Jonathan Hitchcock - Vhata Vas Hyah

Today is the midwinter solstice, but it's a beautiful sunny day outside, in the fairest city in the southern hemisphere. However, today is lovely for more reasons than just that.

Adeline works at Primedia broadcasting, which incorporates Kfm, CapeTalk, Highveld and 702. Mel Jones is part of the KFM Breakfast Team (comprising Nic Marais, Mel Jones and the producer Ian Bredenkamp) and every day, she does Random Acts of Kindness as a station feature. Leaving aside the question of whether you can schedule spontaneity, the breakfast team decided to make today, the winter solstice, an official Random Act of Kindness Day.

I think I should just quote Adeline - she puts it best:

They asked listeners to drop off tinned and non-perishable foods at the studios for the homeless as part of Random Act of Kindness day, and the response has been unbelievable - imagine a 5x10m space just FILLED with food, and stuff is still coming in. It might sound like someone puked up a Hallmark store but it really restores your faith in people, seeing that kind of generosity and enthusiasm. So today is lovely because people are lovely and I am happy to be one.

I asked for a photo, and she sent this (click to enlarge):

She says:

I had to go up to the mezzanine level to get this much in and there's still more outside the frame. You can't see it but to the left is about half the same amount of food as well, it's coming in faster than they can sort it.

Well done, Cape Town!

We've decided on a date for the next in the series of Cape Town GeekDinners: it will be on Thursday, July 26th, at 18:30 for 19:00. Head on over to the wiki to sign up and have your say in deciding on which venue to use.

Lazyweb, O, lazyweb, I call out to thee in my hour of need. I installed the spam and trackback modules for drupal, and to the outside observer, my blog is nicely spam-free. However, I get about fifty spam comments and spam trackbacks a day, which get trapped in the approval queue, and I have to manually wade through cialis and porn adverts/links to see if there are any real comments/trackbacks for any of my posts.

Depressingly, there generally aren't.

What's the best way to keep one's comments and trackbacks spam-free, without having to manually delete every single dodgy one, and without getting any false-positives?

A side note is that the trackback module isn't great - if I want to send a trackback, I have to manually find the trackback URL and put it in the little textbox - isn't there a nice drupal module that checks all outgoing URLs, and autodiscovers the trackbacks, and pings them? The trackback module that I have installed seems to think that this is what it does, but it has delusions of grandeur, in my opinion.