Who is Linking to me?

I found this cool tool on Justsayhi.com it shows a list of other blogs and websites that are linking to you. It's quite cool, here's who is linking to me.

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Crazy Roommates

I've been away for a few days wasn't feeling too well and spent most of the time in bed :(

Anyway when I did venture to my laptop I found this website that made me laugh so much I had to see if anybody else had roommates out there as crazy as this guy does..... and then I found this it seems that crazy people are living everywhere, I thank god that I've never had to have a roommate!

Maybe these people should check out this Wikihow

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Editing SharePoint Themes

As I mentioned a few days ago I've been working on CSS files to edit themes in SharePoint. I haven't seen much documentation on how to do this so after picking up pieces from different places and then figuring out what to do I thought I'd pass my knowledge on.

I have access to SharePoint, SharePoint Designer and IE Developer Toolbar. I find SharePoint Designer better for viewing CSS or HTML files, but another good programme is Notebook++ which is an open source, source code editor for use on Windows. It supports many different languages:

ASP, Ada, ASCII art, Assembly, AutoIt, BAT, C, C#, C++, Caml, CSS, doxygen, FORTRAN, HTML, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, KiXtart, Lisp, Lua, makefile, Matlab, Objective-C, Pascal, Perl, PHP, PostScript, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Unix Shell Script, Smalltalk, SQL, Tcl, TeX, Verilog, VHDL, VB/VBScript, XML

You can download Notebook++ free here

Anyway getting back to the subject editing themes. To edit the theme you need to open the theme file. This is located in /_themes/THEME_NAME/THEME_1011-65001.CSS replacing THEME_NAME and THEME with the name of the theme you wish to edit. Open it from the SharePoint site. Doing that should open the CSS file in your default code editor, unless you have SharePoint Designer then you can locate it that way.

So now I have the CSS file open, I have my Web browser open with the site and theme I want to edit and IE Developer Toolbar. First thing to do is on the IE Developer Toolbar click on "Find" and then on "Select Element By Click" this means that you can click anywhere on the web page and you will not be taken to another page and it will show you the attributes for that part of the page that you have clicked on. So for example, I want to change the page border colour. So I clicked on the page border and in the current style list navigate to the background-color attribute, then right click on this and click "trace style" this brings up a new window, showing me the following

.ms-main {
BORDER-RIGHT: #ffffff 15px solid;
PADDING-RIGHT: 5px;
BORDER-TOP: #ffffff 15px solid;
PADDING-LEFT: 5px;
PADDING-BOTTOM: 5px;
BORDER-LEFT: #ffffff 15px solid;
PADDING-TOP: 5px;
BORDER-BOTTOM: #055baa 15px solid;
BACKGROUND-COLOR: #e3efff

Then a quick CTRL+F in SharePoint Designer and search for .ms-main will take me to the part of the .CSS file I wish to edit (a good idea is to either write in a comment detailing your changes or to create a copy in case you need to go back to the original.)

So I then changed all the #ffffff to blue wrote in a comment to say it was originally white and the I saved the file. After doing this the theme was just how we needed it so I had a look at another theme to see if any others could be edited slightly to become useful. On going back to my edited theme I noticed that everything I had changed had gone back to how it was. I still had SharePoint Designer open so I re saved the file and refreshed the browser, it changed again to the edits that I had made, so I realised that there must be another file that needs editing too in order to keep the theme the same. I discovered this file in the 12 folder on the server. This folder can usually be located in \Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12 then navigate to "Template" and "Themes" there you will get a list of all the available themes, navigate to the one that requires editing. In my case my theme is called "Blue" so I opened the "Blue" folder, in this folder you will see 5 .CSS files, these should be called:

1. COLOR0.CSS


2. COLOR1.CSS


3. GRAPH0.CSS


4. GRAPH1.CSS


5. THEME.CSS

The THEME.CSS is the flie that needs to be edited in order to save the changes, this file begins with the body tag and looks something like this:

body {
font-family:Arial;
background-color:#FFF
text-align:center;
margin:5px;
}

This is the first line in the THEME.CSS however it is not the first line in 1011-65001.css, you will find this at approximately line 150. So now it is just a simple case of copying everything from body downwards, emptying the THEME.CSS file and pasting what you have copied into it. Once this is saved you can change your theme and go back to it and your changes will still be there. I did not require an IIS RESET to do this but there is a chance your changes won't save without one.

If you have any questions on this subject post me a comment and I'll do what I can to help :)



I have a confession to make - contrary to what I previously said the 1011-65001.css file is only acessible with Frontpage or SharePoint Designer, sorry about the mix up!

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Funny 404's - Error Page Not Found

I was playing around on the Internet yesterday when I came across a really funny 404 error, and it made me think what other types of 404's there are. So I have a look round and found quite a few, they made me giggle I hope you enjoy :D

These are a few of my favourites:
Frog
Mario
Button
Photo
Question Mark
Kansas
Lightening
Monkey
Dead End
Oh The Humanity
How To Survive A 404
Psychiatric
404 Translator
Operation Failure
Sonic

And my personal favourite an oldie but I still think its great the Depressed Web Server

I thought some of the best one's were the Sonic one and the Operation Failure one, not just for the humour factor but for the thought, it's much better to get one of these than to get a normal 404 page. I hope you liked :)

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Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar

I've recently started using the IE Developer Toolbar after discovering it thanks to Shane Perran's SharePoint Blog It is a very useful addon for Internet Explorer especially as in work I can't have Firefox, and as I'm working with a SharePoint site on the server that isn't FF compatible. The toolbar downloadable here is a useful tool for exploring the HTML or CSS on a webpage.

The Microsoft overview:
Overview

The Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar provides several features for exploring and understanding Web pages. These features enable you to:

* Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page.
* Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques.
* Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
* View HTML object class names, ID's, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
* Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
* Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
* Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
* Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution.
* Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
* Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align and measure objects on your pages.
* Find the style rules used to set specific style values on an element.
* View the formatted and syntax colored source of HTML and CSS.

The Developer Toolbar can be pinned to the Internet Explorer browser window or floated separately.

I am at the moment using it to edit the CSS files for a SharePoint theme, and it is making my job a whole lot easier!

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Channel 4 censors.

The forums on the Channel 4 website are censoring information as best as they can. An article which has appeared in the Sol a few days ago is being banned from several forums. One user posted the article to the Channel 4 forum twice and got banned by moderators, and recieved the following message.

"The site administrators have removed your access rights for the following reason:

We’re sorry but we do not allow users to re-post topics which we have deleted. Please understand that although it may not be clear to you straight away why a topic was deleted it will have a good reason and should NOT be re-posted. If you would like to dispute this suspension please email chat@channel4.com and include any information related to this issue. Your account will then be reviewed."

Why do the media want to hide this story? Decide for yourself I have posted the article in full below.


published in Sol, on June 30, 2007
an article by Felicia Cabrita and Margarida Davim

Madeleine Case

Pact of Silence

Madeleine’s parents and the friends with whom they spent their holidays in PDL are suspects in the inquiry. There are contradictory versions about the night of the kidnapping, and an assumed pact of silence in the group

The beginning of June is flowing in a strange way in the Algarve. A chilly wind and overhead clouds help to fill the auditorium of Lagos, where a solidarity concert is being held for the missing english girl. It’s been a month since Madeleine McCann vanished without a trace.

A few kilometres from Lagos, in the Ocean Club resort at Praia da Luz, the faint illumination further densifies the climate. At the reception, which leads to the Tapas restaurant, there is nobody. Getting inside is easy.

A portuguese waiter, but with a british ‘behaviour’, strikes the first blow on the journalist’s plan: “We only serve dinner to the club’s clients”. “What about a drink?”. He says yes.

It’s 9.30 p.m. If we were to believe the several members of the McCann’s holiday group, and after several mismatching versions, at this time Madeleine was being carried out of her apartment by a dark-haired man, who would be around 35 years old.

From the same table where the group of nine had dinner on that evening, one tries, in vain, to observe the apartment’s front – a ground floor apartment that faces the restaurant. A linoleum screen on the side of Tapas and the corridor of bushes that follows the limits of the apartment’s back yards prevents any vigilance to that level.

The image of Madeleine – big blue, questioning eyes and an innocent smile, fixed on the photographic films – is always present. It doesn’t leave the conversations of whom passes by. One remembers the words that the mother, Kate Healy, is supposed to have said to a friend (and that the husband, Gerry McCann, did not know): “I had a bad premonition about my children, when I found out the Ocean Club had no baby listening service”.

The choice of Algarve as a holiday destination would come to change their lives. Everything was arranged with three other couples, with whom they used to travel. Some of them had recently been to Greece, with their children, and the Mark Warner agency, the same that prepared their trip to the Algarve, had done their itinerary for the islands. According to their reports, the hotel where they stayed had a baby listening service – a service that is assured by four or five members of staff who would control the children while the adults dined, by listening through doors and windows to confirm that everything inside was quiet.

At the Tapas bar, from bartenders to staff from the Kid Club, criticism is whispered: “We have a creche where they left their children for most part of the day, where they could be until 11.30 p.m. without spending another Euro. They could also have used our baby-sitters, who stay with the children in their rooms until 1 p.m. In this case, they would have to pay an extra fee, but these people looked like they could afford it”, an employee comments, concluding that “this was a very strange group, that never stayed with their children”.

The children’s routine

The story of Madeleine looks like a tangled ball of wool. In the last days of April, Kate and Gerry, both 39 and doctors, arrive with their friends in Praia da Luz. The weather is not very good, but the group makes the best of it. The children seem to exist outside of the adults’ world. In the morning, Kate would take Madeleine, almost 4, and the 2-year old twins, to the Kid Club. The other couples in the group did the same. While the little ones entertained themselves with collages and paintings, the group divides itself between tennis and jogging until lunchtime. In the creche, the girl’s picture is taken: “She was shy and had some difficulty in adapting to the group. She always stayed close to the english children she already knew”.

It is at lunchtime that the families socialize a bit. After a short nap, the children go back to the Kid Club, while the parents use the activities that the club offers. They only get to meet again in the late afternoon, when the children’s dinner is served. Before 8 p.m., Madeleine and her siblings, who seem to function like a clock, are already asleep. Half an hour later, the group of friends meets at Tapas. The staff remember that they only leave at midnight: “They were very lively and drank a bit too much. I didn’t even realize they had children, because I never saw them around”.

Mathew Oldfield, one of the elements of the group, is back in England. He reacts with surprise upon the contact of Sol, but he does not avoid the conversation: “We drank. We were on holidays. So what?”.

And thus the days followed one upon another, at the Ocean Club. The holiday week is almost over and the group’s spirit does not change. Nobody had noticed until then, how the children were kept at a distance.

The most reliable way to undrestand what happened on May 3, when Madeleine disappeared, is to analyze the various versions that emerged.

It would have been 10 p.m. when Kate decided to check the children at the apartment. This is the only moment in the story that gathers consensus. Madeleine had vanished from her bedroom and the twins were sleeping like nothing had happened. The mother was back at the restaurant in one leap. She was disoriented.

PJ called two hours later

In seconds, the resort is in turmoil. The group’s four men and the club’s employees check every corner. They seem to be oblivious of the essential: to call the authorities. GNR is the first to arrive at the scene, but the news only reach Policia Judiciaria (PJ) more than two hours later. The first explanations arise. Where were the parents when the child disappeared? Gerry explains that, inspired in the scheme that some of the friends had used on their holidays in Greece, the nine members of the group took turns in checking on the children with some regularity.

This is the beginning of a story that will change in many chapters. Gerry starts by saying that he first left the table to check on the children around 9.05 p.m. When he entered the apartment the children were fine, he just noticed that the door to their bedroom was partially open. He looked at the window, which was closed, just as the shutters, and relaxed.

Ten minutes later, his friend Jane Tanner, who went around the apartments, crossed ways with a dark-haired man who was walking in the opposite direction, carrying a child. She didn’t make any connections either.

A few minutes later, Mathew Oldfield enters the room, sees the McCann children fast asleep, and notices nothing out of the ordinary. It is at 10 p.m. that Maddie’s mother discovers her daughter has disappeared. The window was wide open and the shutters were up.

To GNR, who is in the area with sniffer dogs to search for the child, this is a highly unlikely scenario. One of the military assures: “This is an extremely silent area, where there are practically no passing cars. That shutter was very difficult to lift from the outside, and would have made a lot of noise. It would have been a lot easier to use the door, but there were no signs of a break-in”.

This was just one of the reasons why the group became suspicious in the eyes of the investigators. Russell O’Brien, Jane Tanner’s husband, is already back in England, but he knows he could be summoned back to Portugal for a deposition anytime. Over the phone with Sol, he tries to keep his british phlegm: “It is normal that we are suspects, and the DNA test is a consequence thereof. We were the closest people involved”.

The conversation always comes back to the same issue: the night of the disappearance. The account of that last dinner has disparate versions among the group’s members. Some swear that someone left the table every half hour to check on the kids; other reduce that time to half of it. Some say control is made window by window; others say the adults entered each other’s apartments.

One of the employees that was on duty that evening does not remember a lot of movement: “I only remember a tall, grey-haired man getting up once from the table”. It was Russell, who, two days earlier, also had attended dinner.

An aerobic instructor from the resort entertains the dinner guests at Tapas with a ‘Quiz’. At 9.30 p.m. the game ends, and Gerry invites her to their table, where she stays for half an hour. During that time, as she later confided to friends, nobody left the table, but one of the chairs was vacant. Najova Chekaya refuses to talk to Sol. And Russell, when the questions start to surround him, loses his sympathy: “I have nothing further to tell you. I am not going to dishonor the compromise I assumed with Kate and Gerry. They want to control all infornation that is disclosed”.

Gerry changes his version several times, but he maintains that the door to his children’s room was open. Mat revokes his first statement: when he entered Madeleine’s room, the door was open and there was more light, as if the shutters had been raised. Here starts to develop the theory that there was already someone inside the apartment. Which reinforces Jane Tanner’s version (that she saw a man carrying a child).

Only Jane saw the man carrying a child

But there is a witness whose deposition contradicts this theory. Jeremy Wilkins – a tv producer who had met Maddie’s father during their holidays and used to play tennis with him – was walking his eight months old son at that time. He met Gerry, who went out through the apartment’s back door after having checked on the children, and the two man exchanged a brief conversation. At that time, if one is to believe the first accounts, Jane would have left Tapas in the direction of the apartment’s main entrance, and would have crossed paths with both of them. “It was a very narrow road and I think it would have been almost impossible to walk by without me taking notice”, Jeremy says, pointing out the fact that he saw no man carrying a child, as Jane states.

But Jane continues to guarantee that, at the top of the street, she saw a man with a child in his arms.

Although the area is scarcely lit, and the situation did not make her suspicious at the time, she describes the beige trousers, the dark thick jacket and the black classic-style shoes in a detailed way. Once again, Jeremy disagrees: “If that happened, I would have likely seen it”.

On the next day, the media circus was fully installed. The first reports are on Sky News first thing in the morning, even before portuguese press takes hold of the story. Journalists and locals dispute the information. Robert Murat, the son of an english mother and a portuguese father, with little luck in business, does not waste the opportunity. He moves from failed businessman into the role of a translator for the press and the police. Some british journalists, after sucking him to the bones, start suspecting his availability.

The Murat contradiction

Contrarily to the GNR elements and the Ocean Club’s staff, who participated in the searches on the night before and assure they did not see Murat around, Gerry and some of his friends guarantee that he was there. And thus he becomes an arguido.

Gerry and Kate’s friends, who are interrogated tightly by the PJ over almost a month, refuse to clarify this contradiction, when asked by Sol. “We have a pact. This is our matter only. It is nobody else’s business”, says David Payne, another element with the group. Minutes after we tried to contact Kate, Gerry, in a fury, calls the Sol journalist: “What do you think you are doing? Do you think you’re better than the portuguese police? I’m going to forward your contact to PJ and you will have to explain yourselves”.


-------


PJ says ‘everybody is a suspect’

The director of the Policia Judiciaria in Faro, Guilhermino da Encarnacao, confirmed with Sol that “we do not discard the possibility to have the family and friends as suspects”. This is always done “without neglecting other clues. Everybody who was at the resort at the time are suspects”.

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Madeleine, The other opinions.

I have been debating most of the day whether or not to write about this. But after spending more time reading it I thought why not? Just because I write about it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with it, so first I'll give the information then my opinions. Firstly is this forum on the Mirror website. This guy has a hoax theory. A very interesting hoax theory.

Mike Hitchen's Blog bluntly gives the facts! I agree with quite a few of his posts.

It does seem that as more time is going on Madeleine is being thought about less and less as a missing person and more and more as a pawn in a parents fame game. Personally I am undecided, the people who have these conspiracy theories put forward very good arguments and they always back up what they are saying with links to news articles nine times out of ten from a reputable source, and to make their argument even stronger, the people who call them "sick" and say they are lying never seem to be able to prove that they are wrong. It just seems to me that these people with these theories are being proved right more and more often, as for Mike Hitchen, he seems to have the opinion that the “Grubs” as he calls them should be prosecuted for negligence. Although I agree that should happen, as it will teach them and anyone else considering to leave their children alone, I do think that any prosecution should be left at least until Madeleine is found, hopefully alive. I don’t agree with the people who are saying they have had punishment enough in Madeleine going missing, I think they should be treated the way every other person who mistreats their children are.

I just feel sorry for the parents of other children missing either presently or in the past, as the way the McCanns are getting attention is through who they know. It pays to know people in high places. It just goes to show it truly isn't what you know it's who you know.

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Benoit - Another Update - Somebody Knew??

In the last few hours it has been announced that some 14 hours (approx 1am Monday morning) before authorities discovered the bodies of Chris, Nancy and their 7-year-old-son Daniel on Monday, someone altered Benoit's page on Wikipedia to say the wrestler missed a match two days earlier because of his wife's death.

The writer has claimed it was a coincidence and a guess here "I feel incredibly bad for all the attention this got because of the fact that what I said turned out to be the truth. Like I said it was just a major coincidence, and I will never vandalize anything on wikipedia or post wrongful information. I've learned from this experience. I just can't believe what I wrote was actually the case, I've remained stunned and saddened over it"

I personally think that its too much of a coincidence as the IP address has been tracked to a computer in Stamford, CT (the site of WWE headquarters) apparently (I say apparently as only one newspaper has said this)other WWE edits have been linked to the same IP address including confidential information about Chavo Guerrero.

Did someone know about the death before or was it all a huge coincidence, if someone knew that person could of possibly prevented Benoit's suicide, which leads to more conspiracy theories.

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The Church - Update

It looks like from todays comic that all religions are joining together in an attempt to overthrow Ethan! In other news the Church of Gaming website has been added to and you can now read the "Bible". I hope Ethan manages to ward off these other religions!

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The Church Of Gaming

Nine days ago on the 18th June, we first heard about Ethan's "faith" and "gods" of gaming. Two days later on the 20th he created a hat and a symbol of his new Church. On the 22nd he informed Lucas of his intentions, and began to write his "bible"

On the 23rd June 2007 Ethan gave all us geeks out there a religion and made the Church of Gaming official, with an official "Holy Instruction Manual" but what geek church would be complete without its own website?? On 25th June Ethan gave us that too, using the powers of a popular website Ctrl+Alt+Del he gave us the Church of Gaming

Yesterday was the first church meeting. I think it will be interesting to see where they go with this, the fact that they have created the website www.churchofgaming.com to go with the storyline is was I liked best, at the moment as you can see the website is only one page, but I think as the story progresses we may be given more especially if it gets a lot of hits.

So spread the word the geek Church is here!!

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Free Online Books

While looking into Linux systems and what to use, I found this website PSPXWorld It has a lot of useful books on it, from a variety of different subjects, including:

• Programming


• Mathematics


• Computer Science


• Database


• Operating Systems

I have found the site really useful for my Linux research :)

And as I'm trying to teach myself some programming languages I hope it will be just as useful for that too!

Speaking of teaching yourself, I have over the past 2 months taught myself HTML the W3 Schools website is really helpful, and although I'm no HTML expert it has been the only website I have needed to use to learn quite a lot :D

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Sorry, I relaxed this weekend!!

I know I know, not even a week into the blog and after saying I would try to post everyday I took a weekend off! Well I did put it to some use and got some of my Uni work done :)

As of yet I don't have much interesting to report but I do have two funny websites that I stumbled upon at the weekend.

Passive Aggressive Notes ever felt like you had something to say to a colleague or room mate, these notes say what we all wish we had said!!

Or Left behind at the Fishbowl This blog contains work people have left behind at the printers. This guy adds his comments correcting spelling, grammar and just basically making it make sense! hilarious :)

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