Jonathan has been having trouble with spam in Drupal, and so have I.

I have a nasty feeling that some of the spambots use exploits in Drupal code to circumvent the verification process completely, which might explain how they got round Jonathan’s sneaky Captcha system.

I’ve just been spammed about 50 times by some bloody online poker site. I have comment moderation turned on so they didn’t get posted to the site, but I now have to plod through deleting the things one at a time.

The people that run these spamming operations are total scum, on a par with the touts I saw outside Hyde Park trying to flog Live8 tickets.

Far be it from me to encourage any naughtiness, but wouldn’t it be nice to see some sort of coalition of good hackers dedicated to searching out the spammers and taking down their sites. Give em a dose of their own medicine…

Update: due to a flurry of spam, I’ve now turned off anonymous comments again. If you wish to leave a comment, please either register for an account, or use trackback.

I’m not quite sure how I managed to miss this gem the first time round.

Thanks, as always, to The Register.

We managed to get hold of some tickets for the big screens in Hyde Park (thanks Jane and Tim), so went along.

I can’t say that much of the music interested me, but there were a few notable exceptions. Annie Lennox did a good arrangement of Sweet Dreams, Robbie did a great turn, and the Floyd were excellent (I saw them at Wembley in 1987, sans Waters, but I never thought I’d get the chance to see all four of them on the same stage at the same time).

I saw a great banner: “Pink Floyd Reunited - Pigs Have Flown!”.

Overall I thought that the atmosphere was a bit muted - it certainly didn’t have the buzz that the TV coverage was implying, but then they probably had a plentiful supply of drink and drugs inside the celebrity enclosure, whilst we were restricted to sneaking in vodka disguised as mineral water!

I can’t say that it felt like many people were there to make any kind of political statement - which is not surprising I guess, given the lottery-like nature of the ticket distribution, and the general level of political consciousness in this country.

It seems to me that it has served its purpose as a way of raising awareness, but it feels more like a media frenzy to me than a genuine groundswell of popular opinion.

Still, there’s no way that the G8 leaders can claim that they haven’t heard. The question is - what happens if they ignore the message?

It would be nice to think that if the summit doesn’t deliver, all those people who are now claiming to be right behind the cause will remember June 2nd 2005 in two or three years time when their national elections come round, and will act accordingly.

Call me a cynic, but I ain’t holding my breath…

The login block in Drupal has been annoying me, as it’s a bit big and clunky for a site like this one, where the expectation is that most users won’t have an account and will not want to login.

I figured that it ought to be possible to make some smart menu login and register items in the navigation block which changed depending on whether or not someone was already logged in.

For various technical reasons this seems to be tricky (probably I just haven’t figured out how to do it), so I came up with an alternative.

The Smaller Login module implements a much smaller login block, which just contains a single line containing login and register links. If a user is already logged in, the whole block goes away (you can enable the log out block in the navigation menu to allow people to log out once they have logged in).

You can see the module in action on this site (if you’re not logged in, it should be visible at the top of the right-hand sidebar).

Quite a lot of my Mac programming friends having been jabbering on about the Osbourne effect, and saying things like: “well I was going to buy some new hardware, but now I’m going to wait”.

I don’t really get it to be honest.

Sure, if the Osbourne effect kicks in then it will hurt Apple, but there’s not much reason for it to kick in, other than a bunch of hand-wringing Mac developers creating a self-fullfilling prophesy.

When you look at what Apple have actually said, it’s just that at some point next year they will be releasing some products using Intel processors. They haven’t said when, and they haven’t said what.

They have said that they definitely won’t instantly be replacing their whole product line. By definition then they will continue to support PowerPC for a good while, and since the trend is towards processor independence, not away from it, it is unlikely that they are going to do something in the future which stops OS X from working on PowerPC.

So by buying a PowerPC machine now, you aren’t going to be left out in the cold in a year. Sure your machine will be a year older than next year’s model, and perhaps a little slower, but that would be equally true if next year’s model was PowerPC based. That’s always true, and one always has the dilemma of whether to wait a while or not, but I see nothing in this situation to make matters worse.

The Osbourne effect is based on the idea that the new product is going to be so vastly superior that there is absolutely no point buying the old one. Apple haven’t said that. One imagines that the machine will be a bit faster, but the real reason (at least the reason that Apple have stated publicly) for switching to Intel is that their long term roadmap is better, not that the current crop of chips totally blow away PowerPC chips.

For all we know, Apple’s first Intel based hardware might be a tablet, or a handheld, or something else that they don’t even make right now!

So what’s all the fuss about? If you need a new mac now, because your current one is too old/slow/noisy, then go out and buy one. If you don’t need one, then wait until you do.

As our Californian cousins might say: “like, duh…”.