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The funniest thing I’ve read about the differences north and south of the border in ages:

[It] hasn’t really been much discussed among those in the terrified red states except when, deep in the night, from their respective lumpy twin beds, they whisper to each other across the room as they pop their Ambien and stroke their portfolios and curse their very genitals: oh my God what’s wrong with those freakin’ Canadians?

David Blunkett resigns, and a Krankie falls off a beanstalk.

I’m not sure why I didn’t think of this earlier. This site has been battered by spam commenters over the last month or so, averaging about 250 – 300 a day – at first I started blocking specific IP addresses with a .htaccess file, but of late the pattern seems to have changed. It’s unusual to get more than two or three hits from the same IP address, which makes me wonder if the spammers are either a) using scripts that change the spoofed IP address on a frequent basis; or b) are using 0wn3d machines.

Then I downloaded Kitten’s Spaminator which caught about 75% of the inbound spam and killed it dead – but I couldn’t figure out a way of training it to catch the ones that were being missed. So while things were better, the spam that was getting through was still a pain.

Then last night the highly obvious piece of inspiration struck – I’ve no idea why I’ve never thought of doing this before, but there you go. The vast majority of the spam is against old posts – certainly it’s very rare to be spammed on a post which is less than 3 months old. I’m not sure why this is, but it does leave me a get-out clause for the moment, at least until I play around with the filters a bit more. A quick ‘update comment-status’ SQL query later, and comments are disabled globally for any post more than three months old. And my inbox has never been quieter…

In search of CPD points, I was at not one, but two BCS events this week – the first one at the West Yorkshire branch for an intro to open source; and the second at South Yorkshire. This was a talk by Richard Allan MP, who’s the constituency MP for the part of Sheffield where the university (and therefore the BCS branch) is located.

As well as being the constituency MP, he’s also the MP That Knows Most About IT, by dint of actually earned a living that way before giving up a real job and entering Parliament. His talk wasn’t overtly political, even though he’s a Lib Dem, but there’s certainly enough to be political about. One of the main Department of Work and Pensions offices is just down the road from the venue, so naturally the subject of the largest Government faux-pas in history came up, as well as his take on the many and varied cock-ups that pass for Government IT projects these days.

So it was doubly depressing – firstly because he’s standing down at the next election (May 5th was his tip) and secondly because he’s a member of an opposition party, so presumably the manifest sense that he was talking is ignored by those in power in their headlong rush for headlines and soundbites. The problem as he sees it is that it’s not IT’s fault that things go wrong all the time – rather that it’s an inevitable result of the process that has systematically stripped out of the public sector anyone who knows enough about the right way of going about a major capital project to be able to manage them to a successful conclusion. And far from learning from past mistakes, even bigger and more expensive projects are going the same way.

Which certainly matches with the experience of the person of whom I’m no longer allowed (on pain of domestic disharmony) to refer to as Mrs Timzilla. Working as she does for a large government department that has just outsourced its IT lock, stock and barrel, the tales of woe that come home with her every night are the direct result of outsourcing the fundamental problems to a contractor in the hope that it’s somehow going to make everything work properly. In actual fact the contractor has inherited the godawful mess that was their systems infrastructure and faces a major uphill struggle to stabilise – never mind improve – the situation. So the desktop software is locked down so tight that you can’t change the sort order of a column in Outlook, but there’s been no service packs applied in the last two years.

So no prizes for guessing Richard Allan’s predictions about the forthcoming success or otherwise of the Blunkett Card. Think of a number, double it, and then sprinkle a few noughts around. And that’s just what we’re going to pay EDS.

Interesting factoids for the night – the “concessionary” pricing for the Microsoft-sourced software part of the NHS IT project amounts to £330m over 9 years. Which sounds quite impressive at first, until you realise that’s just £36m a year spread across the largest employer in western Europe. And public sector spending is more than 50% of the total IT spend in the UK…

Via d2r, here’s one related to the ‘grab a book’ meme that was going around a while ago:

Open up the music player on your computer.

Set it to play your entire music collection.

Hit the “shuffle” command.

Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing. That’s right, no skipping that Carpenters tune that will totally destroy your hip credibility. It’s time for total musical honesty

Write it up in your blog or journal and link back to at least a couple of the other sites where you saw this.

If you get the same artist twice, you may skip the second (or third, or etc.) occurances. You don’t have to, but since randomness could mean you end up with a list of ten song with five artists, you can if you’d like.

So, here goes:

1. The Same Day – Beth Orton
2. Neon Wilderness – The Verve
3. Moon Over Bourbon Street – Sting
4. I Feel The Earth Move – Carole King
5. You Owe Me Nothing In Return – Alanis Morissette
6. Gus’s Blues – Roachford
7. 12 Sniff – The Kleptones
8. Get Over You – Sophie Ellis Bextor
9. Clocks – Coldplay
10. Biko – Simple Minds

I can’t decide if this is representative of my overall collection or not…

I’ve just found an undocumented featurette on my iRiver: the line-out and headphone jacks operate simultaneously in playback mode. Which means that – gasp – two people could listen to the same music at the same time. Surely this must be illegal – I’m expecting a cease-and-desist notice at any time now…

This, my friends, is why there will be no video iPod:

Hollywood allies sue DVD jukebox maker

A Hollywood-backed technology group is suing a high-end home theater system company, contending that its home DVD jukebox technology is illegal.

Update: more background here

Unless you count the comment spam, of course. 400 today, and counting. I wouldn’t mind so much if the URLs that they’re trying to Googlejuice actually existed, but leading-flowers.info doesn’t even 404.

The silence is caused by a) job hunting and b) building a bathroom. The two are not related – if they were that would make me a plumber, which would render a) unnecessary.

And it’s dark and cold, which makes everything harder than it should be.

Although not saying much right now.

More to come…