Archive for 2005

118 Comment Spams in a week

You know that my blog must be getting popular… I got 118 comment spams last week. Thank goodness for Spam Karma and Bad Behavior. Not a single spam got through. I don’t know how much e-mail spam I get these days, Spamassassin takes care of most of it while Cloudmark Desktop takes care of about 10 a day. I had one false-negative last week, but that’s about it.

…and yes Holly, I totally realize that this is another product review in a long string… Nya on you! ;-)

update 10-9-05: BITE MY TONGUE! It seems a very odd coincidence that just a few hours after I wrote this, I got my first next-generation comment spam.

It was a comment from one Ryan M. Parr. He’s got an email address, a web site filled with all sorts of semi-authentic sounding crap and he even writes semi-coherently. The spam was deposited in a very low key manner. He didn’t even mention the name of the product! Instead, he google-bombed on a keyword, “Eye[nocommentspam]Q”. That takes you to a website called in[nocommentspam]fmind.com where they are selling (of all things) a speed reading course.

I thought the spam mail sounded stupid too; so I downloaded it off bearshare; unfortunately now that I checked it out, it turned out to be in an Asian character set and unable to extract from .rar format. If you want a program along this line, a good program is Eye[nocommentspam]Q.

Fuckers.

update 10-11-05: 71 comment spams received in the past 3 days. 0 made it to the site. I just sent $25 to Dr Dave and Michael Hampton, authors of Spam Karma and Bad Behavior.

What are “spices”?

No seriously. At the end of the ingredients list of tens of thousands of products it reads “and spices”. So what are they? Pepper? Nope, ’cause I’ve seen things that list pepper separately. Salt? No, they always list that. Oregano? Bug parts? Plutonium? Dirt? What?! I want to know!

Malcolm and Serenity

Tonight I saw Serenity at the recomendation of several friends. Yeah, it was a really good flick. :-)

I also stole off TorrentSpy the opener to the seventh season of Malcolm in the Middle. The family goest to Burning Man. Great episode! They got it absolutely right and it was darn funny!

Internet Explorer FTP doesn’t suck

I’ve been using FTP Voyager and SmartFTP for a long time. Today I was having some trouble getting them working on a new Windows MCE machine. Michie suggested I use Internet Explorer. “But IE FTP sucks.” “No it doesn’t.” She is right. Somewhere in the last couple years IE (6.0) upgraded their built-in FTP client. It has full drag & drop capabilities and it’s pretty and everything.

Upgrade your brain with Brain Bullet

Spamusement:
Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!

Upgrade your brain with Brain Bullet
Continue reading ‘Upgrade your brain with Brain Bullet’ »

Flying to NJ Oct 10-18

My dad’s angioplasty has been scheduled for Oct 12th. I’ll be in NJ from the 10th until the 18th. I’m hopeful that all will go well. If not, I’ll extend my stay.

How to install SSHD on your Windows XP Cygwin machine

Here is how to set up an SSHD service on your Windows XP Cygwin machine. This comes from a great guide from Pigtail.net on how to turn an old PC into a Linux Router… aptly named the Linux Router Project (LRP)

Local version of how to install SSHD. And how to install SSH

And yes, this works.

Top 100 Bloggers

In my attempt at hubris, I’ve added a link to Top100Bloggers.com in my sidebar. If you read my site and like it, vote for me. It’ll make me feel like one of those big-time bloggers.

The thing to click on should look something like this

Click because you love me

Working Full Time

Wavexpress has upped my hours. There’s a big release coming up and they want it to go well. So my life of leisure will be severely curtailed as I work full time instead of just a couple hours a day.

(from my last post ;-) I don’t know if this makes me into the slaving proletariat or the despised bourgeois.

Installed NoNoFollow Plugin

The NoNofollow plugin

…is a very simple WordPress-plugin to remove rel=’nofollow’ (as proposed by Google) from links in comments in WP’s output.

This plugin checks the date of any comment and removes rel=’nofollow’ if the comment is older than a configurable number of days. This gives the site admin a chance to remove comment spam whithout the risk of Google following the links.

This will hopefully make hyperlinks in comments and on my site more relevant to search engines. It offers encouragement to legitimate commenters to post legitimate links on the site.

update 10-29-05: Nonofollow wasn’t working correctly all the time and I didn’t bother to figure out why so I’ve switched to a different nofollow plugin, DoFollow. I’ve tried it out and it works very well. Note that it is a filter plugin… it doesn’t alter the database like NoNoFollow (I believe) attempts to do. This is probably a good thing from a forward compatibility standpoint.