Here's a quick random thought. As has been pointed out on some other blogs one of the shortcomings of the Time Capsule is that it only protects against some kinds of needs for data recovery. One could add a little bit more protection without sacrificing the convenience by swapping time capsule's with one's neighbor and having your backups live at their house and vice versa. This only works for people in houses close enough for it to happen and doesn't protect against all ills like a flood wiping out the neighborhood but would likely provide some protection against a house fire... of course the resulting physical insecurity of all your data means you have to really trust your neighbor.

Time for a new look. The new theme here doesn't work completely yet as I'm finding a few bugs here and there. The big move is that much of the content which was on the side bars previously is now located near the bottom of the page. This way these items won't be distracting while looking at the page. One of my favorite features of the new design is the "fluid-but-not-too-fluid" nature of it. To a point it is a fluid design but stretch it too far and it will stay at a reasonably readable size. Thanks Drupal for being such a rockin system.

Mollom moved from a private beta to public beta today. I've been fortunate enough to participate in the private beta and can say this stuff rocks. There are plenty of methods of protecting sites from spam and bad content, but this is by far the best so far. The problem with many systems is they treat legitimate users as the enemy. At least with traditional CAPTCHA systems is that they challenge the user for an answer before the user has provided any information to suggest they should be challenged. Users pay the penalty for the bad behavior of the spam bots. There are systems that work around this and some like Akismet have done pretty well on this site. The problem, however, with many of these services is that they can still be gamed to a greater extent. And, since the spambots don't recognize that their attempts to add content have been unsuccessful they merrily pound away on the server. The other methods also generally call for administrators to monitor things pretty closely. With all the great spam tools there would still be a couple of spam posts a week that would slip through on this site. During the transition to Mollom a bot was actually attempt to post. In the few seconds the site was unprotected a couple of posts slipped through. In the weeks since nary a errant post has been made (aside from one on an article which should not have been configured to accept comments but that wasn't spam).