Just Can't Quit Opera for Android

I'm posting this so I don't forget. I seem to forget loads these days. Must be all the red wine. Anyhoo, the thing is I just used Opera mini on my HTC Android and couldn't figure out how to quit without using the back button to fick through all the pages.

Trick is they seem to have removed the quit button. Why do that?

You can get it back though, as I found on the 'My Opera' community site. You have to go into settings->advanced and there is an option for showing the exit button, which for some strange reason is not enabled by default.

I don't know how long it has been like that but it shows how often I bother to dick about surfing on my mobile phone!

I want Mitt Romney to be an Alien

I watched the first head to head with Romney and Obama and I was sick in my mouth. I think a lot of people were. It was the difference between what Romney said and the appearance of how he said it that got you (and stumped Obama). Nearly everything he said was a flat out lie but he came across as so convincing - you would buy a second hand car off of this man.

At the end of the day though the election is a choice between which jailer do you want to hold the key.

Regardless of party, the power-brokers are chipping away at acts that limit your freedom like the NDAA and making sure that you are not a threat to their world order.

Well I think we need to ask ourselves a few questions that they don't want you to ask.

The first question is why there are a billion people on this planet living on less than one dollar a day. You probably can't imagine how that level of poverty  can exist (but it does).

I have a one word answer. Sovereignty. This notion that people who are 'better' than us have their little kingdoms over which they prevail. Surely if we're all equal that can't be right. It persists because they can then have their own currency. The dollar, the krona then yen - they can buy and sell currency, which is really a trick to make you r trading 'partner' worse off when he sells you something. China is having it's pants pulled down by the US right now - don't get me started.

The point is if we are all equal there should be no national borders and a single world currency. 

Learn to Play All Robert Johnson Songs

Just found a brilliant website: http://www.robertjohnsontabslyricslessons.com

The site is a learning resource for the works of the legendary blues singer guitarist, Robert Johnson.


In case you're not nuts about or even familiar with who the great man was, Robert Johnson was an itinerant musician who wandered the deep south in 1930's America, playing guitar, seducing women,drinking a lot and generally living the sort of life Jack Karouac would have killed for. Legend has it that his playing style improved suddenly, almost overnight, leading to the myth that he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for musical skills.

Anyway the reason Johnson remains popular today is his legacy of recordings. He recorded enough material for what is now two CDs, during two recording sessions that took place towards the end of his life that gave the world a taste of his blues style.


Where as other recordings at the time of other great players like Charley Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson often sound old and dated, the Johnson recordings have a brightness and edge to them which makes them as accessible to listeners today as the day they were recorded. Johnson's wailing voice has a haunting painful quality and his lyrics are full of sexual innuendo and hints of his persecution by the devil which again are topics that separate him from his peers. His guitar work too was revolutionary for the day, later famously leading Rolling Stone Keith Richard to question who the second guitarist was, when infact Johnson plays both lead and rhythym himself in one take.


Thought there are several places on the internet where the lyrics and guitar tablature to Robert Johnson's songs can be found, http://www.robertjohnsontabslyricslessons.com is the only site I've come across that brings all the resources together in one place, even to the extent of providing full song tabs in 'Guitar Pro' format. Full marks for making the business of chasing up Robert Johnson's song lyrics and guitar licks a whole lot easier!

Aaargh Ajax!!

First of all, I've got to say in my defence that I've mainly worked as a server-side programmer for the last twenty odd years, so JavaScript has never been my strong suit. Having said that I should have had enough knowledge by now to construct a simple Ajax cascading drop down on an ASP.NET application.

I won't share with you how much time I wasted debugging this thing in Visual Studio, rummaging through Firebug and inspecting requests in Fiddler.

Anyway the penny just dropped and I feel so SO dumb for not realising it sooner. Basically I had a sub on the server and a sub on the client in JavaScript that basically did the same thing so I had given them the same name. So while debugging I'd brainwashed myself into thinking the server script was firing when in fact it was the one on the client.

NOTE TO SELF. FROM NOW ON, BE SMART. USE A NAMING STRATEGY THAT CLEARLY SHOWS WHETHER A ROUTINE IS ON THE CLIENT OR THE SERVER.

Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8

Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8

This is a bit of a horror story for Windows platform coders. Nothing unusual really is you know the territory.

It reminds me a bit of MSN. Now today you probably think of MSN as a kind of magazine web portal with salacious stories about celebs. That is not how it started.

Back in the days before the WWW (shall we say www.bc?), Microsoft became very envious of Compuserve's dominant position as the world's leading bulletin board service. Bulletin boards for those of you too young to remember, were proprietary systems that you could dial up over the telephone with a thingy called a modem. Anyway, not to be left behind, Microsoft created it's own competing dial-up service, called it MSN and tried to flog it for a hefty monthly subscription.

It was actually quite an impressive system as most of it was done with vector animation in an early forerunner of Flash. However the timing couldn't have been worse. Microsoft were still hard selling it as long ago as 1997 when the charge to the web was well under way, but the original version didn't even include access to the web.

So what became of all the developers who built the original MSN with that nifty animation software  - presumably they retooled just as all the windows platform guys are going to have to do now.

Worpress Install Fail on Arvixe

Posting this as an aid memoire.

I've set up several blogs on my Arvixe hosting account without a problem, but today was different. I don't know whether it is something to do with the version of Wordpress or the Microsoft Web Gallery script (much more likely) but when I finished the install and view the blog, I was unable to view it due to a 403 error.

I tried the admin login and that worked OK so it was just the home page that was broken. I had a sniff at the file permissions but they were OK. Then a thought struck me. I tried the full address of the homepage in the address bar http://ubuntu.seonyx.com/index.php and sure enough that worked. Then the problem was clear. I opened up the web.config and found that no default document was specified. Infact it was pretty empty. I replaced it with the following and everything worked OK:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<directoryBrowse enabled="true" />
<defaultDocument>
<files>
<clear />
<add value="index.php" />
</files>
</defaultDocument>
</system.webServer>
<system.web>
<compilation debug="true"/>
<customErrors mode="Off"/>
</system.web>
</configuration>

Mula, Pliego, Murcia, Rural villa with terraces at the front, side and rear of the property

NEW REDUCED PRICE: This is a newly built country property located in between Mula and the pretty village of Pliego in Murcia. The swimming pool is enclosed in a walled area giving privacy when swimming and a large summer kitchen/BBQ has and a bathroom for use of the swimmers!

Country property in Pliego, Mula, Murcia with patios at the front, side and rear

Cehegin, Murcia, Spain townhouse is entirely renovated throughout

This traditional Old Town property has a terrace which is ideal for evening dining. There is a modern kitchen/diner, which features varnished wooden-clad spashback and an electric oven.

Cehegin, Murcia Rustic townhouse where kitchen boasts a wood beam ceiling