Be Lambic or Green

New look on Wordpress.org and a new release!

March 29, 2008 at 11:11 am · Filed under Blogging

I was browsing plugins on wordpress.org when suddenly it all looked different. For a second I thought I’d ended up on a different site, but no, it looks like the new look and feel has been implemented to match the upcoming WordPress 2.5 release, which is now showing up on the download page.

It looks great, as do the 2.5 release candidates that I’ve been playing with for a few days. There are some big changes to the admin interface which are mostly good. This blog will be upgraded sometimes this weekend.

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Aleaping we will go

February 29, 2008 at 11:55 am · Filed under Blogging, Skepticism

It’s February 29th today, so I thought, like 90% of bloggers on the planet, I would do a post about leap years.

Those silly people who think our planet is less than 6000 years old also sometimes think that the leap year thing is because science somehow screwed up and we have to fudge the numbers occasionally or that it’s because the Earth’s orbit is speeding up.

In fact, the leap year was refined over many years, starting with the romans who added an extra month every couple of years, basically whenever they felt like it, to keep the seasons in sync. Then Julius came along and realised the seasons were still all messed up, so abolished the extra month concept, replacing it with a slightly longer year of 365 days (it was 355 before) with extra days added to various months. There was also an extra day added every three years to try to keep the seasons lined up, but it wasn’t enough and they drifted again. A few years later the period was changed to four years, and things were better, but not perfect.

It wasn’t until the 1500s that someone realised that things weren’t quite right. It happened to be a Pope, Pope Gregory XIII to be precise. He noticed that if things carried on, Easter would eventually bump into Christmas, and we obviously couldn’t have Jesus being nailed to the cross on the day he was born, so he changed the rules, with the help of Kepler’s astronomical observations.

The Gregorian Calendar has been used ever since, and the leap year calculation remains unchanged. The calculation Gregory implemented is one I’ve used many times in computer programs. A year is a leap year if it’s divisible by 4 but not divisible by 100 except when it’s divisible by 400 (that’s why 2000 was a leap year).

Our year now averages out to be 365.2425 days long which is accurate enough that we’ll only be out by one day after 4000 years.

We need more Popes like Gregory XIII, even though he was a bit of a bastard to the English and Irish.

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YULBlog Analysis

January 24, 2008 at 3:38 pm · Filed under Blogging

In moments of boredom over the past few days I’ve been going through all the blogs on yulblog.org to see what blogging platforms people are using. The result is the graph below.

Notes:

I didn’t visit every single site. For example most of the blogger/blogspot sites I determined just by looking at the URI, so some of them are probably old or broken.

There are three Chatelaine blogs on yulblog. Apparently Chatelaine uses WordPress.

Apparently I can spot a WordPress blog with a fair degree of accuracy, even without any “Powered by WordPress” hints. DotClear had me confused occasionally though, they are suspiciously similar to WP blogs.

There are some very beautiful blogs in Montreal, but there are some hideous ones too.

This guy uses the same theme as me.

Someone still uses Xanga. Amazing.

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The Habits Meme

January 23, 2008 at 3:32 pm · Filed under Blogging

I got tagged by that guy, which means I don’t have to agonize about what to blog about today.

The rules:

• Link to the person that tagged you.
• Post the rules on your blog.
• Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
• Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
• Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

So here goes:

1. Ever since Blork blogged about “try to” (correct) and “try and” (horribly wrong) I’ve become slightly obsessive about it to the point of making strangling noises every time Pullman makes the error in his Dark Materials.
2. I like port. And single malts. But I don’t smoke cigars or read the Financial Times.
3. I have a scar on my right knee from falling out of my bed onto my etch-a-sketch as a boy. I left the removed stitches in a small plastic vial on a table in a pub garden.
4. I have an Avenging Unicorn on my desk at work.
5. When I sleep, my right foot has a mind of its own. My son has inherited this trait. It drives my wife crazy.
6. I have been strip searched by UK Customs and Excise.

I tag her and him and her and him and double tag her.

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Ch Ch Ch Ch Changes

January 2, 2008 at 11:35 am · Filed under Blogging

I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.3.2 and added Gravatar support to my comments. Gravatar was recently acquired by Automattic, the people behind WordPress and Akismet, so I’m now even more dependant on Mr Mullenweg and his team.

Everything seems to be running smoothly, but if you notice any problems, let me know.

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I got weirded

March 2, 2007 at 2:02 pm · Filed under Blogging

Tara tagged me which is fortuitous as I had nothing to blog about today apart from my failure to walk to work because of the snow storm (but I made it as far as Greene Avenue!).

Anyway, the rules are: People who get tagged must write in a blog of their own ten weird things or habits or little known facts about themselves as well as state this rule clearly. At the end you must choose six people to be tagged and list their names. No tag backs!

I’m so transparent that it’s hard to find 10 but let’s give it a go:

1. I once almost died walking from one Portugese village to another.
2. I have a big mole on one of my toes which I once tried to cut off in a fit of teen angst.
3. I love the winter and the cold and snow it brings. Winter Wonderlands cheer me up.
4. I was once taken to the ER twice in one day for two completely unrelated accidents.
5. I have an Avenging Unicorn on my desk.
6. One new years eve I passed out in the graveyard across the street from the pub and when I woke up the pub was closed and everyone had gone home.
7. I like peanut butter and chili sauce on toast.
8. I have visited four Canadian provinces, eight US states, three commonwealth countries, fifteen European nations and every English county.
9. At school I was a member of the pet club and the computer club and I helped run the school bookshop, mostly to get early lunch passes.
10. I brought a pair of slippers back with me from New Zealand which I love but which are falling apart. I am planning to have another pair shipped from NZ to replace them.

I tag him, her, her, and him. Oh and her if she ever blogs again.

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A WordPress tip

February 8, 2007 at 12:35 pm · Filed under Blogging, Geeky

A lot of my fellow Montreal bloggers are switching over to WordPress; either .com or .org, so I have a little trick I learned today that I’d like to share with you all.

If you’re in the visual editor writing a post, you can hit Shift-Alt-V in Firefox or Alt-V in IE and a new set of buttons will magically appear in the editor toolbar, allowing you to:

• Create headings
• Do underlining (but remember, underlining on websites is a Bad Thing)
• Justify
• Change text colour
• Paste in plain text and paste from MS Word
• Remove formatting when you mess up
• Add funky characters (handy if you don’t have a French keyboard)
• Undo / Redo

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Still here

January 22, 2007 at 12:21 pm · Filed under Blogging, Family+Friends

Yes, I’m still here. I took a blog break last week as my family were visiting from the UK and France. They did all the things tourists are expected to do in Montreal, including:

• The Underground City
• Old Montreal
• Notre Dame
• Walking up the mountain
• Skating on the mountain
• Driving over the mountain
• Drinking in the Irish pubs
• Going to Eggspectations for breakfast and The Keg for dinner
• Shopping on St Denis
• Experiencing temperatures below -20
• Snowboarding in St Saveur

The snowboarding was 5 days ago, but I’m still in pain. Who knew balancing on a plank of wood uses so many muscles??

We also had “Second Christmas” complete with a pancake breakfast, full turkey dinner, festive music and stockings and presents. I got a bunch of British stuff including a Union Jack mug, a London tube map jigsaw and lots of Brit edibles (mmmmm Jelly Babies).

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CAPTCHAs, who needs them?

December 5, 2006 at 8:35 am · Filed under Blogging

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.

What are they?

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.

Why are they bad?

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:

• Any extra work required to comment is likely to deter some people from commenting at all.
• Sometimes the images are so distorted they’re almost impossible to read, even with perfect eyesight.
• CAPTCHAs are hackable. Spammers are smart, they can get past many of our barriers.
• Visually impaired users are completely excluded (although there are audio CAPTCHAs available now).
• Dyslexics have a hard time too.
• There are better and less intrusive solutions.

What are these better solutions?

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:

• Require nothing or as little as possible from the valid commenter.
• Require as little effort as possible from the webmaster/blog owner.
• Work on as many blog platforms as possible, or have similar alternatives for other blogging platforms.
• Stop as much spam as possible.
• Not interfere with valid comments

Here are the solutions which I feel best meet these requirements:

Centralized spam database

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?

Comment analysis programs

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.

Filtering, whitelisting and blacklisting

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.

Summary

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.

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The New Theme

November 22, 2006 at 8:41 am · Filed under Blogging

Unless you read my posts via RSS, you’ve probably noticed I have a new theme. It’s based on the Qwilm! theme and modified slightly for my needs.

The biggest change is that I now have two sidebars instead of one. The one was getting too long and busy so it made sense to add another. This means that the blog is now best viewed in a 1024×768 window, but I don’t like forcing people to use a certain size so if your window is smaller you will just see one or both of the sidebars run away to beneath the posts.

If you have any problems with the new theme, or you just hate it, please let me know. The one problem I know about is that IE6 doesn’t respect the fixed position of the icon set on the left. Firefox does and hopefully IE7 does too.

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Get Firefox!

August 9, 2006 at 7:06 am · Filed under Blogging

Looking at my logs, it seems that 51.5% of my visitors are still using IE to do their browsing. 3% of you are still using a version below 6.0. Why are you doing that to yourselves?? My advice to you is:

Or if you want to be on the leading edge, why not give Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 a try? I’m using it now and I’m very impressed so far.

23% of my visitors are already using Firefox. Very sensible people.

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Published at last

July 18, 2006 at 12:57 pm · Filed under Blogging

Hey look at me, I got published!

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Back, sort of

July 12, 2006 at 8:26 am · Filed under Blogging

Thanks to a mysterious disappearing webhost, lambic.co.uk was down for almost two weeks. Now I have a shiny new provider (ecohosting.net, they give some of my money to charity!) and I’m working on getting everything back to normal.

Sadly unless my mysterious disappearing webhost re-appears, I’ve lost all updates since January. That’ll teach me to take more regular backups.

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I needs…

November 30, 2005 at 8:34 am · Filed under Blogging

Procrasto tagged me, so here goes. I have to type “(your name) needs” into Google to see what I need. Here’s what I need:

• M needs a chick. Think I already have one.
• M needs help
• M needs part-time and backup nurses
• M needs Amanda Buttram, Gotta love that surname.
• M needs to change course or he will plunge into hell at Mach 666. Yep, I’m an evil sinner.
• M needs simple tools. Complicated tools confuse me.
• M needs help to avoid another 2nd-place points finish. Story of my life.
• M needs a bra. Oh now come on…
• M needs to articulate what he wants. I WANT CANDY!
• M needs more room. More. Always More

Who do I tag? I tag Zach Braff. I’ll keep tagging Zach Braff until he acknowledges me.

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Meme-arific

October 21, 2005 at 2:46 pm · Filed under Blogging

OK so I’m in a memey mood this week. Another meme, this time from my wife.

1. LAST MOVIE YOU SAW IN A THEATER: Serenity, gorram it!
2. WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING? It’s in my sidebar.
3. FAVORITE BOARD GAME? Risk.
4. FAVORITE MAGAZINE? Magazines are so last century.
5. FAVORITE SMELL? Whiteboard markers, baking bread.
6. FAVORITE FOOD? Chocolate or Sushi.
7. FAVORITE SOUND? Silence.
8. WORST FEELING IN THE WORLD? Being kicked in the testicles.
9. WHAT IS THE FIRST THING YOU THINK OF WHEN YOU WAKE UP? Morning? Already?
10. FAVORITE FAST FOOD PLACE? Junk: KFC (aka PFK), not so junk: Baton Rouge
11. FUTURE CHILD’S NAME: Children? Me?
12. FINISH THIS STATEMENT. IF I HAD A LOT OF MONEY: I’d be rich
13. DO YOU DRIVE FAST? Ask my wife
14. DO YOU SLEEP WITH A STUFFED ANIMAL? Only when Jen has a cold.
15. STORMS-COOL OR SCARY? Uber-cool.
16. WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST CAR? Red Ford Escort Mark II
17. FAVORITE DRINK? British Beer
18. FINISH THIS STATEMENT, “IF I HAD THE TIME I”: I’d be rich
19. DO YOU EAT THE STEMS ON BROCCOLI? Do I eat Broccoli?
20. IF YOU COULD DYE YOUR HAIR ANY COLOR, WHAT WOULD BE YOUR CHOICE? Black or Blue.
21. NAME ALL THE DIFFERENT CITIES/TOWNS YOU HAVE LIVED IN: Coryton, Newmarket, Corringham, Stanford-Le-Hope, Surbiton, New Malden, Swindon, Shrewsbury, Montreal, Beaconsfield.
22. HALF EMPTY OR FULL? Overflowing
23. FAVORITE SPORTS TO WATCH: Formula 1 racing, Wimbledon
24. ONE NICE THING ABOUT THE PERSON WHO SENT THIS! There are way too many to narrow it down to just one.
25. MORNING PERSON, OR NIGHT OWL? Nocturnal
26. OVER EASY, OR SUNNY SIDE UP? Over. Just Over.
27. FAVORITE PLACE TO RELAX? Anywhere remote.
28. FAVORITE PIE? All pie is good
29. OF ALL THE PEOPLE YOU E-MAILED THIS TO, WHO’S MOST LIKELY TO RESPOND? Hopefully Zach Braff.
30. LEAST LIKELY TO RESPOND? Zach Braff never does my memes, the git.

I’m passing this meme on to Zach Braff, and anyone else who wants it.

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