More than once, the White House told [the Guardian’s] editor, through emissaries, “how much the president relied on the Guardian’s whole-hearted support for its policies.”

Although the exact itinerary of President’s Bush’s upcoming trip to the UK is a closely guarded secret, you can be pretty sure he won’t repeat the last US President to pay the UK a state visit, Woodrow Wilson, who met the editor of The Guardian.

Want to be part of a living work of art for the rest of your life? New York author Shelley Jackson plans to ‘publish’ her short story ‘Skin’ by having each word tattooed on a different person.

Incidentally, I’ve been toying with the idea of getting something tattooed on me but I can’t think what or where. Inspired by Microserfs and Jennifer Government, I thought of maybe a barcode, but I’m not sure what product would be best fitting…

While doing a mass purge of my Inbox, I found a link I sent round in December 2001 to a “Design Your Own O’Reilly Book” generator. However it is now dead.

So I did a a Google search for it, but instead got a lot of random weblogs mentioning the same defunct site, with no real data. I just gave up after a while.

Andrew Orlowski has written recently about how blogs distort Google. Although a lot of his stuff is slightly on the scaremongering side - on how a cabal of technerati are threatening to take over the net - his point is a fair one - Google’s indexing system is biased towards mutually-referring pages of the type found in the Blogosphere. This point was hammered home when I made a Google search for Orlowski’s article, I got lots of blog entries discussing it, rather than the article itself.

Google have said they’re tweaking their algorithms, but the above two examples show they’ve still got a bit of work to do. In the meantime, leaving aside the point that I shouldn’t use my blog to complain about how blogs are ruining the internet (Ric, just don’t even think about it!), if anyone knows if the O’Reilly generator is still out there, or if legal/bandwidth issues became a problem and killed it off, let me know. It was quite funny…

Just been to see The Matrix Revolutions. It was absolute gash.

Linuxjournal reports that most Democratic contenders for the presidency run Apache as their webserver software, while George Bush uses Microsoft IIS.

I’ve done some investigation work of my own. Kudos to the Labour Party for using Apache, while the Conservatives and more shockingly, the Lib Dems are faithful to Microsoft.

The Labour Party’s own taste for Linux doesn’t spread much to other Government websites though - Number 10 and Parliament use IIS as well. But three cheers for the Deputy Prime Minister, as his office uses Apache.

Worryingly, the Government’s e-Envoy and the UKOnline portal refuse to disclose what server they have (although Netcraft records that they’ve used Lotus Domino and Apache in the past), presumably as they’re worried at being hacked. Not good signs that we have a transparent or secure e-government, is it? They should take a leaf out of the Iraqi Provisional Authority’s book - they happily disclose they are using Netscape Enterprise.

LOST: My memory of last night. Last seen shortly after formal hall ended. Small cash reward for its safe return. Thanks.

Just had a great weekend, culminating in watching the Flaming Lips last night at the Hammersmith Apollo (their biggest ever gig) with Marion. Quite possibly the best gig I’ve ever been to, in fact definitely the best gig I’ve ever been to - Wayne Coyne displaying great showmanship, hurling giant balloons at the audience, getting the crowd to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to randoms, doing a cover of ‘Seven Nation Army’, and wearing lots of fake blood, while (according to the NME) Chris Martin looked on approvingly. They’re great.

I tried getting a balloon as a souvenir but it popped. :-( Have to make do with the ticket stub instead…