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Bloodhound engineers test-fire rocket

British engineers have fired up the rocket that they hope will propel their car to speeds in excess of 1,000mph, to smash the land speed record.

Britain’s latest attempt at the world land speed record has come a step closer as the Bloodhound engineers test-fired the new 18-inch-diameter hybrid rocket on a test stand in the Mojave Desert. The hybrid rockets use solid fuel – a synthetic rubber hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB), and high test peroxide (HTP) as oxidizer, and are custom built for the Bloodhound Project.

To find out more about this latest step in the attempt to break the 1000mph barrier on land, click here to read the Guardian Science article.

For more on the project check out the Bloodhound SSC website

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KISS Design in Artificial Intelligence

Regular readers will be familiar with our zest for the simple sites which show people what they are looking for, without all the OTT (Ok Over The Top!) graphics and animations which consume bandwidth without adding information. Our featured site this week is verologik.com, which is an information source without the flannel. It is the brochure site for Verologik LLP of Redhill, Surrey, and is true to our KISS design principle.

Verologik has its roots in a quarter of a century of applying traditional statistical methods to billions of dollars of real-world complex corporate challenges. After a significant investment in research and development, the company has integrated some of the most powerful and breakthrough solutions being generated at the cutting edge of mathematical and A.I. science.

The CEO is Rosco Paterson who has built his practice consulting to, and negotiating for governments and major Fortune 100 companies. Rosco is a Chartered Engineer, who still has an active involvement in technical design, having authored his first A.I. software in the eighties. He is also a Fellow of The Institute of Directors and sits on the National Council.

If you want to find out more about Rosco Paterson and his work in Artificial Intelligence, click here to visit the Verologik website.

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Police Issue Online Viral Madeleine Message

An image presenting Madeleine McCann as a six-year-old with dark skin and dark hair was released by British police last night in a “viral” internet video aimed at coaxing fresh information from the friends, family and associates of her abductors. The Home Office’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) hope that it will be so widely posted on Internet blogs and social networking sites that it becomes the top item if anyone searches for “Madeleine”.

Detectives believe people who know Madeleine’s location regularly search her name online to trace developments in the investigation and police tactics. Madeleine went missing in May 2007 while on holiday with her family in Praia da Luz, Portugal.

In the spirit of assisting the police in this enterprise we are posting the link to the Madeleine video here. We are also posting on our supported sites, blogs and via Twitter.

The CEOP Centre has issued the online viral message aimed at anyone close to the person who was involved in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. That person could be a relative, friend, work colleague or neighbour. Whoever they are, they have a secret that could reveal what happened to Madeleine and protect other children. 

In order to increase the possibility of reaching that person, CEOP supported by global law enforcement agencies and specialist charities, is asking the public to help spread the message via the Internet.

Click here to see the latest Madeleine appeal

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Common Coding Mistakes in WordPress Plugins

While most people using WordPress are happy just to have an excelent blogging platform, there are some people we support who are seriously in to developing web based applications, and tweeking WordPress for the good and benefit of all.

While looking for the solution to a problem on a WordPress site we are setting up, we came accross this gem from Ozh Richard called Top 10 Most Common Coding Mistakes in WordPress Plugins. Actually, to give full credit, there are about eighteen common mistakes listed, and we have probably made (no surely we mean seen!) all of them at some time.

The top ten most frequent bad code bits are listed here for a quick reference, but for the detail and a good laugh, visit Top 10 Most Common Coding Mistakes in WordPress Plugins

  1. It’s not a plugin, it’s a mess
  2. Way too generic function names
  3. What? 87 new rows in the option table?
  4. You create new tables for what?
  5. No uninstall function
  6. Custom javascript or CSS added on each and every admin pages
  7. Plugin forms with no security, or nonces misunderstood
  8. Actions triggered from unchecked GET data
  9. Trust user input and pass it to SQL
  10. Localization done wrong

To read the full post, visit and enjoy Top 10 Most Common Coding Mistakes in WordPress Plugins.

While you are at it, check out the succinct The Definitive Guide To Using WordPress as a CMS on the same site

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Welsh Road Safety Film Is An Internet Phenomenon

A video made for just a few thousand pounds, and staring unpaid student actors has become an YouTube internet phenomenon, which has now been seen by millions of people. The four-minute film, made by Gwent police, is designed to warn youngsters about the perils of texting while driving.

The film has fuelled debates about road safety and prompted people from India to Canada to contact the Welsh force to describe how affected they have been by the images. It was described as one of the most powerful public information films ever made by advertising guru Donny Deutsch

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Avoid Spreading Virus Hoaxes

Today we recieved one of the emails that you get occasionally, which promises a masivly damaging virus is just about to strike. This one had the headline HUGE VIRUS COMING! PLEASE READ & FORWARD!

We always advise people to check these messages out via a reputable website like McAfee or Sophos, because many of them are hoaxes. In fact they are realy a form of computer virus that is spread by well meaning people. The message is usually a chain e-mail that tells the recipient to forward it to everyone they know. Some IT specialists consider virus hoaxes and other chain e-mails to be a computer worm in and of themselves, as they replicate by exploiting users’ ignorance or emotional responses.

McAfee advise users who receive the email to delete it and DO NOT pass it on, as this is how an email HOAX propagates.

Click here to visit McAfee Virus Hoaxes
Click here to visit Sophos Don’t fall for a virus hoax

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Attempts by eBay to sell Skype could be in jeopardy

One of the hot topics on Twitter at the moment may hit a snag about ownership of technology. Attempts by eBay to sell Skype could be in jeopardy because of legal dispute with founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis.

Attempts by eBay to float its Skype internet telephone business in 2010 could be in trouble because of a legal dispute surrounding the technology that makes the system work. eBay is suing Joltid, run by Skype’s founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, to prevent them from pulling the licence to the technology that runs Skype. For its part, Joltid alleges that eBay does not have the legal rights to certain part of its code.

The disagreement occurred after discussions between eBay and Joltid over returning ownership to the founders stalled on the issue of price.

For more details click here to see the Telegraph article

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New York Court Orders Google to Reveal Blogger’s Identity

A New York state supreme court judge has ordered Google to reveal the name of an anonymous blogger who maligned Liskula Cohen, a New York fashion model. The case could restrict Americans’ ability to slag off enemies from behind a veil of Internet secrecy.

The Vogue cover girl has now confronted and forgiven the anonymous blogger who trashed her on a special Web site. Steven Wagner, the attorney for Cohen said the decision would send a message to bloggers about the limits of permissible Internet speech.

Anne Salisbury, a lawyer for the blogger, argued that the raunchy digs at the model were nothing more than “youthful, jocular, slangy” terms – like “sleazebag,” “slime” and “pimp” – that are protected by the courts.

You can read more about this at the following links:
Google ordered to reveal blogger’s identity
Google reveals blogger’s identity to model

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Getting Started With WordPress

Sometimes we get so used to using all the latest tools and tips that it is easy to forget that not everyone uses the Internet or a blogging tool like WordPress every day. Continuing our support series, we are publishing a few tips and tricks for getting started blogging with WordPress.

First of, in the Codex try

A question we often get asked is “What is the difference between a post and a page?”. There are a few key differences between a post and a page, which you should consider before setting out on your first site:
Pages are static entities that you create and edit, and then ere displayed using the Sidebar Widget. On the other hand posts are dynamic and listed in reverse chronological order on the blog home page. You can access posts by using Categories, Recent Posts or Archives and the RSS feed of the blog.

As a rule of thumb, use pages for content which you do not expect to change much, and posts for your daily news and fast changing information.

For example, if you are a startup business and sell a small number of products, you might have a page describing each product. However, to increase your coverage of keywords, you could produce a number of posts describing the products in different ways. Each of these landing posts should be optimized for a different keyword. As a result of doing this,

  • Your search traffic will increase because you’re targeting more keywords.
  • Your conversion rates will increase because your posts have relevant content related to the keywords.

Happy Blogging!