My Comment Spam Hack

Posted by on

Elise.com has a thorough discussion of techniques for fighting comment spam. What seems to be the most widely used is Jay Allen’s mt-blacklist. But since that would have required an MT upgrade, I opted to first try this simple hack. It is based on the assumption that there is brainless automation on the other end of line.

Step 1

Rename the “mt-comments.cgi” script in your mt directory.

Step 2

Find all references to “mt-comments.cgi” in all of your templates and rename them to match the new name you gave the file.

Step 3

When people send you email saying they tried to post a comment and got a “couldn’t find mt-comments.cgi” error message, go back and find the templates you missed.

Update March 30, 2004: This didn’t work. After five days, two different spammers, including one of my old regulars, were back.

Children – a Luxury?

Posted by on

Aaron yesterday suggested children may be an expensive luxury. Dude, there’s good science backed up by badass mathematical analysis to support that suggestion.

One of the puzzles of demography has long been that as societies get richer, they tend to have lower birth rates. This seems evolutionarily counter-intuitive. As you get richer, you ought to be able to support more offspring. But it turns out that as we get richer, we end up needing to shower the younguns with more stuff, so as we get richer it gets paradoxically more expensive to add offspring. So as societies industrialize, their birth rates go down. The math involves allometric scaling laws that also match energy flow-body size patterns in critters. Turns out that the economics here can also be modelled as energy flow through the societal system.

Comment Spam Update

Posted by on

One day into my little hack and I am comment spam free. I also am free of other comments, which either means I’ve also inadvertently disabled all comments (my testing suggests that is not the case) or that I’m just exceedingly boring, that whatever it is I have to say is not worthy of comment.

2.6

Posted by on

Feels kinda weird to be in the middle of a GNOME release cycle with no major role to play, but I”ve been making a quick editing pass through the release notes this afternoon just to feel useful. Murray Cumming and Colin Charles have done a great job, and there’s been very little need for me to touch anything. Mainly it’s fun seeing how much has been accomplished. The code monkeys have been busy.

Battling Comment Spam

Posted by on

Assuming the blog comment spammers are stupid, lazy or both (reasonable assumptions, at least for starters), I’ve added a simple hack to keep their automated instruments of vile torture at bay. We’ll see how long this works.

(A thought: Is there any kind of torture that isn’t vile?)

The Race

Posted by on

I did some smart things, made a couple of big mistakes, and made, for about an hour and forty seven minutes, the hardest physical effort of my life. About an hour and a half into it, on a long gentle climb on a clean, clear road with the wind at my back, I had a moment of transcendental euphoria. And, as I suspected, I was the only one in my race without those cool wraparound sunglasses.

Rt. 6 jersey number
Continue reading ‘The Race’ »

Wish Me Luck

Posted by on

Lissa nailed it when she observed that I hate to go to parties where there are going to be a bunch of people I don’t know. Add to that the fact that I don’t have those cool wraparound sunglasses and you’ll understand why I woke up with a nervous stomach this morning, an hour before my alarm clock was set to go off. It’s not so much that I’m worried about how well I’ll place in my first cycling road race this morning. I’m not really even worried about the pain of two hours of hard riding (in an ugly wind, I might add). No, pathetic as this may sound, I’m mostly worried about fitting in.

Jack Kelley’s Legacy

Posted by on

USA Today yesterday published a remarkable package of stories documenting its internal investigation of the work of Jack Kelley, the paper’s star foreign correspondent. They found:

… strong evidence that Kelley fabricated substantial portions of at least eight major stories, lifted nearly two dozen quotes or other material from competing publications, lied in speeches he gave for the newspaper and conspired to mislead those investigating his work.

Perhaps Kelley’s most egregious misdeed occurred in 2000, when he used a snapshot he took of a Cuban hotel worker to authenticate a story he made up about a woman who died fleeing Cuba by boat. The woman in the photo neither fled by boat nor died, and a USA TODAY reporter located her this month. If Cuban authorities had learned she was the woman in the picture, she says, she could have lost her job and her chance to emigrate.

Househenge

Posted by on

There was a moment Friday afternoon when the cosmos aligned with my pantry.

Teetering on the edge of the equinox, the sun was setting perfectly due west. A broad shaft of light shot through the open back door, through the big family room and the open window between family room and kitchen, straight into the pantry.

This is good, as the pantry is not well lit. It was as if, for one shining moment, some ancient architect had conspired with the heavens to help me find canned peaches.