I just found a couple of plugins for MT that (finally!) allow me to do what I want: Close2 sets old comments and trackbacks to closed (or open, incidentally), while SpamLookup gives much, much better options for dealing with spam. Which probably means everyone is now shut off from saying anything, knowing my luck...

Why doesn't MT have a 'delete all unapproved comments' button? Feh.

Me!

MovableType had been acting very strangely since I upgraded to v3.16. Editing entries caused their categories to disappear, for example, which was very annoying when going back through old stuff to switch off trackbacks. That's one of those spam-reduction things I've been doing.

I posted a note on the MT forum and had a reply that I should re-upload the template for creating entries. Oho, a plan. Firing up the FTP client, I have a look at the templates. Me no understand! They all oldie! What going on here?!

Yes, you guessed it: when I upgraded the installation, I uploaded all the changed cgi files. And nothing else. I forgot to upload the other seven megs of changes.

All together now: "D'oh!"

No matter how hard I try and regardless of the combination of configuration options selected, I cannot get MT to (a) allow comments without moderation and (b) approve regular commenters without using TypeKey. Of course, the MT knowledge base URL doesn't work, either.

Stupid buggering thing.

And, of course, the day after I upgrade everything sees the release of version 3.14 with built-in server load reduction fixes for spam problems. Feh. Upgrading AGAIN.

By the way, comments are apparently on moderation until I can find some time to look at switching that off. So you won't see your comments appear until I get to them to 'approve' them or something. I think that's what the default settings are, anyhow. Once MT-Blacklist is upgraded, things might get even weirder. Bear with me.

Running Spam Total: 5197

Just upgraded to the newest version of MT for the blog: I loathe websites that enforce registration for access to the latest upgrade. Still, it's in place and is supposedly much better at spam-stopping, with MT Blacklist 2.0.

Which reminds me: I need to get that.

Running Spam Total: 5071

I would like to dedicate three small words to all those people out there who think it's a great idea to build feed collectors, lists, directories and other forms of database for all the blogs on the web, but don't actually bother putting any kind of anti-spider mechanism into them and consequently get me an additional dozen spam comments every day:

I. HATE. YOU.

Thank you for your attention.

It's going to be a really busy month, but I'm quite enjoying this new work at the moment. I have SO many things to do that it's really quite scary trying to figure how to meet all the deadlines. Still, I'm learning a heck of a lot in a very short time. Today is Proof of Concept day: I have to prove to myself that my (hopeful) solution for some squiffy SQL will actually work...

Oh, and Ms Jafer... yes, I promise I'll try to put some proper 'before and after' pics up soon. Sorry for that delay. Consider my wrists slapped.

Sometimes I don't understand humans at all. It's even worse when I don't understand geeks at all. So what don't I understand? Why Gmail is so popular.

Gmail is, of course, Google's email setup. It's still in a sort of preview-cum-beta stage at the moment, with signup by invitation only: my guess is that this "insider" feeling is the base cause of its popularity. Looking at the so-called features of the system, I can see no other reason to want an account there.

Firstly, all incoming email is stored and scanned. This is, of course, so that the proprietary Google search engine (which is, let's be honest, astounding) can index and allow users to find anything they want. With a generous 1,000Mb (approximately 0.98Gb) of storage per account, that's an awful lot of history and searching.

On the other hand, I don't really want someone scanning and cataloguing my email. There's quite enough invasion of privacy going on these days without an email service doing the vast majority of the work for whatever agency decides it wants access to their database. Just imagine how much of a mess all those Gmail users would be in if the FBI decided to exercise some of their new rights in the style of the Patriot Act, confiscated the entire Google Gmail database and all its indices, then went and plugged that information into Carnivore, Echelon, BigBadMailEater or whatever their latest surveillance doodad is called. Paranoid? Perhaps. Then again, look at George W. Bush and I think you'll understand.

Secondly, Gmail is paid for by advertising: "Gmail users only see relevant text ads, similar to those on Google search results pages ." Ah, yes. Those relevant links that appear on searches, such as when I ask for information on my DVD burner failing and get half a dozen online shopping links back? Wonderful.

This is the bit I cannot understand. Everyone who's smarter than your average rhinoceros knows that the biggest annoyance in any email system is the amount of crap that ends up in your inbox. Here's a whole bunch of people who should know better and they're inviting Google to scan their email and spam them. That's just masochistic. Some are even buying Gmail accounts on eBay.

"Hey, over here! Beat me senseless again would you? I've got another hundred bucks for you if you do!"

I find it most amusing that the racist scumbag Jean-Marie Le Pen (who runs the National Front here in France) has his own official website. Well, not that... but more the fact that his official website gives errors. And so does the one it redirects to. And the one THAT site redirects to.

Vote FN. Support people who aren't smart enough to use computers: they'll run the country right. D'oh.

Back in February, I splurged. No, not like that: what I mean is that I spent some money on something for myself for once. Something that wasn't essential. Twice a year, the company hands out performance bonuses that, despite heavy taxes, are always a nice extra. Since the one in February would be the last before I'd have to start paying my mortgage, I thought I should spend a part of it on something frivolous, so I ordered a Plextor DVD writer.

Unfortunately, Plextor (who, I should add, make very good burners) decided that their latest DVD writer should have a really cheap tracking mechanism. Presumably this was in the great corporate plan to piss off all their customers by building a device that would be utterly crap and fail to do what it is supposed to. I hope someone at the company is calculating the return on investment for that decision.

So, after several (expensive) failed attempts to write a DVD, I eventually spent a few hours on Google, searching for forum entries. Et voila, the model I have suffers from said tracking problem. Time to return it.

Plextor's RMA service is, to be honest, remarkable. An online form produces an RMA number and an email of instructions. They pay for DHL pickup at your domicile. Three days later (yes, THREE), the new drive is sitting on your desk.

Now that is excellent service. Shame they couldn't apply the same principles to the manufacturing department.

MySQL is now back on the server, complete with the DBI and DBD stuff, so I figured I'd see if my 'old' (i.e. not recreated and imported) blog was still intact. Thankfully it was, so I've been able to just re-post my entries from the last couple of days onto it, switch off the new database and - as a bonus - get all my templates back! Cool!

I just spent most of the day reimaging my laptop, restoring about 10Gb of files and finally being able to read my email a couple of hours ago. Stupid blasted BSoDs... I hate 'em.

Hmmmm. As Scary Ross noted, the comments pop-up link below does not seem to be working. I have no idea why, to be honest. For the moment, it is possible to comment, but it's a bit of a pain in the butt: you need to hit the link on the left to the current entry, and put your comments in there instead of via the pop-up. I'll try to figure out why that's gone screwy...

Thanks to the wonderful efforts of a certain Javier (and the continued technical support of Rob), the employees.org server has been rebuilt and moved to a nice, safe location. Yes, I'm BACK! Woohoo!

Of course, I've had to rebuild almost everything from scratch, so if you find stuff that doesn't work, please let me know. I need to get my post footers back, for a start.

Due to the activities of monkey-boy hackers, I just heard that Employees.org is going to be taken off-line, permanently. This is such a shame: it was a free service maintained by volunteers within the company out of the goodness of their hearts. Nice choice of target, monkey-boys. *sigh*

Anyway, I'm going to have to find a new home for my blog, so I may be gone a while. I'll get forwarding set up once I know where it's going to be.

That ruined my weekend.

Seems the MySQL stuff died yesterday, which was why nothing was working here. Poopy bottoms. Just wanted to check posting is back and raise my head above water level to say hello.

I just noticed the server time is off by an hour: my entries are appearing to have been posted one hour later than they were. Excellent. Ms Admin! Wooo-ooo! Over heeeeeeeere!

I'm observant today: I also just remarked how the number of lines in an email request from a user tends to be inversely proportional to the amount of work it will require to solve their problem. Today's example is a classic:

Email 1: approximately two pages (of A4) long, this one goes into great detail of what is needed, in what format they would like the data, which parts are required or simply desirable and a whole steaming heap of other information. This one was from a techie.

My response is approximately four lines of text and the work will take me (at a rough guess) two or three hours to complete. Shiny¹.

Email 2: approximately six lines long, this one asks for two simple things. A list of lists in the system and the list of people attached to each list. It's from a business user.

My response is over a page long and has an attached spreadsheet that took me 5 minutes to produce. The follow-up work on this one (the second of the two requests) happens to fall into what you might call a "conceptual gap" in the system... the designers didn't think anyone would ever ask for this particular functionality. Of course, in practical terms, that means I will have to produce up to 145 lists of subscribed users manually and individually, depending on how many of those lists this person wishes to see. I'll leave you to work out how long that will take: my calculation gives the result "I'm meeeltiiiiiiiiing...."

¹ This is an expression meaning "Good" or "Great" that I picked up from watching the truly excellent TV series Firefly... and which I can no longer seem to get out of my head.

"Where does he get all those wonderful toys?"

Late last night, I finally got around to installing my latest and greatest PC upgrades. The place where I work gives part of the yearly bonus at the six-month point of the financial year, which works out as February, so I set aside a part of mine to purchase some new gadgets. Given that this will probably be the last time for the next twenty years or so that I can afford to buy myself a present (because of the apartment purchase), I went the whole hog.

So I opened up both PCs and set to work. Well, I opened the main one, anyway, since the secondary doesn't have a cover on it right now. I know that I've always said "never do an upgrade late at night", since it almost invariably leads to several hours of lost sleep when everything goes pear-shaped, but I just couldn't resist!

First off, I've added a 160Gb drive to the primary and moved a 60Gb one into the secondary. Unfortunately, Windows seems to want to recognise only 128Gb of this new drive, so I'm a bit peeved, but it's still a bonus. At least the BIOS recognises it properly, so one day I should be able to convince the OS to pick it up properly without destroying everything currently stored on it. The secondary PC didn't mind the new drive addition too much - it surprisingly picked it up straight away and seemed happy, although it wouldn't boot to Windows. I figured it out after about 15 minutes: apparently, hard drives have to be connected to the IDE cable to work... oops.

The second addition to the primary PC was a DVD-R drive. Yup, writable DVDs have arrived in my living room. I've moved the CD-RW into the secondary for the moment, since it didn't even have a working CD drive and now have the funky black DVD creator installed. Surprisingly, again, the system picked it up correctly without any hassle!

Now, if only I had something I actually wanted to write to DVD...

It's been a couple of days since I set up those two logins on Pukero. Er, sorry, on Yafro. Today, I decided to go back and look at the comments, then to close the accounts, since they're just spamming my spare email addresses.

So what's happened? Let's see. The male picture comments first: only three from women, one of which was pretty 'forward', the second complimentary and the third asking what magazine the picture came from! More amusingly, some guy felt the need to send a few insults, presumably out of jealousy.

The female picture got rather more interest: seventeen comments, of which a mere four were 'forward'. The others were all complimentary and one user in particular was very polite and could even spell.

As expected, most people couldn't string together more than a few words and couldn't spell those, punctuate or understand grammar - my personal favourite was "where r u form hun", which is either some kind of mentally deficient version of "Where are you from, honey?" or a cat walking across the keyboard.

What did surprise me was that most males were relatively restrained. OK, so I just posted a head shot, but there was very little of the expected crap in comments. That's reassuring.

Incidentally, there appears to be no way to unsubscribe from the service.

While wandering the web, I came across this misbegotten child of putrescence. Created by the same people who built the web's very own Home Of Shallow People, it's basically a free picture posting setup to cash in on all those mobile phones with cameras built in. Note to Jackie: free picture posting space!

As you can tell, I'm not too keen on the idea - not because of what it is at a technological level, but because it embodies so many of the things that I dislike about the USA°.

The assumption that other people would be interested in an individual's photos is far too close to the current unhealthy trend of reality TV shows. Looking at this in a positive way, the site could be seen as a little peep-hole into other people's lives, their loves, their hates and what's going on in their corner of the world. On the other hand, it's more likely to be a breeding ground for misogynistic assholes who want precisely that: a peep-hole for their own personal peep show.

However, the main problem will, of course, be the Neanderthals who use it. By building a 'cool' site, one can almost guarantee that the primary subscription group wil be adolescents. This runs headlong into my personal hatred of dewdspeak¹ and of lads². So I thought I'd prove³ my point by running a little experiment.

Firstly, I scoured the internet for a couple of pictures of mainstream-attractive individuals. I picked people who are not at all famous, so that they would not be recognised. Then I opened two accounts with spare email addresses and posted one picture on each: one female, one male. The profile on both accounts lists the owner as male, so I kept the description on the female pic very neutral, while the one on the male pic made out it was me.

Now, I just sit back and wait for the comments to come in. I'm betting that the female pic gets at least three times as many comments and that they're much more forward. I expect offers to chat, requests for more 'interesting' pictures and general lad commentary that would make most intelligent females sigh and shake their head.

We'll see.

° I do not dislike the USA as a rule, just certain things about the culture.

¹ U no w4t I m33n?

² The British term for the regression of males (and now females) into a state of beer-guzzling, football-watching, farting assholes who think it's funny and clever to objectify women, be offensive and grow up as stupid as possible.

³ This will not, of course, prove my point at all - at least not scientifically. It will, however, hopefully prove amusing.

That was interesting. Although I didn't notice it, apparently my fiddle-faddling around over the weekend broke the blog comments! Thanks to this lovely Canadian, I found out things were broken this morning and set to putting things right.

Unfortunately, at the same time as installing MT-Blacklist, I put the latest upgrade on: this was mostly to gain the ability to close comments if I still get spammed by brainless morons. It seems to have been the upgrade that broke everything, since switching off the blacklist plugin didn't have any effect.

Anyways, I didn't have time to mess around this morning (and I can't debug Perl), so I just eradicated everything on the server and reinstalled MT from scratch. It only took about 15 minutes to get everything back up and running again and I now have a nice, clean install. Sounds good to me.

The MT-Blacklist plugin does seem to add a short delay to the comments window when it's opening, though, which is annoying. That part of the blog is slow enough without having additional delays.

Let me know if things are still screwy, please. As usual, you can use the comments or direct email to me at employees.org!

Well, that was easy. MT Blacklist is now active. If your comments get refused, you should be informed and able to resubmit them (at a guess), but I've never seen this thing running, so it'll all be a bit of an adventure...!

Blog spam has picked up again recently, so I've been looking at ways to stop it. Unfortunately, MT doesn't provide automatic closure of comments after a given period, which is without a doubt the easiest way to do things, so I may have to look into the MT Blacklist addition. Trouble is, none of those extra doodads have ever worked on my install, mostly because of my impressive lack of knowledge when it comes to Perl scripts.

It still surprises me that people even bother to spam, to be honest. I mean, imagine you're reading a blog and you have a look at the comments at the bottom of the post. In there is an advert from some stupid-ass neanderthal offering you hair restorer, penis enlargement or some other such ridiculous pile of crap. Are you really going to click that link? Nope, you're going to think "Jeez, yet another asshole earning their living by infesting the lives of other people with their parasitic nonsense."

Here in France, there's public outcry at the amount of advertising: yes, it's true, people are in the streets demonstrating against marketing campaigns. How weird is that? In some ways, I can see their point: virtually every surface imaginable is covered with publicity, no one is left to think for themselves (so they say, although personally I think that's insulting - they're saying we're all too stupid to have an opinion) and so on.

Recently, the people who run the Metro charged a bunch of individuals with defacing their property, because they spray-painted over adverts and stuck stickers on them and so on. A few days later and "free expression areas" were being put up in Metro stations - basically a blank advert, where people can write whatever they want.

You have to love the French attitude about art being as important as science or anything else in life. It leads to some really bizarre crap happening.

It's Monday morning, I'm half-dead and traffic was bad. Apparently it snowed out to the west of Paris this morning, so there's 30km of traffic jams on the way into the city. Thank goodness I live in the centre and head outwards! On the other hand, Psycho's grandmother is in a clinic at the moment (she's old) and we wanted to visit her this week... to the west of Paris... ack!

I'm going through the rituals here: coffee first, voicemail second, email third. As you are all aware, email is a big deal for me. My preferred method of communication, I receive anything from 500 to 1,500 messages a day: it can be a bit of a pain, especially when so much of it is spam, so I rely quite heavily on filtering (yes, I need more space for rules on the damned Exchange server, you administrator people!) and spam detection.

This morning's Backweb news from the BBC included this wonderful piece about Silly Billy Gates, who boldly states that "Spam will soon be a thing of the past". Seeing that just made me sigh, particularly coming from someone who, quite obviously, has no clue about spam. Let's look, for example, at the way Hotmail and Outlook 2003 filtering is set up: sender address filtering. Golly, gosh and gee! That's possibly the most inefficient and ineffective method that we're aware of as users! Excellent choice!

Here's some extra little quotes from Silly Billy, along with a bit of personal commentary (of course):

"Lots of mail you get is from people on your contact list. So what's the problem? Strangers!"

Filtering email on the sender's address is, of course, the best way to reduce your spam reception to almost zero: maintaining the list of acceptable addresses, however, is a total bitch and consumes vast quantities of time. It also opens us all up to virus writers who will know to aim at the address book as the best source of spam 'reply-to' entries. Duh.

"Does the e-mail say it's about 'enlargement' - that might be spam."

Although only touched on here (excuse the pun), this is almost definitely the way to go, it seems. Email content is the thing that best determines that it's spam. It's also the most difficult thing to work with, due to the complexities and multitude of possible languages, sentence structure, the inclusion of images and so on. Mr. Bill, on the other hand, believes such filtering will "not be the magic solution".

More promising, according to him, were "human challenges". This is the idea of forcing the computer sending the email to do a simple computation or the user to solve a puzzle (?!).

"That's easy for a machine sending a few e-mails, but gets very difficult and expensive for a computer sending lots of spam," Mr Gates said.

Uh, yes, it would. And when one considers that the PC sending the mail probably does one computation to send to an email list that's defined on the server, what machine is going to end up doing the mass of the work? That's right: the ISP's mail server. So the spammer just clicks once and off goes the email: every user with that ISP suffers the consequences. Smart move. Duh.

However, Silly Billy has his capitalist brain cells working on this one: he predicts that spam can be killed through the electronic equivalent of a stamp. The idea is to force the sender of an email to pay a fee when it is rejected as spam. This sounds like a really good idea, particularly for the ISPs who can charge their users extra and make some cash.

My question is: who's going to do the digging to find out where the spam really came from? I mean, I get plenty of spams from myself, yet they're not from me at all: the reply address has been munged. I don't particularly want to receive 40,000 demands for cash (or to be automatically charged on my credit card for spamming) when some asshole uses my email address on his spam. This means a lot of work for the network guys, to find out who is really responsible, then more work for their ISP to prove they were responsible, then even more work for the ISP's legal department to try to force the user to pay. That's an awful lot of work.

"Microsoft is pursuing all three approaches, and spam will soon be a thing of the past," Mr Gates asserted.

I have a solution: Microsoft HumanFilter®. A personal assistant in a box. What could be better than a human brain filtering your spam for you? Alternatively, just get out of the spam arena, Silly Billy. Leave it to the professionals who have been working on it for years and aren't in it for the money.

Man, what a weekend. I finally found out what has been causing all the troubles on my main PC at home: the weird BSoDs with 'unknown hard error' reports, the 'Kernel stack overflow' errors and everything. So what was it and how did I find out?

Easy. My primary hard drive failed.

Losing a disk is always a bit of a cow, but I'd never had a primary fail before. It's distinctly unpleasant, to put it mildly: not only will the PC not start (since the OS is dead and gone), but all user settings and whatever data was on the disk is pretty much lost, too. When the primary HDD is 60Gb in size, that's a bitch.

For once, however, I got lucky. Back when I ordered Psycho's PC kit, I picked up an 80Gb drive as a spare, that I put in the secondary. Of course, it was a little bit chock-full of crap, since I'd been using it as non-critical storage. Thanks to the wonder of PowerQuest's Partition Magic, I was able to collect the spare space on the drive's two partitions and create a new, third partition at the start of the disk. At 12Gb, it would be big enough to hold the OS.

Once that was done, I switched the HDDs between the two machines and could set up the new disk on the main PC. Thankfully, I keep a Ghost image of my primary PC's OS partition, so once I had reinstalled WinXP (three times, since I'm an idiot and got it wrong the first two), it was a simple matter of restoring the image and all is well again. Of course, "simple" matters aren't necessarily quick, so I ended up getting to bed at around 3 a.m. on Sunday morning, albeit with a working main PC.

As for the old disk, it doesn't seem to want to spin up. It's a bit of a shame, since it had 50Gb of useful data on it: occasionally, however, the secondary PC will detect it and I can pull stuff off. Yesterday I was able to recuperate about two thirds of the data on there (and finding space for it is not easy when you've suddenly lost 50Gb of storage!). Here's hoping I can get the rest.

Still, the up-side of the failure is pretty good: I now have a fully-functional and not-at-all-dodgy main drive in the main PC, a clean installation and also a quite astoundingly clean bathroom (since I had nothing better to do than clean while the PCs were working on repairs!). I may even be able to find a little money next month to replace the dead drive in the secondary PC, since it'll be 6-month-bonus time.

P.S. Jackie's back! Woop! Woop!

Uh-oh. Looks like Jackie's going down again... and I have no doubt she'll slap me verbally for the innuendo! She's been having terrible troubles with her site since switching to PHP - mostly caused, it seems, by a crappy slow ISP. Bummer. Hope it all comes back up (pun intended) soon, milady!

It's starting to look like my PC problems might be hardware-related, again. For the moment, it's still unsure.

Having seen similar problems to this before on the same PC, I figured file locks and fragmentation might cause them. The last time the machine zipped up to 100% CPU frequently and stayed there, effectively locking itself up, it was because the drives were all over 90% fragmented (not good) and because a program I use was not releasing file locks properly. Consequently, they caused problems when I tried to read them myself and the system thought it should be denying or sharing access.

So, to start with, I started a defragger. Unfortunately, this crashed my PC (the BSoD yesterday), since it's a command-line defragmenter and obviously Windows didn't like it messing with system files or something! I had that 'hard error' failure that is so unhelpful.

Having seen my secondary PC give BSoD errors thanks to the wonder of Norton Internet Security 2004 (specifically Kernel stack overflows), I then thought it may have been that. So I uninstalled the whole thing and put Personal Firewall 2003 back on instead. Unfortunately, this did not seem to solve the problem.

This morning, since I'm working from home today, I have been trying to run the defragmenter again. I figure I might as well eliminate software probabilities before turning to hardware. One very bad lockup has happened so far (causing some 5Gb of data to be duplicated and found by a checkdsk run), but drive C: finished OK and right this second, drive D: seems to be chugging nicely along. Only three more drives to go after that!

It may also be the CPU settings in the BIOS, now I come to think of it. They reset themselves recently (causing a 400MHz drop in speed) and I may have set them wrong, since I can never really remember what they should be. It's all just guesswork for me when it comes to hardware.

I've also just remembered that I have SiSoft's Sandra (their benchmarking utility) here somewhere. If the software side seems to be OK, that should help me find out what's wrong with the hardware side. I just hope it's not something on the motherboard. Last thing I want to do is rebuild a computer. Again.

What a wonderful thing VNC is. This little remote control tool is tiny and simple to set up and use. It's one of the standard apps for any server at work (inside the firewall, of course) and is a brilliant way to handle control from a distance. At home, I have it set up on my secondary/tertiary PCs, so I only need one keyboard and mouse. Psycho even has it installed so I can come running to help when she forgets how to use her PC. Superb piece of work and highly recommended (it's free, too!).

Missed this, just before publishing that last item. It's important for all MT users to read this over at Kasia's. Thanks for the warning, milady!

Oh, and while you're there, check out the previous item, too. Prepare to be spammed, big time. *sigh*

Today's entry marks the inauguration of a new category: I suddenly realised that I didn't have a marker for computer stuff and was putting it in Real World, Work or elsewhere. That just won't do.

Last night, I dropped in at the pharmacy for some stuff for Psycho. I live right above said pharmacy, so I tend to pick up her meds: it's not only simpler, but the lady who owns the shop is friendly and we get on really well. Yesterday, she had a surprise for me - my ADSL modem had been delivered, but it's pretty huge, so the delivery chap had left it with her. That was kind of her.

So last night I set everything up. Surprisingly easy (particularly for France, where red tape and make-the-client's-life-difficult are standard issue) and much faster than the cable I had before. It surprises me, to be honest, that the cable folks are so slow: I wrote to their online support folks three times, explaining that I really didn't want to change if I didn't have to, asking if they were going to make things faster (particularly upload speed, which is limited to 12Kb/s - not bad, but not enough when I'm trying to use the USB phone!) and basically giving them a chance to improve their services.

Their reply? You can have a faster connection for more money, but that won't make upload any quicker. So I switched and am now paying 25% less every month for at least twice the bandwidth, in both directions.