As if to start, this evening I went to a Glasgow TechMeetup. There are Edinburgh equivalents that I never attended so I don’t know how they compare. The format was:

• beer and pizza at 6.30. Next time I must remember a bottle opener!
• a welcome about 7pm including an introduction from everyone in the room. There must have been about fifty people in the room so it took about half an hour!
• a few minutes to chat amongst ourselves, particularly with anyone who sounded interesting or employable.
• a talk about web design
• a talk about http caching

The first talk was pretty dull and I was ready to call it a day at that point. Thankfully I didn’t cos the second talk was well worth the entry fee, even if it was free. If you bump into serialseb he gives a great talk - funny and informative.

• Emily did a fantastic post (with graphs!) about the minimum-alcohol-pricing legislation which is definitely worth a look. I’m a little bit disgusted at the way the newspapers have been flat-out lying about the effects this kind of legislation would have.
• Someone’s lit a fire under Nick’s, uh, editor and he’s started posting like a fiend. Also he seems to be writing a development blog which generally makes for good reading in my opinion. Your opinions on the matter may vary. The new stuff starts here where the long-dormant Clockwork Aphid name is revived. A long time ago I even made a clockwork aphid logo, so I’ll see if I can root it out and donate it to the cause.
• Ben Lippmeier has also started a development blog for DDC, his strict variant of Haskell. I enjoyed following his deep-dives into the bowels of GHC while porting it to SPARC so this one should be interesting.

Those details in full:

• Title: “Proofs are Programs: 19th Century Logic and 21st Century Computing”
• Date: Monday 16th March
• Time: 8.30pm
• Place: Filmhouse cafe bar, Lothian Road

As the 19th century drew to a close, logicians formalized an ideal notion of proof. They were driven by nothing other than an abiding interest in truth, and their proofs were as ethereal as the mind of God. Yet within decades these mathematical abstractions were realized by the hand of man, in the digital stored-program computer. How it came to be recognized that proofs and programs are the same is a story that spans a century, a chase with as many twists and turns as a thriller. At the end of the story is a principle for designing programming languages that will guide computers into the 21st century.

On a related note, one of the Cafe Sci organisers has started a new blog, so go and visit to say hello. Welcome to blogging Ed!

I’d like to think that a food blog would be a tad more excited about food than this. I know Helen is a lot more enthusiastic than that, and I’m pretty sure it comes across in her writing.

SPAM!
© Laura A.

But once or twice a comment by a genuine person (as identified by my patented Genuine Person Detector™) has been dropped straight into the spam bin. So I check through the spam fairly regularly, unspamming the occasional good comment and deleting everything else. It takes just a few minutes, but it’s really beginning to get to me.

It’s not difficult to spot the spam. And I’m really glad the spam-blocker does such a good job. But it just depresses me terribly that I get all this stuff in the first place. Since starting this blog I have had 310 genuine comments and 4627 spam. The vast majority of that spam has been tediously obvious “hot girls! viagra! stock tips! buy buy buy!” links, hundreds of them in a single comment and no content whatsoever. Just ugly link dumps. I just get so fed up scrolling through these things, even though I know they’re already binned by the time I see them.

I wish there was a Neighbourhood Watch badge I could stick on my blog, to say “don’t spam here, we’ll catch you”. It’s selfish and silly, but I just get so beaten down by the endless stream of automated, transparent, stupid crap that flows through this blog.

I guess there is an interface issue as well. It would be easier to sort through the crap if the spam folder were augmented a bit:

• Showing username, email address and website is enough to identify most spam. If there’s nothing obvious spammy in the comment itself then the submitted website will be a link to some dubious-sounding pharmaceuticals supplier.

  In this case, an abbreviated spam page that just showed the meta-data (and maybe the first line of comment, like Gmail) would be quicker to skim through. I would get more spam on a single page too, so I wouldn’t have to click “Next page” if there’s a lot there.

• Sorting by “spamminess” would be good too. I’m sure the spam blocker assigns a “probability of spamminess” to each comment. It would be nice if the “least spammy” comments were floated to the top of the page, so I could deal with them first and then kill the tedious stuff without looking.

I’ve submitted these suggestions to the developers. I would guess the first one is more likely to be followed through than the second. I get the impression that the Wordpress interface doesn’t actually know the probabilities, it only receives a thumbs up/down for each comment.

The flat situation is idling at the moment. The surveyor was holding their verdict to ransom until we paid them. So, their fee was paid today and so the building society should have also received the valuation and will agree to give us money for that particular property.

When that’s out of the way the subject to survey bit will be done and, I suppose, a wee bit legal shenanigans takes place. After that it’s more or less over. Until then we still don’t really know when we get our grubby paws on the keys. Maybe a month, maybe more.

Meanwhile we have to think about letting our landlords ken we’ll be leaving — of course, we’ll need to know exactly when that is so we don’t find ourselves without a house — and look for furniture too.

You can see why I haven’t been blogging about this: it’s cos we basically haven’t a clue. ;-)

Yeah, I’ve been thinking about laptops. And I honestly have to say I’m being quite tempted by the Asus eee-by-gum-lad. It’s cheap (+1), it runs Linux (+1), it has a small screen (-1), it has a Flash hard disk (+1), it has WiFi and Ethernet (+2, I’m looking at you Apple).

My only reticence is with the keyboard. I’d like a chance to play with one for a while but I can’t find any stockists that are likely to have them on display. (Apparently Toys R Us sell them, but probably locked in boxes if they have any in stock north of the Watford Gap.) If I can happily type on it then it looks like a winner.

A thought just occurs — does it have a hash key?

Edit: Naw, I’ve completely changed my mind. This is what the Dixons website says: “916 kg This is the weight of the appliance in KG”. I’ll never fit that in my bag! ;-)

I will probably get more blogging done in the next week. Helen is going on holiday — skiing in France — and I’m staying here to enjoy the horizontal rain and furious umbrella-killing gusts that are typical of Edinburgh winters.

But I’ll be heading away to see my parents for the weekend, so probably no updates in the immediate future. But I must remember to take my CCNA book with me and do some studying.

It was in these darkest periods that she needed a challenge more than anything else, or I feared I might lose my companion for good. When she visited she would sit and stare into space, or idly check for new messages, then disappear outside again for days.

It was during the darkest stage that she and I were sitting indoors. I sat next to the fire, reading some papers for work. She stood at the window, hands clasped behind back, staring at the grim steel-grey sky. Suddenly there came a clatter, as of something heavy landing in the mailbox. She jumped into action (I suppose looking for any distraction, no matter how trivial). She returned from the mailbox with a large parcel, about the size of a hardback book, addressed in her name.

Inside was a book, and a slim, handwritten letter written in washed-out grey ink.

Dear Miss — —,

I have just received the challenge you have set me. It is unusual but I promise to attempt it to the best of my ability.

In return, you should find a complete book of recipes enclosed. My challenge to you is:

Make every recipe in this book at least once before the end of 2008.

Yours etc.

My companion read through the letter, and smiled slightly to herself. She turned over the enclosed book, to reveal the front cover: Nigella Express.

• Apologies to Arthur Conan Doyle, fans of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and anyone who can write. :-)
• The full challenge is available on the challenger’s website.
• Photo by user Kaptain Kobold on Flickr

Not only does it allow you to browse your own images from the page where you write your posts, but you can also browse CC-licensed public images from the rest of Flickr. You can do tag filtering, to look for cats or … well, cats anyway.

I really like the occasional photo to lighten up an otherwise text-heavy post, so this second feature is going to come in real handy. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious means of limiting searches to your listed friends on Flickr, but maybe that will come in future versions.

It will probably also mean that I make more use of my Flickr account. (I even went to the effort of finding out what my username and password for it is; I had long since forgotten.)

Cat photo taken by robad0b.