Matt Palmer wrote:

"Aaah, OK. I have no idea whether [pingbacks] work or not; they're deeply in the black magic category -- never used them."

They're just a remote procedure call. Shouldn't be black magic at all, but a surprising number of blogs seem to do them brokenly, while supporting the more complicated (but just as spammable) comment and trackback systems. On size:

"40x20 would be a good size for me. I'm not sure why people would complain that the comment box is too big, unless perhaps it interfered with the good layout of the page."

I don't think it interfered with the layout. I'll increase the size again Real Soon Now. Josh Triplett commented:

"For me, the size of the edit box doesn't matter much, because I don't use it. I just click the little "edit" button next to it that the Firefox^WIceweasel extension It's All Text provides, and then type my comment in Emacs. :)"

James commented:

"I use the resizeable form fields extension so I don't have a problem with small textareas, but http://www.sabadelli.it/edoardo/projects/javascript/form.element.resize has a script that'll make it resizeable for everyone."

Well, everyone who lets web site scripts use their CPU and electricity... Thanks for all the helpful comments.

I asked: Should we try to stop them, or just post that "Nixforce look like an unscrupulous load of swines trying to trade on Debian Developer names without permission" all over their site? Paul wrote:

"They are violating Google's Adsense policies by inviting people to click on their ads on their front page ("If you dont want to enter, at least go to one of our Advertisers below"). You could, at the very least, have this line of their income terminated by reporting them here "

Works for me. It said they'll respond within 24 hours. Brandon Holtsclaw suggested:

"Or set something to look for the referer pulling the feed and redirect just that nixforce domain to a 404 or some nasty pr0n feed :) just a thought."

I would, but I think most things will fail to pull if I send a 40x and I can't think how to do a redirect or proxy neatly without messing with RewriteRule or similar - nixforce aren't worth messing with RewriteRules. I also suspect they're pulling from Planet Debian, rather than my web host, so if I made a mistake, I'd be very unpopular. Also: Russell Coker and Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho

I've heard about sploggers before, but I've never seen a non-trivial one. It looks like nixforce.com is a splogger that is harvesting all Planet Debian posts and using it to promote their Ubuntu/ Fedora/ Windows services site. (Sod that. You should all buy debian services from my cooperative OK?) I know about this because they sent me a pingback. Unsurprisingly, I've not approved it! Are any other Debian planeteers unhappy that they seem to be claiming that "We are a group of people in Durban, South Africa. We provide services on Ubuntu Linux, Fedora Core Linux ,Microsoft Windows Servers, XP Professional Desktops, Ubuntu Desktops [...] Macromedia Coldfusion Server [...] MysQL and Microsoft SQL Server [...] Unilever" for them? Should we try to stop them, or just post that "Nixforce look like an unscrupulous load of swines trying to trade on Debian Developer names without permission" all over their site?

There are 1988 and 1989 papers by Cyclecraft Author John Franklin about poor accident records of the Milton Keynes Redways which are often cited by cyclists as showing why cycle facilities are dangerous or "farcilities". But I grew up riding the Redways and I think the closest I came to seeing a Redway-caused injury was when we accidentally rode onto an under-construction stretch by mistake and met a road roller. I journeyed to work all the way along the north-west edge when I was employed in MK one summer. (The cross-city Redway I used was fairly quiet on the journey to work around 0700 but quite busy on the return - looked like "school run" traffic.) I lived three miles from the MK boundary for a decade and so I've had some time to think about this. I think condemning the Milton Keynes Redways as dangerous farcilities is simplistic and misguided. Here's why: Milton Keynes was one of the first English cities to have cycle routes designed in from the start. This means that there are cycle tracks of types and in spaces that we hadn't seen before. Where else did you get a network of both low-friction surface high-speed cycle routes with sweeping bends and grade-seperated junctions and connecting routes to every estate? How many places have that added since? Almost nowhere. Milton Keynes is a massive cycle track experiment. In the 1989 paper, Franklin comments that it was "constructed with few limitations of space or finance" which simply doesn't ring true - the experiment didn't go completely to plan and the "secondary grid" of Redways between district centres mentioned in the 1998 paper has simply never appeared. Nevertheless, there are things that work amazingly well, but there are others which are now obviously stupid, like not protecting the sight lines at some junctions and putting late-80s estate routes alongside feeder roads, where they have more frequent and busier level junctions. I believe some of the London data also suggests that the non-separated junctions are one of the three most dangerous places, which suggests that Milton Keynes is not a cycle track advocate's perfect design in the first place. I'll continue to explain what else I disagree and agree with from the Franklin articles over a few more posts. If you have comments about the Redways or these articles, I'd like to hear them: please use the comments form at the bottom of my page.

tm suggested:

"delete the feeds you find yourself reading less and less frequently"

In general, maybe, but there are always exceptions, like feeds which rarely update but carry important information when they do. I guess I should scan my subscriptions to see if there are any extremely unupdated feeds. Update: tm clarified:

"I meant those feeds you've subscribed to, but find out you don't read so often, regardless of how often they're updated. for me, one of those is/was: http://feeds.howstuffworks.com/DailyStuff"

That's not so easy for me to tell. I read my subscriptions through a planet-like page, so they appear in the page flow whether or not I expand them or not. Matt Palmer replied:

"I've got to say that I've never had a problem commenting on Limes & Lycopene. I suspect that the problem you had with Alexis Sukrieh's blog was likely unrelated to SpamKarma2 (or if it was SK2, it was a dodgy deployment -- you don't sound too sure what the cause of his breakage was). On the other hand, if there is anything broken on a blog, the polite thing to do is to tell the owner about it -- it might not necessarily be a problem for everyone (although with SQL errors and things like that, it should be possible for the site owner to get error reports via e-mail, but how often do you reckon that gets done?). And yes, Captchas give me the faeces too. For L&L, at least, I know for a fact that any problems will get looked at and fixed up damn quick. Contact e-mail is on Kathryn's site."

I sent a pingback. No response yet. I'll try email if there's no response later.

"Oh, and a comment on your comment system -- the text entry box is tiny (6 lines by maybe 35 characters just isn't enough for a literate comment)."

My preference is for 40x20 but if I make it that big, I get feedback that it's too big. It's always a compromise. It's meant to be about 22x8 now, but what size should it be?

It's been a topsy-turvy week, but I'm finally getting my head above water again here at our new home. A lot has happened, which I'll try to capture here, but I'm not sure I can get it all. On Tuesday, Maj, Amita June and I spent the morning in Central Park in New York City. It was a beautiful day -- the rains had cleared overnight, and it was warm and crisp everywhere. We went to the big playground near Columbus Circle, which had about 1000 kids from 2 to 14 running in every direction, and a huge water spray fountain which meant that most of those kids were soaking wet. We went and grabbed lunch at the Whole Foods Market on the circle itself, and ate it out on the grass. AJ and Maj went back to the hotel for a nap, and I got a haircut for the awards ceremony that night. Then I had coffee with Tim Wu, creator of the concept of net neutrality and a writer for Slate. We had a great talk about net neutrality, the future of Wikitravel (Tim wrote a critical piece in Slate in April), and new projects we're both working on. It was really pretty fun. Unfortunately, I took too long talking to Tim, and not enough time buying myself a pair of pants for the awards ceremony. So by the time we were done, I was in a huge hurry. I ran down to the Old Navy on W 34th, picked a pair of black khakis off the shelf, and jammed in a cab to get back to our hotel room in time. Maj was done up to the nines, so I jumped in the shower, shaved, threw on my sport jacket and slacks, cut off all the tags with nail clippers, and ran out the door. The event itself was pretty incredible, and I don't want to flood this blog post with all of my comments and recollections. So I'll add a more detailed report later today. tags: newyorkcity maj amitajune travel wikitravel timwu wholefoods webbyawards webbies

Drive time Suffice it to say that we were out really, really late. We got up at 6AM the next morning to make our 8AM train back to Montreal, and it was clear to everyone (even Amita June) that if we tried to make this train it would be one of the worst days of our life. But there's only one train from NYC to Montreal per day, so we'd have to stay in town another night, and then have the same problem the next morning. So Maj canceled our Amtrak train tickets -- which were 100% refundable, even a couple of hours before the train leaves. Bravo, Amtrak! Then I got to work trying to rent us a car to drive home. It turns out that it's hard to get a rental car for a one-way trip from New York to Montreal. I tried Budget and Avis and National, and none of them would let me rent one-way into Canada. Annoyingly, none of their Web sites gave straight error messages on the subject -- I got "no cars available" or "unable to find your destination" (!) -- and I had to call the 1-800 numbers for each one in turn. I finally got a car from Hertz, on-line, and there was even a little note in my confirmation email to the effect of "ONE WAY TRAVEL CONFIRMED". I guess there's a reason that some companies get to be number one -- the more flexible you are, the more grateful your customers are going to be. I, for one, am planning to use Hertz in the future. I picked up the car at the W 55th Hertz office, and it took me 45 minutes to get back to our hotel at 7th and W 47th. The garage at Hertz goes onto W 54th, which is a "Thru Street" -- no turns allowed until you're halfway across town. And, it was bumper-to-bumper, of course. I finally gave up and made an illegal turn, and was promptly pulled over by a motorcycle cop. D'oh! Luckily, he let me off with a warning. Our trip out of New York was uneventful, but pleasant. It was a beautiful day, and the Catskills and Hudson Valley are a beautiful place to drive in the early summer. Deep, cool woods and bright green fields -- they're lush and fertile-looking. We stopped in Lake George for an early-afternoon dinner, and then had a pretty sunset drive through the Adirondacks up to the border. We got in late -- 10:30PM -- but it was overall a pretty good trip. And nice to have left at 2PM rather than 6AM. tags: rentalcar amtrak newyorkcity hertz

MANA Yesterday Mark, Allegra, No ma and Anoushka stopped back through Montreal as they wended their way home to Lausanne?. We had a nice lunch at Zyng and then took a walk down av Mont-Royal, where a pedestrian fair is going on this week. They got off yesterday evening, which makes the last of our RoCoCoCamp visitors to leave. tags: mark allegra no ma anoushka

Pecha Kucha Montreal I'm very interested to hear via Boris and James that we'll be having a Pecha Kucha night here in Montreal. It's going to be on 14 Jun 2007 at 20:20h (8:20PM) at the SAT. Pecha Kucha is an unconference for designers (not necessarily Web designers). I think it sounds like a really interesting event, and I hope to go. tags: pecha kucha unconference montreal

As I mentioned before, I'm getting quite harsh in unsubscribing from buggy feeds. I'm also being quite harsh in not subscribing to sites which have broken feedback systems like no comment box or email address, broken (rather than non-existant) trackback/pingback support, eyetests, or dumb tools like Spam Karma 2. Therefore, I'm not subscribing to Limes & Lycopene, recommended by Brane Dump: The Thoughts of Matt Palmer, because although it's an interesting site it has a broken feedback route, which makes it less attractive. It's more than a bit annoying to want to interact and then be blocked by a broken site. I still subscribe to about 100 sites, but that number will probably fall further. How do you decide what sites to drop?

While I was in Paris, I used a FON WiFi Access Point a couple of times. The rate seemed very reasonable - EUR 3 for a day's access compared to 10 (EUR 15) per day for The Cloud - and I paid with some money that's currently trapped by paypal's incompetence (they wouldn't accept letters in a UK Companies House registration number). I'm wondering whether to run a FON point. I've line-of-sight down the hill to a holiday park less than 400m away. If I aim a 6dBi directional antenna at it from inside a window, will it reach? Would the 2dBi built-in antenna reach the pub and shops 100m away? I used wifi while on a city break, but do people want internet while on a seaside holiday? Fon has adopted Ubuntu as its preferred operating system and the CEO also wrote:

"Fon already is an Open Source company and our software is an Open Source project called http://www.openwrt.org and we should support other Open Source movements/companies"

which is a good cooperative viewpoint, in my opinion. I'm a bit troubled by its Skype, Paypal and Google promotions, BBC Panorama: Wi-Fi: a warning signal and Andrew Savory's Fon not so much fun but it seems like a good idea at the moment because it would save or make money and I'd finally have OpenWRT on a router. Are those good enough reasons? Are there other options? What are they?

While I was away, Jam-Busting June started. It's one of the biggest commuter challenge events in England. I took part in King's Lynn's event last year, but this one has a prize draw too, so go for it if you're in the WsM area. Things are already in good shape here, as you can see from the hotspots in both WsM and Bristol on this Census-based map. The North Somerset Cycling Officer writes:

"There are also the commuter cycle rides into Weston-super-Mare starting tomorrow with the cyclists breakfast organised for Wednesday the 20th - you can arrive at the Victorian Caf by your own route if you prefer. The rides will be:

• Wednesday, June 6 - meet at The Campus - 8am.
• Wednesday, June 13 - meet at Worle Railway Station - 8am.
• Wednesday, June 20 - meet at Ebdon Cemetery - 7.30am (to the seafront for a free breakfast - cyclists can also make their own way to the caf ).
• Wednesday, June 27 - meet at Weston General Hospital - 8am."

Maybe see you there. Their homepage also has a preview of the new Strawberry Line leaflet and the 2007 route map will be up in due course.

Seen on uk.rec.cycling: "I'm sure MPs can be cooked in ways that make them edible. Perhaps the best way is to boil them in calvados for a few hours and then serve with an apple sauce and vegetables of the season. The bones can no doubt be boiled up for stock and the remains deposited in one's green cone." David Hansen PS: I'm back from France. Did you miss me?

A comment on El Blog de Jose that

"I plan to carry white cheese to the Cheese and Wine BoF, and I'd love any comments on how to transport them without posing a biological threat for Europe"

triggered some memories of the warning signs I saw at the port of Dover about the UK milk product import restrictions when returning from my last trip. So, I posted my concerns to debconf-discuss. Until you hear otherwise, if you're outside the EU/EEA, I suggest that you don't try bringing cheese to Edinburgh. I hope that you'd have it confiscated, rather than being fined and/or imprisoned, but I don't know how they'd treat a foreigner trying to carry in enough cheese for a party.

Ilenia and I are looking for tickets to go "home" (Eugene, Oregon) this summer. We've had pretty good luck with Lufthansa in the past (as opposed to Air France, which lost a huge bag of my stuff), so we turned to them first to look for flights. I like the page they have for prices/dates, which gives you a nice way to look around for a better price without stabbing randomly at dates: Big long Lufthansa URL However, the maddening thing is that the prices change frequently. Not every day, but often after even 5 minutes! They bounce around up to 100 euro at a time. I understand the theory behind price descrimination, but this is the classic case where the customer ends up feeling like they're being made fun of and goes elsewhere. United, in our case, which offers a cheaper price for the same plane (they're Lufthansa's partner and thus share flights).

liz radford commented:

"Thanks for the advice, your comments on the route match those of a couple of others so I think we will go ahead and make those changes but keep the hill of pain! I will ride the revised route this weekend to give it a go."

While you're out there... I heard some comments that Windwhistle Lane on the short route wasn't very easy to follow, but I suspect that's more a problem with the council's (lack of) signs than a bad route. I didn't find the black-and-white bikeathon signs easy to spot on the faster/busier stretches. The pink and the yellow(?) ones were usually easily noticeable. I wonder whether the first black-and-white signs were at Worle Moor Gate - I went so wrong there that I rode up to the marshals at Summer Lane/Diamond Batch from behind!

"On the photo web site, you can get access to a total of about 700 pictures but it's not immediately obvious how. Mind you I can't criticise - the http://www.lrf.org.uk site is even less user friendly. We have photos on it of local people getting out there and doing great things to raise money but you try and find them its like wandering the catacombs. We need our own simple West-country site! Have a look and comment if you want, an experts critic is well overdue."

Well, the LRF site isn't bad - it needs to sort out its colours and contrast, and the text alternatives to images seem to be nonsense like asterisks, but I think I can actually access all of the pages without trouble. If you'd like a westcountry site, contact me at work and I'll offer a deal.

"Anyway back to photos. Get onto the one page of photos it will let you see and then click "refine search." This will take you to the menu as follows... Start Childrens Race Bleadon Hill Finish 1 Finish 2 Finish 3 Finish 4"

I can see more photos that way, but still only the first 8 from each category. Thanks once more for organising a great event Liz! I've noticed that my page is attracting some search results for bikeathon - is anyone else who rode this event reading? Care to comment on it? (If you're reading this at swik.net or a similar irresponsible republisher, click "Read more" to get the real comments form.)

Seen on librarian.net: "Hi, I'm looking for anal tourism research." - So silly, so realistic, so hard not to laugh if it happened to you.

Ryan Lovett commented:

"CUPS sometimes doesn't reflect accurage page counting statistics in page.log when receiving jobs from Windows clients in this manner. YMMV, however. Another nuisance is that if you have multiple printers that use the same driver they will be hard to differentiate by name and Windows 2k/XP doesn't let you rename network printers. There is a solution, but it involves modifying the windows registry."

Wow, that's a surprisingly daft bug. I also heard at work that some versions of Windows remove network printers if the network they're on is disconnected. Anyway, enough Microsoft Windows for now. I don't have to touch it very often and then only to make sure it can connect to my servers.

Rounding off AGM season, Sam reports on the national AGM with a second part and also mentions more on the food retail ethical policy. While considering food retail ethics, did you see last night's BBC Whistleblower programme about dodgy practices at Tesco and Sainsburys? I don't believe the claims that this isn't widespread. I've not bought much fresh stuff from them since a friend told me about discovering some of those tricks during his time working in two of those stores. Most of the time, I buy fresh from small independents, but I'm not going to link them here because I don't like their web sites. I'm glad the co-operative food wasn't on the BBC show, but I wonder how good our labelling is at showing the source. It can't be that bad, as I've been able to choose not to buy co-op's Kent-sourced Cheddar since moving to Somerset, as I mentioned in the Food Miles topic of the Climate Doctor Online Discussion yesterday (members only link). I was quite talkative in that, but hopefully not too much. It's not a very lively "live" discussion, because there's no way to see new contributions as they come in or discuss things privately. It's like a web discussion board from 1996, but less accessible.

I'm rather surprised to find that Liz RADFORD comments:

"As my first year as organiser of this ride, I would like to thank you and everyone who came out for us. It was a great day and looks like we raised over 10,000! As Leukemia is the most common form of cancer in Childen I get a bit over-enthusiastic sometimes when I see so many people joining in doing so much good and prehaps see the event through rose tinted specs. I hope you enjoyed it and the legs are better now, the hill is a real challenge. One question for you. Was it something you enjoyed enough to do again or do you think a flat route along the front Sand Bay and Wick would serve us better at bringing riders back each year? Your comments appreciated. Liz X Also check out www.UKeventphotos.com"

10k. That's a great result! I think I'd do it again and I think the initial hill has its uses - it's a bit of an unusual challenge and strings the field out. I didn't have any congestion problems until the first checkpoint after we merged with the short route. If you're looking for changes, I'd put that Somerset Avenue checkpoint somewhere with more space and reroute a quieter way around Worle, maybe up Walford Avenue with the split to the Ebdon loop at Riverbank. UKeventphotos.com only shows me the first page of the gallery - clicking "Next results" dumps me back at the search front page. I think they need to learn how to make accessible web sites (my work offers advice...). I'm glad I took my own camera and I'm sorry if their bad web site limits the amount LRF gets from photographs.

Going back to connecting to CUPS directly, Sam Morris commented:

"http://www.owlfish.com/thoughts/winipp-cups-2003-07-20.html has instructions that I have used in the past. Use "Add Printer", select "Connect to a printer on the Internet..." and enter the printer's URL (e.g., http://192.168.0.1:631/printers/someprinter). When asked for the driver choose the Generic Manufacturer and the "MS Publisher Imagesetter" printer."

Interesting. I always used Apple LaserWriter. Is the MS Publisher one better?

There's a TV Show about Bolzano adopting Free Software with English subtitles in-vision. It's quite good, emphasising the double win of more freedom and fairer costs. Tip to Graham and you might want ytplay

I'm Going to Play Some Number at the Lotto The Lotto Game is a really popular gambling game in Italy, run by the state itself. As in all good gambling game: you, the player, can win a lot of money while who is running the game (the Italian state in our case) will win a lot of money for sure, no matter what. Anyhow, to the facts, it's a well-known folklore that people win playing Lotto FOR SURE by playing numbers told while dreaming by parents, friends, kitties, whatever, ... As a scientist, I've no reason not to trust this folklore, why should I? As a strange coincidence (another fact that strongly hints I HAVE TO PLAY), this night I had a dream (well, it was more this morning while reading the planet, but it doesn't really matter..., folklore is folklore!). There were a lot, really a lot of people whispering this to my ears:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

well, ok, they aren't in decimal notation, and they aren't even comprised between 1 and 90, ... but what would you expect from a bunch of geeks??? They are probably trying to exploit some overflow in the hands of the lotto extractor or something like that... But I won't desist, I'll play those number! Open questions:

• on which wheel(s) should I play the numbers?
• how should I handle overflowed numbers? throw them away? modulo 89 operations + 1?

any proficient Lotto player to answer them around?