Goodness, how did that person get hired as a programmer if they weren't already fully familiar with arrays? I wouldn't hire anybody as a programmer unless they were able to select an appropriate data structure for a problem, and explain why they selected that particular one. (Well, at my current employer, the bar is much higher than that, but I'm speaking in general).

When on the first day out, look at other people and then dress like them for the rest of the journey

Hmm. Best not go to Horseguards on the first day, then.

"I am traveling to London from Washington state for two weeks in December for pleasure (use-it-or-lose-it vacation scenario) and was wondering if I should bother bringing my laptop. I know that I would have to change the region code on my wireless amongst other things and the power cord would have to be changed for a UK outlet.

Why bother? Just get a travel adaptor, like everyone else does. They're cheap, even if you buy them in the most expensive place possible - the airport. Most laptops do not require voltage conversion (and have power supplies that explicitly state that they accept 230V). Check.

Would I be better off not bringing my laptop and just using Internet kiosks (do they exist in London?) or would having my laptop be a better choice to keep in touch, off-load my digital images etc?

London is no different to (say) New York in this way. You can use Internet kiosks, but you'd be crazy to do so for banking transactions, just as for internet cafes anywhere in the world. As for how you work with digital images, it depends on the value of the images and the volume of data, doesn't it? When on vacation myself I generally produce more image data than it's convenient to burn to DVD, so I don't really have that option. Hence I take a laptop + an external drive, so that I can keep two copies of the data. One goes in the checked luggage, the other is carry-on.

I plan on hitting the British Museum but was wondering what geeky things to do that are in London that might be worth going to and any tips hints on overseas travel for geeks? I travel quite a bit in the states but this will be my first trip overseas and want to make the best of my stay in merry old England. What words of advice do you travel seasoned geeks have for me?"

You won't see much "Merrie Olde England" in London. It's a city. As for stuff to do there, you haven't indicated what you enjoy doing. People could recommend you landmarks etc., but that would make your stay awfully generic. Here's a list of non-generic things you'll probably hate because they don't suit your (unstated) tastes:

• The London Silver Vaults
• Camden Lock (when the market's on)
• Dickens House Museum
• Sigmund Freud's House
• Highgate Cemetery
• Greenwich Foot Tunnel
• Royal Observatory, Greenwich (correct pronunciation is "grenitch", that is, one of the Es and the W are silent)
• Almost any of the London Walks company's walks (recommended guide: Richard with the red hat)
• Tate Modern
• The Museum of London (which is a museum about the city itself)
• Horseguards
• The Cabinet War Rooms
• Belowzero
• Harrod's (esp. the barber's and the Green Man)
• The Clink Prison Museum
• St. Paul's
• The Thames Barrier
• The umbrella shop on New Oxford Street
• The Skinny house at the junction of Devonport Road and Goldhawk Road (in the UK, never leave out the "Road" or "Street" part, there are often duplicates - "Foo Street" and "Foo Road" likely both exist and are sometimes far apart)
• The Old Bailey - drop in quietly on a random trial to see how it all works

... so, research them to select the things you'll find interesting.

True enough. If they've fixed the quality issues in their production process, then good for them.

Perhaps you misunderstand. I wasn't using Word. It wasn't part of my "toolkit". I didn't say that the backticks were changed to single quotes by some default behaviour. Nevertheless, there they are in the published book.

I published a book with Sams. Never again. There were two main problems. The first was that they published my material in two books and to start with only paid me for the first (until I pointed out that they had 'forgotten' to pay me). The second problem is that they have a publication process totally based on MS Word. That's very common in publishing. However, in my case the result was that quite a bit of the content got screwed up. The shell commands for example had back-ticks turned into single quotes. Gah. So I won't use Sams or any of the other impressions of Macmillan Computer Publishing again (this is not the same publisher as Macmillian, confusingly). Another thing that would give me pause is the number of completed pages per day they expect. I don't believe an individual author could come within a factor of 3 of that and maintain any level of quality.

Now for the good news. Next time around I would engage with any publisher who has a workflow that either produces camera-ready copy (e.g. with LaTeX for example) or uses something like DocBook -- essentially, any workflow that limits the opportunity for people who don't understand those funny symbols to accidentally mess them up (in my case I don't know if the people or Word messed up my shell code). I'd talk to O'Reilly and Addison-Wesley first, though there are other publishers who are equally accomodating.

OTOH I suggest you take your existing computer science bookshelf, give each book a score out of say 5, and sort them by score. That should give you a shortlist of publishers to talk to.

RMS holds fast to a number of principles, about software freedom and nomenclature. He is not frequently known to compromise a whole lot (actually it does happen, but most often in pursuit of a more important goal). These aspects of RMS's personality - and the fact that he is apparently not motivated by many of the things other people are motivated by - for example, money - make other people uncomfortable. They don't know how to deal with him, and they don't know what tools to use when negotiating with him (if you want to negotiate, you have to control something the other party wants).

The point many people often miss is that if RMS was easily given to compromise, or if he were not so very determined, then he would have given up long ago. Don't forget that the GNU manifesto was published in 1985. RMS for a long time was a voice crying in the wilderness. Most people would not give up a paying job to work on the "software freedom" thing when nobody else has even heard the phrase. To keep on doing that when everybody else thinks this free software thing is nuts takes a special kind of single-mindedness and determination.

Why anybody thinks RMS would stop being single-minded now is beyond me.

Totally separate the data collection from the user interface. Keep both of those totally separate from the system that selects and delivers the alerts. Make sure the system as a whole won't make the problem worse (e.g. if you lose a major piece of infrastructure, will it send you 300 alerts?)

Ireland should be in your first list. Ireland is predominantly English-speaking. Irish children learn Irish in school - at least to a basic level - but its actual use is relatively rare.

And the answer is incoming links from around 86,000 pages according to google (links:domain.name)a lot of them are created internally passing links between malware site to malware site. But the majority come from sites using php forms which add user posts to the the sites pages. A number of months ago i found my sites contact forms were sending a lot of garbage emails to me absolutely stuffed with urls and I wondered why bother doing this since i'm not going to visit the sites. anyway the cure was to only allow the forms to be processed with no more than a few urls in them. stopped the junk hitting the inbox. It's not stopped the automated posting but the forms are not processed and i don't get them any more. When I examined the links to the malware site i found php posted user posts packed with links just like my emails had been the difference being these were posted published and being crawled. Because of these links a site with less than 4 weeks life is ranked highly because of the quantity of inbound links and thats why I got to watch a display of XP like virus and malware scanning,

The general solution to this problem is for you to modify your software so that links in blog comments are served to add rel="nofollow" to all of the links. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow for more details. Of course that will not make the spam comment posts go away immediately but if the technique is rolled out widely, then the SEOs will figure out that posting spam blog comments does not gain them anything.

It's fairly obvious that the cost of informing customers - and other related costs - should be borne by the organisation who failed in their duty to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the data. After all, until we are at a point where it is cheaper to take the measures to keep the data safe than to be delinquent, companies are incentivised to be delinquent.

First, figure out what it means for your website to be available (do people need to be able to fetch a page, or do that also be able to log in, etc.). Select monitoring software and set it up correctly.

As for the serving architecture, at this level of load, you're better off without clustering. You don't need it for the load and it's probably a net loss for reliability; most outages I've seen in two-node cluster is either infrastructural that takes them both out (power distribution failures, for example) or problems with the HA system itself (switches going into jabber-protection mode and provoking a failover, failure detection script bugs, etc.). If you really feel that a single machine does not offer enough protection, go for an active-active configuration and simplify the problem to directing incoming requests to the working web servers, as opposed to "failing over".

This changes a bit if your reliability needs are high enough to justify separate serving facilities in separate data centres in different cities. For that sort of stuff you need to look at working with DNS to solve part of the problem too, but the right approach there depends on to what extent the website is static content.

For the most part, all of the core computing applications have already been developed.

Record that, and come back to read it in 20 years. Or wait 10 years and ask your information agent to find it for you.