December 2004

Comment Spam Blocking with Wordpress

December 14, 2004

For the WordPress users out there there is a write up on doing spam post blocking.

I'm on the fence about Bayesian filters and content spam. The online casino folks who are spamming away the last few days use text that is not necessarily what I want to teach my filter to sort out. It would be a bit better if it matched content with the post to see if text from the Gettysburg address is appropriate to the context. The filtering of URL's and words in content spam prevention seems to be more useful so far.

Drupal rocks when it comes to content spam

December 13, 2004

Once again Drupal is kicking ass and taking names. The Spam module for Drupal is superb at recognizing and kicking out spam comments. Over the last 24 hours this site has been hit by the online casino folks thousands of times. Now the comments they leave go merily away into ether. How long till they figure out it doesn't work? Who knows.

Google Print

December 11, 2004

The Google Print beta product looks really cool. It will be interesting to see how it progresses. How will this mesh with the Take Control books that TidBits is publishing? Seems like a great match. Take the books which sold for not a lot and allow them to be served up with paid ads in Google.

Finals!!!!

December 11, 2004

The third day of finals is underway at the law school. I spent some time this weekend migrating, organizing and updating the photo collection.

A good car dealer?

December 10, 2004

It is just possible we found a good auto dealer. The emissions workshop has been on for a long time. On Monday we brought it to Findlay Volkswagen. $170 later it was fixed. Until we got home. It has taken two more trips but they say they're making good and fixing it for no additional charge.

Apple's changed start page

December 9, 2004

There were hints it was coming, but Apple has gone and done it. Yes the new and improved Apple start page has been released. This is the default page for Safari. The thing is the old Apple Stat Page was great. There was enough news from the Netscape sites to keep it worth looking at. And there was good Apple content. Now the page is merely Apple marketing. I'd guess the number of people looking at it will go down. Apple's been running a script in between it's default address (http://livepage.apple.com/) for the last few weeks. I'm not privy to what goes on inside Apple but I'm sure somebody is convinced a lot more people will look at it. Unfortunately it doesn't have enough real content to keep my interest. The comments posted over at Mac World echo my thoughts that mindshare is going to go away with this change.

Amen!

December 8, 2004

Dave Berlind comments on some complications they have had because Dave Winer doesn't title his items. (Note: Dave Winer responded and said it isn't "always true." which is correct.) Berlind is trying to put together a portal aggregator and the lack of titles is problematic. This is why I generally have dropped more than one Manilla feed from my RSS reader. It gets annoying to either see something that makes no sense (if you look only at titles) or to see the first few words repeated. There are so many great sources of information in RSS land that are usable by a variety of consumers that those who refuse to take readers into consideration will continue to cede their positions.

Who are the good domain name Registrars out there?

December 8, 2004

A question for everyone, who are the good domain name registrars out there? Don't email me an answer because I won't get it. You see eNameCo.com has managed to bungle completely a change of name servers. Several of my key domains now respond to whois by saying there are no name servers for the domains. Here's the timeline, on Monday I tried to use the web interface and change the names. It said there was an error and it couldn't complete. Tuesday I noticed some odd bounces to email saying my domain had to exist to send email. Later Tuesday I started looking at whois and sure enough it says NO NAMESERVERS LISTED.

So I call the bozos, once they decide to get in the office this morning. They say "it's right in our database it just isn't showing up on Internic." News flash - I don't give a damn if it shows up in eNameCo's database. What I care about is does it show up in the Internic response to whois queries.

So the long and short is I'll be looking for a new registrar. I almost moved them today but given the lack of email and the probable confusion a transfer will add on top of their screw up, I'll have to wait. But when I do transfer who should I transfer to?

Cowboy Christmas

December 5, 2004

We spent the last couple of days at the various Cowboy Christmas shows in Las Vegas. It is amazing how difficult these places make it to find information. There is a Cowboy Marketplace at the Mandalay Bay convention center. There are ads on plenty of taxi cabs in Vegas, but not a single page on their website says a word about it.

So I'll say a word about it. Skip it. The Ariat Country Christmas at the Sands Expo Convention Center is great. There's something for everybody and some great booths. The Marketplace, however, is more of the home shopping informercial in 3D than anything truly western. Sure there are some of the herbalist quacks at other places, but they, along with the massage pillows and food-processor sales make up most of the booths at the Marketplace.

Meaning of hack

December 5, 2004

Hadley Stern has a note on the many meanings of hack. I've always liked the juxtaposition of the meanings of a clever workaround or bit of code and somebody who is terrible at things.

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