http://joncom.be/blog/Calamitous in Cambridge (formerly Bumbling in Bangkok)en-gbSun, 21 Mar 2010 18:24:51 -0000http://joncom.be/blog/2010/03/big-in-japan I've been amazed at the popularity of my article on CSS rotation, with links coming in from delicious, webappers, reddit and above all, the Japanese heavyweight, gigazine.net.I really wasn't expecting so much traffic to a page so innocuous I really questioned posting it in the first place. Most pleasing of all though, even during the slashdot effect, my Linode server didn't so much as break into a sweat. http://joncom.be/blog/2010/03/big-in-japanhttp://joncom.be/blog/2010/01/a-happy-daySomething tells me life will never be the same again. Delighted to report Mum and son are doing well. Welcome, Thomas. http://joncom.be/blog/2010/01/a-happy-dayhttp://joncom.be/blog/2010/01/a-sad-day Yesterday morning the world lost a fantastic individual. I am honoured to have known him, be his colleague and above all, be his friend. David was an amazing man. He was strong emotionally and physically, one of the very slender number of people whom, upon meeting, one naturally respects before words are even spoken. He had a genuine ability to fill a room, so much so that when he spoke, everyone listened. He didn't suffer fools gladly - he had a bullshit detector second-to-none - but was always absolutely and unconditionally fair. He could get angry, storm about and swear like a trooper (all of which often came with hilarious consequences), but it was all born of real passion to do what was absolutely the best thing, the right thing, in any given situation. He was a great boss and mentor. He lead from the front and took the flak so his team didn't have to. This was particularly noticeable when he first left work to recieve treatment for his cancer: with absolutely no disrespect whatsoever to the people who came in to take over David's role, the ship he had been sailing lost its mooring and rocked violently out at sea for some time. If anyone were blind enough not to realise how good a manager David was when he was around, they certainly could when he was gone. That's not to say his team didn't cope, David had instilled in us the authority to master our own destiny and it was down to that leadership that even in his absence, everyone continued to pull together and write some of the best software I've been lucky enough to work with. It was David who orchestrated my move from Development to Product Management. "I'm looking forward to getting your shit code off our servers", he quipped, but the lengths he went to ensure I was happy and well looked after at that time, was off the scale. Whislt trying to keep clichés to a minimum, David was a great inspiration to us all. If I can live my life a tenth as good as he did his, I'll have achieved something. Even when he was very sick he continued to join in, was always positive, stayed smiling and had time for everyone. As my colleague Chris so perfectly said, "I do wish people would die in the right order". The pain of losing David will hurt for a very long time. It is nothing however compared to the grief his loving wife will be going through, or his young boy and girl who will grow up without their dad. Our thoughts are with them. Rest in Peace, mate. http://joncom.be/blog/2010/01/a-sad-dayhttp://joncom.be/blog/2009/12/wrapping-up-a-decade Wow, how did this blog become so neglected? I'll make it a New Year Resolution to be a more frequent diarist, one of these years. We're on the cusp of the noughties and, for the wife and I, the cusp of a complete life change. Half running headlong to embrace it, half dragging our heels, too full of nervous self-doubt to accept the inevitable, the coming years are going to be very different from what we know now. Our son is definitely only days away. Aside from the anticipation of our new arrival, I can safely say this has been an eventful ten years! This time a decade ago I'd yet to fly in a commercial plane and hadn't lived anywhere outside Yorkshire, England. Since then I've lived abroad for half of those years, visited twelve new countries (working in four of them) across four continents. My massive move to London in 2000 seems almost trivial now, of course it wasn't at the time. In some ways, the biggest moment was the return to England after so long away. Seeing just a little piece of the rest of the world made me see my home country in a completely different light, we're not half as advanced as we like to think we are, but there were plenty of aspects of our society and home-comforts I was glad to re-embrace. The key high points of the last decade must include taking the job (and the accompanying new life) in Bangkok: I can't imagine my life now had I followed my mothers wishes not to go! I later started my own company, watched it grow, watched it wobble, saw people living in poverty, saw people blasé in their massive wealth, lived through a coup, bought my first house and met and later married the girl (not all necessarily in that order). On sadder notes, I remember the feeling of being in a Greek airport lounge for hours on end unable to depart, reeling from the unforgettable images of the World Trade Centre being flattened hours previously and a solemn anticipation of the implications this act would have for everyone everywhere. Also, the things I saw in the hospitals of Thailand in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami will stay with me forever. I've definitely made my fair share of mistakes in these last ten years but I'm glad I went out and did it all. As long as I've learnt from the majority of those experiences, I'll be happy with that. Definitely no regrets. What has been key throughout has been the countless excellent people I've been lucky to meet plus the fantastic individuals I've had the pleasure of working with and learning from. Thanks for having me. It's the evening of the 31st of December and we're preparing to go out to party. Have a very happy new year. http://joncom.be/blog/2009/12/wrapping-up-a-decadehttp://joncom.be/blog/2009/09/chinese-domain-registration-scam I received this scam email in my BKKPages.com inbox yesterday: (Please transfer this email to your President or appropriate person, thanks) Dear President, We are the department of Asian Domain registration service in china. have something to confirm with you. We formally received an application on Sept. 7, one company which self-styled "Gody Industries Ltd" were applying to register "bkkpages" as Network Brand and several Asia/China Domains based on this brand name. After our initial checking, we found the name were similar to your company's, so we need to check with you whether your company has authorized that company to register these names. If you authorized this, we will finish the registration at once. If you did not authorize, please let us know within 7 workdays, so that we will handle this issue better. Out of the time limit we will unconditionally finish the registration for "Gody Industries Ltd". Best Regards, Peter Liu Room 1303,No.11,Lane 788,Xiupu Road, Nanhui District,ShangHai,China Tel:+86-21-69106991 Fax:+86-21-69106670 Please consider the environment before you print this e-mail. It was one of those mails that immediately screamed the word SCAM! in my head but was worded in such a way that I had to re-read it properly to really register what was going on. Their 'call to action', based on the notion that a process was already underway, is rather crafty and the website they link to is a plausible fake, but ultimately, it is just neatly channeled spam. Search for their phone number and you'll see a bunch of other "companies" doing the same thing. Search for random sentences from the above and you'll find a whole bunch of other bloggers who have been victim to the same or similar attacks. If you get one like this, please hurry up and ignore this domain registration scam. http://joncom.be/blog/2009/09/chinese-domain-registration-scamhttp://joncom.be/blog/2009/08/got-a-rumbly Daeng is pregnant. Yes, I'm going to be a dad. It's all very surreal typing this sentence, even moreso as each time I say or type those words it remains as novel, unfamiliar and as striking as the first time it passed my lips. My body is rejecting to build a tolerance and each time is the polar opposite of deja-vu. Don't get me wrong, I love what is happening and all the change that he or she will bring. I couldn't be more excited to be honest, it's what we've wanted for a long time though nothing quite prepares you for the realisation when it strikes. Furthermore, I'm assured that this tingling apprehension all morphs into something altogether different (and better) the instant a crying, defenceless dependant is placed in your hands. Until then, here we are. Poor old Daeng isn't having a great time of it with morning sickness but it seems, on average, to have been getting better the last couple of weeks. It goes without saying she's totally excited too, though a tiny part of me wonders if this is her new excuse to eat as many litres of ice cream as Wall's produces each day. Our baby is due at the end of January next year. We don't know the sex yet (next month's scan should prove that), though we have some ideas for names lined up for either eventuality, "Flake", "Neopolitan" and "Cornetto" having already removed from the list. http://joncom.be/blog/2009/08/got-a-rumblyhttp://joncom.be/blog/2009/06/pasta-surprise Sometimes, just sometimes, I get it right. Actually, to be fair this wasn't one of those times but hey, it looks good! Lo and behold my tagliatelle, courgettes, asparagus and ham "thing". http://joncom.be/blog/2009/06/pasta-surprisehttp://joncom.be/blog/2009/05/the-continuous-fight-against-blog-spam Just as we arrived in Thailand last month, I found that this website was being flooded with blog spam. As you can see below, I have no CAPTCHAs or anything else to stop naughtiness so it was bound to happen sooner or later. Thanks for the timing though, guys. Despite not wanting to work whilst on holiday, I did grab a few minutes while Daeng was getting her hair done (first priority!) to write a few lines that searched for the presence of certain phrases (e.g. viagra, cialis, etc.) and prevent the comment being saved if any were found. An obvious downside to this approach is that one has to add new words (and delete a whole raft of comments) every so often to the list of 'banned phrases', but I was pleasantly surprised to find that my effective list of these phrases and URLs remains remarkably short. Upon returning to England, I spent some more time trying to think of a better way to resolve this issue. I still don't really want a CAPTCHA on my site (I don't really like them outside of serious web-apps to be honest, plus there are better ways), wanting it to remain as simple as possible for a friendly passer-by to say hello. I tidied the hastily added code written in Bangkok and started logging the spammer IP addresses in MySQL in the vain hope I'd see a pattern or two. Not a sausage: it only took a few minutes to amass a few hundred addresses and sadly, against my wishful thinking, they were all unique. It's not the end of the world of course, after all, the problem was "solved" whilst on holiday in so much that I haven't had a spam message left since, but it doesn't stop that grating feeling that I'm still getting thousands of attempts per day that I'd rather prevent. "Back to the drawing board", thought I, "but not this morning, things to do". In a final act of churlish spite against my attackers, I added a quick line to return a 403 "forbidden" error to spam comment submission requests instead of returning back the usual page (that's my 2000 bytes of bandwidth, godammit), logged off and went about my offline day. That was last Saturday. I was stunned to come back and see that this simple move stopped the requests instantly. Had I beaten them so easily? No, sure enough they started up again but this week has seen less requests overall, their number slowing yesterday and so far today, many less spam requests than genuine hits. I'm pretty sure that if they're giving up it's because their requests are failing to register a fruitful spam comment rather than worrying about the returned error code, but the nice upshot of this is that my JAWStats installation no longer treats these hits as genuine (the 403s are logged as errors under the 'status' tab) meaning my website visitor statistics have become meaningful again. Have I invited a whole world of pain writing this post? http://joncom.be/blog/2009/05/the-continuous-fight-against-blog-spamhttp://joncom.be/blog/2009/05/well-that-was-fun I've told myself off for not updating my blog, consider this my penance. Actually, I've got a few things lined up to write about but I wanted to round off the holiday first. Thailand has become a lot more expensive than I remember. Local prices seem to have risen by a not insignificant percentage while the exchange rate has pushed everything way up for the visitor. It was gloomy reading to be in a bank and see the sign on the wall showing their interest rates akin to our own here in in England - current account: 0.5%, 30-day account: 0.65%, long term savings: a whopping 1% - it wasn't that way when we left. I didn't understand why the Bangkok Post and The Nation newspapers seemed much thinner until I worked out it was because their usual job vacancy supplements were, pardon the expression, paper thin. The entire globe has taken a cruel left to the chin. That didn't stop the Mrs make a innocent mistake when she bought a bottle of wine for 34 quid, accidentally miscalculating it as £3.40. Want insult with that injury? It was plonk. Want salt in that wound? Try chrimble's twitter feed the next morning exclaiming that "Tesco has 3 bottles of wine for a tenner!". Great, thanks mate. It was wonderful to see family again. My sisters-in-law were all resplendent as usual and my two young nephews were predictably loud and boisterous. We waved sister Lek goodbye for two years, she's gone to the University of Washington to continue her climb up the medical ladder though first she is trying to understand why Seattleites wear t-shirts when the sun comes out while she shuffles around in a thick jacket and ear muffs. It hit 44°C during our stay in Bangkok, she won't experience much of that in the Great Northwest. It was fantastic to return to Saxophone, the jazz and blues bar just off Victory Monument that Daeng and I previously frequented. Hoochie Coochie managed to be even better than I remember them and it was a pleasant surprise to hear Pure Band play too; the last time I saw them they were playing Bohemian Rhapsody at our wedding. Seeing Nacho and Joy in the Bull's Head was brilliant too, I miss those guys. The real highlight of the trip though - even better than feeding the hippos at Samut Prakarn Crocodile Farm and Zoo - was our trip with perfect friends, Suki and Nooh, to Koh Samet. I've been to a few of the islands before but this was my first trip there and it was well worth the wait. Sitting on a paradise beach for a few days - doing nothing - while others bring you ice cold beer and fantastic food (the laab moo was exceptional) really does something fantastic for the soul. It was a struggle to leave, it really, really was. http://joncom.be/blog/2009/05/well-that-was-fun