Cocomment exposes your emails from flickr

What happened was this:
I installed the cocomment Firefox extension. While on flickr I sent a flickrmail to someone. I didn't turn off comments, so cocomment tracked mine. I have an RSS feed to comments similar to mine, so anyone else with the same extension who sent an email from flickr (flickrmail) showed up in my feed reader:


Something to be aware of. Although it's tempting to read those emails, I haven't.

New Executive Director for Wycliffe UK

Wycliffe UK (which is where I work) will have a new Executive Director from 1 March. His name is Eddie Arthur and he has a blog. He's been in the organisation a number of years. It should be interesting to see what changes he brings.

As part of the transition into the job, he will be Acting Executive Director from the end of January.

Raiser's Edge database schema

I just found a really useful resource on the user-powered site for Blackbaud customers. For those wanting to dig into the RE SQLServer database you can get details on the database schema in the file C:\Program Files\Blackbaud\The Raisers Edge 7\Help\RE7Schema.chm

All credit to Dan Larson.

Converting a real machine into a virtual one

I've just followed some very helpful instructions on taking an image of a real (Linux) machine and turning it into Virtual Machine.

It boots, but at the moment I can't get the display (i.e. X-windows) to work.

Mozzarella Firefox

One of our kids was about to start their turn on the computer.
"Do we have to use Mozzarella Firethingy?" they asked.
"You don't have to, but IE keeps crashing," I said.
"Only about once a year," they said. Browser views in one so young!

As it is IE crashes every so often with the flash games they play, so more than once a year. I'm not sure if they prefer it because of familiarity, or because they don't have to type in URLs, because their favourites are in the dropdown in the address bar.

Advent as a time for getting things done

I recently gave someone a job to do, split into bits, one for each day in December, roughly. I called it an advent calendar. I guess the next time of year to do this would be Lent.

Also, on the advent theme, I'm enjoying reading 24 ways, and learning that there so much about web design that I don't know I don't know, as well as the stuff I know I don't know.

"Get satisfaction" customer service site

I came across the Get Satisfaction site a couple of months ago. It's a sort of customer service intermediary. I guess it would be useful for companies that don't want to set up customer support forums for themselves. I put a complaint on it about Oracle Discoverer Reports. It was encouraging to know that an Oracle employee was monitoring my complaint and put in a reply.

I didn't Get Satisfaction entirely as the answer I got from someone else was to hack the Oracle software, but maybe the Oracle employee will submit my complaint internally so my annoyance can be fixed in future versions.