I think he is both mean and rude. I think the people he hires are not the sort of people that should be in a web 2.0 start up. I think this because of the way they behave in public. Honestly who would set out to make headlines like these?)

All significant leapfish traffic could be assigned to sales calls alone according to numbers reported elsewhere (like alexa) and given that the 80 salesman LeapFish use each making 150 sales calls a day and getting people to visit the site as part of the call. I made the average to be just over 2.54 visits per sales call. Add in the likes of me checking to see if they have crashed their servers again yet and that is all the traffic to my mind.

But perhaps you are not looking for me to rehash what regular readers already know. Perhaps you are looking to find out answers to such questions as "Is the LeapFish astroturf machine broken?" or the article with the potential LeapFish spam (not to mention possible international court action when/if more evidence is gathered) where I asked "Was I just trolled by Ben Behrouzi of LeapFish?"

Talking of Mr Behrouzi there is an article by Pip Penguin called "The benny b report". Benny boy is the CEO and head guy for LeapFish and Ben is, in my opinion, totally morally bankrupt or so foolish as to think he is moral sound (or both).

Those who want to ready about "ben behrouzi" may also be interested in reading about "Mark of Dot Next". DotNext (also known as DotLast and DotNever by some people who shall remain nameless) is the "ben behrouzi" parent company that now tries to avoid all mention of ben and leapfish's connection to ePerks (whoops, whoops again). Mark is also the director of marketing (and twitter spam I think) for DotNext and LeapFish and probably ePerks (if it is still running) and whatever other start up they happen to fancy selling using high pressure telesales.

In case you want to know what ePerks was then you can read Pip Penguins article "How to commit nuclear suicide with your brand or business".

If you were searching Bing, Google or Yahoo (or even (very strange) LeapFish) for "LeapFish Scam" then you might want to look at Phony Phishing with LeapFish! where we look at the questionable claims that scammers are trying to "phish" leapfish customers. I think that this is not-at-all likely to be anywhere near true. Anyone that wants to send me a signed statement assuring me that they have never been employed with or have any financial interest in LeapFish or companies run by Ben B but were a customer or leapfish.com and have been subject to phishing attacks (with evidence) and I will not only retract my statement I will help benny boy to track down the scammer.

I'm not holding my breath.

On the subject of leap fish scams, bans and rudeness with Ben Behrouzi and Mark

You may be interested to learn that there are two separate instances of people that Ben Behrouzi does not like being accused of child molesting! Yeah that is quite sick. The first time and the second time. There is only (currently) strong circumstantial evidence to link Ben to these attacks.

In his own blog (I'm not going to link to it but you can find it on Google easily enough) benny b claims that the cyber sqautting rumour weed is false Rumor # 9 : Ben Behrouzi Engages in Cyber-squatting. False. But I have purchased domains that are of interest to me. Let us look at that. Ben Behrouzi has purchased domain names that related directly to the name of a person he sued. Ben, it seems, purchased vladzablotskyy.org Vlad being one of his strongest critics. If it looks like cyber squat, smells like cyber squat then by jove I think it may be cyber squat.

Would that make Ben a lier? I think it might.

Likewise ben (who has yet to correct the no capitals in my name insult) claims that he does not support shilling and spam but the evidence says otherwise to me. The spamming techcruch example comes to mind.

End Notes

If you don't like me being critical of you then do not do things one can easily criticise, insult me or my family or my company or my friends (covered already); be rude to me for no reason (see above), live in a glass house and throw stones, use high pressure sales and claim to be web 2.0, tell easily exposed lies (see above), threaten people's livelihood, cyber squat, astroturf, charge an excessive price, steal content, make legal threats every time you are criticised, spam my favourite blogs, edit your own wikipedia entry (I hate that), use click fraud, attempt to sue people on fairly flimsy grounds for doing what you paid them to do; be mean to people (see above), make (what appears to be) false claims, use hard sales, make character assasination attempts, spam twitter or make unfounded and damaging accusations (see above). At The Very Least. In other words don't paint a huge target on your backside and then moon me (metaphorically).

* Even if adverts could increase my traffic by a thousand percent then a leapfish advert would be worth to me... nothing at all. So now you know.

Disclaimer: we all know that a personal blog is the opinion of the blogger only. Even so I'm not wanting to spend money on ben and his (in my opinion very silly) law suits so this is to point out that this content is only my opinion (apart from anything not on my website), may have inaccurate bits (it's unlikely but that's the sort of thing a disclaimer has to say) and is largely not a formal statement of intention nor the opinion of my advertisers, partners, affiliates, mates, family, company, hosts, DNS providers, domain registrars, domain registers, God, the UK population, other people calling themselves Lord Matt or indeed any other entity. However that opinion does include that the following content could apply to ben behrouzi (but I could be wrong).

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On the Microsoft wheel?

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:15:08 +0100

Forcing the issue, Microsoft has said it will stop supporting Windows XP in April 2014. And even if there is an extension, by then most makers of third-party software for XP will have phased out their support, says Steve Kleynhans, vice-president of research at Gartner, "which will increase the pressure to upgrade" to Windows 7.

What they are saying is that once you are a Microsoft customer you will be pressured into buying a replacement operating system every 3 years.

I think that we can all assume that users will also be pressured into buying newer versions of Microsoft Office (unless they move to Open Office) and newer versions of any other key applications.

This means that the cost of PC ownership when running windows is ongoing. To be safe, to be secure, to be up-to-date you have to buy the newest version. A very real form of obsolescence that keeps you paying money to Microsoft (and her partners).

Yet how can it be any other way? Once they have your money from you they need to find new ways to get money. If Microsoft was offering lifetime support for software with free upgrades (something most smaller developers and all Open Source projects offer) then they may have run out of customers back in the late 90s.

It's no wonder that Microsoft are one of the worlds largest companies. The vast majority of us are hooked on using their software which they make obsolete, re-brand and resell to us every three years. Genius for them - folly for us.

Surely there is a better way?

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I'm too lazy for my blog, too... oh, thems not the lyrics

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:42:55 +0100

How long have I been looking at my blog thinking - this isn't right? It's got to be coming up on a year and a half now.

So why on earth have I not done anything about it? (If you don't count two entire redesigns that I've never implemented).

Yeah it beats me too.

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One Feed to rule them all - Get the latest (MMO) news as it happens.

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:14:17 +0100

Get the latest MMO news as it happens.

You can now get the latest MMO (Making Money Online) news as it happens - or as makes no odds with the MMO Master List. This cunning page which has taken me the best part of three days to get right takes the feeds of some of the most impressive writers in the MMO (aka IM aka make money bloggers) niche and summarises it like facebook would.

Expect to see headlines from Seth Goddin, Andy Beard, Strategic Profits and ShoeMoney to name drop but a few.

Imagine if all the best writers on making money were writing just one blog. It's updated several times a day, the content is always extreamly good and it is all now in the one place. That's what the MMO Master List does for you.

The nest bit is the geeky bit so if you are not interested in how it was done - go check out the MMO Master List if only because I am very proud of it.

Each headline tells you just how long ago the article was published which will give you a feel for how many comments there might be. Just don't go shouting "first" in everyone's comment box now.

Right then the how and why.

I can't say exactly where the idea came from but I do know that it's not a new one especially and it was something I have wanted to achieve for maybe six or seven years. The final working out of it all took me three days.

Taking a bunch of feeds and putting them on a page might not seem like much but it is quite an achievment. It would allow for a Live Journal or blogger "my freinds" / "other blogs" style page. That gives me an idea... more on that later.

It's written in PHP5 and uses simpleXML and a whole bunch of custom libraries that I use to power a lot of my projects. It takes each feed and converts it into an object that I can set the attributes of such as number of items to use and the length of time to cache the feed for.

It then does a whole lot of heavy lifting very quickly and creates a single sorted feed (which it caches to avoid doing it again too soon). This private feed is then used to generate the page along with nifty screenshot thumbnails, a short excerpt from the blog post and a link back to the full article. Just for added cool it tells you how old the article is too.

This required me to rewrite a library that had served me well for years - Lord Matt's XML Lib. This library takes some of the things I lvoed about MagpieRSS which was vital for PHP4 RSS stuff and allows me to enjoy it with SimpleXML in PHP5. Primary is the cache control methods.

LM_XML_LIB 1.0 simply kept all feeds for the remainder of the current hour and then took a fresh copy in the nest hour. This meant that there was up to 60 minutes between external calls to any given feed - long enough that a second call would not hurt the server.

However I wanted to take this further so LM_XML_Lib2 allows for the cache time to be specified in seconds. Of course this meant that whole sections had to be made far more suphisticated and robust.

Talking of robus the normal way to read someone's feed is to use however this does not allow for servers that are having problems. So I wrote a repalcement function that first checks to see if the call is via http or https and opens a socket, stremas the content and then passes the SimpleXML object back or loads the local one or times out and returns false.

That meant that local feeds are now slightly faster with a fractionally smaller overhead but that remote feeds don't crash the script with a time-out error.

Once we have all the XML loaded and hiding inside custom objects we itterate the object which impliments a pointer to keep track of where it is in the feed and a NextItem() function to obtain the next SimpleXML-Element and incriment the pointer.

All that so we can check the dates, sort by date and rebuild as a single XML file.

Additionally it is not easy to add an existing SmpleXML-element to another SimpleXML object so some fancy messing about has to take place to build the new feed. Fortunatly the Internet does provide and there were plenty of notes on geek blogs for me to look at. If I was a better blgoger I'd have the links to hand so I can give them some credit.

Anyway LM_Multi_XML is the result and it can be used to create a single feed of all the blogs I read in one simple page. No more information overload. Perfect.

It also has additional advantages. Google's blogger allows users to set a list of blogs in their sidebar and have the most recent post of each display with the freshest at the top and the oldest at the bottom. This could do the same thing and so I'm thinking that a plugin for Wordpress and another for NucleusCMS is called for.

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A very geeky pre-christmas

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:14:13 +0100

Could this be the sauciest post ever on The Fantastic Site of Lord Matt? Maybe but it will tell you how tog et the XBox to yourself in the coming months.

It's October and you know what that means my fellow geeks. Yes it's time to get the Christmas shopping done now so that you can:

(a) avoid crowds
(b) score quality time with the main TV for guitar hero in November and December
(c) freak out other people by pretending that you were not going to bother this year (only to surprise them with gifts come Christmas Day).

Now for those geeks that have found an enlightened geek loving woman there arises the question of what to get her. Might I suggest that dressing up and role play are things a geek should be good at.

A bit too raunchy for you? Perhaps something from the Avon Christmas Range? This should also provide a solution for mum, sister, aunty, nan and any other relative for whom you have no idea what to get with the exception of Granddad who will be cursed with twenty seven new pairs of socks as per tradition.

What about geeks that have not taken the relationship that far yet? Where things are more hand holding, kissing and other (still fun) less demanding activities. In simple speek what if we're are not at the soap and bedroom toys stage yet?

I would suggest something geeky yet simple. Perhaps a good poster for her bedroom wall. Something you don't have to compete with ideally.

Okay, so one way or another the geeky woman in your life is catured for now you need to focus on the most iuportant person in your geeky life.

You.

I suggest the Area-51 750i or at least some nice bright new modding extras for your primery beast.

Now you can kick back, relax and while everyone else is running around doing the shopping later you can hog the Wii, XBox and PS3 or just get some seriouse Eve Online time without any nagging.

You might even have time to feel sorry for granddad and get him something that isn't socks... but let's not get carried away now.

Tell me what the geekiest thing is that you want for Christmas.

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