Bagel Belly Blog

Comments, spam, viri

One thing I did notice while I was away - the sheer bulk of crap flooding my inbox and my blog on a daily basis. At the beginning of last week, I had to take drastic action and remove the Movable Type comment script temporarily, as the spam in this blog was threatening to overwhelm me.

I had my laptop with me in Corfu, primarily so that I could download photos from my camera (I have a few MMC cards, but not nearly enough for the number of photos I planned to take). It also allowed me to keep an eye on my mail. At one point, I was cut off all weekend when Vodafone Greece broke GPRS in Corfu, and by Monday morning this is what I was faced with:

Over 1300 messages. On a weekend, when things are slow. A quick check revealed more than 1000 of them were spam, virus or mailserver error messages. And this is after I filtered the worst out on the server.

On Friday, spamassassin and clamav were installed by a friendly sysadmin. Things are a lot quieter now.

I'm back!

I'm back from holiday, and from the insanely busy week that followed it.

The holiday was two weeks on the island of Corfu with my family. I wouldn't say it was a restful time - chasing after my two young nephews ensured that - but it was certainly good to be away from home and not thinking about work and other stuff 24/7.

We rented a villa for the two weeks, complete with swimming pool which, by the end of the holiday, was as warm as a bath. From the pool, we had this fantastic view across Corfu, and we could see Corfu Town in the distance. We also hired a couple of cars - one of which was a Fiat Scudo, which was great fun to drive (especially on the long and winding cliff-top roads). This meant we got to see quite a lot of the island. I have to say, I found Corfu to be one of the nicest places I've ever been.

In total I took well over 500 photos, so I won't post them all here, I'll just put some of my favourites up. The rest are all online, but I pay for bandwidth so email me for the URL.

During our first week, we went on a day trip on a boat that consisted of sailing north up the eastern coast of Corfu, until we found this secluded beach where we stopped to swim and have a barbecue. On the way back, we stopped at some caves where we hopped out of the boat straight into the sea for a swim.

In the second week, we took a longer boat trip to the islands of Paxos and Anti Paxos, where we again got to swim off the boat - here, in the most beautiful blue-green sea I've ever seen. The whole coast of Anti Paxos is riddled with caves and coves, with some stunning scenery.

One of the most surprising things about Corfu was how pleasant the capital (Corfu town) was. Clean, atmospheric, crammed full of winding streets, great little shops and with hundreds of birds swooping overhead. The view of the old fort from the top of the new fort was amazing, especially near sunset, with the Greek mainland looming in the background. I really loved it.

I was definitely glad I went for two weeks. The sunshine, food, swimming and atmosphere were just what I needed, and several people remarked when I got back that I was looking a lot healthier than when I went. I certainly feel it. Now I just need to make sure I stay that way. And I need to book my next holiday!

Where's Andrew?

Bit quiet around here, isn't it? Probably because I spent the last week rushing round to get everything finished before disappearing for a little while. Here's one of the views from my drive yesterday. (Compressed, this is a sluggish unstable painful GPRS link.) Where am I?

OSS Watch observations

Back from the Open Source Advisory Service conference on "Support Models for Open Source Deployment". An interesting morning - the afternoon lagged a bit, as it was rather more "vendor hard-sell" in my opinion.

Some observations:

• The audience seemed to think they'd buy Open Source support if only it were available. Well, it's been available from a variety of sources for some time. Are we providing the wrong support? Or are we failing to get the message out about our services?
• Acceptance of Cocoon is growing. It was a delightful experience to see one of the panel - Joel Greenberg, Director of Strategic Development, Learning and Teaching Solutions, The Open University - extolling the virtues of Apache Cocoon to a full room. It's usually me doing the hard sell to directors, not the other way round.
• Sun don't know what they are doing. Novell know exactly what they are doing, but have over-eager sales types. My impression of Sun's presentation of "vendor support" was that it was weak, muddled, and ultimately clutching at straws. Sun definitely came across as a struggling company going for a community land-grab because they don't know how else to stimulate interest in their products. In contrast, the Novell presentation was slick, finely tuned, and focussed - though far too long.
• The DTI's message about open source software is too open to debate. Even amongst a room full of so-called experts, it was impossible to reach agreement on the "Open Source Software as a default exploitation route for government-funded software" paper. Does it demand the consideration of Open Source Software? Who knows.

I'll link to the OSS Watch site again when all the presentations are available. Some will make very interesting reading, for sure.