Oh crap! The Advogato spammers are back. I hope that some of the account holders notice - although most seem to post by RSS feeds these days.
On an unrelated note, the Advogato posters who embed video are still terminating the recent entries, and their own entries, prematurely. I haven't yet investigated further.
I am currently reading John L. Casti's Five More Golden Rules. I don't know why I waited so long, as his earlier "Five" book is one of my all time favourites, and is what started me on the path to enjoying mathematics again. A partial trigger for reading the Casti book was The Poincaré Conjecture by Donal O'Shea. I didn't keep up with all of the topology but it is a fascinating read. That was a welcome relief as I had previously grabbed a copy of Stephen Baker's The Numerati from the library and found it way too superficial for my tastes (I think I was hoping for another Mathematical People). For lighter reading I have The Brother's Christmas present, Snuff, which has an excellent Vimes proportion (maybe another Fifth Elephant). Current favourite software program is Berkeley Madonna, mainly because it is small, fast and interactive (as well as being surprisingly powerful).
Good to see that the Advogato Recent People feature is working again (and being abused, [sigh]).
It was eerie to see this great cartoon from Jon Rosenberg as I always thought there was a chance of the scene ending like that (Roy Batty meets Ozzy).
Also, good news on the tag fixes. I really appreciate your hard work. It would be a shame to see Advogato deteriorate or disappear.
Okay, now thanks to bad RSS feeds the Advogato front page is really messed up. The main target seems to have been the "Recent People Joining" list (which, thanks to the mess-up, now pretends to be empty). Of course, that has been the only way you can find out when the new spammers join (unless they actually create a diary entry). So, it looks as if we are screwed...
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!