It probably cannot get more ridiculous than that: a blind man has been arrested for driving .

Lately I am getting lots of spam comments to my blog entries, mainly concerned with pornographic sites or anti-impotence drugs sale. This is really annoying, and although my comments are not published automatically, but are rather stored in approval queue, it wastes more and more of my time to go through it and delete all of them.

A valid option would be to use a captcha module for Drupal. I tried it, but it obviously has some bugs, which prevents even humans from posting, so it is not really useful.

After almost half a year of refurbishment work the Waterloo and City London underground line will reopen next week, on 11th of September.

Those of you who use Microsoft Outlook know about its address auto-completion functionality. You type a few letters into the address field and Outlook presents you with a list of possible completions. The list includes those recipients, to whom you sent e-mails recently. The problems start when an address is no longer relevant, either because the person has got a new one, or you don’t write him/her many letters any more.

According to an article in The Economist, London attracts more capital and hedge fund managers each year. Mayfair starts to threaten NY’s dominance as the hedge fund capital of the world. Higher profitability as well as better regulation are quoted as the reasons behind the change. An interesting quote:

Amazingly, the FSA (the UK financial regulator) has fined only one hedge-fund manager thus far—and that was for just £750,000 ($1.4m). As London catches up with New York, though, this will surely change.

An article claims, that the property market in the United States will collapse any moment, since many home owners cannot make necessary mortgage payments.

Another one also discusses a problem with payments - this time describing a particular controversial mortgage product, still quite popular in the US, which the article claims was wrongly sold to many people who didn’t understand the risks involved.

I must admit that both articles were linked from Calculated risk - probably the biggest property crash whiners on the Internet.

I wonder whether there are ways to improve ratings of my site without paying for advertisement. Any bright and not too obvious ideas are welcome! Write in comments below…

Microsoft is developing a command line environment, which they call PowerShell . I read some negative feedback, but it looks rather interesting and powerful. The main difference from traditional Unix approach is that the commands do not communicate via standard input/output channels, but rather export and consume objects with properties. These properties can be queried and eventually actioned upon.

The current release candidate uses .NET Framework 2. It would be very interesting to see a port to Unix - a lot of ready code can be extracted from currently existing Unix tools. Maybe an open source project will start to create such a port.

All you Windows developers - there is an alternative to Regsvr32.exe - Reggie . I haven’t used it yet, but it looks quite promising. You need it if you experience problems registering your COM+ DLLs or typelibs, and don’t have a clue what is the cause. Reggie is more informative, and even provides a shell return code, so it can be deployed in scripts.

I really like Drupal - the open source community and blogging software. But their alphabetic sorting drives me nuts - is it so complicated to create proper manual ordering? They have something called “weights”, which can be assigned to items in a list, but this is really not convenient, especially when lists change frequently or are long.

But given how many great and useful features they already have, I hope that this problem will be solved in the future.