I have read a number of Ben Elton’s recent novels including: Popcorn and Dead Famous which have been my favourites so far. I really liked Elton’s earlier work particularly some of his comedy written for TV, but these recent novels whilst good or even very good, are not great. His curent book (now in paperback) […]

A while ago it most websites used tables to position the various elements on the page. This was a bit of a fudge, but was in response to the fact that the original html used to construct websites did not have any other way of laying out pages. This was not an issue when the […]

The headline story in the Birmingham Evening Post yesterday is about a two year old boy that died of meningitis after being misdiagnosed by both a doctor and an ambulance crew. It appears in this case that the problem was that some of the symptoms the boy showed were similar to those of chickenpox. Full […]

I am a volunteer within St. John Ambulance. Whilst we have a number of members that work in the health care profession, most of our members do not. To be a first aider does however require holding and renewing a first aid qualification. Many of the members also go much further including qualifications in medical […]

I have recently reinstalled one of my computers as the operating system had become corrupt. Perform the reinstall has highlighted the number of extra applications that I have installed. Most of these are free. The following are all for Windows XP (Linux thankfully comes with most of these or equivelants already installed). Most of these […]

In July I visited the Cotswold Motoring Museum and Toy Collection at Bourton-on-the-Water. I wrote a blog entry: Blog Entry Cotswold Motoring Museum and Toy Collection Last weekend I had another opportunity to visit the museum and this time had some children with me. This included my daughter (who just slept through the whole visit), […]

Using the Apache mod_rewrite module and a bit of php code I have devised a basic Intrusion Detection System for Apache running on Linux / Unix operating systems. This is primarily as a demonstration of how aspects of an IDS can be implemented using existing tools provided in Linux and it’s applications. It could however […]

A new version of the loginfo Apache Log Analysis program (for Linux / Unix) has been released. The latest version is 0.1.2 beta, and includes a bug fix to resolve incorrect values in the hourly hits view. The latest version can be downloaded from: Linux Loginfo Apache Log Analysis Program

On Friday I became a Father. Amelia Rose Watkiss was born on Friday 29th July at 10:55 Weight 7lb 0.5oz Sarah and baby are both doing fine. If any friends or family would like to get in touch: stewart-sarah-amelia@watkissonline.co.uk Updated 2nd August 2005 Sarah and Amelia came home yesterday. I’ve also added a couple of […]