lemon garden

There’s nothing on TV and it is pouring with rain outside, so I’ve put on a bit of music: “Time (The Revelator)” by Gillian Welch.

I love the opening song from this album, the title track. The recorded song has Gillian singing and strumming her acoustic guitar, and David Rawlings playing lead on his 1935 Epiphone Olympic archtop acoustic guitar. There is no other instrumentation. It is a simple and beautiful sound. The guitar that David Rawlings plays has the sweetest, warmest tone that I have ever come across. It is worth buying the record simply to hear the end of this song, where Gillian quietly strums the chords and David picks out the most delicate melody on his guitar. The microphone is so sensitive that you feel really close to the music. You can hear his fingers moving on the strings and the rap of his hand against the body of the guitar. Wonderful stuff.

I know it breaks the tenth commandment*, but I covet that guitar. I wonder where one can buy a 1935 Epiphone Olympic archtop. This fellow found one knocking around in his parent’s attic. The lucky bugger.

* Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor most particularly his guitar. Exodus 20:17.

It’s been almost three months since I installed the Akismet plugin to deal with comment spam. In that time it has caught 6,716 spam comments!

If we assume about 5KB per comment, which seems a reasonable estimate, that would equate to nearly 33MB of wasted bandwidth. It’s a good thing that I’m allowed up to 10GB a month.

At work, I’m responsible for looking after the webservers that drive our website. Amongst other things, the website contains a variety of online forms. None of these result in content published online, instead they invariably fire off an email to someone within the organisation. I’ve had complaints from people who are receiving spam messages submitted via these forms, not that there’s much I can do about it. But I get the impression that these spammers are crawling all over the internet and submitting their strange messages into every single online form they come across.

If you were to tot up the costs of all this wasted bandwidth and wasted time for organisations and individuals around the world, how much would it come to?

Ruth Kelly, the Minister for Communities and Local Govenment, has created a Commission on Integration and Cohesion. She says, in her speech launching the new commission:

I believe … we have moved from a period of uniform consensus on the value of multiculturalism, to one where we can encourage that debate by questioning whether it is encouraging separateness.

The idea seems to be that we need a more integrated and coherent cultural life in Britain. It is an idea that gives me the creeps.

Multiculturalism is part of British life. Yet, in the last decade or two there has been something of a shift towards a monoculture, with many towns and cities around the country losing their distinct character and many people leading much the same sort of life. But this is a bad thing and should be, and is, resisted.

One thing I love about North Yorkshire is that, when you wonder around Skipton or Thirsk, you know you are in a North Yorkshire market town. Nowhere else in the world is quite the same; the style of the buildings and the stone used, the cobbled market place divided by the main street, are all so characteristic of Yorkshire market towns.

I love that a German friend was mighty confused when invited to a Yorkshire home for tea, and was presented with a meal rather than a hot drink. I like the chapels, canals and Mill buildings of northern England. I love that Yorkshire cheeses are very different from Somerset cheeses. I love the thatched cottages you see in various parts of the south of England and the strange Sussex pub games, entirely unknown to me, that my cousin dragged me into playing last time I was visiting.

There has been religious plurality in England since Cromwell (well, barring a few setbacks here and there). Britain has a diverse and wonderful culture. Would we really want Cornwall, Perthshire, London, Newcastle and Cumbria to all be the same? Multiculturalism is a great thing. It is a monoculture that is to be dreaded.

Having a varied cultural life in this country causes no problems. Having different people living rather different lives causes no problems. We seem to have a problem with a handful of crackpot muslims that want to blow things up, but I do not think this is because of the glorious plurality of culture on this beautiful island.

I had a frustrating day at work today, writing javascript to do fancy things with XML documents and running into annoying bugs with various web browsers. I’ve come to expect bugs in Internet Explorer, but I was surprised today to find a bug in Opera’s implementation of the LSSerializer interface.

Considering that Opera seems to be the only browser to have implemented the LSSerializer interface, it’s a shame that they haven’t quite got it right. I’ve reported the bug to them so, hopefully, they’ll sort it out in the next point release.

For those interested in such things, I have documented the bug along with a demonstration of the problem. Obviously, the demonstration will only work for you if you are using Opera, but you can always look at the source code to see what’s going on.

So England go out of the World Cup on penalties. Again. Bugger.

Fire the manager, that’s what I say. Oh, he’s gone already.

Now here’s an example of extremely bad software design. At work, one of my jobs is to administer the web server that hosts our public website. Most of the work I do by connecting to the server using “Remote Desktop” - a tool from Microsoft that allows me to open a windows session on the remote server. So I see the normal windows desktop. It works very well until I want to log off and close my remote desktop session. To do this I must do the following:

1. Click the “Start” button.
2. Click “Shut Down…”
3. Watch a dialog window entitled “Shut Down Windows” appear and fight off the momentary panic that I might be about to shut down our public web server(!).
4. Choose “log off” from the dialog window that pops up.
5. Double-check that I haven’t accidentally selected “shut down” from the drop down list of options.
6. Click “OK”.

A top notch piece of software design there from Microsoft.

When our web server fails to deliver an email, it bounces a copy of the message to me. These message failures get filed away in a quiet little corner and I look over them from time to time, to watch for any problems with the mail service. There was one message today, nothing alarming, just someone who’d mis-typed their email address into a form our our website. But the SMTP error information read as follows:

Final-Recipient: rfc822;
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: smtp;554 delivery error: dd This user doesn’t have a btopenworld.com account [0] - mta839.mail.ukl.yahoo.com
Anti-spam/. Violations will result in use of equipment located in California and other states.
Thu, 8 Jun 2006 09:05:15 -0700

So tell me, Mr Mail Server, what is this mysterious “equipment” to which you refer? And why is its location so secret?

I have visions of some terrible device dedicated to the torture of those guilty of “violation”, hidden away within the unmarked carriages of an anonymous goods train rattling across the States…

That’s one way to deal with spam I suppose.

This morning, as I lay dozing listening to the early morning radio, I slipped away into sleep and began to dream. In my dream I got up out of bed and began getting ready for the day ahead. On the radio, they were giving out the latest weather forecast - sunshine, across the country. But when I went to my bedroom window and drew back the curtains I found that, here in Yorkshire, it was actually snowing.

Later on, after I’d properly woken up and got ready for work, I felt a small pang of disappointment as I drew back the curtains to find only sunshine falling on the street.

My parents gave me an ipod nano for my birthday. It is an adorable little device. Those people at Apple certainly know how to make some beautiful, user-friendly gubbins. I’ve loaded it with assorted tunes from my record collection and make great use the “shuffle” mode to play a constant random selection of glorious music.

I had thought that I was blessed with a broad musical taste. But listening to this, I realise that most of my favourite music features acoustic instruments and has a definite leaning towards folk music. Except for the stuff by the Pixies.

To give you a flavour of my listening pleasures, whilst writing this post I’ve heard the following:

• “Stockton Gala Days” by 10,000 Maniacs - from MTV Unplugged
• “Clothes of Sand” by Nick Drake - from Time of No Reply
• “Time of No Reply” by Nick Drake - from Time of No Reply
• “Worcester City” by Eliza Carthy - from Anglicana
• “I Want to Sing That Rock And Roll” by Gillian Welch - from Time (The Revelator)
• “Bird Dream Of The Olympus Mons” by Pixies - from Trompe le Monde
• “Cripple Creek Ferry” by Neil Young - from After the Goldrush

You see what I mean?

Ok, I’ve just enabled the Akismet plugin that comes with the latest version of Wordpress. Apparently, this plugin will check each incoming comment to see if it looks like spam and, if so, stick it in a spam queue. The spam queue is separate from the normal moderation queue that holds comments from new visitors to this site until I can approve them. Akimet will automatically delete any comments sitting in the spam queue after 15 days unless I intercede to rescue them. Sounds good to me.

One thing I didn’t realise was that all the comments I have previously been marking as spam were still in the database. They were just hidden on the site. The Akismet plugin has detected all these spam comments and will delete them completely for me.

It seems that in the year that I’ve been running this blog I have received a grand total of 2394 spam comments and 124 genuine comments. 95% of the comments submitted to this site have been spam.

It occurs to me that, although the Akismet plugin will ease management of comment spam, it doesn’t address the bandwidth wasted by these spurious submissions. I wonder what proportion of the data streaming over the internet today is taken up by this illegal traffic.