A few weeks ago, I posted an account of my trials and tribulations with Blue Cross Blue Shield Horizon of New Jersey. Well now it is high time for an update, an update I think readers of this blog will be interested in because it tells a fascinating story about the Internet, blogging, and perhaps new uses of Google Alerts. My goal in writing the post was to inform readers of their options when faced with problems caused by their health insurance company. Well, I had no idea a response would arrive from Blue Cross Blue Shield, and so quickly. For within 2 hours of posting my blog entry, the Public Relations Director of Blue Cross Blue Shield of NJ wrote me an email, which basically said that he came across my blog posting and was offering his assistance. Needles to say, I was shocked. After months of getting some of the worst customer service I have ever received (when on the phone with Blue Cross, I always felt like I was talking to smarmy collection agency reps), I get an email from upper-level management, offering his assistance. At first, I thought some of my geek readers were playing a practical joke on me. While it seemed plausible that Blue Cross monitors links to their site, and probably do so with Google Alerts, I had a harder time believing that the Director of Public Relations would fire off an email to me, directly. Naturally, following the arrival of his message in my inbox, a small glimmer of hope flickered, especially after he had someone from the Appeals Department contact me. And this small intervention had a large noticeable effect: decent and transparent customer service became a reality, for the very first time. Instead of interactions that were opaque and frustrating, I finally had ones that were crystal clear and intelligible. According to the main Blue Cross Blue Shield Web Site, they pride themselves on Blue Distinction:

Blue DistinctionSM is the Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies’ nationwide program that will create an unprecedented level of transparency with two goals: engaging consumers to enable more informed healthcare decisions and collaborating with providers to improve quality outcomes and affordability.

The contrast of my service before and after having the Public Relations director contact me speaks volumes to the actual nature of Blue Distinction as it pertains to BCBS of NJ. For most of my interactions with Blue Cross Blue Shield, I encountered an unprecedented level of opaqueness and frustration until there was intervention from high-above. I actually appreciated the service I received and saw it as a laudable move. Unfortunately, the outcome has been far from my liking. I recently got word they are not paying up for any of the dermatological services. So perhaps the fact that a PR person contacted me was significant because in the end, it has panned out as a typical PR move: all gloss and lacking substance. What now? I am moving to an internal BCBS appeal process and if that does not work, I will move on to small claims court in NYC and perhaps a more organized web campaign. In the mean time I have basically have decided to blog about the process so look out for future updates!

I've cursed myself quite a bit during the last two or three weeks, because there probably are no good excuses for not attending DebConf this year, it's just that I didn't plan it at all. Sorry to everyone who expected me there, and thanks to those who have insisted me lately to book tickets, and even planned my arrival by sea. :) Unfortunately, last minute plans won't work this time, as my new job doesn't permit. I hope you all have a great time, and unlike me, will POP THE TRUNK, all week. Oil delivery will resume... maybe in Argentina? Or Birmingham, why not!

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

Just over two days ago I sent a DMCA take-down request to nixforce.com for copying my content in violation of the non-commercial license that I offer, I have not had a response from them and they have kept mirroring my site. I have just sent a DMCA take-down to tierzero.net which appears to be their ISP. The email address listed in the whois record for that ISP bounces as does the postmaster address. It seems that I’m not the only person with this problem, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho is also having problems with them. Any suggestions on how to deal with them would be appreciated. One possibility that I will eventually persue is to file a DMCA request with Google, this can result in their Google Adwords account being terminated.

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In response to my comment and post about the cost of driving to work there was a comment on the blog post I responded to suggesting that a small car is better value for money than a hybrid car. The claim was made regarding a Nissan Pulsar, but to investigate this I decided to compare the Prius with the Corolla Hatchback, as far as I can tell the Corolla Hatchback is the nearest non-hybrid car to the Prius that Toyota sells (being similar in size, weight, and performance). Comparing cars of different make adds extra variables into the equation. Unfortunately the Toyota web site fails to provide specifications for the Prius and only provides a PDF file with minimal information on the Corolla, but it is enough for some minimal calculations. A car company run by intelligent people would publish the specs on all their vehicles and provide a search form to compare selected models. The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation has a good search method that allows easy comparison and ranking of items in their database (here is an example). It would be good if Toyota would permit us to compare models in their car range in a similar manner. According to the Toyota web site the Prius uses 4.4L/100Km when driving in the city and the manual transmission version of the Corolla Hatchback uses 7.4L/100Km (7.7 for the auto). For the average 16,000Km that an average Prius owner drives that would save 480L of petrol which would save about $700 at current petrol prices. The Corolla Ascent Hatchback (the cheapest of all Corollas) is $21,000 while the cheapest Prius is $37,400. If you compare the Prius with the cheapest Corolla then it’s a $16,400 price difference. If you save $700 per annum then it won’t cover the interest on a $16,400 loan or match the interest rates earned by a bank term-deposit if the $16,400 was invested. So it seems apparent that at current petrol prices (NB petrol prices are expected to increase) and with average Prius driving patterns a Prius will not be more economical than a cheap Corolla. Currently the Commonwealth Bank of Australia offers 6.05% interest on term deposits of between $10,000 and $25,000. This means that $700 per annum would be the interest on a term deposit of $11,500. If we compare the Corolla Ultima Sedan at $32,000 with the Prius at $37,400 the difference in price is less than $11,500 - but the cars have incomparable sets of luxury and safety features. The Prius i-tech appears to have a super-set of the luxury and safety features of the Corolla Ultima Sedan but at $46,900 is again going to cost more for the average Prius driver. The Prius is a very quiet car to drive, there is almost no engine noise (when driving at speeds where the Petrol engine is operating there is usually more noise from other vehicles) and no gear changes (handy if passengers are consuming hot or sticky drinks). It has a good set of safety and luxury features and is also a prestige car (no-one will say “oh wow, you’ve got a Corolla”). If you assign a dollar value to these features then a Prius may be the most economical car that meets your requirements! Finally, let’s keep in mind the fact that petrol prices are steadily increasing. If you save $700 by driving a Prius this year then you may save $1000 next year. There is also the option of converting a Prius to a plug-in hybrid which will be a useful option if petrol prices hit $10/L! Also the amount of money saved will depend on the use of the car. If you are running a courier or taxi business then a Prius will probably be a lot more economical than a Corolla due to the greater distances travelled and the travel in the slow city traffic that the Prius was designed for. PS All prices are in Australian dollars and concern products on offer in Australia, I would like to see comments from other people who perform the same calculations for their countries.

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A few people have asked what I meant in my "boxes" comic. Other just look at me strangely. Some hackers have enjoyed the comic, so I thought I'd try to unpack the meaning of it a bit for the layperson. Of course this will spoil the joke, but what the hey. A hacker who looks at the comic probably thinks about things like recursion, fractals, unicode, fonts, and bugs. fonts A font is how the computer knows how to draw the letters on its screen. Before computers, a font was a bunch of metal bits that could be arranged and fed into a printing press. As with most things involving drawing on a screen, font technology is much more complicated these days than you'd ever imagine. Fonts and the programs that draw them (font engines) are something of a mystery even to most hackers. unicode Unicode is an absurdly complicated version of the alphabet. Or rather, of every alphabet and similar thing used by anyone on earth or in Star Trek. It's not a font, it's a way for the computer to store text internally, by basically assigning a unique number to each letter. Since most hackers grew up in a world without unicode, and suffered through the (still continuing) transition to it, they're familiar with lots of quirks and weird and broken behaviors you get from it. One of these quicks is what to do when the computer wants to display a particular letter from unicode, but that letter is not available in the font. Since unicode contains effectively an infinite number of symbols, and each symbol in a font is carefully crafted by hand, this occurs pretty often. Handling of this situation varies, but often the computer will just display a little empty square box for the letter that it doesn't know how to draw. Some font engines go a step further and write the number of the unicode character in little tiny numbers inside the box. Presumably so that a hacker can look at it and tell what character is missing. The numbers are typically written one in each corner of the box, and you'd have to squint to see them. fractals A fractal is a special kind of picture, where parts of the picture repeat over and over at different scales. You've probably seen pictures of the most famous fractal, the Maldebrot set. That one is generated by a kind of formula, but there are much simpler ones, like the Koch snowflake. Hackers love fractals, because they're pretty, and complex, while based on very simple math. recursion "Recursion: See recursion." Ha! That's the best hacker joke ever, a true classic. Recursion is when the computer sees an instruction like that and mindlessly repeats it over and over. This actually turns out to be useful, and hackers see a kind of beauty in it. bugs Bugs are what happens when a computer program, which is supposed to be internally clear and simple, and have well-defined behavior, instead turns out to exhibit unintentional complexity. Kinda like a fractal. This begs the question of whether hackers like bugs, or not. Most of them spend most of their time creating more, so you be the judge. The bug I'm alluding to in the comic is this: What if the computer, when drawing some word, stumbled over a unicode character that was not in the font. And then say it went to draw the little box instead, and fill in the numbers to indicate what character it was. Except it turned out that its font didn't tell it how to draw the numbers either. And thanks to a really unlikely bug, it then proceeded to recurse, drawing smaller and smaller boxes for these characters that it didn't know how to draw. Until it drew a fractal instead. See: It's just hilarous once I've explained it. (And that explanation of the word "cat", by the way, is why I don't try to write most of the technical posts in my blog in a form that a layman could understand.)

So, in the midst of trying to convert some Darcs repositories to Mercurial repositories (see here for the reason), I hit an "interesting" bug: tailor processes "rename" patches by deleting the renamed file. A little debugging later, I get to this simulation of what tailor does:

>>> from mercurial import hg,ui
>>> uio = ui.ui(debug=True,verbose=True)
>>> r = hg.repository(ui=uio, path='.', create=True)
>>> f = file('A', 'w')
>>> f.write('Some data\n')
>>> f.close()
>>> r.add('A')
>>> r.commit(text='Add A')
A
'i\xe9\xb4\xc8\x9d\xb8\xeb\xbe\xb1k\xae\xb1\x182\xa9ao\x80\xd0'
>>> r.copy('A', 'B')
B does not exist!

Huh? Of course B doesn't exist, that's why I want to create it! So, we look at the code in localrepo.py to handle copying...

    def copy(self, source, dest, wlock=None):
        p = self.wjoin(dest)
        if not os.path.exists(p):
            self.ui.warn(_("%s does not exist!\n") % dest)
        elif not os.path.isfile(p):
            self.ui.warn(_("copy failed: %s is not a file\n") % dest)
        else:
            if not wlock:
                wlock = self.wlock()
            if self.dirstate.state(dest) == '?':
                self.dirstate.update([dest], "a")
            self.dirstate.copy(source, dest)

Double huh?

1. Why is this method checking whether the destination exists before it does anything? It appears to me that this is actually necessary; just disabling this test leads to a crash later.
   
2. How does mercurial work at all with such huge breakage in its core code? Does /usr/bin/hg use a different implementation of the repository code than mercurial.hg?
   
3. Why, in the name of $DEITY, is this a warning and not a fatal exception? One example of what happens when you don't signal to your users that you're ignoring them is this bug: tailor happily goes ahead and removes the original file, safe in the knowledge that mercurial has copied it to the new location. Except, of course, that mercurial hasn't actually copied it. Whoops.
   

I'm hoping that someone will tell me that it's just too late at night for me and I'm being an idiot. Please tell me this. It would make me very sad if code like that was in my VCS.


:-( --- sad Daniel

I just finished implementing postpone, a wrapper that is intended to take an arbitrary command, fork into the background, wait until some lockfile is freed, and then run the command. Of course the idea is that the lockfile is /var/lib/dpkg/lock, and that postpone is used in maintainer scripts. (Update-menus already does that, and I've basically grabbed that code and generalized it as a separate program.) As a test implementation, I modified the post inst,rm templates in the tex-common package and rebuilt texlive-lang-* using that. dpkg -i texlive-lang-*.deb takes over 4 minutes in the old version, but only a total of 60s with postpone used (35s for dpkg -i plus 25s for the background jobs). A Debian package is currently sitting in NEW, let's hope it will actually get used in maintainer scripts.

thanks to Rapha l again. git gc, nice hooks, branch tracking, ... all this is yours. Now that git-gc is on alioth, as alioth has a gitserver (and hence provides a not dumb transport like http), please run git gc from time to time so that repositories keeps beeing small (hi XSF ;p) FWIW I also will maintain git-core backports on bpo starting ... now. [sorry for the closed comments, I can't stand spam on my blog anymore]

We’re sitting in Teviot, the network is up and running and everyone here is happily hacking. So we can make detailed and concrete plans about the video setup now. And we just realized, that seven cameras are just not enough ;-) If possible we would like to use eight cameras, because we’ll be switching between three cameras in the two main talk rooms, plus another camera in each BOF room. So if you happen to have another DV camera, please get in contact with us (to make sure we don’t end up having fourteen cameras…) and then bring it with you. That way, we won’t have to switch equiqment around and the people operating the cameras will always know what to expect in a certain venue.

Surprisingly many local people seem to be catching icky-illnesses of death recently. Both Megan and myself are under the weather recently. I managed to infect her with a nasty cough and cold on Wednesday and the pair of us have been mostly shivering indoors since then. Today is the closing day of The Leith Festival (Leith being a district of Edinburgh. Where we live.) So we made it outside and consumed beer and pies for a while. Now we're back and I'm wishing I'd not left the house. Still it could have been worse I could have been in the sun in a blurry suit and without any books! (Books visible and recognizable include the complete works of Terry Pratchett, minus two, the complete works of Steven Brust (Maybe Vlad will give me the edge in the assassins game!)) All being well we'll be more recovered in time for the Debconf7 activities, although I expect Meg to be driving around Scotland for part of the time with a friend and not completely available. (A three-day roadtrip with Emma - a local girl who is hoping that somebody at Debconf will be able to fix her Ubuntu laptop..?) Update: - Debconf7 game of Settlers of Catan..? (I have only the Zarahemla set myself, but it will suffice for four players in a pinch.)

There seems to have been a bit of fuss over this Sudoku solver implemented in SQL. In Easter 2005, when Sudoku fever kicked off in a big way in England, my Dad started writing a solver implemented in PostScript which I then modified so that it could perform backtracking. I also wrote a C# solver for my phone around the same time and later sneakily won a competition with it - I am now barred from entering competitions in that paper. Anyway, here is an example PostScript board (PDF version). It was labelled “Fiendish” in The Times. The board can be easily changed at the top of the PostScript file. NB. Best results are achieved if you view the PostScript directly in a viewer such as gv or GSview as you actually see the process of backtracking in solving the puzzle, the recursion depth and the set of possible symbols for each square — most PDF viewers are terrible at displaying the process as they seem to render inside the wrong thread. (In terms of solving the puzzle, we both found that by enforcing the simplest constraints and then ‘guessing’ was far easier and more efficient than performing any of the complicated constraints typically employed by human solvers. I’m certain I am not the first to notice that attempting to emulate the brain’s method of solving a problem is usually a short-sighted approach for a computer.) There are few other goodies in the file: replacing the final autotest with autotestR will recurse using the right-most possible symbol - if you get the same board with both of these then the initial board has a unique solution. Also, if you can get your hands on a true PostScript printer, printing the file will mean the puzzle is solved in hardware. Enjoy . I’m looking forward to DebConf7! UPDATE: Added PDF version.

Two bug reports that I wrote were recently closed with the following explanation:

Last message was posted nearly three years ago. Considering abandoned and closing.

Whoops, I thought, I must have missed a request for more information. So I went to the bug page and, nope, the only message on the bug was my initial report.

Let me repeat that: the total sequence of interactions on these bugs was:

1. I report a bug in 2004
   
2. Someone closes it in 2007 because it's "too old".
   

Now, there are times when it's at least somewhat excusable to close old bugs without verifying that they're fixed (or even knowing that they might not be). When a package has hundreds of bug reports, closing old bugs that can't be reproduced can be a good thing: even if the reports are valid, keeping reports that can't contribute towards a fix around is arguably less useful than cleaning out the bug list so it's usable.

In my case, though, the package in question has only 20 or so bug reports, an easily managed number. Worse, both bugs I reported could be trivially reproduced. One of them was arguably not a bug, but the guy who closed my bugs did not argue that; as far as I can tell, he didn't even look at my bug report.


Notice that I haven't mentioned the maintainer of the package? That's because he didn't close the bug. In fact, the person who closed the bug is not a member of Debian, nor is he in the NM process. Evidently he's just a random user who decided that old bugs offend him, so they should be closed.

So please, everyone, exercise a modicum of common sense when it comes to closing bug reports. This will keep the BTS useful for all of us and keep blood pressures at a reasonable level. :)

Trip involved a lot of waiting. I arrived too early at London City Airport. It was really easy to get to from Tower Hamlets, so there are some advantages living in East London. Since I am of Scottish ancestry and it is the first time I am in Scotland, I was almost hoping for some welcoming party. Sadly, nothing of the sort and I ended up waiting at Edinburgh Airport for another DD, however his plane was late. Thankfully I discovered the multi-denominational “Prayer room”. After visiting some amazing mosques on my travels, I know it is quite permissible to go in a Islamic mosque and take a little nap, which I did. I wish they made Christian churches a little more comfortable in that respect. Laying down on the floor of a typical Western church and admiring the architecture would probably be bad for one’s health. Ok, I’ve started tagging debconf7 on my flickr uploads during my time here. I wonder if Aigars will do the same. ;) Edinburgh reminds me a little like Calcutta, with the soot stained buildings. Teviot house where the debcampers are is a great building. Up the road near a mosque was a cheap Indian eatery. I had a great chicken curry, nan and pakora. Fantastic.

I arrived yesterday in Edinburgh for debcamp and debconf 7 after aprox. 14 hours and 3 flights from Brazil to Scotland (Rio->Guarulhos, Guarulhos->London, London->Edinburgh). The city looks really cool with a lot of interesting places to visit and the weather is ok for me until now. We're now in the main talks room, that's is a sort of hacklab at this moment too.

Unfortunately TAM and British Airways (they call each other partners) don't give me my baggage yet, at least I've my laptop and my friend Felipe (faw) to help me with essential stuff. Hopefully this problem will be sorted out really soon, so I can concentrate on real Debian related work.

See you!

In this post I recommended that job seekers not publish their CV. In a comment Gunnar suggested having a special CV for conferences. I think that Gunnar’s idea is good and have started writing my conference CV at http://etbe.coker.com.au/conferences. When I complete it I will make it part of every submission for speaking at a conference. The LCA 2008 call for presentations is now open. One of the most interesting, noteworthy, and slightly controversial items is the suggestion that people submit a video. I think that the video submission is a great idea, either a video or testimony from audience members from past presentations should be required for all submissions (NB I’m not involved with organising LCA2008 so my opinion means little in this regard). The reason is that I have attended many presentations which fell far short of their potential due to poor speaking skills. I’ve been to great presentations by people with strong accents, by people with speech impediments, by people who are incredibly shy, and by people who just don’t have a clue about public speaking. However my observation is that if a speaker has more than one of these disadvantages then the presentation is likely to fail. I have previously written at length about how to give a good presentation to a technical audience (such as is found at LCA). Dave Hall blogs about Should I do a presentation at LCA 2008. He mentions lack of a web-cam as a disincentive, but I am happy to lend him my digital camera (which makes really high quality movies) to solve this problem. In fact I have considered recording some short Linux talks at the SGI office during lunch breaks (Dave and I both work for SGI). Dave also mentions a nightmare scenario about a laptop not working with presentation hardware. My post about getting laptops working for presentations will hopefully help some people in this regard. I’m not sure if I’ll make an offer for LCA this year, I haven’t been doing much cutting-edge work recently. Maybe I’ll just offer some talks for mini-confs, I could probably get several offers accepted by mini-conf organisers if I try.

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In just about 50 minutes, I will get on the bus next to my university dormitory and after a 4 changes and 17 hours later, I ll arrrive in Edinburgh to attend the 7th annual Debian Camp and Conference for two weeks. Yay!I m rather unprepared this year, due to other distractions. I hope I can help with the meta-init-idea floating around, and maybe other things as well.I ll keep those of you who will not be there updated, and I m looking forward to meet those of you who will be there!

In my last post about Heartbeat I gave an example of a script to start and stop a cluster service. In that post I omitted to mention that the script goes in the directory /usr/lib/ocf/resource.d/heartbeat. To actually use the script you need to write some XML configuration to tell Heartbeat which parameters should be passed to it via environment variables and which nodes may be candidates to run it. In the below example the type of web means that the script /usr/lib/ocf/resource.d/heartbeat/web will be called to do the work. The id attributes are all arbitrary, but you want to decide on some sort of consistent naming scheme. I have decided to name web server instances web-X where X is the IP address used for providing the service. The nvpair element contains a configuration option that will be passed to the script as an environment variable. The name of ip means that the environment variable will be named OCF_RESKEY_ip. Naming of such variables is arbitrary and a script may take many variables. A well written script (which incidentally does not mean my previous blog post) will have an option meta-data to give XML output describing all the variables that it accepts. An example of this can be seen by the command /usr/lib/ocf/resource.d/heartbeat/IPaddr2 meta-data. In the XML the resources section (as specified by --obj_type resources on the cibadmin command-line) describes resources that the Heartbeat system will run. The constraints section specifies a set of rules that determine where they will run. If the symmetric-cluster attribute in the cluster_property_set is set to true then resources will be permitted to run anywhere, if it is set to false then a resource will not run anywhere unless there is a constraint specifying that it should do so - which means that there must be at least one constraint rule for every resource that is permitted to run. In the below example I have constraint rules for the service giving node-0 and node-1 a priority of 9000 for running the service. In a future post I will describe the cluster_property_set and how it affects calculations of where resources should run.
(more…)

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After asking last week if anyone had any experience with Project Honeypot, I got one response, from Chris Samuel, who was pretty positive about the whole thing:

I'm one of the people contributing, from the stats on my site it appears I've contributed to the identification of 6 harvesters and a comment spammer. I'm only running it on one site at the moment, but it seems to be a useful service and once it's up and running it seems fairly inconspicuous.

I decided to give it a go myself, and signed up. It's pretty nifty the way it all works. You can do a number of different things to be part of the project, from linking to other people's honeypots (through the trivial act of adding some HTML to your web pages), or you can setup a honeypot of your own (which is done in an ingenious manner, and just requires you to be able to run one of a bunch of different forms of dynamic script -- about ten minutes work, tops). You can also contribute a domain (or subdomain) which the project will use as a spamtrap domain -- all you have to do there is add an MX record. The use of lots of different domains makes it harder for spammers to filter known spamtrap domains out of their lists. In exchange you get good karma from helping to identify network abusers, and you can monitor chunks of IP space (such as space that your company sub-leases to others, for example) for evidence of abuse, or use the collected data to block abusers from your own web servers through the project's http:BL service. The http:BL, for me, is probably the most valuable "payback". It lists IP addresses that have been used recently by comment spammers, address harvesters, and other abusers of HTTP resources. It's not a list of spam sources, though -- there's no shortage of DNSBLs for that. The project has an Apache module that can query the list and re-route or block requests from those IP addresses, and there's also a Wordpress plugin that queries the list (not that I use Wordpress, but it's an example of what can be done). Unlike Chris, I haven't helped to identify any bad activity yet, but there's been some activity on my honeypot, so I'm hoping that I'll catch someone soon. I think it's worth getting involved and contributing what you can -- there's very little cost involved (I got all my resources setup inside of an hour, and I haven't noticed any increased load on my server or bandwidth), and everyone wants to stop Internet abuse. So please, take a look at the project and consider joining.

I followed the advice of the lazywebs a while ago and bought myself a phone (Nokia 6100) on the local auction website then went around to the local Vodafone dealer and bought a SIM card for it. When I signed up I ticked the box saying "Enable Global Roaming" and now that I'm travelling I realise I should have actually confirmed that happened before I left the country, because it didn't happen. Now I'm sitting in Melbourne with only the (free :-) Wifi to keep me company. So looking at the Vodafone site, it appears that I could dial "777" to enable global roaming. Apparently I should have done that a few days ago, because it sure won't work now. Perhaps this "Manage Your Account" thingy will work? A period of perusing pages of FAQs follows, and I eventually conclude that it would work. Except that when I try and register for the service I am told that my phone number is not valid. Yes, I moved my old number across to Vodafone, about the same time Brenda was lamenting the inadequate preparation Vodafone did for Mobile Number Portability, and while the actual phone has been working, Brenda did note back on April 1st that "you can't use the website to manage your account". Two months on and it still isn't possible, which is pretty poor really - you would think Vodafone would be actively encouraging people to move across to their network. So I'm effectively phoneless until I get to Edinburgh and can buy a SIM card. At least I can still get on IRC and ask someone to call Heather and tell her why I'm not phoning.