I've been having all sorts of problems with the North Bucks Road Club website.  These manifest themselves at intermittent connection problems earlier this week, followed by complete loss of function yesterday morning.  A bit of probing revealed that the issue lay with the hosting company (it's not the company that hosts this site) - as far as I could tell, database connections were timing out.

Yesterday lunchtime, this became more severe, with no access whatsoever.  I have had a series of recent backups using Joomlapack, an excellent Joomla! extension that backs up entire websites.  After a number of false starts (consuming several hours yesterday evening), I was able to restore a functional site on a local PC, thereby reassuring myself that at least the backup was functional.

This just, in the "What were they thinking of?" department.  Poor old Microsoft.  They get splattered by the EU for forcing Internet Exploiter down the throats of Windows users, they get told by a Texan court to stop selling their biggest money-spinner, Word, and now they are embroiled in accusations of racism.

An advert featuring happy executives (one asian bloke, a black bloke and a white woman) was clumsily Photoshopped to replace the back bloke's head with that of a white bloke for the Polish marker.  The Photoshopping was pretty clumsily done, and they didn't edit the hand of the chap who lost his head. You can see the before and after pictures of this particular PR disaster at the BBC website.

So, we're in the midst of a major recession, the Government has spent huge amounts bailing out the fat cats of international banking, and Joe Public is tightening his or her belt.  The Higher Education Sector, in which I work, is certainly feeling the chill wind of cut-backs, and in my Institution's case this comes on top of the Goverment's ELQ policy.

So, one might have thought that costly and pointless exercises such as the dreadful ID card plan, and the even more despicable Interception Modernisation Programme might have been curtailed or dropped.  Not a bit of it.  Computer Weekly reports (Home Office trebles consultancy spend):

From the excellent xkcd...the Tech Support Cheat Sheet...

The Astana professional cycling team has certainly been an interesting team this year.  From the reappearance of Armstrong (for me, an unexpected force at the Tour de France), and the subsequent soap opera that ensued as Armstrong and Contador jockeyed for preeminence through the duration of the Tour, to the reassertion of Kazakh control and the departure of Bruyneel, Armstrong et al to form the new Radio Shack team, it's been pretty exciting.

Now, Cyclingnews.com reports (Vinokourov to head to the Tour of Spain with Astana) that Vinokourov is back in the Astana fold after serving his ban for blood doping, and will lead the team at the Vuelta.

This was my last open event before the Duo Normand (20th September) and, given the hopeless character of my season thus far, I was hoping for some indication of returning form.  I decided to ride over to Tempsford, a ride made slightly dodgy by the huge roadbuilding exercise going an along the A421 - but of course at about 6am, there's not too much traffic.  The ride was an excellent warm-up, and I felt pretty enthusiastic as I lined up at the start - and this despite the stiff breeze that had sprung up, and which would make the going a bit tough on the south-bound legs.

Fortunately the F1/25 starts with a short southbound leg to the Sandy roundabout, then a 12-13 mile leg north across the Black Cat roundabout to turn at the Buckden roundabout, then there's a final leg of about 8 miles that today was into the teeth of the breeze.

The Guardian reports (Office of Fair Trading to investigate targeted ads and pricing online) that the Office of Fair Trading is to investigate aspects of behavioural advert targeting. 

"We are also considering including the use of personal information in advertising and pricing," said the OFT. "In particular, we may look at behavioural advertising where information on a consumer's online activity is used to target the internet advertising they see.

Not only was this event the final evening event of the North Bucks time trial series (the remaining events are weekend morning), but it was the seventh counting round in the League. A cloudy morning gave way to brilliant blue skies and high temperatures.  Oh, and strong wind!

I rode over from work to the meeting point at Stony Stratford, dodging the usual strange driver-roundabout situations.  The good weather resulted in a good turnout of riders.  At the appointed minute, off I went, and pretty soon found the outward leg was to be blighted by the strong wind.  Still, I persevered through Beachampton (fortunately avoiding the tractors that were going to and fro along the course), and on up to the climb up to Nash.

Cyclingnews.com reports (UCI confirms USA, Great Briton's top allocations for worlds) that while France and the Netherlands will only be able to field 6-man teams in the 2009 World Championships, the UK will field a full team of 9 riders.

Team sizes are determined by the UCI using some arcane method that Cyclingnews.com don't share with the reader.  However, it's undoubtedly linked to ranking performances.  France and Netherlands gain their places via the Europe Tour, as indicated by the table below:

This story popped across my screen this morning:Microsoft patents phylogenetic comparative methods. . . say what? - Dechronization blog  (hat tip, PJ over at Groklaw).  Bizarrely, Microsoft appear to be patenting a method for Clustering Phylogenetic Variation Patterns.” The authors of the blog article are understandably a bit agitated about this (see this neat graphic).  The author of the Dechronization blog article, Liam Revell, writes:

The patent filing, by Stuart Ozer, claims invention of a variety of techniques already in wide use by systematists and evolutionary biologists – and (so far as I could tell) none of these inventions are original in quality. The whole patent filing can be read (at one’s own risk) in its entirety here