It seems that Experts Exchange is now making people pay for accessing content generated by their users. I'm sure it was inevitable but it's very underhand to build up a free knowledge base and then make people pay for what will often be content they've contributed to.

It's even more underhand that they have to let the content remain accessible to Google otherwise they won't come up top for searches any more. But that's where there's a route around the subscription system. In easy steps:

1. Search for something useful in Google e.g. "javascript baseHfef".
2. See a possibly useful result from Experts Exchange.
3. View the version that's in Google's cache e.g. results for "javascript baseHref"

Maybe they'll think of a way around that sometime, but in the meantime if they want their content in Google then it's got to be accessible.

Most of the persistent low achievers in England's schools are poor and white, and far more are boys than girls, a Joseph Rowntree Foundation study says.

But surely persistance is an achievement in itself?

BBC NEWS | Education | Low attainers 'poor white boys'

The "Object reference not set to instance of an object" error in ASP.Net has to be one of the most annoying of all error messages giving, as it does, almost no clues as to what the error can be about. And yes, I know it's easy to get more information, but it doesn't really provide any more help than just saying "It broke" would.

It has to be up there with "Object expected" in PHP and the old favourite "Error on line 0 character 0" in JavaScript.

The Shepherd Epstein Hunter (SEH) Architects Fantasy Football league for 2006 to 2007 finished as below. We didn't quite make it to 1st place in the end, finishing second (which I blame almost entirely on Ashley Cole). Still, given the distance we were behind in 4th place at Christmas I can't complain that much, and I think this year we finished higher up in the national leaderboard than ever before (although I don't think they give out prizes for coming 57972nd). Next year it's going to be important to get a good start, though, given how close it seems to be at the end.

Well done to Keneche for winning, but we want our trophy back next year.

Telegraph Fantasy Football
SEH Architects

The new proposed Highway Code will apparently make it compulsory for cyclists to use cycle-specific facilities rather than roads wherever they're available. Knowing the state of some of the cycle lanes I'm faced with I don't see this as sensible and hence have signed the petition to have the new highway code rejected by MPs.

Obviously, it's not going to make any difference, (the government has far stronger groups than cyclists that it doesn't listen to on a regular basis,) but that's no reason not to try. The cycle lanes I'd be forced to use are currently half full of diggers around the Olympic site. Am I meant to hop on and off the pavement, into and out of the flow of traffic? It's just not very well thought out.

Petition to: Listen to cyclists and not approve the revised highway code.

The apparently XML derived "500 server error" problem with FCKEditor's image upload tool and asp.net seems very common, and there seem to be half a million different confusing solutions on the web. In my case, it turned out the problem was paths and was fixed by adding a new key entry in web.config:

<add key="FCKEditor:UserFilesPath" value="/_img/cms"/>

So nothing to do with XML at all really and the error was simply the result of an incorrect URL resulting in a 500 server error that returned invalid XML... A helpful error code could be added to FCKEditor, perhaps?

I was camping in Cornwall with the Sainsbury Clan over Whitsun Bank Holiday weekend. It really wasn't the best time for it, as this picture of our tent as it looked when we came back to it on a very windy Sunday afternoon shows:

We decided to call it quits at that point and pack up and drive back to London.