Category: Byte.me

My blogging has slowed down this summer. I have been spending more time cycling and reading, and less time at the keyboard.
The spam situation has improved. There hasn’t been any spam on the blog for a long time. What I mean is that is that the spam attempts also seem to have dropped off. The maintenance on the spam logs was not time consuming, but it was annoying. I run MT Blacklist without getting Blacklist updates. I culled the list to a few dozen strings and a couple of dozen patterns. For a while, the log showed I was getting hits, but it seems to have dried up a few weeks ago. I also run Spamlookup and Keystroke which take care of everything that Blacklist doesn’t block. I think a lot of spam was probably coming from a few sources and they may have just taken me off their lists when they couldn’t get a hit.
Movable Type is beta testing MT 3.2. I am going to wait until they have a stable commercial release, tested to work with the plugins that I use, and then upgrade. I don’t want to move to another platform unless another platform offers clear advantages.

I got an email from Garth advising me that he had been blocked from commenting on my blog. It turns out that he had used the word socialist, which was blocked by the text string “cialis” in the Blacklist. Cialis is some kind of drug or herbal – I don’t know what it is but it has been promoted through blog spam. I have been using a combination of MT-Blacklist, SpamLookup and MT-Keystrokes. I have cut out a lot of stale URL’s from MTB, but I still run it to screen for proven text strings found in spam relating to gambling, porn, drugs. SpamLookup and Keystrokes have been pretty effective. I think they basically take care of everything, but there is some question about server load running SpamLookup under a moderate spam attack. MTB intercepts incoming comments first.

This is the opening part of one of the more flamboyant email spams I have received, another variation on the Nigerian or West African Bank fraud, I think.

Continue reading “Lady Di’s Heirs?”

I spent several hours last week setting up the Sister Jane site, converting Word documents into text and marking up the text with html tags, and organizing the site and the pages. I decided to create a style sheet. The basic idea was to use the headers to break up text sections visually as well as logically. I used borders and background colours in the headers to turn them into visual bars. I applied a couple of levels of indentation to the text. After that, I took the same style sheet and applied it to the Sea of Flowers site with a different colour scheme. The results aren’t fancy but the sites seem to be more readable and slightly less generic.
The colour scheme on Sea of Flower site was inspired by the Dutch flags in the documentary on the Canadian Army’s fighting in Holland in 1944 and 1945 on Global last Saturday night. I like it and I have applied it to the blog too, as you can see.

I found a couple of related articles which complain about the flaws in Microsoft Word’s grammar checker. This one at the Chronicle of Higher Education points back to Sandeep Krishnamurthy’s online article.
I find the grammar checker is useful at finding my common typographical mistakes like extra spaces and double words. It can get annoying because it tries to correct matters of taste and style – the passive voice error, and the use of which and that. I end up ignoring the suggestions most of the time. I should be able to change the settings but that means time with a manual and fiddling with the program. Configuring Word is not simple, and that is a drawback.
I was first forced to use Word to share documents with co-counsel on a case I did a few years ago. I hated it instantly. It does insane things to paragraph formats based on hidden commands. The last versions of Wordperfect for DOS and the Lotus versions of Wordperfect for Windows (6.1) gave the user much more control. However Word has become the standard and many clients and contacts require documents in Word format to open and print them. I tend to work in text and convert to Word only when it is required to print or send the content.

It’s Wednesday, and for the last 4 of 5 weeks, perhaps longer, that’s porn spam day. It doesn’t show up on my site, but my Blacklist log shows the comment and ping denials. I get a few email notifications telling me that some made it into moderation (until I installed MT-Moderate for Trackbacks, some pings showed up on the site).

Continue reading “Naughty Spam Day”

My friend Randy Reichardt, a librarian by profession, blogged about the Gorman controversy in separate entries today and yesterday. Michael Gorman is the president-elect of the American Libary Association. In December 2004 he wrote an essay in the LA Times which criticized Google’s project to digitize entire libraries. His article was discussed in some blogs. Some of the discussion was thoughtful and well-informed, some was polite and some wasn’t. People sent him clips of some of the more colourful things some bloggers were saying. Then he wrote a piece in the Library Journal online dismissing blogs and bloggers. (Information and relevant links in Randy’s entries linked above).

Continue reading “Lost in the Library”

Before e-mail spam started to arrive in torrents, it used to be fun to read some of the messages. Now, most of my spam is screened by my ISP and autoscreened in Mailwasher, and I clean up the rest when I see an obviously suspicious return address or subject line. One in a while I still read one for fun.
The Nigerian Bank scam (also see this link or the RCMP web warning) is so well-known that it ought to obvious, and the pitch is stale. Sometimes the con artist ads a nice touch.

Continue reading “Nigerian Bank Fraud”

Steve has changed servers. His domain name is still the same, and the domain name registry has been configured to redirect users to his new server. Old links seem to work, and my browser is redirected to the new location of his home page and weblog. He reports that he can’t run his own custom blog CMS any more, and he is using DocBook for his blog now. He saved the posts entered under his old CMS and imported them into the newest version of his blog. (Update – February 14/05: Steve has taken down his web page and blog for the time being).
Mike has launched a WordPress blog called Meanderings. His cycling exploits can still be seen in his Cycling Log. The log stopped in November, but a cyclist’s spring is only a few weeks away.

My cell phone died before or during my Sunday ski with Steve on January 23.

Continue reading “Trading Up”