Tag: General

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.

It has been one week since I started my new job as a contracted web developer working with the Air Force. So far I like it a lot, and I don’t forsee that changing any time soon. I went in a little intimidated by the military aspect of it, not having spent any time in that environment before, but I quickly realized that it’s nothing to worry about, and that the people there are very nice.

Working downtown is great, being surrounded by all the good restaurants, and being about 1.5 miles from home. The money I am saving on gas will be amazing. I was putting over 30 miles a day on my car; now it’s barely 3. I looked at used bikes the other day, but I think I will save that adventure until spring rolls around.

Nothing too exciting to report otherwise. I’ll post some more interesting stuff here soon.

This is why I love the internet.

Something I have had in the back of my head for a long time, but always forgot to do, was to look up the origin of [sic]. That is, the editorial comment you see used in writing when the author is quoting someone who has mispelled a word or not used proper grammar.

For example, if I was quoting George W. Bush on this web site, I would say:

“This has been tough weeks in that country[sic].”

-George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., April 13, 2004

The [sic] implies that it was the person quoted that made the grammatical mistake, not me. Consider it a grammatical passing of the buck.

Today I finally remembered to look up [sic] and see if I could find out what its origins were. I searched Google for “what does sic mean?”, and the first result I found was quite a suprise. The page I was lead to told me that SIC stands for “Standard Industrial Classification”, and relates to barcode technology.

However, if you go on to read the comments from other people that follow, you find a rare gem of internet culture, where people have all found each other under the wrong pretenses (searching for the meaning of [sic], not SIC), and have established a dialogue that spans a couple of years. There are some rude comments, but it’s pretty interesting to follow along and see what happens.

It is also impressive that the owners of the site have realized what they have inadvertently created, and have decided to let this go on for so long.

It has been almost 48 hours, and only 1 person has asked for one of the 6 GMail invitations I offered. There are still 5 left! If you want one, say something nice in the comments, and tell me about your fingernails.

C’mon people, these things sell for $100 on eBay!

The Jedi Academy has opened in Romania.

When Macromedia created what it calls “layers” (really just CSS div tags positioned absolutely) in Dreamweaver, it did a world of damage to the field of web design. This is largely in part because people tend to think of layers like those you use when creating complex images in Photoshop, and expect them to behave similarly.

Furthermore, the way they implement these so-called layers, by using absolute positioning, works against forward-thinking CSS design.

I bring this up only because I see people everywhere (everywhere being Yahoo web design chat and some Web Design forums I frequent) stuck in the layer way of thinking asking questions about why their layout works in IE, but not in Firefox, or vis-versa.