My laptop is heavy. Exceptionally heavy. It's also worth a lot, not just in its initial cost but still, 3 years later, it is a great spec and is well basically my business. So taking it back and forth between my two homes each week is not good for either me or my laptop. I have a spare laptop that I bought a while back. The spec isn't that great, the floppy drive hasn't worked since two months old, but it'll do for 2 nights a week in Cardiff. So I've installed Ubuntu Linux on it.

I feel like a beginner again! All I need at the moment is Firefox for definite, which I have. From this I can access my email via webmail, all my client sites have an online file manager via cPanel, so I can edit pages if necessary. So I've downloaded a new version of firefox, got my theme and extensions installed, however it doesn't run via the menu, only the old version runs, therefore I have two versions installed. And I'm completely lost as to how to fix it!! A lot of the documentation loses me, especially as my mind is on other things! It's going to be a steep learning curve I think.

Yesterday whilst on the train to Chester I saw a bloke with the perfect sized mini laptop. It was sleek, bright screen (like a plasma type screen), Sony Vaio. 12.1" screen at a guess (and from what I've found on the Sony site). It was BEAUTIFUL!! Unfortunately from what I've see it's also over £1,000 which is a shame as I was quite prepared to pay £500 or so for it. I'm sure Vaios used to be cheaper.

Anyhow, after lugging my case up and down steps yesterday getting to Dave's I've decided I'm going to find a laptop, put it on my business card (business expense), and then transfer the balance to my personal card that's doing 4% interest on transfers. That way if I don't get it all paid off just yet I'm not paying an extortionate amount of money either. So we're off this afternoon to take a look around Dixons and Comet, purely because I want it now!! (I'll then reformat and install what I want and not what they think I want on it!).

So I've now left my car at Dave's as we need it more there and I can survive without it in Cardiff. However this means travelling by train twice a week – which isn't a problem and means I can relax more than when driving, however it does mean I have to take my little suitcase back and forth with my laptop in. My laptop is a heavyweight Dell Latitude C840 and I love it. Just over 3 years old and I've only needed a replacement harddrive when the other corrupted. Have since upgraded to a larger capacity and faster HDD but otherwise it's all the original build. But the downside is that it is quite heavy and large, as it's a 15" screen. Plus on the trains you don't get much room anyhow, and I travel for at least 1.5 hours from Crewe to Cardiff so I could utilise the time by doing some work. Whilst I can sit and plan stuff with a pen and pad, I'd rather be able to sit and type work up too.

I know there are 12" laptops out there, but all quite costly right now. However I'd rather have a 10" if they do them (anyone know?). This way I could sit on the train, do work, and not build up wrestler type muscles by lugging around a tonne weight bag! Unfortunately, well not so unfortunate, I am buying a digital camera at the end of the month which will cost not quite £200 so that's my big expenditure until after Christmas. By then I probably won't really have much use for a small laptop! Of course a windfall of money may come in any second now and I can get both!!

About 3-4 weeks ago we had around 25 form submissions in at work for one department. However every field entry was *random set of letters*@thewebdomain.co.uk. Mildly annoying to most but much more to us as our forms are submitted straight to the recruitment database and it left me having to manually delete each one by searching on the 'email address' used.

I didn't think much more about it until about 2 weeks ago when it happened again on another of the department sites. This time I started figuring out error traps to prevent this from causing as much of a problem. I also traced the IP of the perpertrator and emailed the abuse@ address of the company running the IP range. I've also now seen others having similar problems and it's all the same script that's doing the work. Some of these form submissions get a mixed up email header going in as well, with the MIME type being described and you can see that the bcc address within this mess is an aol.com email address. Whether this is the original script writer or if it's some poor sod who's been caught in the crossfire who knows.

I'm also wondering whether this script is being run by bots stored silently on computers around the world as we're now getting hit about twice a day at work and every IP trace sends me to another country. I realise the bots could be hacking an IP but I'm wondering if the owners of the PCs don't realise that these bots are running in the background. At this point can I just recommend to everyone to either at least enable their XP firewall (if running XP) or go and download one of the many firewalls out there, free or purchased. ZoneAlarm, Kerio and Sygate are all perfectly fine. These will prevent bots from executing on your machine and accessing the internet!

So I've now got error traps in place that reroute the email to a spam box for checking over. However looking through the log files of the web server, this bot also doesn't have a useragent defined, so my first job for Monday will be to add in a few lines of script at the top of each form mailer saying "if no useragent defined then boot them to google". I don't have time for faffing about with Spammers, I've got a job to do!!