Stuart Homfray The Weblog

Villa Get Randy

As an Englishman, I am obliged to be amused by ‘double entendre’ and therefore, the ‘Carry On..’ series of films. In actual fact, I’m not really a fan of those films but I do, like any other citizen of Albion, still giggle like a 12-year-old at sexual innuendo!

To get to the point: there were a few interesting articles on the takeover of Aston Villa by US businessman Randy Lerner in this morning’s Times, but I have to highlight the following introduction to a piece by Patrick Kidd:

WITH a name that makes him sound like a character to be played by Sid James in Carry On Driving School, Randy Lerner is bound to become the subject of a few imaginative chants from the Villa Park faithful.

Thank you Patrick. Mr. Lerner’s name was amusing enough beforehand; now, I’m not going to be able to see or hear it without thinking of Sid James‘ wonderful “mwah-hah-hah-hah-hah” laughter!

Stick Sports

In a link from somewhere or other yesterday, I came across this incredibly addictive Flash-based cricket game. The link itself pointed to Stick Sports Soccer, a game that was purported to be similar to the wonderful Sensible Soccer, but unfortunately the Stick Sports game doesn’t quite live up to that billing!

However, from the same guys, there is also Stick Cricket, which is a completely different ‘kettle of fish’. You get various different bowlers and have to score as quickly as possible using any of the four options: an off-drive or cut, a pull/hook, a drive, and a duck (you can get bounced!) This is a lovely little game and it’s easy to while away your lunch hour playing it (although you probably need to enjoy a bit of cricket though!)

Google Flight Sim

Goggles, by Mark Caswell-Daniels, is a fantastic little flight sim utilising the satellite pictures from Google Maps. There’s a number of cities around the world to choose from, and you can even fire at the scenery! :)

This is a SERIOUS timesink - great stuff Mark!!

Google Stops Badware

“Google warns on ‘unsafe’ websites“, “Google offers malware warnings“, and “Google launches ‘neighbourhood watch’ malicious website warning system” - just three of the many reports today on the announcement that Google will work with StopBadware.org to help protect us from the dangers of those scummy sods that fill our computers up will all sorts of spyware-type crap (also see StopBadware.org’s original announcement: “Safer Searching“)

Great news - it’s just that I’ve tried it out and it’s not actually working yet… :(

Update Wed 9th Aug 2006: it’s working… OK! The search I used to retrieve SERPs containing dodgy sites was ’serial numbers’. Clicking the second result gave me an interstitial page informing me that the site you are about to visit may harm your computer. To be honest, though, this should have applied to more of the results…

Cameroon Domain Shenanigans

All your typos are belong to us!

CircleID highlights the issue of Cameroon exploiting mis-typed urls. I’ve just tried apple.cm, microsoft.cm and google.cm, and yes, all those pages look pretty similar!

I don’t agree with the author’s opinion that OpenDNS should redirect .cm typos to their search page (if you’ve not heard of them, OpenDNS is a nifty little service that speeds up domain name queries). This might prove problematical, as the .cm top level domain does contain a few useful sites (Google returns around 486,000 results with a site:.cm search!)

EDIT: Almost forgot about John Levine’s blog entry that lists the actual hosts of this Cameroon typo page!