Mr Langley writes:

Why hasn’t anyone back-ended gmail?

Ummm, whatever tickles your fancy. Sicko.

I don’t want my address to be @gmail (and Reply-To isn’t good enough).

Full ACK. We’re not alone.

I like Linux a lot, and I think the sentiments in this article are pretty much spot on. But seriously, look at the graph on the front page. Can anyone really keep a straight face during a board meeting with a projected growth like that? A quite-blatantly levelling off turning into a doubling just because you can squiggle the axis? Anyhoo, I’m sure that linux’s natural level will be a bit higher than a measley 3%. Eventually.

Well, it didn’t take much persuading to make this 18-34 year old drink some real-ale, but to be honest I only realised the significance of the word “beer” in the “beer festival” when I realised that it was being run by the Campaign for Real Ale. That’ll be “Beer-with-a-capital-B festival” then. Still, liquid and alcoholic, fine by me. I’ll still be drinking lager in the bar though.

Oh, and it’s thundering and chucking it down again. And the prommers are getting wet again.

A while ago, me and Gary collaborated on a method to stop nasty types from getting emails off of the dramsoc website. It’s a low hanging fruit solution - using javascript to write out encoded characters, cunningly done so that nobody even notices what’s going on. The point of it is that it raises the bar to harvesting the addresses, and most importantly, since it’s just some little thing that me and Gary cooked up, it’s unlikely that someone will reverse engineer it to get at the email addresses. If our little method (it’s Gary’s really, but I don’t mind stealing credit) became widely used, it would be somewhat juicier fruit, and someone would attack it. (That’s a hint by the way - don’t anyone start using it to list millions of addys. OK?)

However, the dramsoc email address (the one at the top of the DramSoc website gets lots of spam apparently (although I’m not sure if this relates to the @ic address instead), and here’s the problem - our method doesn’t help when you write out the email address on the page. Try entering in “www.dramsoc.org” into this page (explanations). Notice that the email link to elpresidente doesn’t get found, since that just has “Martin” instead of the email address. If you’re techy minded, have a look at the source to see what’s happening.

Oh well. Next time he’s bored, maybe Gary will write another little javascript thingy.

The Day After Tomorrow appears to be Today. Lightning is striking all the buildings around me, and this thunderstorm has been going on for hours. And worryingly, whenever there’s a bright flash through the windows, there’s a nice electrical sparking noise from somewhere over beside the storeroom circuit breakers.

Hmmm.

I’m just glad that I’m a) using a plastic keyboard on a wooden table, and b) not queuing for the Proms.

Now come on. I’m getting sick and tired of all these bogus terror warnings. Did nobody in charge of the Western world ever get read bedtime stories when they were kids? Especially about crying wolf?

Yesterday, new intelligence about a “credible” threat to US financial institutions came to the attention of some over-paid bureaucrats (they’re overpaid in that they’re paid at all), who raised terror warning levels to “high” - the second highest level - which should really be reserved for some Jack Bauer style “We were tracking the bomb across the Atlantic but then lost it in the port” shenanigans - one level lower from the “oh-my-god which wire do I cut” maximum level. Employees were being “urged to report to work” - a doublespeak for “not sure which day your all going to die, but it might not be today”. The president issues a statement saying that the “Nation is in Danger”. Wow - big impact stuff.

But no, it’s actually that some terrorists, four years ago, had a list of banks, and that some of the banks details were updated as recently as - wait for it - seven months ago. So they are obviously going to be attacked, and sometime before the end of the day. Or maybe tomorrow. Still, everyone is urged to turn up for work.

Here’s some more up-to-date intelligence on UK financial institutions - there’s a bank near the South Ken tube station. Two, in fact. And some more on High Street Kensington. There’s also a cash machine opposite the Co-op in Uxbridge Road. I’ve seen them all sometime since last week - significantly, that’s sooner than January. Hmmmmmmmmm.

So, some terrorists were looking at some financial institutions a long time ago. If they were only scoping out a few buildings, I’d be impressed - I’d expect there to be an enormous list of things that Al-Queda (or however you spell it today) have been looking at. Imagine, in 1999 (that’s when I was starting Uni) that some Guarda found some papers from the IRA dating from 1995 (before I started my GCSE equivalents) saying “There’s a bank near the South Ken tube station. Two, in fact. And some more on High Street Kensington”. Hardly end-of-the-world stuff, and the IRA actually set off a whole heap of bombs, and plenty of them were in London. They were an extremely credible threat.

So have all the other alerts over “new intelligence” been scaremongering too? Well, I’ll leave the comparison between the flimsyness of the most recent debacle with all the hundreds of previous terror warnings, to Tom Ridge, the US homeland security chief, with this quote.

“I would point out that [these are] the most significant detailed pieces of information about any particular regions that we have come across in a long, long time, perhaps ever…”