EverydayOrdinary

**updated, see below**

Comment spam is Teh 3vil.

Everyone knows that, right?

So I have Akismet running on here, nicely catching all the spam.

And except for one false positive, it worked perfectly. Except for trackback spam. So I disabled trackbacks, and installed a wordpress plugin to catch spam trackbacks. They appear to be gone now. But I get annoyed at having to empty out all the Akismet-caught spam all the time. I know, I can just let it be deleted after 15 days, and I can probably set up Akismet to delete it automatically, but the idea that it’s getting through bothers me. It’s just annoying.

So I embarked on a quest to stop the evil from getting through at all. I’ll leave Akismet as a last line of defense. So I installed this thing called “Bad Behavior” which filters out spam bots through arcane magicks or heuristics or something. Which has helped. And just to be really, really sure, I installed a plugin which basically puts a Turing test on the comment submit page (it asks a basic math question, but without using the real numbers, and then validates the answer, e.g.: “Sum of s1x + s3ven ?”).

I finished setting all this up today. And within three hours, Akismet had caught three spam comments. How!?! I’m fortified, dangit! I don’t understand this. It has to be a bot, right? No human being would sit there all day copy/pasting spam into random, little-read blogs, would they?

I don’t want to require registration, but that may be the next step. Or one of those image-based CAPTCHAs.

Or maybe I’ll just program my own Turing Test web service API & a Wordpress Plugin: Any software can request a challenge to display on an input form. The API will return a test, like a CAPTCHA or a math question or a “Pick the wrong one” type of thing — randomly, and different in every case. Alon with it, it will return a hash and a random identifier. The random identifier and hash will only stick around in the APIs system for a couple minutes. The software that requested the challenge will display it to the usedr (or bot) and get a response back. The response will then be sent, along with the identifier and the hash, to the API, which will then attempt to validate the response. Based on the results of the validation, it will return either true or false, and the software will know if the Turing test was passed or not.

As I’m typing that, I’m thinking that the hash may not be necessary, that the identifier may be sufficient in itself.

Anyway, with such a service, it could be incorporated into any software, as a modification or as a plugin. And with a degree of randomness for the methods used in the challenge/response (differing the method each time), there will be a reduced likelihood of the spambots or spammers cracking the challenge. At least that’s the theory.

That was kinda the theory in the math question plugin too, but some spambot(s) seem(s) to be getting through.

Le sigh.

**update**
Oh, fer cryin’ out loud. In the time it took me to write this post, Akismet caught another spam comment that had slipped through.

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/14463513/

This is actually over two years old, but I just found it on Sunday, and had to share it with all four people who may end up reading my blog, just in case you all haven’t seen the item.

This nifty PSA comic strip was drawn by Amanda Bussell, A.K.A. “shinga,” who draws the web comic “Head Trip.”

Yeah, so when I saw this I had to go read every single “Head Trip” strip she’s done.

***

Also, I just found out that Mohammed Haque draws another web comic, besides Applegeeks. It’s called “Too Similar.” It’s kinda like the Applegeeks Lite strip he draws. Where does this guy find the time?

Never buy incense sticks from the Ninety-Nine Cents-Only store. There’s a reason they’re only $0.99.

It’s ’cause they suck at being incense. I mean, yeah, they make smoke, but not the nifty cinnamon-y relaxing aroma kind you’d (I’d?) expect from cinnamon incense. They just make smoke. I had to put it out, and use one of the less-cheap ones that actually make the pleasant aromas. Not cinnamon like I wanted, but then, neither were the cinnamon ones.

Oh, and I apologize for the pun.

The pun was a way to relieve my stress, because I was “fuming” over the fact that my investment of $0.99 had “gone up in smoke.” My anger was “smoldering” inside me, and the pun was a way to mellow out.

Okay, I’ll stop now.

So I’m working on a new design for my church’s website, right? It’s a simple design. I’m a semi-minimalist.

I also happen to like:
a) Web Standards
b) Logical HTML markup
c) Human-readable code

So I wanted to do the navigation menu for the site as a Unordered List, e.g.:

<ul id="menu">
     <li id="someID">some link</li>
     <li id="someOtherID">another link</li>
     <li id="yetAnotherID">random link</li>
</ul>

Okay. Easy. But in my design, I want the menu horizontal, not vertical like a list. Okay. Still easy. I just add:

#menu li {
     display: inline;
}

to my style sheet, and add all the needed padding, borders, etc. And presto, my menu is horizontal.

But it’s displaying wrong. At least in Firefox. In between each list item is a bit of white-space I can’t get rid of. At all. I set all my margins and padding to 0 to debug, but it still shows up.

After much hair pulling, I discovered that Firefox isn’t ignoring the line breaks I used to make my HTML human-readable. It’s turning them into a space. Yeah, that white-space I can’t get rid of? It’s … white-space. And the only fix I can figure out is to get rid of my linebreaks. Which I don’t want to do.

Some searching on the web turns up that that’s the expected behavior in Firefox.

Apparently W3C’s spec leaves it up to the UA to figure out what to do with whitespace, and Firefox is treating white-space as a text node in the DOM model (no, I didn’t figure out that part: this one guy looked at the DOM inspector for some javascript he was coding). Which confirms my theory that Firefox is turning my linebreaks into a space. I suppose there’re some technical reasons Firefox does this, but it’s really, really annoying.

Yeah, so I’m a total geek.

I have an unlimited data plan for my phone from Sprint, and I use bluetooth to connect my PDA to the ‘net via my phone.

I could use this miracle of technology to communicate more effectively, stay up on current events, check email, trade stocks, organize a smart mob, or something else that’s, you know, productive.

But no.

I bought the Kinoma Player 4 EX, and I use it, with my Internet connection, to … listen to talk radio at work.

Or streaming Internet music.

It’s dorky, yeah, I know, but it works really well.

And today, I downloaded & installed Orb, so now I can stream all my content from home to my PDA wherever I am.

It’s like the world’s bestest MP3 player ever. Well, second bestest. It would be first if I had more bandwidth. As it is, I have to throttle Orb down or else Kinoma keeps having to re-buffer incessantly.

But still, this combination made my PDA much, much more useful to me. Or at least more entertaining.