Philip Nicosia

I’m puzzled by Google at times as I’m sure a lot of webmasters are. I’ve just noticed that some of the pages of this site have been labelled as “Supplemental Result”.

Anyone who has a website for long enough will likely have this happen to them but I am puzzled as to how Google determines which pages they place in the supplemental index.

One of the pages that has gone supplemental is www.philipnicosia.com/page/3/

Now this page updates virtually everyday and has done so since it was online. Any search results going to this page are going to be months out of date and pretty pointless for the user. I could understand if this page remained the same months on end by why has this page in particular been singled out?

I don’t have the same problem with much older pages such as page/4/ page/5/ right up to page/20/ so what has Google got against page/3/ ?

My brother was recently a victim of internet fraud where someone had got his log in details for online banking and setup transfers to send money to another account. Now this really surprised me as he is not stupid and runs his business on the internet and wouldn’t have fallen prey to any phishing emails.

He runs anti virus software on his PC but received a key logging program via an email which wasn’t picked up by him or by the software. These key loggers record all the key strokes you make on your PC and then sends the results through to the criminals who then analyze this data trying to strip out usernames and passwords to get access to any online accounts you may have.

Given that the security of most online banks has improved over the years I questioned how they managed to get through. When he logs onto internet banking he has to enter his log in details and then is taken to a separate page which he then has to go through further security and enter random characters from another password via a drop down menu. These menus are very secure and stop key loggers from getting these details hence making your sign in more secure.

So how did they get in? My brothers downfall was due to laziness which I’m sure there are many hundreds of thousands of people who would fit into this category. What he had done was use 1 password across many other accounts he had with people like Ebay, Paypal, Web Hosting accounts etc, because it was easier for him to remember and it was this password which he also used for his online banking drop down menu password.

Now the criminals will be able to see this pattern and used it to get into his bank account. Luckily he caught it quite quickly and the bank were able to instantly return the money but has he have not logged in for some days he might not have been so lucky.

The moral to the story is “Don’t use the same password across multiple accounts“.

I noticed on the Bucks Herald website that they were reporting gridlock on virtually every road into town on Monday morning.

Apart from the 1 disastrous day back in August when the Water Board decided to cone off the roads at the same time as the new junction road works were going on I haven’t found too many problems with traffic myself.

That being said, I don’t tend to travel at peak times so perhaps I am a bad judge of this. Now that the traffic lights have been installed and are working at the new Watermead junction I am finding it quicker to get out of Watermead and not too difficult to get in.

That may change when the four way lights are used by the new housing development junction more regularly but only time will tell. I do find it surprising that the traffic lights haven’t been made as intelligent as they could be. When traffic is on a green light in out out of Aylesbury the right hand filter light for traffic into Watermead is red.

This obviously makes sense and keeps the traffic moving along the main road but the amount of times I have been sat at the filter light which only lets a few cars through at a time when there is nothing coming in the other direction, you would think they could make the traffic lights intelligent enough to realise there is no traffic coming into Aylesbury, there is a queue of traffic waiting to come into Watermead so lets change lights so traffic can still go straight on out of Aylesbury and turn right.

How hard would that be?

Carphone Warehouse are buying AOL Uk for £370 million pounds and together with it’s TalkTalk broadband operation will make it the third largest broadband in the UK.

Given the problems that Carphone Warehouse have with Talk Talk broadband is this such a good idea?

I got a Sony PSP given to me for Christmas last year and I have to confess I haven’t used it that much. I’m not into all these modern games so much and would prefer playing the old classics like Tetris.

So I was looking at it the other day and thinking what else could I use it for other than playing games and having a wireless TV. Going through the menus I noticed the RSS Channel which wasn’t there when I first got it so must have been part of an upgrade.

So I delved a little deeper into it and it turns out that the Sony PSP now supports Podcasts. You simply enter the RSS feed of the podcast you want to subscribe to into the internet browser and it will recognize it as a feed and ask you if you want to add it to the RSS Channels. Once you’ve done this you can then select the feed in the RSS Channels menu and it will list all of the available episodes.

You then have more options with the episodes and can choose to stream it live on your PSP or save it to your memory stick. Saving it I think is a better option if you’ve got room as once your playing the file you can fast forward and rewind until your hearts content without having to wait for the PSP to catch up with its buffering.

When you’ve saved the file it appears under the Music menus as it is an MP3 and the Sony PSP thinks it will be a music file.

So if you don’t have an iPod and normally listen to podcasts on your PC a Sony PSP is a good way of listening to podcasts on the move.