McWalter.org :: Blog index page

Ah, there's nothing like making life difficult for yourself. This site, you see, is maintained by a script of my own creation. For a very long time it's been a cygwin bash file, which at its heart is a massive find statement. This finds a bunch of html-like source files and runs them through an html preprocessor. I use iMatrix' HTMLPP - I can't say I particularly recommend it (it seems there's no ongoing development on it, it's a bit crufty and requires a bunch more stuff in the templated document than I'd really wish. Ideally I'd move to a modern, supported templating system (people have recommended Clearsilver to me, and it looks nice), but the effort of changing all my sources files (of which there are around forty, plus some files that are built automatically) would be a bunch of work. The bash script which drives this thing grew and grew, doing automatic image thumbnailing, having support to host source code files (importing them from a nearby live sourcetree and formatting them nicely), and having some basic blogging support. Imagemagick handled the image scaling.

A while ago I started rewriting in python, still on cygwin. I really don't know why. It was worth it, I suppose, but more complicated than I'd hoped. In a final push yesterday and today I finally finished it, and cut its dependency on external utilities that cygwin provides (sed and find and stuff). So now it runs natively on Windows or Linux, which is a relief. Cygwin is fine as long as you stay inside the little cygwin box - but if you have to call in and out of it then you run into endless little filename-escaping issues.

The python version is certainly more verbose than its bash counterpart, but much easier to read (and, I hope, to maintain in future). Image scaling is now done by PIL rather than imagemagick (I just couldn't get PIL to work properly on cygwin's python). Where I used hacky sed calls to do some text substitutions I now do some really botched python regexps instead (I'm more ashamed of them that I was of the sed ones, which is saying quite a lot). The whole thing has about as many lines of code (although far fewer backslashes) and takes about the same time to run. But for exactly one line (a shell variable expansion in code called inside the macro system) it's entirely portable (damn, I'd forgotten that hideous DOS %var% syntax). I still use htmlpp to do template expansion, html tidy to fix any html snafus, and linklint to verify that there aren't any bad links. Blogs are still built in an overly manual way, and there's still no RSS syndication.

I keep wondering whether to shift the blogging support to Wordpress (which I've goofed around with, and which couldn't be easier). I guess I'd put the Wordpress content into an iframe (where the current static blog appears now) as I don't really want the entire content served from Wordpress. I'm squeamish about dynamically generated content when static would do, so I guess I'll have to figure out how to get it to produce static content. Urgh, I guess that's another hundred lines into the buildscript.

Our morning glories are out today (and will be gone tomorrow), so I took some pretty nice photos of them. I've added the best (the plainest) as a new background.

In checking through my webserver logs I've discovered that several teenager use my images for the backgrounds to their weblogs. Technically it would be better if they downloaded the images to their own website (instead of using up my paid-for bandwidth), but they seem like sweet people, so I'm not going to hassle them about it. If I was particularly nasty I could write some code that checks the referrer on requests for those images, and send visitors to their site (but not mine) something horrible like the goatse man.

It's a compliment, I guess, so it'd be churlish to complain. The thing about copyright is that if I fail to defend it, someone might claim that I've abrogated my right to do so in future. The last thing I'm going to do is send a nasty cease-and-desist letter to these folks, so here's the smart solution - the following myspace users are hereby granted licence to use images from this website on their personal weblogs:

• So Nostalgic
• Deevo
• Lalala LiSa
• Nothing Left
• Ramsses
• crystal
• Charlotte
• Claire
• Ashley

(boy, you guys have some really overproduced websites)

I've been looking after my neighbour's greenhouse and the plants on his deck while he's on holiday. The weather has been lovely, which makes for much watering to be done. Although the neighbours are missing the display, I'm enjoying the flowers. Here's some photos:

• fuschia2
• godetia
• surfinia
• lavetera
• lobelia1
• lobelia2
• lily
• osteospernum
• pelargonium1
• pelargonium2
• petunia

I'm back from holiday in the US. This began hanging out with some old, good friends back in the Bay Area. Nothing really changes, although the traffic appears to have recovered back to its dot-com-bubble level. Absent the dot-coms that used to eat everyone's spare time, it seems there has been much making of babies, which makes me feel rather old. After babies come lawns. Then sheds. Sheds are the little death.

This was followed by snowboarding in Lake Tahoe. I really can't snowboard, and I do it so infrequently that I forget almost everything in the two or three years between sessions. So this time I squished in a rib (opinions differ as to whether it's technically cracked; it sure hurts enough), twisted an elbow in an unfortunate (but not serious) direction, and probably did my liver irrevocable damage with all that endless apres-ski. Still, I had a lot of fun - if only Scottish ski resorts were as fancy as Squaw Valley and Heavenly. If only Scottish ski resorts had more (like any) snow, and more (like any) sunshine. Perhaps I should invent "rainboarding"?

Here are some photos:

• The Carson valley in Nevada at dawn
• An ancient (?) rusted tin in the Mojave Desert south of Death Valley

After that back to the bay area for a couple of days, including a fancy meal at a faux-sixties place in San Francisco (oh, fine dining is wasted on me) and then off on the longest drive of my life. From Oakland to Barstow (boy, that's not a very interesting place), then a day and a half in Death Valley (sleeping in Beatty, NV, as the accomodation in the valley is unpleasantly expensive). Death Valley blew me away: I've never been anywhere so big, so bleak, and so empty. In the middle of this desolation the little desert flowers were blooming (this, apparently, is one of the best seasons for them in years). It's strange - the smell convinces you that you're at the seaside and it's just low tide. There are salty tide pools and the landform feels just like the seaside. It took more than a day before I could persuade myself that the tide really wasn't coming back in. It would be a great place for backpacking or biking (in the winter; I don't fancy being there in the summer at all). I also visited Scotty's Castle, which wasn't really very interesting.

More photos:

• Golden Evening Primrose blooms on otherwise barren slopes
• Death valley viewed from an ash rim near Little Hebe Crater
• A wet playa lake near Badwater
• Ubehebe Crater, an extinct volcano
• Closeup of some dry mud flats at the southern end the valley
• Golden Canyon
• More exciting dry mud

After that I'd planned on spending a day in Las Vegas before driving further east. It poured with rain, and I figured that I didn't want to be trying to have an outdoor part of the holiday during the rain, so I spent two nights there. I'm really not overly fond of Las Vegas: I don't gamble, don't want to spend $100 to see Wayne Newton, and I'm generally immune to (or deathly afraid of) most of the other modes of sin that Vegas had to offer. So frankly I was rather bored. I did drive out to the Hoover Dam, which was impressive. The tour wasn't, however, and they neglect to tell you how limited it is when they're taking your money. Apparently the tour went to several places inside the dam - I really wanted to see the dam from below. Not any more; I can't conceive of Al Qaida blowing it up - it's about the least explodabling thing in the country. They take you down to the gallery above the turbine hall, you look at it for about two minutes, and then they take you back up. Apart from that it's the usual diorama visitor centre type stuff.

From Vegas I drove west to Flagstaff and then north over Coconino (at night, in a fair amount of snow) to Tusayan. The following morning I help an English guy at the gas station, who can't figure out how to pump gas. The first time I did this in the US (a long time ago now) I got similarly confused. In Britain you pump then pay, but in the US it's the other way around - which means if you're silly enough to pay in cash you have to guess how much, or overpay and then go back for change. Plus there's the pointless handle you have to lift to make the pump work (I've never found any need for that).

The vistor stuff at the south rim is way touristy, and one is left walking a tame little path with hundreds of bickering teenagers. I'm a bit underwhelmed, but that's probably entirely a function of only being at the tame top, and not having time to venture down into the canyon itself.

Photos:

• One of the fancifully named "temples" on the north rim
• View westward
• Snow on the south rim

Kayenta, like the rest of the Navajo Nation, is dry (alcohol wise); I wonder if the case of beer in the back of the truck will get me into trouble. Not to worry; I only see one Tribal Police vehicle in my entire time in the nation, haring down the road on some vital mission. Every layby off the road is strewn with bottles, so I guess that's what the kids do when the TV is bad.

Monument Valley is big, and impressive, and certainly worth the (rather hefty) trip. Like (almost) everwhere else on this trip, I wish I had a lot more time to explore properly, and to do so on foot. Even from the tame road around the easy bit, it's an incredible place.

You get that same uneasy feeling you do in any inhabited touristy place - the people there want your money, but they really don't want you. There are signs asking you not to take photos of people's homes (or, rather, signs saying you'll have to pay to do so). I don't take any; doing so would seem to require rather too much of a condescending "oh look at the quaint little houses the poor people live in" attitude. This is the poorest place I've been in the US, and it's noteworthy how many "Support Our Troops" signs there are here; I don't know what else folks would do for work.

Here's four photos of the valley. Even after pouring over the USGS geodetic map I still can't figure out which mesa is which, so if someone can help me with that, I'd grateful:

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4

It should be possible to figure everything out from the annotated aerial photo I submitted to Wikipedia a long time ago.

I didn't go to Canyon de Chelly, largely due to not bothering to read the next few pages in my guidebook. I did briefly stray into Utah (my first time) after I missed the Monument Valley turnoff, and I'm glad (and slightly surprised) to report that I didn't instantly turn into a pillar of salt. Worse, I didn't leave time for Arizona's meteor crater (something I only noticed on the map once I'd gotten to Phoenix).

From there it's a long drive south to Flagstaff and then down into Phoenix. I didn't have much time in Phoenix (I didn't arrive until way after nightfall) so I can't say much about it. Well, other than everyone drives very fast and the highway numbering is crazy.

Now, one question I need to address is the sat-nav issue. My Dad has a TomTomGO unit, which he's very impressed with (I less so, having been sent some weird roads in southern Glasgow by it). I could have spent ú100 on the US mapset for it, and I probably wouldn't have gotten lost. I did get lost, but not drastically. I can never navigate around suburban east Oakland, but the Tom Tom sometimes lets you down in such places. Flagstaff's freeway signage confused me a fair amount, and Phoenix was terrible. Vegas was easy, and every other town I was in only had one street. So I'm on the fence - I may be wasted two or three hours over the whole trip driving on the wrong road; on the upside, I didn't have to worry about whether to leave that expensive satnav unit in the car overnight.

I'm just back from a two and a bit day trip to Barcelona with a friend of mine (she who herein shall be called "the german woman"). Wow, that was a much better place to celebrate my birthday than dark chilly Scotland (not that it wasn't pretty chilly in Barcelona, particularly when we (rather foolishly) went wading in the Mediterranean.

I've you've not been, I couldn't recommend it enough. Beautiful, clean, friendly people, nice architecture, lots of interesting stuff to do. The food was great - I don't know how I'm going to go back to eating my own cooking after living on delicious, cheap, and varied tapas. Like all "ethnic" food, the less you pay for it (and the plainer the place you buy it) the better it is. We ate in one place under the Montjuic which served us each a fish, three slices of tortilla espanola each, and two (eerily British) desserts. That and a bottle of water and a bottle of Estrella beer (the latter for me, naturally), and the total cost came to eleven euros. Heck, you couldn't eat from McDonalds for that (and they barbarically don't serve beer).

How hard can a Spanish omlette really be? (I may have to consult Delia on that one, hopefully she does more stuff than just Yorkshire pudding). Naturally I took a bunch of pictures (it's so nice to be somewhere where there's enough light for cameras to actually work properly).

• segrada1
• segrada2
• batllo1
• batllo2
• batllo3
• calatrava
• graffito

In between the rainstorms, I took the following:

• autumn
• leaf2
• web

I've added Some more photos from California (the last lot, I think). They're all of flowers, taken in the garden of a friend of mine. You know, I'm really not particularly a fan of flowers in general, but if you want to take a beautiful photo quickly and cheaply, it's really hard to get a better and more convenient source that some little flower growing in an unused patch of land.

Also, by popular demand (not least from me) I've chopped the photos page into sub-pages, sorted "thematically". So, while there's still an overall index page, things are also grouped into more easily downloadable sections.

Most wiki sites have some kind of talk or discussion page, and the larger ones have fairly extensive processes, much of which implements structured things like multi-threaded conversations, staged processes, and sometimes voting - all made with the common clay of wiki.

Wiki is great for the task for which it was intended. It's great for collaborative editing of text. To date it's pretty much useless for collaborative editing of anything else (there's no reason once couldn't have a graphics wiki or a midi wiki, for example, but no-one has written the tools to do this).

Wiki isn't great for conversation, isn't great for process (which is workflow-managemant, I suppose) and really isn't good at all for voting.

• Archiving is hard - pages grow to large sizes, so someone deletes bits or moves bits or archives the whole thing in some repository and the discussion starts anew. This all has to be done manually, and it destroyes the flow of the discussions. As there's no structure to the discussion, there are no logical points at which to perform such an archiving procedure, and there are no clues to allow either people or software to later reconstruct the stream of what was going on.
• You can't permalink a comment or a discussion-tree. If it gets altered or deleted or archived, it's essentially lost (sure, it's in there somewhere, but in a form that means you have to go searching for it.
• It's almost impossible to syndicate and aggregate. There's no "we're done now" event in wiki, beyond the simplest edit-update. As edits can (and frequently do) go back and touch previous content (inserting comments, fixing bad links, reformatting, etc.) a naive RSS channel of a single wikipage would be filled with trivial update edits (and with no way of telling the client to glue all the little changes together into a single object).
• There is no structure to conversations, other than arbitrary conventions (often formatting-based). So it can be hard to follow a conversation, hard to see how an old discussion got into the present state, and there are no cues to allow software tools to figure out what's going on. So there's no way to automatically filter (in or out) a discussion or a thread that's happening on a wikipage which has multiple things going on simultaneously.
• The very plasticity of the wiki medium means that one person's comments are subject to infinite alteration by others. Although serious cases of this tend to be quite rare, one has to be a skilled operator of the change-history system of the particular wiki to figure out if, when, and by whom a (sometimes very subtle) change has been introduced. With those wiki systems which don't have history (or don't present it publiclly in a very useful way) then it can be almost impossible. Votes can be tampered with, and conversations altered to make the guilty appear innocent and the innocent guilty. Worse, if a discussion is subsequently archived (using the common cut'n'paste archival method) then the history is essentially lost.
• Voting is cumbersome, needs manual intervention, and is susceptible to fraud. Wikis often need to vote (what to delete, promote, laud, fix, move, rename, split, join, and what general policies and proceedures need to be adopted). Votes are conducted as general wiki conversations, and have all the problems associated with those, and some special ones of their own.
  • There's no means of checking that a given voter is qualified, and has voted only once. (this has to be done manually, something that doesn't scale well)
  • Managing more complex voting systems (such as transferrable voting) makes for more manual labour.
  • Discussions get muddled with votes, and untangling the two can be a tiresome (and yet again, entirely manual) business.
  • As with all wiki discussions, there's room for deliberate vote-tampering (by changing or manufacturing votes by others, or deleting unfavourable votes altogether). There's also room for entirely innocent accidental vote alteration or deletion.
• There are no hooks from which to hang a decent workflow system.

  Items need to be created, edited, checked, cleared, approved, and published. This isn't so much of a issue for an edit-forever public wiki like Wikitravel or Memory Alpha, but wikis which produce works in a finite time (such as those in professional organisations) may find the discussion of work and the actual work done itself dislocated. Resolution of discussions and concomitant changes in the work items must be done manually.

  To be fair, wikis weren't really built with workflow management and automation in mind, and don't have support for it anywhere, not just in the discussion pages.

So enough with the griping - clearly things aren't ideal (although even big wikis like wikipedia muddle through). For things to work better, and in particular scale up successfully, a wiki site (not necessarily, although ideally, the wiki software itself) needs to exhibit much of the behaviour of a bulletin board. So I'd suggest using some preexisting forum software, handled this:

1. The forum needs to have proper permalink and thread handling, and its interface should be able to present these sensibly (with permalinks obvious and with the user being able to open and close the "treeview" of a given thread or threads.
2. As this is a discussion about the wiki or its contents, users must be able to embed wikimarkup (including wikilinks, images, tables, templates, etc.) into forum items.
3. As there still all advantages to collaborative editing of "meta information" such as discussions, the system either shouldn't replace talk pages entirely or (better, I think) forum entries can have a "is editable" field (which can be changed only by the original creator of that item). Editable items behave exactly like miniature wikipages (and if the permalink code works properly, should be able to stand alone as templates or macros).
4. The forum should be integrated with the wiki's user account management system, including single sign-on and support for common policies (administrators, banning, flood prevention).
5. Integration with the wiki software's UI, including common stylesheet elements and proper cross referencing between the discussion and the article interfaces.

In particular, the separation between pages and talk pages (which software like mediawiki maintains) can be viewed as being rather arbitrary. With proper display-time inclusion there should be no reason why discussions or discussion elements couldn't be transcluded into pages, or why pages couldn't form (statically or dynamically) parts of ongoing discussions.

Here are some more of the photos taken on my recent holiday. They're all from California (indeed, they were all taken on the same day, a lengthy but high-speed drive up the Sonoma and Mendocino coasts of California). There don't seem to be any decent ones of New York City (it was terribly humid), other than some rather dull ones of the (very disappointing) Guggenheim museum I added to the corresponding article on the Wikipedia.

• basking, a photo of some seals (harbour seals, perhaps?) basking on a sandbank on the Pacific coast of Sonoma County, California, just where the Russian River flows into the ocean.
• sonoma_coast, some of the amazing rock formations that dot the Sonoma County coast. These are also from the Russian River area, taken rather early in the morning (hence the unfortunate sea mist). I saw some similar formations further up the coast (near Elk) later in the day, but by that point I was late for an appointment in Oakland (which is far from Elk) so had no time to stop.
• golden_gate, a shot of the Golden Gate bridge taken from the Marin side (following, incidentally, my getting horribly lost in the Presidio while driving a gigantic rental truck). You can see parts of San Francisco, particularly that TV transmitter tower (Sutro Tower, I believe it's called).
• breakers, a shot of Pacific waves breaking on the shore of Manchester State Beach, just north of Point Arena. Man, I stood in that damn ocean for ages, alternately freezing my feet off in the icey water or burning them on the blazing sand.
• shimmer, a simple texture shot of the receeding water, again near Point Arena.
• foam, another texture shot, showing that frigid oceanwater. I'll spare y'all the numerous photos of my bare feet turning blue.
• driftwood, a shot of an interesting structure someone built from driftood on Manchester State Beach. Visible in the background is the Point Arena lighthouse, which is (apparently) the tallest on the west coast of the US. You'll notice I've managed to entirely avoid that tired photo cliche, where we try to draw some lame allegory where the driftwood symbolises death or corruption or something. Nope, it's just a pile of wood on a beach. Sorry.

I'm back from America (technically I was back more than a week ago, but I'm only just crawling out from under the mountain of jetlag). I've not taken many nice photos (I decided it would be more fun to actually have a real holiday, rather than drive around places as a slave to my evil overbearing camera). I'll add some photos in a couple of days.

In the meantime, I've moved mcwalter.org and mcwalter.net from their prior home at plugsocket.com. There's nothing particularly wrong with Plugsocket (other than they're maybe rather overpriced) but they don't offer java or python and their config panel is the aging Sun Cobalt thing (which is fine, but horribly limited). So we're moving (or have moved, hopefully) to javaservlethosting.com. The DNS update has taken here, so I see the new version, and it seems to work fine, and at least seems to be a bit faster than before.

In a fit of getting stuff done, I've added some background images that have been sitting around waiting to be put up for ages. There's the three:

• sky, an attractive sunset taken from Stirling's King's Park last month
• usbkey, a supposedly artistic closeup photograph of my little USB flash memory key
• lily, a cute (in a blurry kind of way) photo of a nice spotted lily. This one was taken in someone's garden in California. No, really.

Woo-hoo! Tomorrow I'm off on holiday to the US, for a fun packed fortnight sleeping on my friends' couches and making a general imposition of myself. Although I've been back and forward to the states for years, this will be my first time travelling through the much maligned Newark airport (which seems to be called Newark Liberty Interational Airport now - surely they're not still on that "freedom fries" thing, are they?).

My clever travel agent (a very friendly German chap at Stirling University's in-house travel agent) pointed out that I could take as long as I wanted for a layover at Newark - so I'm taking a couple of days in New York on the way back. I expect to suffer a bit from the humidity (hell, I complain the scottish summer is too humid) but nothing ventured nothing gained.

It's spring here, at long last, and everything has come back to life. It's funny, you really don't notice these things usually (at least I never really have). It's easy to complain about tourists viewing their own holiday through the viewfinder of their camera, but one really doesn't see things properly until one actually looks, until one is perpetually scouting for a half-decent photo.

The cherry trees are in blossom now, and the japanese maple tree seems to have grown a whole new set of foliage virtually overnight. So for this month or so my little part of Scotland looks, to some extent at least, like Kyoto.

Of the usual myriad of sub-mapplethorpian flower photos I've only added the following three:

• blossom1
• blossom2
• bluebells

It's becoming clear that there's too many flower photos, in particular that the twenty or so crocus ones really are too similar to one another to justify their all being there. I'll have to thin them out somehow, but how does one choose between one's children?

Many additions to the images gallery:

• camellia1
• camellia2
• doggus
• duckling
• rabbit
• ripple2
• wettie
• daffodil_3 (yes, another darn daffodil - they're pretty, dammit!)

So, more of the same old faire. I've also deleted a few of the previous fire images, the editorial commission having stricken them (at least, I think I've striken the ones they told me to).

More exitingly (?), I've also made a new section, presenting images suitable for you to download and use as the background on your PC. Frankly, they're not really all that good, so I doubt they'll actually compete with that one of Halle Berry's boobs that you're already using, but I can life in hope. Take a look a the backgrounds section. Your feedback, including technical feedback, is most welcome. As are pictures of Halle Berry's boobs, naturally.

Unusual weather today - alternately blazing sunshine and heavy rain (although not both at quite the same time, which is something one sometimes gets in Scotland in the spring).

I've taken a bunch of my trademark (hackneyed?) low-level photos of daffodils growing in on the lawn of the HQ of Central Scotland Police. I'm quite glad they didn't take ill to my standing around on their lawn taking photos, all too many of which have images of their (rather unattractive) buildings, antennas etc.

The two photos I've added to the image page are:

• daffodil_1 (that's a shot of the sun shining through the petals)
• daffodil_2

If you look carefully, you can (just) see beads of water left over from the rain which had just ended (and which returned to soak me on the walk home).

I've added some images of farmworkers buring stubble to the images archive.

This was taken recently, on a rather soggy day in late March 2004. Hmm, I was always under the impression that such burning was generally done in the Autumn after the growing season. Still, it was a very welcome distraction. Taking the photos, walking around on the burning field, and talking to the workers (who didn't really seem to be having as much fun as one might think they would) nicely took my mind off the otherwise interminable fishing trip on which I'd been dragged. No, I don't like fishing one bit, even if we did catch a fish (which we didn't).

If it's not clear from the photos what they were doing (yes, it really isn't) the workers had long (maybe three metres) wires with some kind of fuel-filled rags tied to the far end. They walked back and forward across the field, leaving a (rather unimpressive, frankly) trail of fire behind them. If the flames appear at all scary in the shots then that's entirely a function of my being about six inches away, with the camera right down on the ground.

In the battle of the spam email, the tide has turned. Open relays are rare when they were once the norm, and modern baysian filters now reject all but the most illegible email spams. As noted spam-fighter Paul Graham wrote in August 2003 "so far, so good".

But spammers are professional, they're technical (or rather, those who write spamware are), and they have a strong impetus (profit) to continue in their line of work. Their goal isn't to send email, per se - the want user impressions, and they don't really care how they get them. Hitherto email and newsnet spam has been the easiest way, and so they've mostly stayed there. With email becoming a less hospitable environment, they're going to move elsewhere. They already are.

BBC news reports "spammers are targeting blogs". Equally, instant messenger and chat spam is now commonplace. This isn't a diversion - this will be the new battleground for junk postings. It'll follow the same trajectory as it did for mail, and it will be just as hard to stop.

Any website which allows users (anonymous or registered) to make changes to the website which other visitors can see will be used. Some examples include:

• weblogs (both those managed on professional websites like Blogger and those managed on individual hosts.
• wiki based sites, such as wikipedia.org
• community groups such as slashdot.org and plastic.com
• open-source software sites, which allow posters to post messages, file bugs, and in some cases upload software changes. Examples include bugzilla.mozilla.org, savannah.gnu.org, and sourceforge.net

What the spammers will do:

1. Insert their (textual) spam copy directly into pages
2. Insert graphics, applets, flash, or other media directly into pages
3. Insert DHTML code that pops up windows directing visitors to their own content
4. Add links to their own content, in the guise of ligitimate content
5. (in media where alterations can be made, such as wiki) subtly alter existing internal and external links to point instead to the spammer's content

How the spammers will do this:

• Where anonymous changes are possible, that's what they'll use
• Where access is uncontrolled but IP addresses are public, they'll keep as large a pool of addresses as they can, and use each address on as many sites as possible (a horizontal distribution). This makes a single site's blocking an existing address as ineffective as possible. Rather than flood, some of these accounts will perform incremental changes in a piecemeal fashion. A block of text or a URL will be tranformed from valid to spam not in one go but by steps, where each step doesn't make editors or reviewers particularly suspicious.
• Where registration is mandatory, they'll register using throwaway email addresses (they've already got plenty of those). For a while (until they're blocked) they'll have multiple accounts per site per email address. They'll setup SMTP servers on dialup accounts to handle these.
• They'll create sophisticated, site-specific scripts to make their changes. The more heavily policed a site is, the more clever these scripts will become.
• Where sites are policed (and obvious spam quickly removed) they'll have their scripts cut valid content from other pages or posts on the site, make some (less than obvious) spam changes, and repost this as a new entry, page, or post on that same site. This will, in general, produce content that will pass a cursory screen by overworked editors.
• One of the goals of the spammer is to have their spam posting persist for as long as possible. Ideally it'll be picked up by a search engine, and wholesale spamming of various groups and sites will be one way in which spammers attempt to elevate their google pagerank.

What can be done to stop them, or at least limit their activities:

• both to protect against HTML/DHTML spam and for security reasons, sites need to be very dillignet about escaping or removing html tags
• anonymous changes are problematic, and will be the most frequently abused. Some sites will disallow anonymous access altogether
• email sites already have countermeasures present to prevent new accounts being created be scripts - these generally rely on asking the client to do something that humans find easy and machines hard (such as recognising text on a noisy field). Spammers have ways around these, but this slows them down. Websites will encorporate similar countermeasures.
• blacklists of IP addresses and email accounts can be distributed between sites (via some kind of clearing-house facility). This is more useful for "webspam" (which is persistent) than for email spam (in which cases the spammer has already abandoned the address before it gets blacklisted). For webspam, once an address is identified as bad, all subscribing sites can flag or remove all postings that match it.

Spam filters put a darwinian pressure on spam and spammers, either to adapt to more effective spam, or to move to a new area where it's easier to operate. Similarly, spam in new venues will put pressure on software for communities, chat, wikis or blogs to adapt or be swamped (as email has) to the verge of being useless. In the meantime, get ready for a web that sucks (in places) as much as email does now.

I've added another image to the image archive.

This photograph, which I took on a horribly hot and humid day this summer. It shows the lower summit of the hill called Dumyat, which overlooks Stirling in Scotland. Down there in the bluisish murky haze one can just see the Abbey Craig, which is topped by the monument to William Wallace.

That purple stuff is patches of heather. It really does grow in that weird pattern, and it really is that colour (infact, it's far more vibrant, but my camera is rather too poor at capturing colour to properly display what it really looks like).

This is probably going to be the last image update for a while (unless I dredge something up from my rather extensive image archive). I have to confess to having broken my trusty Canon digital camera (note to self: don't leave expensive things on the roof of the car). It actually doesn't look too badly damaged (and perhaps needs just some kind of camera-orthopedics), but it'll need fixed.

I've added yet another photograph, this time of a tree on the moors, to the photo archive. I hope y'all like it.

For the geogeeks among you, it's on the Sheriffmuir above Stirling in Scotland, pretty close to Dunblane. The view is from Sheriffmuir road looking roughly North West, over the valley to the Trossachs. Right beside the cellphone mast, and a large and depressingly modern farm (farmers just don't want to pander to the rustic stereotypes of we jaded urbanites). It's also surrounded by some blackface sheep, which manged to perpetually be in the way and almost never in a cute photographic pose - the only decent photo I have of any of them is a "L.A. style" driveby photo, with only half of a rather angry looking ewe in it.

I have at least a hundred photos of the same area, all taken on the same evening. It's perhaps the curse of using a camera with automatic exposure control that each picture either shows the amazing sky or shows details of the dark landscape. This falls from the latter catagory - the sky was infact infinitely more grand that it appears here.

Another addition to the photo page - this time a shot of the just-snowcapped Grampian mountains in Scotland.

Sorry, mountain fans, I've really no idea which mountains these are - they're somewhere on the road between Aviemore and Pitlochry (but then, there's lots of mountains between those two places, so that probably doesn't help much). Again, this is a product of the same holiday as yesterday's seal pictures.

Aviemore has a rather bad reputation in Scotland (and particularly in the acid pages of certain guidebooks), as it's long been a concrete ski dormitory. It's really not that bad (having, apparently, been tidied up over the past few years). It's still trying desperately to be a "proper" skitown, but it's got a long way to go before it's Aspen or Zermatt, although it feels just a teensy bit like Tahoe City (which isn't all that impressive, but still). Frankly, after endless one-street Scottish towns and villages which feature only a drab tearoom and a "heritage centre" (note: "heritage centre" appears to be code for "shop"), Aviemore is a breath of fresh air.

I've recently returned from a short holiday touring around Scotland with my Californian friend Scott. Frankly, I really don't understand why americans think October is a suitable time to visit Scotland, particularly when they want to visit the scenic but notoriously rainy west coast. I suppose it's as silly as Scotsmen holidaying in Orlando in August.

Some of our time was spent at the Scottish Sea Life Sanctuary on Loch Creran near Oban. It's a great place ; don't let that ugly-ass website fool you - they're much better at fish and seals and stuff than they are at website design.

The seal pups there messed around with us terribly, hanging around looking as cute as possible and then zooming off into the murk as we fumbled vainly for our cameras. I did manage to capture a couple of decent images (and over a hundred rotten ones). I've uploaded the decent ones in the 'animals' section of the photo page (warning: nauseating cuteness ahead).

Will we ever be free of the tyranny of GIF? Not at this rate. We need to upgrade modern browsers so we can move on without breaking older, smaller, and more specialised browsers.

Apart from the legal problems associated with the format, GIF is technically outmoded, lacks decent colour imaging, has no alpha support, and features rather poor compression. Ideally it would have been entirely superceeded now either by the vastly superior raster formats PNG and MNG or (for maps, diagrams and other such "drawn" things) by the scalable vector graphics format. PNG support is essentially universal in modern browsers, and both MNG and SVG are bubbling under nicely.

While the burn all gifs page flatly recommends "by switching your site to PNG, you encourage users to upgrade to PNG-capable browsers", this rather stern prescription leaves all too many innocents in its wake - there's still enough users who're stuck (for technical or institutional reasons) in GIF-only browsers. Wise web developers (and me too) believe, rather, in making pages that "degrade gracefully". This leaves web page developers with something of a dilemma - either stick with the antique format yet again, or leave the poor innocents who can't upgrade with a broken website. Whoever said HTML was portable?

It's possible (although tricky and rather non-portable) to pick up image information from a CSS stylesheet, and it's possible (although tricky, very non-portable, and frequently disabled) to use DHTML (i.e. JavaScript and some DOM other other) to alter images according to browser capabilities. Lastly one can dodge the client issue altogether and generate the appropriate webpage on the fly in the webserver - but using expensive server resources is a rather expensive and troublesome solution, particularly to a problem that should be trivial to solve on the client.

What we really need is a fix to the markup that defines images, which presently looks something like this:

If browsers supported image markup that allowed us to define a number of images (with some ordered notion of preference) and let the browser load and display the best one it is able to. So a first-cut at this might look something like this: This second version is better, as it allows newer browsers to support enhanced functionality (a newer file format, in this case) without messing things up for folks stuck in antique browser land. We have to be careful, however, not to just defer the problem into the future - if (as is bound to happen) a third (fourth, fifth...) format becomes available in a few years - do we either condemn future web designers again to the same hard choice as above?

Naively, one could fix the problem incrementally (for some amazing new 2009 era file format "FUF"):

Naturally, the above isn't really much of a solution for anything. It's altogether better to solve the problem in one go, by specifying a list of available files, and letting the browser pick the first one (scanning left-to-right in the list) that it can support:
Note that I cheated a bit above, by putting the mime types (image/fuf etc.) into the (pseudo)URI (which is naughty, to say the least) but it means the client doesn't have to parse the filename (which is itself naughty) or load the file (which is inexcusable) just to figure out it can't support that format.

This approach (or something more general, ideally with better thought-out syntax) also solves that perennial browser-author issue "what's the point in our supporting it before IE does". That seems to be a significant part of the "do we include MNG" argument that the Mozilla folks are going through right now (see mozilla bug 18574).

I spoke too soon. After much hand-wringing and chicken sacrifice, this version of the homepage does use a CSS only layout. It seems to work acceptably even in IE6 (sorry, I don't have access to IE5 or 5.5, so please let me know if things go weird in those browers). Better yet, the page degrades gracefully, so it should be much more accessible for visitors with screen readers and text-only browsers.

I've redesigned the homepage of the website quite radically. The old homepage was a dreadful anachronism which dated from the days when I really had no idea how to write decent HTML layout code. Hopefully this new version looks stylish and sells the website's contents better (to the casual visitor) than did its rather amateurish predecessor.

I really wanted to change from using a table layout to an entirely CSS layout. Written properly, a CSS layed out page can degrade much better than the usual table-based solution that's the current state of the internet. This would provide a simple and usable page for disabled users and those using limited access devices (like TV set-tops and cellphones). The villain of the piece is, as always, Microsoft. IE6's handling of percentages in CSS layouts differs from the other modern browsers (Netscape/Mozilla, Konqueror/Safari, and Opera). I'm being generous here - really IE6's CSS layout code is broken. I'd love to either not cater for visitors for IE6, or at least give them a crappy experience, but the grim fact of the matter is that around 90% of my visitors (poor misguided innocents that they are) still use either IE6 or or (jeepers) IE5.5.

So I have a plea for moderately technical visitors who're still running Microsoft Internet Explorer - web authors and sad disabled children the world over beg you to try another browser.

For mac users, try Safari or Mozilla.

For windows users, try Mozilla or Opera

Better yet, all of these browsers are free to download and they're all better than Internet Explorer, faster than Internet Explorer, and more standards compliant than Internet Explorer. Users of these browsers also have a lowered rate of gonadic atrophication. Honest.

[ perhaps I should explain: "mozilla" is exactly the same as the Netscape browser, just with Netscape's advertising stuff removed ]

This website (which can be accessed from http://www.mcwalter.org or http://www.mcwalter.net) has recently moved home.

It was previously hosted by Yahoo! in the sunny silicon valley. For both technical and logistical reasons I've moved it to Plugsocket Internet, so this page is now being served from the dank East Anglian fen in the low eastern part of southern England. Do you remember that "dead marshes" place in the second Lord of the Rings movie? East Anglia's just like that.

Perhaps it's my imagination, but things seem to run much faster from the new location. If you're looking for a decent low-cost web hosting solution, and you don't need the handholding that providers like Yahoo! provide, I can heartily recommend Plugsocket.