Author: willc

After months of research, reading reviews, observing price fluctuations, and dreaming, I found the opportune moment and took the plunge. I am now an iPod owner.

A 20GB fourth-generation iPod, to be exact. Needless to say, I have been in MP3 la-la land for the last few days. Te idea of being able to carry thousands of songs with me everywhere I go is still trying to sink in. I know I am way late getting onto this bandwagon, but I am happy I waited so long, for I have tasted the magical Kool Aid, and it is good.

I had narrowed down my MP3 player search to 3 choices: the iPod, the Dell DJ, and the Rio Karma. It was a tough choice, but in the end, I feel I made the right decision.

The ease-of-use, the configurability, and the marriage to iTunes make the iPod excellent. The only thing I was a wee bit disappointed about were the earbuds that it comes with, which don’t fit my ears very well. This was easily and inexpensively resolved though.

So look for me not paying attention to you, off in my own world, at a coffee shop near you 😉

It would seem that the Kitten’s Comment Pay extension I installed has put an end to the comment spam for now. The spammer in question didn’t choose to pay me to post his/her spam, rather he/she got frustrated that his/her posts were not showing up and all they got was a screen asking to send me money.

To you, dear spammer, I say, “I find your lack of faith disturbing“.

Ah, the irony.

You spamma me, I charga you money.

For the last 48 hours or so I have been fighting a spammer who keeps posting nonsense comments here on my blog. The point is to fill my blog with links to their site, which helps their serach engine rankings and spams their site to people happening to read my comments.

I used the built-in function of WordPress to mark their comments for moderation before being posted, however, they are hitting me about 20 times an hour, so this has been a pain to keep up with. Blocking their IP address from my site has been futile as well, for they use a different one each time.

So, I did some research and found a great plugin called Kitten’s Comment Paythat fights back. When someone submits a comment that is marked as potential spam, they are taken to a page where they can pay me $50 via Paypal to have it posted 🙂

I will keep my fingers crossed and see how well it works.

With no one ever posting on the old Geekamongus forum, and new exploits of Invision Powerboard growing in number related to it’s increase in popularity, I decided to try something new.

I found this cool guy online who writes really cool little PHP scripts at MyLittleHomepage.net, and tried out the My Little Forum script. The author, Alex, is aware of Web Standards, and seems to have a clue about creating well-formed web pages. I mean, how many forums have you seen that are written in XHTML1.0 Strict? And RSS feeds?

Granted, the forum doesn’t pass HTML validation, but it’s only because of a lack of character encoding (the &’s are throwing it off). This may be something I can fix once I have time to do some reverse engineering.

It’s clean, lean, and easy to set up. Invision was convoluted, clunky, and not much fun to administer because of all the options that you don’t really need. Plus, I heard they started charging for the free version, or something that sounded like it wasn’t worth upgrading anymore.

Regardless, check out my new forum, sign up, and let’s start talking!

An interesting article on CNET today points out what many of us have been saying for a long time.

My favorite quote:

The situation has some Web developers shaking their heads in disbelief.

No wonder I have a headache…

I have been spending a lot of time doing these things lately (in no particular order):

• Working. We are setting up four Dell 6650 servers for our new J2EE-compliant web application platform at the AFCCC. This is exciting stuff. We installed RedHat Enterprise 3 AS on two of them today, and will finish up the others tomorrow. We have also spent a lot of time in meetings to plan the new web site
• Playing Magic: The Gathering. Yes, I am a geek and proud of it. Magic is the game to end all games.
• Being with the family. Since the new job started, I get home shortly after 4 every day, which has allowed me to spend much more time with Gray and Alicia.
• Side Work. Still helping out with Puckett web stuff and Ingles web stuff. Also working on some web design for other clients, and just finished setting up my new dedicated web server for hosting them.
• Planning the addition. The contractors started on our house addition yesterday, and things are moving along quickly. I can’t wait to have a bigger kitchen, a bathroom downstairs, and a new study with a bay window. If all goes well, it will be done by Thanksgiving.