I’m writing this as I’m preparing my laptop for our trip.

My first two questions for a trip are: do I take the laptop and do I take the camera?

Both are rather bulky compared to the other items I would take with me, and both are by far the most valuable item I’d have.

For many trips, I leave them behind so I don’t have to worry about them. It can be easier to just enjoy things that way, and sometimes it’s nice to not have e-mail and Haskell available as distractions. I find myself doing things I wouldn’t otherwise be doing sometimes.

On the other hand, sometimes it’s nice to be able to have a secure way to check my e-mail on the road. (I never trust public machines/terminals, way too easy for them to become infected with spyware.) Sometimes it’s nice to have things to do, too. So here’s what I’m loading my laptop up with for this trip:

• A full sid mirror, binary-only, for its architecture. I already have a copy elsewhere on the LAN, and I have enough spare disk space, so it makes sense. I always hate being stuck somewhere without a ‘net connection and really needing some package.
• Several books, mostly from Project Gutenberg.
• Updated recent checkouts of stuff from my darcs repository.
• Maps, lists of free hotspots, and information about the cities I’ll be in
• Current copies of my e-mail (via OfflineIMAP) and Usenet news (via newsx) to read/work with
• Docs and references for GHC and any other programming tools that I might wish to use
• Some MP3s
• One CD-RW, in the drive, in case I need to exchange data with anyone

What does everyone else load up on their laptops?

I’ve had a lot of trouble with comment spam. This blog has blocked many thousands of comment spams. And unfortunately, it’s blocked a few of Cliff’s legitimate posts, too.

So I have switched to the new captcha module for Drupal. In case you don’t know, a captcha is an automated test designed to tell humans and computers apart. It often takes the form of a graphic with letters or numbers in it — letters or numbers than humans can read, but computers can’t.

I used this idea before with WordPress and it was 100% successful.

So now, you can prove that you are a human right when you make a post — and you will be told instantly if the post is accepted or not. And if it is, it appears instantly.

A lot of comment spam is arriving via trackbacks, and captchas can’t be used with them, so I’ve disabled trackbacks for now.

I think this should make blogging a lot less annoying.

This change also applies to the other Drupal sites hosted here: The Haskell Sequence, Forest of the Plains, and Rail Passenger.

There’s a piece by one of the Wikipedia founders that is very intriguing — he likens many of its problems to Usenet. If you’ve never used Usenet, that’s a dreadful insult indeed.

Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism

According to reviews I have read, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People should make a fascinating read. It’s now available as individual PDFs from its home page. I also used pdftk to combine those into a single large file (1MB). I’ve also then converted that into ASCII text, Plucker, and Palm DOC formats.

Downloads via HTTP

Downloads via Gopher

Here are some other reviews and discussions about We the Media:

• Smartmobs
• One of several articles at Dan Gillmor’s own blog
• Online HTML version
• Dvorak

There’s a interesting interview with Joe Trippi, former Dean campaign manager. He has a lot to say about collaboration, the power of the Internet, and how things are shifting from television to the ‘net.

One year ago, I noted the Quovix experiment to find candidates for a job by blogging. That experiment didn’t work out.

This year, they tried it again. This time Quovix CEO Marty Morrow reports Blogging beats Monster.com for job posting. He lists some benefits, which center around greater interaction and ability to learn about what makes potential employees tick (and the ability to learn what makes potential employers tick).

Meanwhile, Dan is going the other way: he’s blogging to find employment.

Maybe someone should write something to match up the Martys and the Dans… but then we already have monster.com, right?

Does the whole thing stop working if “everybody” starts doing it, because then you have all the riff-raff too? Or does that just make it better, because the social network is larger?

One word: ARRGH.