Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I was considering This Chick’s anti-spam checkbox solution to fight my continuing spam problems, but I decided to go with Gene Shepherd’s step-by-step solution. Jeff Barr has a similar approach.

They all work the same way: add a new required field to the comment form, and spambots designed for the average blog comment form can’t fill it in right. Manual spammers can still type in their spam, but they don’t send 100-200 spam comments a day. I also noticed that I hadn’t renamed wp-comments-popup.php, so I changed that, too.

I’ll be backing down on my moderation requirements to see how well the new despamination works, so you can say “incest” in my comments again (for the time being). Now to post a test comment…

[Update] The test worked, but I think the spam is still coming in. I wonder if they’re scraping each HTML form. I may need to use This Chick’s trick after all, since it has the added human-interaction barrier.

[Update II] Note the snazzy new checkbox.

Slashdot fosters rumors that SixApart is buying out LiveJournal. SixApart makes MovableType and TypePad.

[Update] My favorite comment comes from Pentomino:

[Slashdot] has many features similar to Livejournal, most notably the friends list, and the view of friends’ journals.

Slashdot even goes one better — you can also define a foes list. If LJ had that, it would be World War III.

Pentomino himself has no foes.

Quote of the day: a /. commenter says The BSD license is free as in “Working for Apple for free”

The management apologizes for the recent blog outage. I’m not sure exactly what happened or how it got fixed, but it wasn’t the spammers. I suspect it was a problem with the host’s upgrade to PHP 4.3.10. As an added bonus, the 406 error also seems to be better now.

On the other hand, the Tech categories missing from the category list in the sidebar were entirely my (and WordPress’s) fault. I had no posts in the parent Tech category, so WordPress and company were bumped off the list. I added an arbitrary post to the Tech category and now all is well in WP 1.2-land.

We await WP 1.3 eagerly, or maybe they’ve upped the next release to 1.5.

The management apologizes to anyone who stumbled across some particularly nasty comment spam in the blog recently. I’ve deleted it all and banned the obvious words, but I think I may be in for a new round of comment spamming. I could install all sorts of anti-spam plugins, but instead I’ll wait and see how much my recent changes help.

And wait impatiently for WordPress 1.3.

Mac link of the day: free icons for OS X developers

Due to an unexpected snowstorm, I’m prematurely back in Boston—almost, but not quite, ahead of the snow. When I checked my email, I found that the comment spammers had been at my sample color-rotation blog. All comments were held up for moderation, but it’s a pain to delete them all.

Since I don’t expect real live people to comment in a demo blog that’s all in fake Lorem Ipsum Latin, I took the easy way out of WordPress comment spam: I deleted the wp-comments-post.php file. Anyone who tries to comment will get a 404 error.

Firefox extension of the day: FlashBlock stops Flash ads from flashing

John Gruber has updated Markdown and explained the new licensing. Pardon the late link.

This will probably be my last fresh entry until Monday, as I will be AFK for the weekend. There may or may not be canned stuff for your holiday consumption.

Psych link of the day: A precious case from Middle Earth (via GNXP)

I’ve added some bookmarklets (javascript bookmarks that do cool things) to Firefox. Most of them came from from CowboyScripts, especially from playing with the Size-Align Bookmarklet Generator.

I’m not so concerned about getting the evil PC to look like a mac, but I do want it to act like a mac. I want to hit my usual Mac key sequences and have the usual things happen. Lovely user interface things like QuickSilver (command-space) are just a dream (but for a not-so-cheap imitation see ActiveWords). Cutting and pasting is a day-to-day activity.

In short, I wanted a command key so I could hit command-c and command-v for cutting and pasting. This virtual command key would actually be a control key in disguise, since control-c and control-v are the cutting and pasting commands in the evil OS.

Windows does have a rip-off of the command key—the Windows key—but no one uses it. (Apparently it’s so unpopular it’s even left off the keyboard on some Windows laptops.) In any event, it’s in the wrong place (in Alt territory), and the Alt key is where the command key goes on a Mac. So I had a lot of rearranging to do.

Before I get into sordid things like regedt32, I should mention that in the OS of Goodness and Light, you swap keys by downloading the free keyboard mapper uControl.
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It’s a shame it’s so hard to find Firefox extensions, even when you know they exist. ColorZilla is very cool, but it took me forever to hunt it down at home after installing it at work.

Warning: Geeking ahead!

So I’ve been trying to reproduce a real operating system on Windows. The very first thing I did, of course, was install Emacs. Today I noticed that Emacs wasn’t finding RCS (my favorite version control system) even though I have Cygwin installed. I found the answer in noniq’s .emacs file:

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