Willow and Oscar at the end of a busy day of chasing leaves around the garden (and annoying the hell out of me) decide to rest on the sofa for the day.

Later on tonight they will complain why dinner has been delayed by 5 minutes and that they had tinned Beef two days ago.

Willow will take one look at what I put down in her bowl and look up at me as to say "And this is?" before walking off.

Oscar will wait until I move off the sofa to get a drink from the kitchen so he can move in and take the warm spot I left behind.

Cats, you've got to love them! :)

When you think of Internet fraud you probably think of credit card theft or hackers getting into your computer stealing information to make lots of money. If you have been on the net for a while you may have heard of the notorious Nigerian 419 scam. Where unwitting victims are led to believe that a wealthy widower from an oil rich African state wishes to get her money out of the country and requires your help to do so. Sound familiar?

Well the Internet fraud game has taken a more sinister approach preying on lonely people on Internet dating websites. Now don't get me wrong there are probably a lot of genuine young women on Internet dating websites looking for long term relationships. But among these genuine people will be the fraudsters who have set themselves up with a fake profile. In many cases the photo of the person in these profiles is of a rather beautiful woman. Investigate the photos further and you will probably see they are taken off a modelling web site.

The fraudster will spend a lot of time forming an online relationship with their victim or maybe even several victims at once. Our fraudster does not have any morals and while they are leading on several victims in a dating scam, they may also have other little fraud projects setup on the side. One of the fraudsters favourites are fake banking websites setup to capture your credit card details (you know the ones?). To the fraudsters this is their 9-5 job this is how they make their living. The fraudster will eventually come up with a story of how they would like to come over and see their victim but need money for a ticket. The fraudster may also say they require money for a life saving operation. At this stage the victim is so smitten with the fraudster they are willing to give them anything. The fraudster will keep this scam going until the victim either catches on or runs out of money. The fraudster ensures they have a constant stream of cash coming in by having several of these victims lined up, almost like a production line. 

There are some key ways to identify these frauds which you can find on the following web sites.

• Signs you are dealing with a date scammer
• Nigerian dating scams
• Internet dating scams

Other ways of identifying fraudsters and not just Internet Dating fraudsters are:

• Are they using a Yahoo email address? For some reason this appears to be the free internet email service of choice for Internet Fraudsters. Its so common someone has even started a directory of fraudster email addresses.
• Is all correspondence in capitals?
• If you Google the address they gave you, you may find its been listed on anti fraud sites. You may also find the address is used by several people.
• If you Google the persons online nickname you may find they are registered on every single dating website out there. Possibly in several different countries.
• If something sounds too good to be true it probably is.

My wife works in type setting and sometimes needs to merge PDF's together which can be quite a cumbersome task. I had a look on the Internet to see if there was anything freely available to do this but everything I found started at $60. Being a developer I decided to make my own program to do this in C#.

I found a code sample on Jean-François blog which uses the iTextSharp library and wrapped it up into a command line program and a .NET DLL.

Its a pretty simple and quickly put together application which does exactly what it says on the tin. Below I have put together a zip file which contains the command line version of the tool and a DLL you can call from your own application. I have not tested if it is COM compatible. Let me know if you find it useful or if you have any feedback!

Download RS PDFMerge

Mandelsons plans to privatise Royal Mail have been in the press a lot this week. What I have found so interesting about it, is that even though the plan is so unpopular and has the potential for Labour to loose a lot of votes (maybe even an election), they have not backed down on the idea. Gordon Brown has openly backed it, even after the large out cry from the unions and their threat to hold back funding for Labour.

So, why go ahead with the idea? Well we all know the Royal Mail pension pot is in a lot of trouble and the group is haemorrhaging cash. Talk to postal workers and they will tell you that the communications watch dog will not allow Royal Mail to increase the cost of a basic postage stamp. Royal Mail mainly makes a loss on the mail service to the general public which needs to be shored up by the money it makes from businesses, for example the delivery of your BT phone bill, Gas bill,bank statements etc. Currently Royal Mail is finding it very hard to be competitive in this market because companies such as TNT (you've seen their postage stamps on your mail) are offering more competitive rates to win these business contracts.

You may be asking,how does TNT deliver my mail to me? The answer to that question is they don't! All TNT do is collect the mail from large companies sending out their bills and statements, and sort the mail. They then get their lorries to deliver this sorted mail to the various Royal Mail sorting offices, ready for Royal Mail postman to deliver it to your door. In this market Royal Mail as I am told, is not allowed to undercut these private companies. They rely on Royal Mail which has the delivery network to deliver this post. Without Royal Mail it would not be very cost effective for companies such as TNT or Business Post to try and employ their own postmen, its just far to expensive. The money Royal Mail would have made by trying to be competitive and cutting their rates for sorted mail to companies is not allowed by the competition watch dogs. The money Royal Mail needs to cover the cost of the public service is then reduced. So the government is left having to pump more money into the postal service. But wait a minute, the government as been pumping a lot of money into the banking industry lately so there can't be that much left to spend on much else could there?

Would privatising Royal Mail make the government some money to help them fill the depleted coffers caused by bailing out the banks? I know its a drop in the ocean but I can't help but feel this wont be the last attempt by the government to raise some cash by selling off the family silver. Maybe they will attempt to privatise Network Rail again?

The UK's unemployment and benefits culture has been in the news quite a lot recently and the various parties have all come up with ideas on how to solve these problems (as you can see from the links below)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7419748.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/7313716.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7792218.stm

It has become quite a political hot potato where one councillor even resigned over suggesting people who were on benefits should undergo sterilisation.

As I see it there appears to be two types of people on benefits those that want to go back to work and are desperately looking for work and those that have no intention of ever working.

We have seen plenty of documentaries about several generations of one family being on benefits. They have effectively been brought up this way its what their parents did and what they're grandparents did. They have never known anything else and support or pressure from family to get a job is not there because of it. The situation costs the British economy billions each year to support this new culture and there have been various attempts to try and get these people back into work. The problem is, these people may not have the education needed to get them into work. They may never have worked a day in their lives in some cases, so in many cases a skills program is introduced to try and teach people. This is all very well but what I don't understand is why benefits money is given away for nothing.

You're probably wondering where I am going with this. A large proportion of people on unemployment benefit do not want to be there. To them it was a last resort after they had exhausted all avenues of trying to get back into work. In many cases they would take just about any job to make ends meet and to keep their pride. So why not do away with unemployment benefit and introduce a new system.

The solution

Your local council will always have a job for you while it doesn't come with a pension, it is a job. The job could be anything based on the skills that you have it could be office work, street sweeping, helping to restore broken neighbourhoods, helping to take care of the elderly, running day care for peoples children who need child care cover - the list goes on. Paying for this service comes from channelling the unemployment benefit these people would have received to local council where it in effect becomes a salary. Because people are part of this initiative it becomes a tax free salary, people would only work the amount of hours the unemployment benefit money would cover. This way the money paid in unemployment benefit starts to work for the economy jobs that are needed doing which would usually cost councils a lot of money can now be covered by this scheme. When these people are able to find work again their future employers can see that they were in employment for that time. This system also removes the concept of getting something for nothing, it teaches those that would have just lived on unemployment benefit that eventually they can do better. People are no longer strangers to hard work and hence ending the culture we have come to detest so much.

When will South West Trains start being a little greener. Surely its cheaper for them to use the heaters on their trains instead of the aircon units keep them warm. And why not get the doors to automatically close to keep the warmth in when waiting at waterloo station?

One day of snow and everything grinds to a halt in London and once again the media is out on a witch hunt to find out who is responsible for allowing the city to grind to a halt.

I have been to New York where 15 inch's of snow is quite natural. I have also been to  Vancouver in Canada  where I experienced 7 meters of snow! In New York everything continued as normal. In Canada (understandably) everything ground to a halt briefly before the snow ploughs could make their way through to all the small roads then as in New York everything went back to normal. The difference between the UK compared to the US and Canada is that in these countries this is a regular occurrence in the UK it isn't. That's the reason everything grinds to a halt in the UK when it snows, we are just not used to it. There is almost no reason for the UK to have the heavy duty snow gear we see in these countries as it would probably only be used once every 10 years. Its no ones fault that it snowed heavily and that the London buses didn't operate today or that the already gritted roads needed gritting again because of the heavy snow. There seems to be a constant habit of blaming someone for everything, its kind of how people start suing each other for the smallest of things. Lets just say it was some bad weather and leave it at that? No matter who you blame the snow is still going to fall isn't it?

I have read some interesting articles about where we are going after web 2.0. Some people have said that higher CPU and greater broadband speed will see us moving to more rich applications based on the likes of Silverlight and Flash.

I for one am a bit sceptical on this predication. Not that I don't think this will happen but just how this all works for us. For example I know Flash and Silverlight look very nice when applied to a site (correctly). But and this is a big but, I believe machines are not quite there yet. You are probably thinking "what on Earth does he mean?". Well let me put it this way, we have all encountered Vista and some of us Linux at some stage we know the machines to run Vista need to be pretty powerful. These pretty powerful machines generate a lot of heat so we need to put some nice big fans in them to cool them down. If you don't have the higher spec fans on your new Vista capable machine, it usually ends up sounding like a small aircraft taking off. Now take that same technology and apply it to a Vista capable laptop, can you remember the last time you could sit with a laptop on your lap for any reasonable amount of time? It gets pretty hot doesn't it? Now think about the last time your fired up a Flash or Silverlight rich website on your laptop, after a while the fan on your laptop started getting rather noisy and if you were working off the battery on your machine it probably started losing power a lot faster.

My point is the faster machines have become - the noisier, hotter and more energy they have started to use. Basically there is a cost for that power provided by the higher end CPU. If you cast your mind back to Windows 95 or even Windows 3 the machines running these OS's were a lot quieter you could also place the laptops on your lap and not suffer a heat injury!  When I visit websites I love websites that just use just HTML, why do I love HTML? Because it is simple it doesn't take large amounts of CPU power to process, my machine stays relatively quiet and I don't have to wait for annoying Flash and Silverlight applications to load. Don't get me wrong I think Flash and Silverlight have their place and that is for small nuggets of information not for the whole page, as so many people wrongly use it for in my opinion. I like sites I can also use from my mobile device or from my laptop on 3G. 3G may be fast but at times it can be very slow especially when you are in London at rush hour with hundred of other commuters doing the same thing. Believe me you don't thank the makers of Flash intensive websites when you are on a slow connection and need to get to the information on a site in a hurry.

What I am trying to say is why can't we use technology that doesn't require the masses of processing speed and stick to simple applications that are well programmed so as not to require the large amounts of CPU usage and can transport the information needed over lower bandwidth for them to perform? At the end of the day I am after the information and if I get a richer experience based on the clever usage of keys bit of technology while keeping the need for processing speed and bandwidth low surely that is best for all? Just because we have more bandwidth doesn't mean we have to use all of it, shouldn't we use it only if we need to when providing information to Internet applications and not because we can? The same goes with processing power, if Internet applications were done more in this way we would end up with happier machines that didn't have to dedicate all of their processing speed just to one hungry application.

If you have read my previous article you would gather I've been looking around for some computer related bargains. A few weekends ago I picked up a Netbook, what is a "Netbook"? I hear you ask. A netbook is a new name given to a certain size of laptop. They are basically ultra portable laptops and because of their size they are usually only 10inchs wide. What is even better is that they are designed to use as little power as possible and as efficiently as possible using processors such as Intel's new Atom processor basically the smallest processor Intel have ever developed. You would have thought with such a processor that you would be limited to the likes of Windows Mobile PC or a cut down copy of Linux, but the Atom can support Windows XP! Now I know Windows XP is supposed to be on its way out (Microsoft said so!), but one thing the Atom processor does is run Windows XP incredibly well. It is the ideal operating system for such a machine which probably would have ground to a holt if Vista was installed. My larger more powerful work laptop usually does if I'm not careful! Although its worth noting that Microsoft are releasing a new version of Windows for netbooks, lets wait and see how good it is..

Anyway back to my Netbook. Its an Advent 4213 with built in 3G, web cam, 160gig hard disk (yes you heard right), built in SD card reader, bluetooth, wifi and1 gig of RAM. That's what neat little package, I thought the 1gig of RAM would have been an issue but the machine hardly uses any of the memory especially when using the likes of Internet Explorer, Remote Desktop and  Windows Live Mail. Granted the machine comes installed with IE6 which I am reluctant to upgrade based on the dire performance issues I have had with it on previous XP installs. The machine hibernates and restarts like a dream in under a minute which is pretty impressive. The built in webcam has excellent quality for Skype calls something this machine does very well. The most impressive feature and the main reason I bought the laptop was for its size (so I could use it on a crowded rush hour train) and the built in 3G modem. Using the 3G modem was simplicity itself, you plug your SIM card into the slot found under the battery compartment boot up and connect to the Internet with the preinstalled connection software. The only issues I have had has really been with the "3" 3G network when it goes down to 2G in low coverage areas. This lower coverage area is actually the Orange network which 3 have a contract with. The Orange 2G network is painfully slow I would imagine that they give 3 customers lower priority over their own customers. just a thought.

My Advent fulfils all of my needs so well that I have now left my work laptop at work because it is so heavy and just use my Advent to connect over VPN or to do work on the train.  

I purchased a Dell Inspiron 1525 some time ago with Windows Vista preinstalled for my wife. However after a year the machine was constantly maxing out its CPU. I tried everything, from installing all the Microsoft performance patches running virus scans and spy ware scans with every program I knew. I even searched Dell forums and installed the latest hardware drivers to make sure. I eventually installed Unbuntu Linux on the machine in dual boot mode to make sure it was not the machine causing the problem, and it wasn't the machines fault at all. Unbuntu barely used 5% cpu occasionally it would jump to 100% when using Firefox but other than that the machine was very usable.

The solution
So the problem must have been Vista, so I continued to monitor processes especially the svchost process and check what services this "catch all" windows service was running. Eventually I detected one that kept on coming up all the time was Windows Defender (MsMpEng.exe). I decided to disable Windows Defender by going into the control panel opening up Windows Defender selecting options and disabling it. Like magic the machine was down to 5% CPU usage! Opening FireFox, IE and Outlook only used short bursts of high CPU before bringing the CPU down to 10% to 34% usage. Which was far better than the 100% constant CPU usage.

The clash
One thing I did note though was that AVG anti virus and Windows Defender seem to be in a constant struggle with each other. Its as if Windows Defender checks a file then AVG goes who that file was touched let me just go and check it quickly and then Defender does the same which may have been causing a vicious circle of CPU usage. All I know now is that its better to be have some common sense when surfing the Internet and installing applications on your machine. Anti Virus software if you keep it up to date should be all you need to keep your machine safe. I know some people may require more protection for their machines but there is probably a better product than Windows Defender out there that doesn't stop you using your machine.

Process Tamer
Another program I have found to have been of great use to me is Process Tamer. This little app sits in the system tray and stops any one process on your machine from using more than 100% cpu usage.

I hope this little article is of use to people!