If you turn to today’s Technology Guardian (available online) you’ll see a lovely shot of me standing in my garden with my wife’s laptop, looking seriously at the (blank) screen. It’s for the article Porn bill firm opens new front.

It’s part of The Guardian’s ongoing coverage of the MBS billing software debacle which I first covered in March last year.

It’s given some positive press to the MBS Victims Forum Liz and I set up towards the end of last year.

I wonder what (if anything) it will do for me: “Professional blogger Andy Merrett”.

Welcome to any Guardian readers who’ve been following links!

If you’d like to read what I think of Apple’s latest operating system, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, head over to Tech Digest and read my full review: OS X Leopard First Day Review.

Does anyone have any decent information on terminating an application in Mac OS X when it refuses to quit by any known method?

I’m talking about EyeTV, which every so often hangs during playback (spinning beach ball), but refuses to quit.

Here’s what I’ve tried, all to no avail:

1. “Force Quit” icon on dock
2. Run "kill -9 $pid" from the Terminal command line (where process ID is found using ps aux | grep EyeTV

When using the second method, I get this kind of output:

andy 576 0.0 0.0 0 0 ?? E Mon10PM 0:00.00 (EyeTV)

The “E” status means that the application is in the process of ending.

Only it never does. The only way I can quit or relaunch it is to restart (or log out), which is really annoying if I’ve got a lot of other applications open.

EyeTV is the only application that does this. I’ve done all the usual housekeeping stuff I can think of (repairing permissions, etc).

Does anyone have any ideas? It’s a real pain.

I’ve written a number of topical posts here, based on current news events that I’ve felt passionate about, and it’s attracted a fair number of visitors and created a small amount of conversation in the comments.

I’ve also written a couple of posts about minor celebrities, which still pulls in a respectable number of visitors looking for information on them.

I’ve also written one post which has become quite a honey pot for people searching for help and advice about an ongoing software issue.

In March, I wrote about Micro Bill Systems’ software, which effectively takes a PC hostage if users refuse to pay a bill.

I hadn’t been personally affected by the issue, but wrote about it because I read an article in the Guardian newspaper and felt angry about those who were caught up in the mess.

It wasn’t a particularly well-planned article, but because I was one of the few bloggers who picked up on the issue early on, it was indexed well in Google.

Then the conversation started. Generally emotive. Sometimes heated.

The post currently holds the record for most visitors over a sustained period (over 17,000 in six months), and comments (345 to date).

And yet, the post has done more.

It has brought people suffering a common affliction together.

It led to the creating of the MBS Victims Forum – a more structured way to discuss the issues (standard blog comments tend to get a little unwieldy once you hit the hundred mark).

It provided a springboard for people to take action, and know that they weren’t alone.

It could yet be challenged by MBS’s lawyers, though I’ve not been told to remove it – yet.

Proof that, even if a post isn’t “dugg” or “stumbled upon”, and doesn’t get huge amounts of traffic in a short period of time, it can, over time, have a significant impact on a situation or a group of people.

Writing about topical events simply to get traffic isn’t advisable. It’s like writing a blog simply to make money.

Passionless writing tends not to get you very far, but if you have a genuine interest in topical subjects, people, and situations, then go for it, because your post could become a focal point and online community for other like-minded people.

I work a lot with open tabs in Firefox, and frequently use the Command-Alt-Left Arrow and Command-Alt-Right Arrow key combinations to switch one tab to the left or right.

It has become very noticeable recently that sometimes Firefox refuses to switch tabs.

It won’t always switch tabs when the cursor is in the location bar (but now I’ve just tested it, it will).

It won’t always switch tabs when there is Flash content on the page (at least, this seems to be the trigger for misbehaviour).

It won’t always switch tabs when the cursor is in a form text box, but again, it’s intermittent.

It is really starting to annoy me now as it means that I have to click with my mouse on the tab I want, and I’m a keyboard shortcut junkie.

Anyone have any bright suggestions as to how I can fix this, or whether it’s something that I just have to put up with?

I don’t know what was happening today, but Firefox (version 2) for Mac decided to mess me about.

Perhaps it was because I had a pretty nasty, unproductive blogging day anyway, but every time I wanted to do something in Firefox, it misbehaved in some way.

Firstly, the yellow “minimise” buttons disappeared for part of the morning, yet Command-M would still minimise the window.

Other weird behaviours which I’ve observed before included:

• Window refuses to stay put when dragged from one place on the desktop to another, particularly when dragging between two monitor displays.
• The active tab changes when moving the window.
• The window’s title bar disappears above the top of the screen after dragging, requiring a minimise and maximise operation to restore it.
• Whole program hanging when trying to do inline search for text on large pages.

I’m sure there were other issues as well.

The only saving grace for the latest version of Firefox is that it regularly saves the text in form elements — this has saved a lot of time when I’ve had to restart the program, though it would be great if it didn’t crash or hang in the first place.

Highly unusual for Skype, the service has been down for a couple of days now.

I’m not moaning — I don’t really use Skype much except for a bit of instant messaging — but I thought there was a slight irony to their “Heartbeat” page this morning:

This shows that SkypeOut, SkypeIn, Skype Voicemail, and Skype SMS, are all working normally – however, it’s near impossible to log in to use them.

Maybe there are secret ways in that I don’t know about, but on my Mac I can’t even keep the Skype client loaded for more than about 10 minutes before it crashes.

I know they’re working on it — and to be honest it’s actually quite nice not being disturbed.

How are you coping without Skype?

I think inKline Global, who make (amongst other things) the PC Booster software for the PC, has been taking “customer support” lessons from the Domain Registry of America.

I was intrigued and perplexed as to why inKline Global were taking out targeted banner advertisements for their PC Booster software, and yet not filtering out Mac users. I’ve seen a number of banners stating that “my Mac has poor performance”, and when I was intrigued enough to click on one, I was offered a PC-only piece of software, even though the sales page on the web site still referred to my Mac!

I emailed them, from interest only, just to see if they were aware that they were wasting money on poorly targeted ads:

Why do you advertise to Mac owners?

Your FAQ says categorically:

“Does PC Booster run on Macintosh?

PC Booster does not run on Macintosh.”

So why do you run loads of stupid banner ads saying “Your Mac may need a tune up”?

It’s wasted advertising and it’s annoying! If you only make PC software, you should abandon contextual advertising to anyone NOT on a PC!

Now I don’t care what this company does with their money – but I enjoy sending pesky letters from time to time, just for the fun of it.

Here’s the response I received this morning, via email, from the lovely Trisha:

Dear Andy,

Currently PC Booster is not compatible with Macintosh. Once we have a compatible Mac- product, we will notify you through our newsletter.

Have a nice day.

Oh I will have a nice day, safe in the knowledge that I haven’t wasted money with a company that doesn’t bother to read their support emails properly. Had she done this, she would have seen me reference the very answer stating that they don’t make the software for Macs!

Oh, and you had better not notify me through your newsletter, as I’ve never signed up for it. I do hope you haven’t subscribed me to it.

Come on, companies, sort it out.

I currently have four or five web browsers installed on my two Macs, and am still deciding exactly which one I like the best.

I used to be a staunch Safari fan – nothing could beat it, even though I knew that it lacked some features.

However, I went through a phase where Safari would quit for no obvious reason, and I ended up not being able to trust it. Believe me, when a browser crashes and loses ten to twenty open tabs, and your browsing history is incomplete (because it crashed) it takes the shine off.

I’d love to use Safari more, and with the impending iPhone, there are rumours that Safari will become a lot more important in the global scheme of Internet browsers – or at least, developers will need to ensure that their pages display and work correctly using it.

I had moved over to Firefox but had the same crashing problem. However, version 2 of FF seems a lot more stable – in fact I don’t think it’s crashed once since I’ve started using it, on either my Intel- or PowerPC-based Macs.

Camino does a decent job but its lack of built-in spell checking in forms really doesn’t cut it for me.

Opera was OK, and I liked some of its features, but I rarely fire it up now.

Firefox seems to be my favourite at present, and there’s a fairly good chance that what I’m seeing on screen is similar to what my PC-owning friends will see. I also like the fact that it remembers which tabs you’ve recently closed, and can start up an old Firefox session if you quit the program and then relaunch it. It also handles rich text forms far better than any of the other browsers – you may as well forget Safari handling them though hopefully a future release will address that.

It’s still not quite got the Mac GUI effect going on – the buttons are a bit XP-like – but at the end of the day I’m more concerned about getting my work done effectively. It’s not ugly – just not quite ‘Mac’.

And it’s not Microsoft, which can’t be a bad thing.