At least one tabloid newspaper here in the UK is reporting that Materazzi called Zidane the son of a terrorist whore (he has Albanian roots - presumably on his mothers side) to cause the headbutt.

If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, Zinedine Zidane, apparently one of the best footballers in the world ended his career on a low note by getting sent off for headbutting an opponent in the final of the 2006 FIFA World Cup.

Here are some images of the headbutt in all it’s glory. I don’t know where these images come from. If you can reasonably prove they’re yours I’ll give you credit.

I’ve been playing EVE for a few weeks now. I ventured into low sec (0.3, 0.4) space a couple of times and killed some NPC pirates. So I got arrogant and decided to hang around to mine some better ores. I’ve since lost two ships (well four technically - one of them was a freighter with two shuttles) to player pirates and moved back to safer space. Although I didn’t lose my escape pod during either attack.

Some of you may have noticed the blog being down regularly. Well I haven’t fixed it yet. But I finally got the script to work that was supposed to restart it. I eventually diagnosed the problem as an incorrect path setting for the cron daemon. Anyway, it should now never be down for more than a few minutes.

Pimsleur makes the perfect companion to EVE Online, especially when you’re doing cargo runs or other things that don’t meed much concentration. Why not learn Spanish nipping out to buy that new Battleship? :P

I’m not sure if you can alter the in game music that EVE uses (and changing it to Pimsleur would probably be a hassle since you’re only going to play each track once) but you can run EVE in a window and therefore use whatever media player you like in the background.

EVE, EVE Online, Spanish, Pimsleur

Ooh, my host now has a referral scheme. It doesn’t seem that good for businesses but great for users since they aren’t giving money but USB pen drives. Anyway if you take up the offer on any Miniserver or dedicated server you also get 10% off.

Miniserver or Fully dedicated server.

The Miniserver is what I’m hosted on. It’s half way between virtual hosting and a dedicated server. The server is essentially partitioned across all it’s resources with each user getting a guaranteed usage depending on the number of users. Of course you usually get more than this since most users don’t use a server to it’s limits. The advantage over a dedicated server is simply the price - they start at £19.95 a month. The advantage over virtual hosting is you can do almost anything to it that you could do to a dedicated server except change the hardware or alter the kernel (they’re running Linux). You can even install a different distro on them (they come preinstalled with your choice from a small selection).

The bandwidth is unmetered, but you’re only guaranteed 1/40 of a 5Mbps line on the cheapest option (and this doesn’t allow adult sites - you need the metered option for those).

For anyone like me who needs the freedom to install software but can’t afford or justify a dedicated server, they’re perfect.

Okay, it’s a dangerous thing to do and of dubious use, but boy do you get loads of buttons to press, I am now the CEO of a 2-man corporation in EVE. In slightly dodgy space no less. But between us (that would be me and the other guy) our capability to defend ourselves is ever increasing.

One thing I’ve noticed is an apparent lack of information regarding running a corporation. Most of it I can work out, but what the hell is gold for instance? If anyone could point me at a guide I’d be much a appreciative.

I had a three player game of C&C Generals last night at a friends house. Close to the end a big box appeared saying the computers were out of sync and it closed. Generals isn’t the only game to do this, many do (Star Trek Armada was a bad one for it) and there really is no reason. If the game goes out of sync and the clients can tell they’re out of sync why not just pause and it request the current game state from the host? It can’t be that different to everyone else and it’s better than quitting.

Google Checkouts has a launched as a rival to PayPal. Competing with PayPal will be difficult, especially with the eBay integration. That could end when GBuy is released though (a competitor to eBay that will obviously integrate with Google Checkout).

On the surface Google Checkout is more expensive - 2.0% + $0.20 per transaction (PayPal is 1.9% + $0.30). However Google will let sellers have $10 of free transactions for every $1 spent on AdWords. The big disadvantage is that it’s only available in the United States. But that won’t last forever.

Well I’ve been using my Google Mail account for about a week and I have to say the spam filter is really good. A couple of hours after putting my email address on the blog I was getting spam and all but two messages have been correctly marked. More importantly, none of the messages marked have spam have been wrong.

There is one slightly entertaining fact. When I read the spam messages I still get Google ads related to the content. I thought perhaps they’d treat the spam folder as a special case. Although I guess it does make sense - I read a dodgy email with “Looking for the best value in discount software?” and get a nice Google ad offering me genuine Microsoft Office for £235.

Jitsu is another AJAX toolkit.

Like Backbase and Atlas it supports an XML based declarative format that is parsed by JavaScript and converted into real HTML.

This one is open source and free.