November 2004 – Page 8 – Something Odd!

Kitten's Spaminator

I’ve just installed Kitten’s Spaminator on this site. Go into your Plugins page and activate it there.
Kitten’s plugin “combines the best of Tar Pit & Three Strikes” as she says on her blog. It’s a great idea, scoring comments based on spam words and links. Unfortunately there’s a bug in the plugin running on her site so I can’t comment on her blog. Kitten – please change $this->strike_cnt = 10; to $this->strike_cnt = 0;
All comments get trapped otherwise!
I’m playing around with the rules, I added a check on the URL, the plugin goes through all the rules regardless of wether referer and link count checks return true or not. It’s fairly benign unless you actively teach WordPress about your comment spam. Next time you get spam copy the URL, first 3 number from the IP, and email into your spam words textarea in Options->discussion. This post will probably be updated throughout the day.
13:50 – if no email entered then automatically notch up one strike.

As this post will appear there, I won’t make a big deal of it, but WordPress development can be followed at WordPress Planet, an aggregator collecting posts from here and other WP developer’s sites!

IR In the Park

Inspired by the psuedo-IR tutorials I linked to yesterday I walked down by the Regional Park and took the following shots. Lots of post-processing in the GIMP, and none were handled the same. It’s amazing what can be squeezed out of night-shot mode of a Sony digital camera!

Paddy Power: Odds on the Election!

As of a few moments ago, these are the prices on both candidates in the US election from Paddypower.com:

2004 US Presidential Elections
Selection	Prices
George W. Bush (Rep)	4 – 7
John Kerry (Dem)	5 – 4

And, as we approach the election hour, here’s Bush showing his true colours, giving Just a one-fingered victory salute to you and the world!

Sunday Times Online.. reading tonight

I bought the paper yesterday but it’ll probably be easier for me to browse it online anyway. I find myself skimming articles and on paper that’s hard to do.
I blame the web. First we grew accustomed to banner ads and flashing gizmos flying out of our browsers, then to suck down all the content blogging creates every day we learnt to quickly scan titles, then along came css so we don’t have to even visit websites any more! Now I can quickly scan the Sunday Times, and I’m waiting for the RSS feeds.
And, pron, Jeremy Clarkson’s article on security at Westminister was great!

The BBC, for instance, is supremely well guarded. The security personnel are programmed to allow nobody in, at all, ever. And if you do make it to the electric revolving doors they will respond only if presented with a computerised photo ID.

To get round all this I simply enter the building every day through the post room.

WPMU Update – Paging Categories Works!

Yay! I finally got around to fixing it! I noticed a while back that paging of categories didn’t work, but then got swept off by some other problem before I could fix it. Anyway, it’s a simple fix to your wp-inst/.htaccess file. Open that file up in your favourite editor, and add the following after the first line:
RewriteRule ^category/(.*)/page/(.*)/ BASE/wp-inst/index.php?category_name=$1&paged=$2 [QSA]
Change “BASE” to wherever your installation lives, ie. http://domain/wpmu/ will have a BASE of “/wpmu”.

WordPress Discussion Options – limiting spam annoyances and problems

WordPress 1.3 has much better anti-spam features than previous releases. It’s still relatively simple however but despite the existence of third-party hacks and plugins to catch spam here’s how I configured my site:

Disable email notifaction when comments are held for moderation
Before a comment appears, the comment author must have a previously approved comment
Hold comments if they have more than 1 link
Fill the spam words textarea with words, urls, emails, IP address, etc that you want blocked.

You’ll catch just about all the spam that gets posted to your blog this way!
Later… Feck ya spammer! None of yer crap got through! 🙂

Photography and Graphics Links

How to make a Button Set in the GIMP. Nice.
Solving Color and White Balance Problems: Using Levels – Works equally well in the GIMP too!
Slow Shutter Speeds and Long Exposure Photography – Here’s my tip. Hold the camera steady in your hands, suck in your breath and let it out slowly, hit the shutter. Hard to do, but easier with practise. Rick has a Sony F717 and took “infra red” photos with it in night-shot mode and a 5 1/4″ disk! Must try that!
Two on the iPod – Hacking iPod and iTunes, universal remote control, run Linux on it, put it in your car. Here’s a not very encouraging review of the iPod Photo from playlistmag. All I want is a device to store images while “out in the field” for extended periods so there are better suited products out there IMO.
A Killer Digital Lens – there’s so much happening in the digital camera world, it’s extraordinary!
Ken Rockwell updated with new stuff in the last month, including a review of the Canon 20D (and complains that sync speed is too slow) and an updated digital workflow article. Good thing he uses a Mac, “we just don’t have “computer” problems like that that people blindly using windows consider acceptable.” hehe.

Sandbags Everywhere

They’re all over the place but didn’t stop major damage to many shops and premises in the city center. I guess the road works didn’t make things any better for retailers or shoppers alike. Hopefully we won’t see floods as bad as that again this year. Did anyone see Clonmel on the news? Yikes! I had parked in places that were about 3 or 4 feet deep in water!