Your Account is deleted

Amongst other things, I'm the webmaster for the Australian Carnivorous Plant Society.

I just received this email from seekdotnet, the company we have been using to host our website for the last few years:

Dear Mr/Mrs [NewLine] Your Account is deleted due to non-activating more than 1 month. [NewLine] Thank You.

(Yes, that is an exact copy of the text, including the questionable grammar and the [NewLine] string).

And they aren't kidding - browsing to the website www.acps.org.au results in a 404 File not found error. Eeeek!

No warnings, no nothing. Just deleted like that after being in continuous good financial standing. If you want to keep your customers, you don't just delete all their info if there's suddenly a problem with payments. You might at least attempt to let them know there's a problem so they can fix it before it goes too far.

I've contacted the company, and I'm hoping commonsense will prevail. We'll see.

How to rip audio from a DVD to Audio CD

Paul videoed Sevenfold's recent performance and created a really nice DVD for all the band members.

Jane doesn't have a DVD player however, so I used these instructions to burn her an audio CD.

Additional comments 2nd Jan 2008

Things didn't go as smoothly as I'd hoped. My DVD burner came bundled with ULEAD Burn.Now. I wanted to add CD-TEXT track info which Burn.Now supports. However after I burned the CD and tested it, I discovered that some of the tracks had been messed up. The track times were correct, but the content had been messed up. Jumping to track 4 played the content that was actually half-way through track 2. Very weird.

I read that WinAmp supports CD-TEXT, but after trying it out, discovered that it only supports reading CD-TEXT, not writing it.

As a last resort, I grabbed iTunes, and it did the job, though it could only add CD-TEXT for each individual track - I didn't see a way to add info about the album as a whole.

Passed 070-528

This morning I sat the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 - Web-based Client Development exam, and am pleased to report I passed with a score of 824. Yippee :-)

There were a few questions that were a bit tricky. One in particular had me wondering if it had an error in it, the possible answers didn't seem to make sense to me.

Not to worry, I'm now a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist .NET Framework 2.0 Web Applications.

Unlike some previous exams I've taken, I didn't study for this one at all. It just goes to show what Rob says, if you know you're stuff then you can pass these exams just relying on your experience.

Next stop is 70–547 and I'll have have my Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD): Web Developer.