memcached as a distributed session solution

It's moderately common these days to write web applications using sessions. When a user turns up, they're given a unique session ID, generally fed to them in the form of a cookie. The programmer can then store any old junk that they like in the session, which generally looks like a hashtable, and is stored server-side somewhere. This is handy for maintaining state and so forth.

Now, there are a few ways that the session can be stored. With things like PHP (and Ruby on Rails, and mod_python, and...), it's typically stored in a temporary directory, as a file. With Hunchentoot, the Common Lisp webserver that I use, it's stored in memory, in a real hash table.

A problem emerges when you look at having more than one machine handling HTTP requests. Suddenly, locally stored sessions won't necessarily work; user X's first request might be handled by server A, but then their next request might be handled by server B. One way to get around this is to redirect them to a specific server on entry, and keep them there. Hotmail used to to this, for instance. Another is to store the session data somewhere accessible to all servers. A MySQL database is occasionally used, especially by PHP-y people, but a better solution is memcached. Memcached is essentially a giant in-memory network-accessible hash table. It automatically manages data, deleting things as it runs out of space or they expire or so on. RoR, for instance, can use Memcached for sessions.

I was recently wondering about how one would go about creating a distributed application using Hunchentoot. This is particularly important since, while multi-core servers are becoming more common, most Lisp implementations, AIUI, do not do SMP (SBCL and OpenMCL do). Therefore to fully utilise a server it might be necessary to run more than one webserver on the same machine. Memcached seems like an ideal solution; the one issue is that there currently isn't a Lisp client for it. I'm writing one at the moment, as I get a chance; I will make it available when it's in a decent state.

Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Taoiseach

Have you seen Bertie Ahern's Fianna Fail's lovely new election posters?

Two candidates, and a picture of his Bertie-ness. He has generously given us permission to vote for his candidates in whichever order we see fit, but still, it's a bit much. I'm not sure are all Fianna Fail posters like this; there are none on Westland Row for the moment, and that's the only place I've been in town today. Possibly Martin Brady and Michael Woods are simply so hideous that their faces would scare off voters?

Now, if Bertie was a universally-beloved father-of-his-country sort, this poster might make some sort of sense. As it is, he's the leader of a party which is polling about 35% in opinion polls, and he hasn't, in the past, been adverse to accepting the odd generous gift from the business community. Possibly a bit overly full of himself?

Words stolen from the English language by filthy deviants

One of the war-cries of the ageing bigot is that various words have been 'stolen' from the English language. Words like gay, special, fax-machine, blancmange, necrophilia, all are now tainted.

I found a wonderful example of a sentence that a respectable modern writer would never, ever put on paper today, though...

There was the sound of an ejaculation within, perhaps just 'Oh'.

Isn't that wonderful? The same book also uses the phrase 'on the telephone', today the province of highly specialised fetish pornography.

New Advances in Ugly Fonts

This web-page is interesting, not so much because of its content (it's about an object persistence system for Common Lisp, and hence is highly uninteresting to most normal people) as because of the interesting and ugly font it appears to use.

Now, while this font appears on my Mac, it may not appear on your boring Windows computer. Just in case, here's a sample.
Hideous, eh?

Edit: On copying and pasting a bit of the page into TextPad, I found that the offending font is 'Arial Narrow'. I've seen it on font lists and so on, but never actually used before. Now I know why.

Smile!

I have, on occasion, been given out to because none of the various photos of me scattered about the place are smiling. I attempted to take a few smiley ones today:





I think possibly my face just isn't able for smiling, or something...

Freezer by the Sea

I saw this interesting item while on the beach today.
One of those chest freezers of the type typically used to store dead bodies in television programmes. I wonder how it got there; the beach isn't particularly accessible; most access is by small steep paths and there's certainly no road access. Possibly it washed in from the sea!

Also, these. A little drawing of a family of birds; quite nice.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Bertie Ahern evidently wastes no time. With the election only announced today, the following work of art has already appeared in Sutton.
Note that all the text is in Irish. This is to prevent anyone from actually being able to read it.

'Universal' Binaries

Many, if not most applications for MacOS now come as 'Universal Binaries'. A Universal Binary is an x86 executable and a PPC executable in one package; these 'binaries' thus run on both pre- and post-Intel transition Macs. As of the most recent version of XCode, in fact, a Universal Binary can now contain up to four executables, for x86, x86-64, PPC32 and PPC64. As the forthcoming iPhone appears to be ARM-based, a fifth might even be added.

The advantage of all this, of course, is that it makes it easy for users to download and developers to maintain applications for the various architectures. The downside is size. Universal binaries are already often nearly twice the size of conventional application packages; as the two 64bit architectures get added when Leopard is released, this will get even worse. I recently downloaded a 700mb TeX package for MacOS; its non-Universal predecessor was about 400mb.

There's a lot to be said, at this stage, for maintainers to at least give users the option to download packages for one architecture or the other. Few people need both, after all. VLC does this, but it appears to be almost unique in doing so. Note that the non-Universal packages are about half the size.

Trinity Ball Ticket-tastropy

As it's my final year and I've never been before, I decided to go to the Trinity Ball this year. I'd like to go before I leave, and it gives me an excuse to wear a tux, which I often quite enjoy. Anyway, tickets for the Trinity Ball never sell out. The SU always makes out that they're about to, but they never do.

Seemingly for the first time in living memory, they sold out this year, before I got one. Bugger.

Good God I'm Ugly

I was at a friend's party last night. I awoke today to an email notifying me that someone had tagged a picture of me in Facebook. It's one of the more horrifying ones I've seen recently; I feel the need to wear a paper bag on my head from now on.

Here's a cropped version of the image, with the guy I was talking to removed. In case he doesn't want his photo all over the internet, and not at all because he makes me look even worse by comparison, you understand. Of course not.

Bertie is dead. Long live Bertie.

The current government has abruptly disappeared in a puff of apathy, as Bertie calls a general election.

I always find it mildly disconcerting when that happens.

I worry about the outcome of the offending election; I really don't like the idea of living in a country run by terrorists, but they seem to be doing rather well in the polls, and might well swing a coalition.

Belts

For the first time ever, I recently purchased a belt. Amazingly useful; it has rehabilitated an old but quite nice pair of jeans which I had thought irreparably gone (they're sufficiently loose that they tend to slip off almost immediately). I generally take a 30" waist pair of jeans or a bit below, so most of what I have are at least slightly inclined to migrate floorwards. This is, of course, God's way to punish me for my vanity in losing weight.

Sellafield, noted nuclear reactor

A number of people have informed me recently, in no uncertain terms, that Sellafield, the nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria, is a nuclear reactor or collection of nuclear reactors. They are, basically, wrong.

Early in its life, Sellafield (Windscale) had two air-cooled nuclear reactors used for the production of plutonium, tritium, and various other substances, largely destined for use in weapons. One of these caught fire; this was the Windscale disaster, one of the largest nuclear disasters in history. They were shut-down, and are in the process of decommissioning.

Sellafield was also the site of the Calder Hall nuclear power plant, the world's first nuclear power plant. The last of the four Calder Hall reactors ceased operation in 2003.

Then there was the WAGR (Windscale Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor), a prototype for the AGR reactor series. That was shut down in 1981.

And that about wraps it up for Sellafield's reactors. Sellafield is really, of course, a nuclear reprocessing and storage site, and continues in that role to this day.

Real nuclear reactors in the UK include Sizewell B, a unique-model PWR designed by Westinghouse, Hinkley Point B, a plant with two AGRs, and Wylfa, a plant with two large MAGNOX reactors.

So, while Sellafield contains a selection of defunct nuclear reactors, they are hardly its focal point, and to say that it is 'a nuclear reactor' or a collection of reactors is a little odd.

The Web Advertising Treadmill

I make a reasonable amount of money off of Google AdSense (on this website). Not a fortune, but it's certainly very helpful. Now, payouts are in US dollars, converted to Euros. A large part of the market is also dollar-economy. So over the last few months, while I've had a modest increase in page views and dollar earnings, my earnings have, in real terms, stayed static.

This is an exchange rate graph of dollars against euro for the last 120 days. Depressing for anyone who makes money in the US. Nice, I suppose, for anyone who wishes to visit the US; New York's tourist board has actually run an advertising campaign here advising people to 'shop while the dollar drops'. Absolutely horrific for US visitors to Europe, no doubt, although it seems that the small proportion of Americans who are inclined to travel internationally are mostly in the economic class to be able to cope with a little currency devaluation.

Andrew Lloyd Webber

I've just rediscovered Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I'd forgotten just how much fun they were. They were, I remember, one of the few things that kept me going as a child. Sad, or what?

Biscuits are good for you!

The following adorned Tara Street station this morning:
Let's see how close we can come to hinting that chocolate biscuits are good for you without actually saying so! (That would, of course, be a lie, and probably not permitted.)

Of course, Guinness used to do this rather more explicitly, but that was banned. No doubt the cigarette companies did the same, back when they were allowed to advertise...

Should this really be allowed, though? The 'goodness' of McVities, indeed! And 'wholemeal', of course, is a health keyword these days. Bah.

As an aside, I bumped into somebody I know vaguely yesterday who was on his way to a cake party! A cake party! Imagine!

(I'm just bitter because I don't allow myself chocolate any more.)

Edit: Google, as always, obliged, with a wonderfully wacky ad for this topic.
Biscuit beckons! The cry of fat people everywhere.

Esoteric Web Development Language Wars

SlideAware, an online presentations tool, is apparently written in Erlang. Yes, Erlang, the odd, concurrent, Prolog-like language. As someone who has written websites in nothing odder than Common Lisp, I'm feeling slightly upstaged. :)

Permanent TSB still can't spell

I previously mentioned Permanent TSB's (Permanent TSB is a largish bank-type thing) ad, with the spelling mistake:

Recently, I saw the same ad again. It seems that the person who made it has remembered how to spell 'unnecessary';
But forgotten how to spell 'quarterly'. Is it really too much to expect a bank to employ vaguely literate marketing people?

Cllr. Terence Flanagan sets an example

Terrence Flanagan is a Fine Gael politician who is standing for election to the Dail in my constituency. Now, he appears to have decided that he needs a bit of public exposure, which is probably wise, as I had never so much as heard the name before. Seemingly, he settled on using a car with his face and name on it. Now, of course, in these times of fuel worries and CO2 emissions crises, he decided on something small, tasteful, and efficient, right? Well, not quite.


He apparently, on some mad flight of fancy, decided on this eyesore. I mean, possibly it was his own 'car' anyway, but still, using it may not be the best of ideas. A lot of people really don't like these, and the Sutton/Howth area is particularly full to overflowing with them. Why do people drive these things?

In any case, it's nice to see candidates making an effort on emissions, even if it's not necessarily in the right direction.

In view of this sighting, I have revised my 2007 election blacklist thus:

Sinn Fein - May have terrorist wing.
Greens - May try to put windmills all over the place.
Christian Solidarity - May be totally, irredeemably mad.
Fine Gael - May be overly attached to ugly, wasteful pseudo-cars.

I'm inclined to hope that this becomes the greatest electoral advertising blunder since Ivana Bacik's unfortunate colour-changing posters in the MEP election, but of course in this particular, SUV-rich, constituency, he may get away with it.

Wherein AdSense loses the plot

Seen on one of those 'pictures of fluffy cats with silly captions' sites.I mean, what on earth?! What, exactly, is the high street price for a cut princess? And what has CORBA to do with cats? I'd prefer an XML-RPC operated cat, please.

Photo fun from the LGB

I was at a Trinity LGBT society event last night. The actual event I didn't find enthralling; it involved playing Nintendo Wii on a projector. That meant that I had lots of time to wander 'round the Eliz room (a room in Trinity House 6) taking photos of silly things.

So, without further ado...

Usage instructions for a fire blanket. I won't discuss the meaning of item number one, as this is a family blog. Number two tells you that in event of fire, you should have the nurse fling the fire blanket on it while everyone else flees in terror. This is why every room should always contain at least one nurse. In number three, we see that if the gas fire implanted in a cyborg's back comes on, they should be wrapped in the blanket and rolled along the floor.

This is a lifestyle microwave. In our modern society, many people carry a microwave at all times.

This is the secret solution to the recycling problem. The offending tea urn (for such it is) has been there for at least a year; Trinity apparently achieves its laudable recycling targets by never, ever, throwing anything away.

There were a few pictures which sadly didn't come out. One was of a stereo with a light labelled 'CH MEMO', another was a VCR with a switch labled TMR. Now that's usability!

More usability. Do you want BLSS 10 or RDSS 10? You mean you don't know?
A mail order barbarian firm.

Hitler and DeValera share a joke.

More on the way.

Yet Another Blog Move

I have actually moved my blog again. It is now hosted by Google Blogger; the original was self-hosted with Wordpress and the second was self-hosted but uploaded automatically by Google Blogger.

So, why? Well, Blogger is introducing all sorts of new features (easy templating and so forth) but they are now treating the (S)FTP users, like I used to be, as second-class citizens; they don't get most of the new features. However, they now have 'custom domains'; you can have your own (sub)domain resolve to Blogger. This is what I'm doing now.

One minor downside is that when I upload pictures, they are now stored on Blogger (and accessible through PicassaWeb). The problem with this is that there's a 100mb limit on uploads. I suppose, though, that if I go over this, I can just put them somewhere on my own server and include them in posts.

This should be the last move, really!

Thanks Google. Thoogle.

Google AdSense is Google's advertising service for small publishers. It's very nice, and gives me free money, but a major annoyance was always that one was required to use a separate user account for it; it didn't use the unified Google account system. All the more annoying because if you happen to be logged into, say, GMail, you will be logged out on visiting AdSense.

Anyway, they now let you use your unified account. Yay! Much handier, and no longer dependent on my college email address. Apparently, Google AdWords still has to use a separate account, but I don't use it, so I don't care much.

Confused Oversensitivity

On the radio today, the interesting case of Brian Ferry, an English singer who recently got into some trouble over praising the architecture and film work of the German Nazi era was mentioned. I'd never heard about it before. The whole thing really seems a bit silly; while the architecture in question is, in my opinion, a bit ugly and tasteless, he's certainly entitled to his opinion, and it's not as if much of the architecture that people admire is entirely innocent. In any case, there was a bit of a public scandal, and Ferry had to apologise. If it had been me, I wouldn't have.

Millions flock to Rome every year to admire St. Peter's, largely built by a Catholic church which at the time was hugely complicit in the enslavement and extermination of the native population of South America, and the international slave trade. While they're at it, they admire the ruins of ancient Rome, and possibly pop into Athens on the way home. Both (ancient) cities erected by slave labour under vicious regimes. Washington DC's great public buildings? Built by a heavily slave-dependent nation. And so on. In fact, I can think of very few great public works of arts put up by reputable regimes; vaguely ethically sound regimes seem to favour ugly boxes and, in extreme cases, giant golf balls.

So, admiring works of art from the Nazi era is wrong, but admiring works of art from civilisations in many cases even nastier is acceptable, even desirable? Right. (Incidentally, the Volkswagen Beetle seems to have entirely escaped and odium as a piece of Nazi art, or at least industrial design. It is allowed to continue as an iconic car. None of this really makes sense, does it?)

It's all about the journey

Ever noticed that many recreational activities are more about getting ready for the activity than actually doing it?

Various sports, for instance; sailing seems to be a particularly egregious offender. Three hours of doing complicated things with ropes followed by six minutes in the water.

And then there are these complicated board-games played by people who typically don't believe in showering (Warhammer and the like; I know I am pandering to a stereotype here, but real-life experience seems to mostly bear it out); the setup seems to take an unreasonably long time. I assume that as you add complexity of pieces to a game setup time increases exponentially; a draughts board takes hardly any time to set up, a chess board takes a couple of minutes, and these things take weeks. Pokemon and Magic the Gathering and similar, where you collect cards and theoretically play with them, are even worse; there is only anecdotal evidence that anyone has ever played a game of Pokemon cards. Think about it. Have you? Of course not. Why on Earth would you?

As computer games become more demanding and complex, I suspect that the amount of time the real serious loony-gamers (you know, the ones who upgrade their computer every three weeks) spend actually playing them is diminishing dramatically. Many seem to spend most of their spare time taking computers apart, doing horribly fiddly things with fans and water cooling and similar, swapping out memory (yes, memory. It appears that standardisation more or less went out the window a while back when no-one was looking; apparently high-performance memory is fickle and has compatibility issues), and, of course, installing Windows. I haven't had the pleasure of installing Vista, but Windows up to XP is very reluctant to use DMA while installing, making the process quite breathtakingly slow. And once you've done that, you must appease the Windows Genuine Advantage thing with a blood sacrifice, I hear. And then, you will have to download updates for your games, which come out roughly every three minutes. My little brother seems to spend most of his life doing this. Finally, you start playing the game, and notice that it takes ten minutes to get from clicking on the icon to being permitted play; they do seem to have gotten very slow.

I also know at least a few people who seem to get an almost sexual thrill out of downloading movies and TV shows. Yes, downloading, not watching. They talk a lot about the latest torrent sites and bittorrent clients, and it is abundantly clear that they really get far more fun out of the downloading bit than anything else.

There are even whole toy industries catering to this tendency to enjoy the journey; look at lego, for example.

Humanity is strange.

Famous Fatty!

I've just discovered that a picture of me from when I was fat (the above; I was 85kg at the time, I'm now about 62kg) is one of the top Google Image results for 'fat person'. Not only that, but if you search for 'fat person' on normal Google, it comes up in the results; I share them with a cartoon and an ample lady's bottom:
I have no reason how my ample ex-self rose to such great prominence, but it shouldn't last too long; the page that the original lived on no longer exists. Horrifying, all the same; people everywhere looking for embarrassing fat people pictures will find that abomination.

Minor TwitterBuzz Fixes

I've fixed a few little problems with TwitterBuzz; more major changes (including a 'what links are your friends Twittering' feature) coming soon.

Progress in the War on Fat People!

A gene which causes people to be inclined to be ample has been identified. It is certainly, however, not simply an excuse for being overweight; people who have it are on average only a few kilos heavier than the norm.

So it won't work so well for the 'I am destined to be fat, it's in my genes and nothing at all to do with me eating far too much' crowd, then.

They are Legion

Ever been in Dublin at about the time that the nightclubs are closing up? The rows of taxis going in and out are simply amazing. The whole of the coast road from Clontarf to Dublin tonight was filled with a huge row of them. That's consumer society in action.

Thailand Uber Alles

I hadn't realised until recently just how odd Thailand was. They recently reduced the sentence of a man who spray-painted on a poster of the king from ten years in prison to deportation. They also blocked YouTube because it contained videos making fun of their king, and lese majeste is still on the books.

Bizarrely, people seem to be fine with this.

After all, where would we be if we weren't allowed make fun of our governments and heads of state? No Spitting Image, no Bull Island...

I would encourage more people to post things which offend the Thai government's delicate sensibilities throughout the Internet; if they have to block everything, they may abandon the censorship. I shall start by mentioning that his Kingship looks vaguely mad in this.

Deo Optimo Maximo Sub Invoc Chocolatae

You can't really see it very clearly in the picture, but the object in the centre is a bread roll with a rainbow flag protruding, bearing the legend "Society of the Year", stuck on in candle wax. You see, I was at the Trinity College Central Societies Committee Awards tonight; the LGBT society (for which I am treasurer) was entered in a few categories, but didn't, in the end, win anything. The bread roll was our own self-made trophy.

Now, originally, two candles were placed in front to draw attention to the text. Feeling bored, I put a chocolate in between them (one of the event sponsors having put a small box of chocolates at each place). The end result looked a little like a shrine to the chocolate, so I have decided to attempt to bring a cult of the chocolate in as the LGBT society's official religion.

This will mean, for a start, electing a priest every year along with all the other officers; it will be the priest's duty to keep the fires ever-burning, and to protect the chocolate. I would like to build in a few bizarre restrictions for the priest, similar to those placed on, say, the Roman Flamen Dialis (an extraordinarily restrictive office apparently at one time occupied by Julius Caesar the dictator). So far, the only one I've been able to come up with specifies that the priest must not partake of non-chocolate confectionery. Suggestions?

Of course, by the end of the night the question was more or less moot, as the ever-burning fires had died down and the chocolate had been devoured (even the bread roll, I think, did not survive). Still, it could be kept on as an Ark of the Covenant-type item.

This is exactly why I shouldn't post things on the Internet after coming home from a night out, of course.

On the pointnessless of Alexa

Alexa, for those of you who don't know, is a site owned by Amazon which provides website rankings (based on visitors). So, for instance, Google is ranked number one, generally.

It does this by monitoring which sites users of its browser plugin visit.

Now, everyone knows that Alexa results aren't really all that informative. It was driven home to me just how uninformative they are today.

The Alexa rank for my TwitterBuzz site is around 200,000. It has only about 150 visitors a day.

The Alexa rank for my FindMeATune site is also around 200,000. It has about 6,000 visitors a day.

The worst of it is, many still use Alexa results for pricing advertising and so on. Madness.

Horrible Cretinous SEO Scum

SEO is, basically, the art of lying about the content of a page to make it look attractive to search engines.

Take a look. If that doesn't make you feel ill at the state of Internet marketing, nothing will.

Victor Meldrew's Animal Holocaust

I've just noticed that in about every second episode of One Foot in the Grave, an animal is killed, generally rather unpleasantly.

What on Earth is going on there?

Permanent TSB and the Art of Spelling

Have you considered switching to Permanent TSB?

They've sacked their proof-readers, and they're passing the savings on to you!
Hopefully, they have an accountant or two left.

Interested? An ugly man will tell you all about it here!

Getting into the spirit of the season

Funny, I would have thought it an ideal day for torturing people! There's precedent, after all.

FYP Demo Done

I'm just back from doing my final year project demo. What a relief! It actually went better than I expected, I think; I managed to more or less get over my natural fear of such things.

I got mentioned on The Register!

Or rather, one of my websites did; TwitterBuzz, in a round-up of Twitter-related things. Cool!

Also, this. I'm people, now, apparently.

I have, of course, neglected the poor website appallingly; it badly needs an overhaul.

Brave New Frontiers for the BBC Department of Silly Comparisons

The BBC occasionally likes to pepper its stories with silly comparisons and visualisations. Whether it's the fact that Britain eats enough crisps to fill a telephone box every 34 seconds, or that Calder Hall nuclear power plant produced enough electricity in its operating lifetime to power a two-bar electric fire for 3.8 million years, they're always around.

As we can see from the episode of Monty Python where Tchaikovsky's head is said to be the same size as a small rabbit, this isn't even a new trend.

They've outdone themselves this times, though. This story is about an accident at the new accelerator at CERN. That's not really important. It's the following quote that interested me: "These experiments, each about the size of a mansion, will capture and measure new particles produced in the beam collisions."

The size of a mansion? What size is that exactly? It can surely range from a largish house to a palace.

Possibly there are only a limited number of size comparisons they're allowed use; maybe something along the lines of vole, cat, Queen Victoria's bottom, telephone box, house, mansion, Margaret Thatcher's ego, VY Canis Majoris. If this is the case, then I think there's a case for RTE following them; don't we pay television licenses as well? I look forward to the day when cocaine seizures are measured in terms of Mary Harneys.

Imminent Death of Reddit Predicted

Reddit seems to have been going downhill for some time, probably because, as it became more mainstream, it attracted more stupid people. It has previously been demonstrated, most notably with UseNet, that stupid people tend to destroy communities. Remember, kids, stupid people kill.

The same thing, of course, happened to Digg; the average IQ of a Digg user seems to be about 80, and falling.

Anyway, a few days ago, it announced its intention to start using ads. Of course, this was inevitable; there was no way it could fund itself forever. However, I suspect it will drive people away, a bit.

Possibly Y Combinator's fake Reddit will benefit.

No doubt the BNP loves it...

In an impressive display of xenophobia, Russia has banned foreign workers from working in shops. Wonderful. A sensible policy for a happier nation, if 'happier' is taken to mean 'economically devastated' (this is the way that many more extreme 'environmentalists' define happy, of course).

Missing the Point

Google just announced their toilet-based ISP service. Many people appear to feel it necessary to point out that it is an April Fools' joke, and to ridicule the people going along with it for the laugh.

Possibly Americans really can't manage humour...

Why so few women in IT?

There's a fascinating paper on the subject here. (As an aside, the author of the paper works at a college in the US which has male and female graduate students but only female undergraduates. Amusingly: "Full-time: female faculty 64%; faculty of color 25%;" - Somehow 'faculty of color' strikes me as a very funny phrase.)

Anyway, read the "Ways that males and females are treated differently" bit. While it is a little out of date (the paper is 16 years old) it is absolutely, utterly horrifying.

These days, being a feminist is apparently a bad, horrible thing. If a woman says she is a feminist, people will look at her like she has just said that she enjoys eating babies. 'Feminist' is used as an insult. And yet, shouldn't we all be feminists, people who are in favour of equal treatment for women? There seems to be a bit of a backlash at the moment.

Interesting backup to this here, from a female to male transsexual PhD.