Not me! This blog. It is exactly one year ago today that I made my first post on this blog.
As for what’s next, I shall continue in a similar vane posting random thoughts and ramblings about nothing in particular. Enjoy!
While doing a search on Google for the word fuckwit I was amused to find out what came top of the list. I believe this is a good example of a Google bomb.
If you are unsure what the word fuckwit means, then check out the definition.
By the way, the title of this post was something I heard Charles Barkley say on TV during an interview many many years ago. At least I am pretty sure it was him. Kind of ironic coming from a professional sportsman and profound too!
I have just completed the upgrade of my map application to use version 2 of the Google Maps API. I had a few issues but there doesn’t appear to be any problems now. Permalinks generated previously should still work. Unlike Windows Vista I decided to maintain backwards compatibility!
In the new API Google provide a method to automatically calculate the distance between two points. I wrote code to do this in the previous version, which I have now removed, so if you are using a permalink generated using version 1.0 there may be a slight difference between the total distance calculated for the route.
Any problems, please leave a comment.
Well I appear to have the comment spam situation under control. I installed Spam Karma 2 as Miles suggested and so far so good. I am still getting comment spams but they all appear to be getting caught. I refuse to turn comments off or to make people register as I think this discourages people from leaving comments. I quite like this idea although I am not sure how well it will work if spammers specifically target your site because it has lots of traffic, as suggested in some of the comments. Still, it may be worth a try.
Another option would be cut the spammer out at the transport level: if a machine with a blacklisted IP address tries to make a connection, just drop it. This would avoid the need to have fancy filters that try and figure out statistically whether something is spam or not.
The battle is won but the war is not over! Ding ding. Round 2.
Is there a way in WordPress of being able to reject comments based on the IP address they came from? I had a brief look at the available plugins on the WordPress site but there doesn’t appear to be anything that does what I want.
Basically for about the last week or so I have been getting numerous bogus comments that I keep having to delete; all of the IP addresses are in the range 64.62.228.x. Using Arin’s WHOIS service it appears that all of the comments are originating within a range of IP addresses owned by an ISP called Hurricane Electric.
If there was some way of telling WordPress to automatically reject comments that fall within a certain IP range, I wouldn’t have a problem. I remember the discussion forums in the old ACS had such a feature. If you have any suggestions, let me know.
This is my 100th post! I have been trying over the last few days to come up with something “different” for my 100th post but I’m afraid this is as good as it gets 🙂
Check out this video of a woman doing some kind of floor routine. I didn’t think it was possible to be that flexible! It’s kind of freaky.
So I was minding my own business trying to manually insert an entry in the user table for the XMPP server that I am using when I got an error when I tried to set the creation date. Turns out that the creation date column in the user table is a 15 character string, 0 padded, that represents the number of milliseconds since January 1st, 1970. Why it is not a standard date type is beyond me but I digress.
Well if you ever need to do such a thing, and who doesn’t, here is the SQL query to do it:
select lpad(round(extract(epoch from now())*1000),15,0) as result from dual;
result
-------------------------
001144246603582
Note that this query is specific to Postgres. You may have to alter a few things to get it to work with whatever database you are using.
It is also worth noting that extracting the epoch from the date only returns the number of seconds since January 1, 1970. To get milliseconds we need to multiply by 1000.
The topic of who runs the Internet and how it is governed is an interesting one. It also came up in Vint Cerf’s talk last week at Google. As I know very little of about how organisations such of ICANN actually operate I decided to ask a friend of mine to write something about the topic for me. This is the first in a series of mini-essays that will appear on this site over the coming months. Well, that’s the plan anyway.
a review by Dagmara Kodlubanski
About the author
Dagmara is doing an MSc in Media and Communications Policy and Regulation at LSE. Her thesis is about Internet Governance. She works at Camden Council and listens to strange music.
That last part about the music is just my opinion 🙂
Google has just bought startup Upstartle the makers of Writely, the online word processing software. According to the article this puts Google in direct competition with Microsoft Office, except they now need a spreadsheet program and something for doing presentations.
If it’s a spreadsheet Google want then how about wikiCalc, an online spreadsheet created by Dan Bricklin. Bricklin was the co-author of VisiCalc, the first ever spreadsheet that appeared way back in the early 80’s, or was it the late 70’s.
And what about using Wimpypoint for creating online presentations. OK, maybe not!
I particularly like the comment at the end of the article:
Writely’s founders said on their Web site they sold to Google to broaden the user base from thousands to millions.
Yeah right! I suppose the large amount of cash on offer had nothing to do with it right?