POLITICS: The real reason labour are pushing for road tolls?

Well, make you own mind up but as ever, it seems there are plenty of things no-one is acknowledging...

Take a look at this post on the EU Referendum site for information. The bottom line: a question as to whether the current government merely wants to introduce road toll charges to bolster the gulf in Gordon Brown's expenditure.

Go here to read the article.

TV: Heroes - the jury is out...

I read a snippet about this US show a while back in a writing magazine so when I saw that the SCI-FI channel was showing the premiere this week I decided to check it out.

Now, the fact that it was on 'SCI-FI' was a little worrying. I assumed the only frequenters to that channel were Egg heads and trekkies etc. So I changed channel and drew the curtains...

The first two episodes showed promise and were in many ways a kind of amalgamation of all the recent super hero films of late (an indestructible girl, the boy who can fly, a man who gets visions of the future). Seperately no single story thread is remarkable but as a whole it potentially holds together. I say potentially as a lot will depend on how it develops from here.

By the end of the second episode there has been so much 'borrowing' from the heart of other ideas (the notion that these characters are evolutionary firsts is all too familiar for anyone who has seen an X-MEN film) my concern is that it has nothing much original to give.

It's a NO1 show in the US at present but I wonder if the slight lack of originality will cause it to plummet in time. Or, perhaps it has plenty more cards up its sleeve and things haven't got started in earnest yet. I hope the latter.

Catch 'Heroes' on SCI-FI, Mondays at 10pm. Read more about the show at the official site www.heroes-tv.com

By the way, the show creator, Tim Kring, was also the writer of 80's movie 'Teen Wolf Too'!

TECH: great FREE OSX newsletter program

I recently needed to get a newsletter out to some of my past and existing customers and as OSX is my operating system of choice set about finding a suitable program. I wanted to send a 'posh' html mail for those that could receive it and after a while 'googling' I cam across this...

Newsletter by Pescado Software

The best bit about this program? It's free. But be a good sport, use the 'donate by Paypal' button to at least send the man enough cash for a couple of beverages as this is a great little program.

If you're running Tiger (OSX 10.4) you will need to run the app under 'Rosetta'. Choose more info by right clicking the app icon and tick the 'run under Rosetta' option.

WEBSITE: broadoakevents.co.uk now live

Broad Oak Events are a UK event management company and organise all sorts of cool events for corporate clients. I built the last website for them in 2003/2004 and things have moved on a bit since then, web design wise. I've just finished uploading a 2007 re-design of broadoakevents.co.uk. I've made a case study of this one so you can see all the improvements that have been made. Head over to Case Study to find out all about it.

TECH: Always win that auction on ebay

It's a common scenario. There is something on ebay you really want. There is no 'buyitnow' so there are two possibilities. 1. You stay in for the items final hour as the clock ticks down, poised to make that well timed bid and then shuffle uncomfortably in your chair clicking 'refresh' every remaining second to see if you have won... Guess what? You invariably don't, causing a good 30 minutes kicking the cat (doesn't have to be your own cat, loads around my way). Option 2. You have a life, forget about the auction, come home to find you missed and go cat hunting. Neither is ideal.

Here is option 3. But I warn you, desperate situations require desperate solutions. Presenting: Auction Sniper. Fast effective and cruel for everyone apart from you. You log in to the site, enter the auction number and your ebay log in. It automatically places a bid for you (upto your pre-defined maximum) 7 seconds before the auction closes. So, no pushing the heart rate monitor to its limits each time an auction is closing, no endless spending on useless tat (you get the useless tat, just pay less for it) no more wasting time waiting for auctions to close. Anyway, go take a look and it gives you 5 free snipes to start with...

FOOTBALL: England - get some stability in the line up!

Having watched the Spain Vs England friendly last night (quite rightly won by Spain) it seems obvious to all but McClaren that there needs to be some stability in the squad. McClaren should decide on a formation (4 4 2 would be favourite but whatever), pick a core of 15-16 players and get them playing together consistently. Instead, every time we have a game there is a different formation, team, result. How does he hope to build any consistency and confidence in the players by this continual intervention and tweaking? You don't need a team of superstars. You just need a team; structured, cohesive and committed. To build such a team you must do exactly that. Choose the components that make up that team and then build it; structurally, emotionally and physically. I'm not surprised the players look lost, they probably have no sense of what the heart of this 'team' is, nor what it aims to be or how it hopes to achieve it. Injuries of key players aside, if McCLaren has a serious plan for this team, it's time he started to execute it and get some player confidence back in the squad and some wins under their belts.

WRITING: Digital Video tutorial in shops

The final installment of my tutorial series on DVD Studio Pro and Compressor for 'Digital Video Magazine' should be in the shops now. It's part 6 of 6 and covers final burning of a project.

WRITING: Great TV/film writers podcast

Anyone who is interested (or actually is) writing for TV or film would be well advised to check out the 'Sam and Jim goto Hollywood' podcast. It's been going a couple of years now and follows these two guys who gave up their 'normal' lives to try and make it as writers 'out there' in Hollywood. Amusing and insightful. You can get the link direct from their site here or by browsing for it on iTunes.

FLYING: Source for mock exam questions - NPPL

I have one more ground school exam to pass and then the theory side of things is all done to qualify for my NPPL (National Private Pilots Licence). I find trawling through the books and study papers a bind and found it much easier to get the exams passed by simply trying my luck at mock exams. Long story short: a great source of mock exam questions is the Microlight Hangar. You pick from any of the ground school topics (Aircraft General, Human Performance, Air Law, Navigation, Meteorology & Radiotelephony) and it gives you mulitple choice questions complete with an excellent marking system at the end so you can see just how badly you did but more importantly where you went wrong. Essential site for anyone training for their NPPL.

TECH: An easy 'contact us' script for websites

A lot of folk want a simple 'contact us' form for their website. Historically there have been lots of relatively simple CGI scripts that could handle this such as FormMail.pl. However, these have two problems nowadays. Firstly, they are far more complicated than they need to be (the eyes of many novice web masters glaze over when you tell them to make sure they CHMOD the script to 755, check the path to Perl, upload the files in ASCII etc). Secondly they lack security, their functionality is often easily by-passed and many web hosts won't allow such scripts to run as they have been used to send spam etc

The solution: head over to www.tectite.com.
They have a simple step by step interface that makes you a FREE custom PHP script that you can simply upload to your website. Ah, if only everything in web design were so simple. If you like the script, make sure you send those folks some money. It's a great tool and means you can literally just upload the script to whatever directory your HTML page is and Voila - fully working form. You can see it working on my 'contact' page at benfrain.com

Note: Virtually all hosting companies support PHP. If you want to test if your host server has PHP installed, simply Open a text editor and type in the following:

<?

phpinfo();

?>




and save it as phpinfo.php

Now upload this to your webspace and go to it in your browser. If you have PHP installed you will see a page with all the details of your PHP installation on it. If you find a section about MySQL then you will know that MySQL is also installed.