Day 1: The Bay - de Maisonneuve side
Day 2: Crescent, outside a chocolate shop
Day 3: Burnside Hall, McGill Campus
Day 4: The back of the Screaming Eagle boot store on St Laurent
Day 5: Place Montreal Trust, first floor, outside Omer De Serres.
For the last scavenger hunt of 2006 I went indoors, and I went Xmassy.
Identify the location of this photo and let us know in a comment. To find the book I left nearby, walk north (well, Montreal north) from the spot this photo was taken from until you come to a small chair on it’s own overlooking the floor below. In front of the chair is some festiveness. The book is under the festiveness.
I’ll post all of the week’s locations tomorrow.
The week of scavenger hunting continues. Today I have two photos for you. The book has been left behind a metal plate against the wall between the two buildings shown.
Identify the location and tell us about it in a comment. And if you find the book, don’t forget to register the catch at bookcrossing.com.
This one should give you a big clue:
And this one probably won’t:
It’s all scavenger hunting all week long. Identify the location of the photo below. Tell us about it in a comment. Go get the book I left there (you can even see the book in the photo today!)
I left home this morning, got on the train, then realised I’d forgotten to put a book in my bag. Luckily I had a bag of random goodies in my bag instead which I’ve left at the location below.
Identify the location, tell us all about it in a comment, go there and look under the first of the steps to the left of the Totem for the bag of goodies.
This photo was taken east of Guy, south of Sherbrooke, north of St Catherine and west of Peel.
I’ve decided to have a week full of scavenger hunts leading up to xmas, so this is the first. Identify the location of the photo below, go there, retrieve the book from the xmas tree under the wreath. Leave a comment here to tell everyone where it is.
There is one slight problem. The big black pot that the xmas tree is sitting in is more hollow than I expected it to be, and the book fell in. You may need very long arms or a small act of vandalism to retrieve the book.
So, where is this?
A while ago I wrote a plugin for WordPress (the software that powers this blog). The plugin has the catchy name of Comment Analysis and produces stats on the comments received. You can see it in action in my second sidebar to the right (or down below if your browser window is small), showing the top commentors and the latest comments.
I finally got around to documenting the plugin properly, so you can read more about it here.
I took my old web diary and converted it into blog posts today, so this blog now has posts dating back to 1998. Does that make this blog the oldest in Montreal??
It was strange reading that old stuff, my blogging style has obviously changed and evolved over the years but I should try to get back into the habit of actually writing about my life instead of essays on blogging and religion.
Thanks to some specials a the local supermarket, we have a lot of chicken in the freezer.
When time is short and some thawed chicken is in desperate need of cooking, I turn to one of the easiest recipes, Paprika Chicken.
Not only is it very easy, it’s also very forgiving. You can add the ingredients in almost any order and it will turn out ok.
Here’s how I did it last night:
Chopped two onions roughly and sauteed until soft.
Chopped four chicken breasts into bite size pieces and browned.
Added a chopped sweet potato (sweet potato? In Paprika Chicken? Sure, why not?).
Added a small/large pile of paprika and flour to the mix, sieving to reduce risk of lumps.
Add a couple of wine glasses of water.
Bring to a boil and simmer for a while (I had to get Aidan to sleep at this point so it simmered for about an hour).
Stir in some plain yoghurt (it’s supposed to be sour cream but we didn’t have any) and warm through without boiling.
Serve with rice or noodles or potatoes or gnocci or whatever other starchiness you feel like (I found some rice and macaroni remnants in the cupboard and used them both).
How much paprika you put in is up to you, but it should result in a sauce that is orange to deep red in colour. When I’ve made it before I’ve dredged the chicken in the paprika/flour mix before browning, which works just as well.
For proper authentic Paprika Chicken you should use a whole chicken cut into pieces, keeping all the bones in, but it’s easier to cook and eat in a hurry with boneless chicken breasts.
Now, what should I do with the other multitude of chicken breasts sitting in the freezer?
Update: This essay is now up at WLTC, if you like it, go vote for it!
They’re everywhere, and they’re annoying. They’re called CAPTCHAs and they’ve become a ubiquitious part of blog commenting. Bloggers use them as a quick and dirty solution to an annoying problem without consideration for the annoyance they will cause the reader.
I want to persuade all bloggers who are using them to please stop.
CAPTCHA stands for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”. I know it should really be CAPTTTTCHA but hey, I didn’t come up with the acronym.
Before bigots destroyed his life, Alan Turing posited the idea of a test to determine machine sentience. His test was designed to decide if a computer had achieved artificial intelligence. So far no computer has passed a Turing test, but the CAPTCHA uses the idea of a Turing test in reverse, testing if a supposed person is really a person and not a computer program pretending to be a person.
So a CAPTCHA is a test to make sure the person posting a comment (or anything else, but I’m concentrating on the blogging usage here) is really a person, and not a spam generator trying to post comments about card games, prescription drugs or sex. It usually involves an image showing some distorted text, requiring the user to type in what they see in the distorted text.
Anything that stop spammers is good, right? Well generally yes, but some things that stop spammers are better than others; so much better that the inferior solutions become un-necessary. There are many problems with CAPTCHAs:
Hopefully by now I’ve convinced you that CAPTCHAs are not the best solution to the spam flood. Now it’s time to bring in the alternatives, but before I offer my alternatives, we should decide what our requirements are. An effective and non-intrusive spam blocker should:
Here are the solutions which I feel best meet these requirements:
This is what I use, in the form of Akismet. The idea is that all spam comments get submitted to a central server. Each time someone comments on your blog the comment gets checked against the central database. If the comment looks like spam it is automatically flagged as such. The person leaving the comment didn’t have to do anything. The blogger just has to check for false positives occasionally. Everybody is happy.
So far Akismet has stopped over 15,000 comments from being published on my blog with about three false positives (comments marked as spam which were not spam) that I know of and about 5 false negatives (spam comments that did not get marked as spam).
Akismet is designed for Wordpress but will work with other blogging platforms, and the API is open source.
The downside of this solution is the reliance you have on a central database. If the database goes down or disappears altogether then the spam flood will begin again. But while it’s around, why not take advantage of it?
Programs like the Bad Behaviour plugin for Wordpress take all comments received and analyze them for telltale signs of spaminess. Using data hidden in the HTTP headers like user agent information it is possible to tell if a comment came from a legitimate user or a spambot.
The downside of this kind of solution is that it has to be smarter than the spammers, and spammers are smart. Bad Behaviour works very well though, or so I’ve heard; Akismet takes care of things so well that I haven’t needed extra solutions.
If your spam problem isn’t big enough to warrant external tools, you can probably get a fairly good spam filter going just with what your blogging software offers natively. You should be able to filter out comments which contain common spammy words (like phentermine, poker, viagra, holdem, etc.).
If spam is still getting through you can look at whitelisting; maybe your blog has an option like “only allow comments from people who have commented before” which is like an automatic whitelist after the first moderated comment is approved.
Blacklisting is trickier, but if you see spam constantly coming from the same source then you can blacklist that source. Most spammers will get around this easily though.
For a list of other spam busters, you can try this page, which is for Wordpress, but the concepts still apply to other blog platforms.
CAPTCHAs are bad. They don’t test for humans, they test for smart non-lazy humans with good eyesight and smart spambots that have CAPTCHAs all figured out. They are at best an annoyance and at worst discriminatory.
Using some or all of the suggestions I offered above, you can eliminate your spam problem without making your readers jump through hoops and without losing your own time dealing with the problem. If your chosen blogging platform doesn’t support these solutions, then think seriously about changing your platform. I heartily recommend Wordpress for all your blogging needs, either hosted or your own installation.
My final piece of advice is for quitters. If you give up trying to deal with comment spam, or you give up blogging completely, please please please remember to disable commenting before abandoning your blog. Every spam comment that gets published is a victory for the spammers.
NB: This post is longer than my usual offerings because it’s my entry into the WLTC blogging essay competition.
Friday Night: Freezing rain. Trees falling. Power going out. Exploding transformers lighting up the sky. A room full of candles. A night without heat.
Saturday: Power back. No phone. No cable. Scone and cookie making. Party at J and Ks. Beer. Very silly games. Christmas and 80s music. Too much food. All hail the chinese cheese biscuit.
Sunday: Early morning scone making. Snow. Early morning Magic games at T and Cs. Beer. Several hours of Diplomacy resulting in a 7-way draw. More snow. Too much food. Caramel Baileys. Unfinished game of Risk.
Thanks to J, K, T, C and the weather for making it a weekend to remember.