General

I've been using Wikipedia for looking up items of interest for quite a while now. For those unaware of it, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that is maintained by the general internet community (with some moderation to prevent vandalism and such, obviously). Frequently, after watching a film/documentary about a historical event/person, I'll look up their Wikipedia entries to get the whole story, particularly because of the tendency of movies to gloss over the areas of the story that don't suit the director's view of the event.

It's only yesterday that I realised just how dynamic the whole Wikipedia project really is. Just over an hour after yesterday's election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI, I made my way to Ratzinger's wikipedia page to find out more about the new Pontiff, to discover that the entry had already been updated to reflect his new status (and name). This morning (about 16 hours after the election result was announced), the page had changed considerably, to offer a far more in-depth biography of someone who had just been elevated to a status deserving of it.

Of course, all the traditional elitists with their dust-covered copies of World Book and Encyclopedia Brittanica (along with everyone who spent good money on Encarta) still have John Paul II as the Pope when the kids go researching for a school project. This is a great example of Wikipedia becoming a seriously useful tool - now all they need is some investment to speed the damn thing up a bit!

It's hardly ground-breaking stuff but sharp-eyed visitors will have noticed that a couple of things have changed around here recently.

The Irish Breaking News section should be back up-and-running as before, now that an issue that was bothering the Skynet admins has been sorted out.

I've also finally, after threatening to do so for a while, ditched Moveable Type as my blogging tool of choice. The (until now) endless comment and trackback spamming and the disturbingly lengthy loading time have finally nagged me into doing something a little different.

As an alternative, I've done even more playing with WebMake to come up with a solution and, hopefully, the result is going to be ok. There's bound to be some problems with it but hopefully not too many. Bug reports on a postcard to the usual address.

Anyone using the old RSS feeds for live bookmarks will have to change to the new location. Link is at the bottom of the right-hand column. Firefox users can, of course, click on the nice handy Live Bookmark button at the bottom-right of their browser window. What could be easier?

Edit: For a start, the comments don't work for the moment. I'll get that whenever I get a chance.

A bloke in the US has recently gotten his own back on an eBay scammer (ok, so it happened in April and has probably been reported on every blog in the web by now but I don't really care). The whole story is outlined on his site and is well worth a read. It's also very long so for anyone who intends to get any work done over the next 2 days or so, so here's the condensed version. Either way, the photos are a must!

Selling a PowerBook on eBay, Jeff was contacted by a scammer who offered to buy the item through a non-existent escrow service. The scam works by pretending the money has been paid to the escrow, getting the seller to ship the item and then do a runner, gaining a free laptop. In this case however, Jeff realised from the start he was being had so he decided to dispatch a ring-binder posing as a PowerBook, complete with a keyboard and marker-created screen and ports.

The real counter-scam was, ironically, the original scammer's idea. Wishing to avoid paying import duties on a laptop worth US$2200 (about US$600), he asked Jeff to declare a smaller value when it was being shipped. Jeff, posing as a naive newbie eBayer, revealed that when he sent it, he'd been asked the value of it and hadn't wanted to lie, but would pay half the taxes if the buyer let him know how much it was. Our scammer, (still on-course to get a new laptop for a quarter of the price remember) decided to pay the tax and the "package" was delivered. Jeff had even managed to get some "internet-buddies" in London to go along to the delivery address and take pictures of the delivery. Priceless.