internet

Blogspam A Problem… No More

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve been getting more than my fair share of blogspam of late. I’ve been spending about twenty minutes every three or so days clearing out the ‘moderation’ queue and updating my keyword lists. Worse still, some spam has been getting through nonetheless (hopefully I’ve always been quick to remove it, and so none of you – my readers – have had to see any of it).

So: I’ve implemented a new anti-blogspam solution: whenever you post a comment to my weblog from now on you’ll be asked a simple question. The answer is usually obvious… to a human… but very difficult to automate a computer to answer. I appreciate any feedback on this (why not leave a comment to this post), and I’ll let you know whether it fixes the problem. And, of course, if it does, I’ll offer my code snippet back to the WordPress development team in order to include it, perhaps, with a future version: or, at least, offer it to friends of mine who use similar blog engines and are troubled by spam.

I need sleep.

In other (almost equally geeky) news, I’ve been spending a good deal of time working on my new RockMonkey WikiGame – TromaNightAdventure. If I can keep up a reasonable development rate on it this weekend (which could be tough – I’ve lots to do, and Gareth is visiting and keeps distracting me with cool technology like GPS devices and VoIP telephones), it’ll be ready on Tuesday evening. Watch this space.

Popularity Of The Welsh Language

<ROFLMAO>

Want a giggle? Go to Google and type “old dead language” into the search box (with or without the quotes… either way), and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky!”.

This is the follow-up to my experimental googlebomb the other week. I’ve had my fun, now, and I actually believe it’s possible (I was skeptical when I first read about it, but it turns out that Google really is that easy to manipulate) to pull off a googlebomb of this scale with my limited resources.

In other (equally geeky) news, I’m starting to have trouble with blogspam, and my usual keyword/IP/link-count filters aren’t catching it all… might need a reprogram.

My Very Own Googlebomb

Partially out of curiosity, partially to point out a flaw in the #aber multipass system, I’ve made my own little googlebomb. For those of you who don’t like reading, a googlebomb is where you manipulate the way that popular search engine Google into falsely linking with great priority a page that it probably should not. I’m sure you all remember “French military victories” and “Weapons of mass destruction”?

Go to Google, type in “Stuii should fix this”, and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky”. You’ll be taken to the #aber multipass page of a user who has never existed, a user called “Stuii Should Fix This”.

It’s a pain that when people search for ‘AvaPoet’, the first result is what should be my multipass (but it expired long ago). However, there’s obviously still a lot of places linking to it, so people keep getting that page whenever they look for me. Grr.

In any case; the theory’s been demonstrated plenty of times before… I just wanted to do it for myself. Yay.

Fantasy Terrorist League

You know what’s become quite popular among the masses since the take-off of the Internet? Fantasy leagues. Yes; that’s right – those things previously reserved for pub regulars and geeky play-by-mail types. Now, the internet is full of Fantasy Sports Leagues, Fantasy Share Trading, and so on.

For those of you not in the know; when playing in a fantasy league you are allocated a number of points (frequently represented by pseudo-currency). These points can be spent on, for example, famous football players, or companies, or whatever, and as the perceieved values of these commodities change (e.g. the footballer scores more goals, or particpates in more winning matches… or the companies share value changes), the value of your team/portfolio adjusts accordingly. You can then sell the successful players or shares (ideally at their “market peak”) in order to finance the purchase of others, plus a small profit for yourself. Some fantasy leagues take this to it’s logical extreme, and actually play gambling for real money (with the values of the commodities scaled down by a factor to accomodate the wallets of the participants, of course – few people carry around enough spare cash to finance a premier league football team).

So; here’s my idea: Fantasy Terrorist League. It’s a web site where, once you’ve signed up an account, you’re given a number of ‘points’ which you can invest in the many terrorist organisations that are active the world over. The value of these terrorist groups decreases gradually over time, unless they get media attention. Value of groups goes up as they are featured in the news. Value of groups rises dramatically as they perform other acts: for example, taking a hostage might be worth 5 points per hostage taken (2 bonus points for a successful execution); detonating a car or truck bomb might be worth 10 points (with bonus points available for damaging foreign embassies); a toxic gas attack or biological terror might get a group’s value up by 15 points; a plane hijacking could increase a group’s value by 20 or 30 points. The points weightings will be variable, too, based on difficulty (it’s a lot more difficult now to hijack a plane than it used to be, apparently) and popularity (“Oh great; HAMAS did another suicide bombing… by the time the PLO get around to detonating one it’ll be worth nothing! I knew I should have invested in those Chechen rebels…”). Of course, I wouldn’t run such a site as a real gambling site (last thing I’d want is somebody with, how shall we put this – insider information – using it to gain a profit to support their activities), but I think it’d be a fascinating social experiment to run as a true “fantasy league”.

If you think this is in bad taste: fuck off. o_|/ It amused me for awhile when I thought of it.

Our Web Developer’s “Line Of The Day”

Yet again my concern for the value of an Internet Computer Science degree from UWA is raised, as a dippy co-worker with two years of such a degree behind her asks me for help:

“Dan,” she begins, “How do I make a table in PHP?”

For those of you that don’t know quite as much about web design as she should, PHP is a programming language used, amongst other things, for developing dynamic, flexible web sites which integrate with other data sources. This weblog, for example, is powered by PHP. It is most frequently used to output HTML, the language of the web.

“I think you mean HTML,” I reply, seeing what she’s trying to achieve – the alignment of two text fields with their corresponding labels. She’ll need a simple two-by-two table. The code for this is as follows:

<table>
  <tr>
    <td>
      Top-Left Text
    </td>
    <td>
      Top-Right Text
    </td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>
      Bottom-Left Text
    </td>
    <td>
      Bottom-Right Text
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

What are they teaching them these days? I remember learning this at about age 14, using Netscape’s examples. This young woman has been studying Internet-fucking-Computing at degree level for two years and hasn’t been shown this?

Don’t even get me started on the fact that she shouldn’t be using a table for the purpose she was trying to use it for.

Update 2023-12-07: In hindsight, I made a knee-jerk reaction in writing this blog post. I should have treated this junior developer as what I’d now call “one of the lucky 10,000” and been more-supportive and a better teacher. We’re all learning, and back in 2004 I clearly had a lot of learning still to do.

A.I. Nuts, Again

Do you remember a week or two ago I wrote about a guy who patented the “Ethical Rules Of Artificial Intelligence”? Well – it looks like he’s read my article and placed his own comments. I’m quite surprised and impressed that he took the time (away from his heavy schedule of philosophising or book-signing or whatever) to come and read my counter-arguments to his ideas, and placed comments of his own (albeit mostly pre-fabricated stuff).

Here’s to you, John LaMuth.

The Internet As An Art Form – The Infinite Cat Project

Just came across the Infinite Cat Project. The premise is simple: take a picture of your cat looking at the current picture on the web site, and send it in, and it will become the current picture. The first cat is Frankie: just click Next Cat to get to the next one.

I think this is a great use of the high-speed communication that the internet gives us in order to produce something truly artistic. Cool.

Troma Night Website Integrates With Abnib

Woo and indeed hoo! I’m really starting to enjoy programming RSS feeds into my web sites now. I’ve just done a little bit of recoding of the Troma Night website to allow the newly-relaunched Aberystwyth weblog aggregator, Abnib, to syndicate it. Now, Abnib will show the details of the next upcoming Troma Night… and not a moment too soon – if you’re viewing this post on Abnib, you’ll see the announcement of tonight’s Troma Night just below it. Yay!

Abnib’s Back!

(much thanks due to Gareth)

Abnib, the Aberystwyth Weblog Aggregator (bringing you niblets of the best of Aber’s weblogs) is back online, after months of absence. Take a look and see who you recognise.

Haven’t quite gotten around to putting everybody’s ‘mugshots’ in there (as I’m having some difficulty with semitransparent PNGs), but Gareth’s made a good few to get us going. Yay! Hooray for Gareth! And Aberystwyth! And Abnib! And RSS!

How Google Could De-Throne AIM, And Other Geeky News

There’s an article on how Google could overthrow AIM/ICQ (link removed; apple-x.net now seems to be occupied by domain squatters), and perhaps even MSN Messenger, from their dominant positions in the instant messenger market, and improve internet standards usage and accessibility, by releasing their own instant messenger tool powered by the (wonderful) Jabber protocol. It’s a lovely idea, but (sadly) not one which is likely to happen.

On similarly geeky news, there’s a new web site, BrowseHappy, which aims to help everyday users make the switch away from Internet Explorer to safer, simpler, faster, better browsers. If you’re still using IE, take a look. If you’re already enlightened, show it to your unenlightened friends. It’s a very approachable site in nice, easy language.

And finally, there’s apparently a new worm doing the rounds, “Peeping Tom”, which, upon infection, turns on the victim’s webcam and microphone, and begins broadcasting to the world. What a lovely idea for a novelty virus.

Thanks for listening

Bush’s Foreign Friends

There’s a new googlebomb out, abusing the way that the popular Google search engine works. To see it in action, go to Google and enter “Bush’s foreign friends” (including the speechmarks) as the search term, and hit the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.

How To Keep Up With The Latest Happings On Scatmania (or What Are All Those Pretty Buttons?)

If you’re looking for a way to keep up-do-date with the latest Scatmania happenings, it’s now really really easy. I’ve enhanced my weblog with a heap of useful syndication tools that make keeping track of my latest activities a doddle, even for those of you who are unenlightened and can still be caught using an awful choice of web browser.

You may have noticed that at the bottom of the Scatmania menu there’s a series of button. Most of these buttons (the top five) relate to subscribing to Scatmania, like this:

RSS	RSS is a popular format for syndicating news and views on the internet, supported by most weblog communities and applications, as well as by many news sites. To view RSS content, you will need an RSS Aggregator such as Pluck (a plug-in for Internet Explorer), RSSOwl (for most operating systems) or the attractive NewsMac for MacOS. The Opera web browser now supports RSS feeds, too, and it looks likely that other browsers will soon follow suit. The RSS : Journal feed from Scatmania provides you with the latest blog entries, as they happen. The RSS : Comments feed collates the newest comments and replies to my weblog entries. RSS is a great way to keep up with your friends weblogs and your favourite news sites.
Atom	ATOM, like RSS, is a simple way to keep up-to-date with your favourite sites. Just download an ATOM-enabled newsreader (some, like BottomFeeder, can read RSS feeds as well) and point it at the sites you want to watch. Scatmania publishes an ATOM feed of the latest blog entries.
ESF	ESF is a small, fast, and simple new way to publish content like weblogs. There aren’t really any programs for reading it right now. Why not consider writing one (see how simple the data format is).
CDF	CDF, developed my Microsoft as part of Internet Explorer 4, was supposed to be the future of the way we used the web and subscribed to the services of web sites… but it never took off. However, Internet Explorer to this day provides the means to subscribe to ‘active channels’, and for Internet Explorer users, this may be the easiest way to keep up with Scatmanian events. Just click the button in Internet Explorer and Scatmania will be added to your Favourites list as a submenu, automatically adding new items (and removing old ones) as new entries are added to the blog. Thanks to Aquarionics for suggesting this reincarnation of Internet Explorer ‘active channels’.

So, now you’ve got no excuse for not being up-to-date with my blog… or anybody elses!

The other buttons are mostly just me showing off because I can write standards-compliant code – click on them and see for yourself.

Making Progress

Claire’s at work this Saturday morning, so I’m taking advantage of the oppertunity to finish the web site I’m developing for my dad – almost got a deployable version ready, which is nice, because I could do with getting his feedback on it and (assuming all’s well with design and whatnot) deploying it “live” on Monday morning. Which is all good, because I need the money!

The folks who now own the cafe below us – our new landlords – have made great strides in getting it ready for use. It’s now got tables, and chairs, and a chiller unit, and some stock, and a coffee maker, and all kinds of stuff. It’s been entirely repainted and refloored and redecorated. It’s pretty much ‘there’. They’ve even put up the new sign. The new sign advertises the cafe’s web site, mgees.com. I’ve taken a look… and… it would appear that they tried to make a web page in Microsoft Word (bad start), then ran the source code through a copy of Dadadodo to ensure that it was completely mangled, before they uploaded it. Jeez. Still, they’ve asked me to quote them for a new one, so once I’m done with this site for my dad I’ll see what I can do for them.

Speaking of Dadadodo, Claire‘s been playing with it recently. You should see what happens when you put the book of Genesis through it… oh; we laughed.

Back to the code…

Something Cheery

I see that Slate, a magazine run by MSN (and owned entirely by Microsoft), recently published an article promoting the idea of not using Internet Explorer. Whoopsie, say Microsoft. Better yet, the article suggests using Mozilla Firefox, their main competitor in the browser market, instead.

Promised you something cheery. There it is.

Scatmania, Version 2

Welcome to Scatmania, Version 2!

After my disasterous data loss the other day, I decided to take the oppertunity to redesign Scatmania into something altogether better-suited to the purpose (i.e. doesn’t use a silly flat-file system). And here it is (well; unless you’re reading this through LiveJournal).

I’ll be graduating this afternoon, which will mostly involve standing around in silly robes while a man talks bollocks in Welsh. After this, I’ll be going out for a meal with my folks, who’ll be visiting for the occassion.

On an unrelated note, does anybody want to join Claire, Bryn, Paul and I on a trip to Alton Towers, some weekday during September (taking advantage of the cheap rates and lack of schoolchildren that’s available at that time of year)? Date to be confirmed, but if you want in, drop us a message or leave a comment.