Apparently Japanese telecoms companies are trying to convince the world that written Japanese does not already have enough characters.

These additional characters are used to depict emotions and other symbols in a similar manner to SMS emoticons.

Rather than being combinations of characters, such a , which is entered as a : followed by a ) ,  to represent a smiley in the Latin character sets, there is a movement to create a whole range of  new symbols, into Unicode, which include colour and animation.

At present, they are exchanged in SMS messages by using privately agreed character codes, but there is pressure to add these new emoji ideographs into the Unicode specification.

Some of the key problems that adding Emoji to the Unicode standards would present include:

1. Adding shapes to Unicode, which has carefully remianed indepentant of how glyphs are drawn
2. Adding colour requirements to Unicode, which again has had no logical need to specify colours for characters
3. Adding the concept of animation definitions to characters, which is well outside the range of a character set definition

In Australia, Queensland’s Tourist Authority is pulling off a phenomenal publicity stunt. Which may be a victim of its own success, as the web site for a single job seems to be barely accessible because of the quantity of hits on their web site.

Queensland are advertising a well paid real job, under the slogan “The best job in the world“, for six month on the the Great Barrier Reef paradise island called Hamilton Island.

The aim of using this job to attract international interest in Hamilton and the other reef islands seems to be being met too well. In the few days since the Queensland Tourist authority started advertising the island reef job, it has attracted the attention of British, American and Japanese news media.

For the last three days, http://www.islandreefjob.com/ has rarely been accesible because of the overwelming web traffic.

I’ve recently been testing a new broadband line speed checker called Isposure. The download is free and the speed tester is easy to install on Windows PCs.

It is unobtrusive while running and seems to provide accurate speed results for my ADSL connection. Isposure provides charts of your connection’s behaviour and the ability to compare it with other local providers, presumably based on collated speed statistics of other Isposure users.

This doesn’t suprise me particularly, as one of the authors of the software was a former colleague of mine, who was a particulary skilled developer.

If you’re interested in trying the product it can be downloaded from Isposure.com. When you are installing, you can use the promotional code “Luke Jagger”.

It is so good to see a simple, free broadband speed checker that does what it says and doesn’t try to sell you anything.

There’s been quite a bit of coverage on the radio about a scam, where people receive a call on their mobile phone, but it rings off quickly, either just before they answer or as they answer.

The scam relies on the victims having a natural, and reasonable inclination to ring the number back.

What the victim hears when they call back is the tone that tells them call is ringing. Many people are very patient and listen for a fair time before they give up. What they are actually listening to is a recording of a ringing tone, on a premium rate number. of course, the longer the victim holds on and the more they call back, the more money they are paying on their phone bill to the scammer.

I’ve recently had a selection of calls to my mobile phone which fit the profile, but I have not wasted my money by ringing them back. In my case they all called on different days between 11:00 and 12:30 GMT, presumably hoping I’d call them back at lunch time.

The numbers which called are :

• 07506738901
• 07791832748
• 07791835658
• 07791841162
• 07908583355
• 07908583385
• 07908583386
• 07908583387
• 07944453453

My advice is not to call back any number you don’t recognise, particularly if it rings off quickly. Genuine callers will wait for you to answer and will try again.

If you know of any other numbers that might be linked with this type of scam, please add your own comments.

Freecycle is an organisation that tries to keep unused objects out of landfill, largely through locally based email groups on yahoo. Unfortunately, as with every good idea, there can be some downsides.

I am a moderator for the Congleton Freecycle group, and as such have to try and keep out the obvious scammers and spammers.

Recently, I’ve seen a surge in a particular type of scam on the freecycle groups.

It starts with someone, who usually has recently joined the freecycle group, advertising a high value item, such as a PS/2 or a Tom Tom Sat Nav.

When people respond to the advert, they get a reply saying the item has gone but directing them to a web site where the goods can be won  or purchase cheaply.

At best victims that fall for it provide referral commission to the scammer, and at worst they provide their identity and credit card details to the scammer for later fraud or identity theft.

A typical scam response read like this:

I’m really sorry, but the Playstation 2 has already been given away to someone else I wish I had more to give away.

However, the least I can do is try and provide with some useful information to grab yourself a free Playstation 3 (which is how I got mine, which arrived in just over a week!)

First of all, you need to head over to <Scam web site> – sign up to the website, and then you need to complete an offer… I’d recommend either doing the the Lovefilm offer or the HSBC Bank Offer (where you just have to open a bank account), as they’re both free! Or, you could complete the Gala Bingo offer which only costs £5!

All of the companies which are offers are really well known so there’s no risk.

I have already received my Playstation 3 through my door! And am awaiting some new games for it too. I was really skeptical about this at first, but my friend showed me what he had received for free, so I thought I may as well try it out, and I’m so glad I did! (I have the new iPhone 3G coming soon too!)

If you have any questions, please reply to this email with the subject as QUESTION.

Once again, I’m so sorry that you missed out on this Playstation 2, but I hope that you will be able to obtain a brand new Playstation 3 just like I did this way.

The website again is:<Scam web site>

Thanks a lot.

<Scammer name>
xxx

At the recent W3C Technical plenary in Cannes, I was discussing issues of literal translation. A Japanese delegate came up with a phrase that was new to me. “緑の黒髪 （みどりのくろいかみ）” The phrase literally means green/black hair, but has an idiomatic meaning that the hair is very dark and lustrous.

Debian release a new version of Linux on 23^rd October 2008.

As I run an Apache testing web server on my Debian box, I installed the most recent updates. Then came the simple question of How can I be sure that I have the most recent version of Debian Linux.

The simplest way is to open the file /etc/debian_version . On a correctly installed Debian System, this has a single line entry showing the version number, as defined by the package base files.

Many thanks to Dragon for overseeing a smooth domain transfer of  www.mrpillow.co.uk   from edirectory’s servers at freecom.net over to united hosting.

This was tricky operation because the IPS tags appeared to be in the ether while both parties were attempting to serve DNS !

No problem for Dragon  who also created a new index file for mr pillow and  ensured that the www does not need to be typed in to find the website.

Thank you – Peter (Mr Pillow)

In the article Enabling “Send To” from Microsoft Office to Mozilla Thunderbird I wrote about restoring the Send To email recipient link from within applications.

Microsoft Windows Vista also seems to lose the right click on a file for “Send To mail recipient”. This is another MAPI problem, and appears to be a problem for many mail applications including Outlook, as well as Thunderbird, so conspiracy theorists won’t be able to blame this on Micro$oft protectionism for their own email programs.

I looked at several solutions for restoring the missing link. The best solution that I found was in the article “Restore missing Mail Recipient entry to the Send To menu in Windows Vista“, where Ramesh Srinivasan suggests 3 approaches.

The simplest approach restored the send to link for me on Windows Vista, and used his simple automated tool at: //www.winhelponline.com/fixes/

I still haven’t worked out why I lost my send to link from my file manager in the first place – I assume it’s just a vagary of Vista following one of the many updates.

When I’m not flying helicopters or writing books I like to relax with various sorts of craft work.  A short time ago I found this fun new craft – Pixelhobby.  It enables you to make your own mosaics, using tiny plastic tiles on a baseplate.  No cutting or glueing is involved, and it’s the sort of thing you can do in odd moments.  You can even use the Pixelhobby software to make mosaics from your own photos.  Anyway, when my supplier decided to give up I bought all her supplies, and…well, you can find out the rest by going to the Pixelhobby website.

Many thanks to the dragon for giving me some web space.  I’m  a helicopter instructor, working at Tatenhill Airfield, near Burton-on-Trent.  Helicopters are tremendous fun, so if you fancy having a go, have a look at my web pages and then contact me to book a trial lesson - or even a whole Private Pilot’s Licence course.

Right, I’m off to sort out some marketing stuff for the helicopter book.  Bye for now.

The dragon at Dragon Thoughts has taken a new flier under its wings today.

Helen Krasner, author and helicopter pilot instructor is a dragon’s friend and needed a little web space.

Helen has been given her own pages to write about her helicopter flying courses in Staffordshire and Derbyshire.

Helen is always interested in new students for helicopter flying.