March 26, 2008 Archives

I've just watched the France - England game and can honestly say it was a poor game and England can feel disappointed that they lost the game. England didn't play particularly well and with such a lacklustre display they definitely didn't deserve to win the game, but can feel that they, maybe, deserved a draw. France looked dangerous going forward, but the defence seemed to cope well enough.

David James didn't really have much to do other than pick the ball out of his net after the penalty that won the game for France. The back four was pretty solid throughout other than the momentary lapse that led to the penalty from which France scored. Rio Ferdinand and John Terry were solid again. Ashley Cole is probably the best choice we have at left-back although his distribution is questionable at times. Wes Brown wasn't at all impressive and his distribution was woeful at times. I'm a Manchester United fan but Glen Johnson impressed me more in the brief spell he got. I'm not totally sure that we have a natural successor to Gary Neville yet.

In midfield Owen Hargreaves was solid and dependable; probably our best player. Gareth Barry also had a really good game. Steven Gerrard was pretty decent. David Beckham, winning his 100th cap, spent good periods of the game watching the game go by him and spent a lot of the game underused, but the moments he did get the ball, his distribution was as good as ever. David Bentley came on after an hour in place of Beckham and did well. England, for whatever reason, decided to play a lot on the left side of the pitch in the first half and it was rather compact at times. However, Joe Cole was pretty good out there. Stewart Downing replaced him for the second half and I really have to question his continued selection. The guy can't bring a ball under control, can't pass the ball and definitely can't cross the ball. I doubt very much that he can even run or tackle. I'm not a Chelsea fan but it's patently obvious that Joe Cole is the best left-sided midfield player that England has.

Up front, Wayne Rooney was exposed for much of his time on the pitch. Playing by himself, he tried his best but was often crowded out by the defence. It just felt that the balls in to him were not of sufficient quality and support from midfield was lacking. Michael Owen and Peter Crouch came on for the second half and were both pretty unimpressive.

All in all it was a pretty laboured performance. I think the core of the side is there but we need somebody at right back to replace the absent Gary Neville and we need to stop playing just 1 up front. As good as Wayne Rooney is, he can't work miracles against quality defences on his own. He needs a partner up front, be it Michael Owen, Peter Crouch or even somebody like Jermaine Pennant or Jermaine Defoe.

I've been receiving a rather large amount of spam on a daily basis for at least the last couple of years. It started off with about 150-200 a day but has recently peaked at a regular figure closer to 1000. In fact, once or twice it's been closer to 1500. Anyway, with broadband I never really concerned myself too much about it and let my email client and the filters I had set up within it sort them out. However, it still wasn't sorting them all and I'd still have to trawl through at least 100 a day to make sure there wasn't any genuine emails getting caught.

Anyway, I finally decided to try and sort it out a bit better; with the intention of stopping the spam even getting as far as my inbox. I had a poke about in my domain control panel and thought I'd figured it out. Rather than redirecting all unqualified domain addresses to the main account I told it to filter them first; searching for certain prefixes. Anything that didn't match the prefixes would be bounced. Testing seemed to back me up.

However, thanks to Mondrak, I managed to discover that it was blocking all emails except the ones I had originated from my own PC, either via the email client or via any of the web mail services I have access to. After further tweaking I managed to eventually solve that problem only to run into a different one. The way the filters have been designed means that as well as allowing bowch@ as a valid prefix it would also allow notbowch@ or fakebowch@ or any other prefix ending with bowch@. Setting filter options that would solve this wasn't working. Everytime I set it to read "Does Not Equal" it would change to "Equal" for no apparent reason.

I have ended up setting up extra email accounts and telling the server to forward them to my main account. Any unqualified emails will now get bounced back with a failure message. Valid email addresses now only include bowch (at), blog (at), useful (at), webmaster (at) and yahoogroups (at) with everything else bouncing. I've set them up with relatively low disk quotas and will hopefully not need to change much. I'm going to keep an eye on it over the next couple of weeks and make sure that it forwards okay and isn't eating up valuable space on my domain server.

PortableApps.com is a really useful site that I can highly recommend to anybody that has a need to have a collection of applications handy. It's especially handy if you're going to look at somebody's PC and you want to use software that you're familiar with. The Standard version will run from a 512mb USB stick, their Lite version will run from a 256mb USB stick and the totally stripped down Base version will run off a 1.44mb floppy disk. All 3 versions are easily extendable with other applications available from the same site.