Let's just say, hypothetically, that you had a grant application that was due for a preliminary check on 2nd of April and you didn't even know about the hypothetical preliminary deadline until 3rd April when you opened the email from your hypothetical PhD supervisor who is quite forgicing about that sort of thing because he's not very good at it eitheri and he says something like "turns out that crucial deadline was yesterday, why don't you ask if you can apply anyway, so you can maybe go to Romania in July?" And then the hypothetical research administrator is very kind to you despite considerable provocation from random useless research students over the years and decides to allow you to turn in your application on the morning of 4th April.

And by some miracle the travel agents actually get your hypothetical emails asking for a quote with a one hour turnaround and actually send them and furthermore they've undercut the matrix.itasoftware.com quote by 50%.

And then you hypothetically think to yourself "Alas, alack, these emails look terribly and shouldn't go in a grant application," and you think about installing Evolution or Thunderbird but that seems like a lot of work just to get your emails to print nicely. And you try mp but it doesn't like Outlook style quoted-printable emails, so that's a bit of a wash. However, thank goodness there is such a thing as muttprint. muttprint isn't very complex; you'll be able to kind of see, very faintly, the aura of the LaTeX commands that made it glowing ethereally from the page. But it does look nice.

Way way back in the day when I was going through a "I want to help Free Software and don't really know how" phase—somewhere around about 2002 or so I finally became a reasonable programmer, and it's still not really clear to me how that happened, after I'd tried for so long—I created a site called buglinks.org, a sort of a bug reporting portal.

It was hosted for a while by Will LaShell, who was someone I didn't know otherwise, and when I accidently nuked the directory it was hosted in, I was too shy to ask for it to be recreated, and that was that for a while. Some time passed and he must have let the domain name lapse, and in due course I had my own hosting, bought the domain name myself, and re-started it. But it's never really gone anywhere, I'm just not terribly involved in the bug fixing world. So if anyone else is interested in hosting a "welcome to the world of bug fixing" site or something similar and wants the domain name and existing content, email me. Otherwise I will let the domain lapse in June, and probably archive the content somewhere under puzzling.org.

Mark Pesce, Jeff Waugh and I did a short panel interview on blogging, online communities, standards of behaviour and so on for Triple J's Hack program. This is all part of the follow on from the inter-blog harrassment of Kathy Sierra (see also Sierra's update prior to her appearance on CNN).

It was recorded Monday and went to air yesterday afternoon. I'm appearing in my new capacity as the international coordinator of LinuxChix (of which more later), although that was actually a coincidence of timing, I'd only been coordinator for a day at that point. (LinuxChix is mischaracterised in the introduction as a blogging community, by the way.) The Hack program for that day is currently available as an MP3 file [13 megabytes] (13 megabytes is at least a half hour download for dialup users, and about 7 minutes on 265kps broadband) via their podcasts. The segment I'm in starts at 22 minutes 46 seconds and ends at 28 minutes 34 seconds.

Bitch PhD: Open letter to Markos Moulitsas:

Now, I agree with you: the vast majority of that kind of assholish crap isn't *really* threatening. Most email or comment threats are just hot air. But at some point, some dickhead is going to stir up enough craziness that someone really *is* going to get attacked in real life as the result of some online bullshit.

Codes of conduct aren't going to prevent that, of course. Maybe nothing will. But people like you and me *can*, I think, postpone its happening, maybe even make it less likely, by not just saying (in effect) "butch up or quit blogging." The voices of vulnerable people matter too. Maybe even more than the voices of those of us who aren't easily intimidated.

...

...those of us who provide readers with opportunities to respond--in blog comments, or on online forums, or in chat groups--need to make sure we come down hard on assholes who use those opportunities to hassle, harass, or threaten people (including us). For god's sake, don't make excuses for them by pretending that they're some kind of force of nature, like an earthquake, that we can't do anything about. Because we can, if we shut them down when they show up.

I host puzzling.org on a Virtual Private Server at Linode. (What a Linode VPS is: a Linux server with its own public IP address that is sharing hardware with other servers. It works out as a cheap way to host a small to medium load Linux server with all that entails—root access, multiple users, webserver, whatever other processes you want to run—on a USA-fast connection with USA-cheap data transfer prices and someone else generally worrying about things like RAID and kernels for you.)

Linode is a generally good choice for a Linux VPS, as they have an immense amount of automation. Here are some of the things you can do without having to ask tech support for help: boot and reboot; install a distribution; re-install a distribution; create multiple 'boot profiles' with different distributions; create new disk partitions; and resize partitions.

One less good thing about them is that they keep in touch with their community mainly using their web forum and so, being a non-web forum kind of person, I miss a lot of their new features. So, some new features for my Linode using friends:

• a Finnix recovery image that doesn't count towards your disk quota, with the usual recovery kind of features (ability to mount your filesystems and so on); and
• 100% more RAM and disk than a few months ago (this was, apparently, brought forward so that they'd be roughly competitive with Slicehost on resources, with the advantage of instant signups without a waiting list).

New customers get the upgraded resources automatically, existing customers will have to shut down their Linode, and may have to migrate it, login and check the migration queue for any pending migrations of your 'node. (IP etc stays the same, since the resource-related migrations are always within a single datacentre.) Once the migration is complete, you have the new RAM automatically, but you will need to shut your Linode down again to re-size your disk images to take advantage of the new quota.

I found out about the Finnix image when I was trying to move /var to its own partition (this is pretty much impossible to do without either a recovery image or at least the ability to boot into single user mode). It would have made recovering from accidently removing ubuntu-minimal and its dependencies the other day (/bin/init was removed) a lot easier if I'd known about it then.