I wrote a few months ago about my difficulty trying to obtain a decent laptop without Microsoft Windows bundled in with it. After all, it seems ridiculous to have to pay for something that costs as much as £250 in the shops, when I'm never going to use it, right? Samsung (from whom I eventually bought the machine) reacted quite strangely when I asked them about the possibility of getting one without an operating system bundled in. In the end, I just swallowed the bitter pill and bought one anyway. I payed my Microsoft tax, and then wiped the software as I was required to do by the licence agreement (given that I didn't agree with its terms). It's not nice to have nothing to show for your money.

A few months later, and the idea of computers being sold bundled with GNU/Linux seems to be taking off a little. Dell announced a while back that they would be offering their computers with Ubuntu, the sister of my distribution of choice, Kubuntu. Despite the fact that currently the offer is only available in the United States, this is real progress.

Thanks to Bryce Harrington, a few photos of one the new Ubuntu-bundled Dell laptops is available here. I imagine many people will be keeping an eye out to see how this develops.

In the meantime, Dell have a website called IdeaStorm, on which members of the public can vote for ideas which they would like to see become reality. There are three separate calls (I know, in the open source world why do something only once, eh?) to extend the offer to Europe. Click on the tick here, here and here!

20th July, that's the day to stand up and be counted. Thanks to the guys over at Birmingham, It's Not Shit, it will be "Talk Like A Brummie Day".

From their website, the aim is that "people around the city and the rest of the country with be asked to spend one day talking like a Brummie". It's hoped that this will help to "break down some of the prejudice and stereotyping that surrounds Birmingham's accent". I wholeheartedly agree.

How often do we hear on the news that Birmingham is home to Britain's stupidest accent, or that people are least likely to trust someone with a Brummie accent? After all, Adrian Chiles's recent rise to popularity as a presenter on the BBC is barely enough to counter-balance the worldwide impact of Ozzy Osbourne, and Claire Short hasn't doing us too many favours either. It really is time that the people of Birmingham took the initiative and revamped the image of our accent, just as has been done with our city itself in recent years.

So, download a poster here and display it in your window, or on your office door like we have. Then, on the 20th July, make sure you talk like the Brummie you are! And, if you're not from Birmingham, why not give it a go? It really can be quite a lot of fun sounding like Jasper Carrott.

Ha! I've done something about the comment spam I've been getting lately. Readers of this site might have noticed the occasional comment showing up at the bottom of the blog posts full of spam links, mainly pertaining to sex and loans. I've been doing a pretty decent job of deleting the comments when they do arrive, but their volume has been increasing quite a bit lately. Time for action.

There are a couple of different approaches which can be taken to this kind of thing. The first option is some kind of automatic spam filter, often based on a machine learning process, or a look-up table of known spammers. I'm not a fan of this kind of thing. The primary reason for this is how do I know that it's not getting it wrong? A couple of spam emails slipping through the net is okay, I can just delete them, but what about any falsely categorised solicited emails? Email is important to me, and I don't want to have to start worrying about that. After all, I wouldn't get someone to throw out my post for me if the envelope didn't look right. So, I don't use a spam filter for my email. To be honest though, I don't get too much of it anyway (a handful of emails per month). I attribute this to being quite vigilant in not letting my email address get out there on the web in plain text format. So far, it's worked very well.

So, I don't want to go down that route with this site either. I also like the fact that anyone can comment, without any approval from me, so that isn't on the cards. I've gone instead for the option of a captcha. Regular internet users will probably be familiar with this kind of idea. It's basically a variant on the idea of a Turing Test (perhaps). In essence, you, comment poster, will now be required to prove that you have a brain, and that, to some extent, it works. Oh, and that you have studied some kind of maths, at least to primary school level. The captcha module for Drupal, which I use for this site, defaults to using a simple maths problem, such as 2 + 8. Answer correctly, and your comment will be duly posted, but answer incorrectly, and it will not. Simple, eh?

Of course, as I have already alluded to, this does also discount people with very poor maths skills. Another, albeit small, widening of the digital divide? Actually, some sites which use more complex visual captchas do have to provide accessible versions too. A graphical one is not that useful, for example, if you use a text-to-speech style browser.

The idea also assumes that computers generally can't solve the problems being asked. Now, of course, 2 + 8 is perhaps even easier for a computer than a human, but the key here I imagine is that the computer isn't expecting the question. This could of course be combated by determined spammers though. As the techniques both for designing and for recognising captchas improve, will a problem be found that is provably impossible for a computer to solve? Or is the long term future of open digital communication doomed to wallow in can upon can of spam, or else rely on automatic filtering?