That’s my YSlow rating for the BMTG website.

It’s taken me a year but I’ve done it. The only thing missing – that elusive 9% – is a CDN. But I’m not going to have that so I now have the highest rating I can achieve.

Once this site is at its new host, I’ll start looking at the same thing (restrictions on the .htaccess file, amongst other things, prevents me at the moment).

To put this in perspective, Amazon.co.uk and Apple.com both have a score of 63%, Microsoft.com a score of 94% and PC Pro a score of 52%. Google, not surprisingly, scores 99%. What is surprising, though, is that Yahoo – the people who originated this scoring system – gets 82%.

Ha. After my story the other day that the iPhone advert has been banned, PC Pro have an excellent video showing you EXACTLY how quick the iPhone would be doing what they advertised.

Meantime,  my other story about a software retailer not lowering their prices has been revealed by PC Pro, and they’ve mentioned their name, which I decided not to do. Yes, stand up McAfee. The PC Pro article was also reported by an affiliate, who remained anonymous, but their words reflected my own. It doesn’t help that before this story broke, PC Pro has also published an article about how PC retailers were planning on dropping their prices to reflect the VAT change.

However, no sooner had they revealed the story about the VAT put McAfee decided to back down. Hurrah for common sense.

Some choice comments from their forums…

Do you really want to buy software as complex as a security suite from a company who cannot easily update the VAT rate in their own selling software?

I think McAfee has a very good candidate for “Most Pathetic Excuse of the Year”

There’s a facility with VirtualBox to install “Guest Additions” – various utilities for a particular OS that will enhance it’s capabilities to work with VirtualBox. Most of the other virtualisation software has its own equivalent.

However, I’ve struggled to get it work until I came across an article in PcPro (October 2007) about how to do just that. It’s for Ubuntu but works just as well for Kubuntu.

First of all mount the Guest Additions disk. Now run the following…

sudo aptitude install build-essential linux headers-`uname -r`

When that’s done you’re supposed to change to the CD rom and run the following…

sudo sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

For some reason I can’t get to the CD Rom via the terminal program (well I could, but it said there was nothing on it). Instead I found, by more luck than judgement, that I was able to install it at root via clicking on the CD Rom icon.

Anyway it worked. Amongst other things I can now resize my Kubuntu window up to the full 1280×1024 of my monitor. I’ve also got seamless mouse use – no more using a special key to move in and out of the virtual window, back to the host. All very handy.

Lastly, the same article gave details of a useful command line program provided with VirtualBox for making clones of your virtual hard drives. The command iis in the VirtualBox folder and is…

VBoxManage clonevdi {source disk} {output file}

The source disk is the full path to where you have the virtual drive stored.