CogBlogged from ‘February, 2005’

It’s been a while since the spam roaches attached the Trackbacks on the Maricopa Learning eXchange, but I guess they had some extra time after recess to splat their PPC (porn, pills, casino) links into the MLX Sharebacks. I am still resisting closing it down completely, but likely will, as no one really sends non-spam trackbacks. It took about 75 seconds in phpMyAdmin to clean out the spambacks, but I decided as a fun task to build my own web tool to do it even easier. Presenting the Spam Trackback Annihilator: All I need to do is to fill in the easy to guess typical spam words, and select to wipe out from the Source, URL, Title, or Body fields (or all at once to lower the big boot). In one click I can kill thousands or roachies. You will not find this URL on our server, as I can [...]

I am soooooo envious: Northern Voice Blog Conference

I continue to put my pennies in a piggy bank towards a future iPod. Until then, in scanning more and more RSS feeds that contain references to the audio enclosures, I am bothered/irked/annoyed by the scant details available to the summary in an RSS Reader: My Views on the Cheese Curdling Controversy Today’s podcast on the big stink about cheese. Download file (6.4MB mp3) Now regular cheese enthusiasts might automatically listen to my daily cheese diatribes, but if I am casual visitor, trying to make a decision if I ought to subscribe, I would be looking for a perhaps three sentence summary in text form, to accompany the feed. Not only that, if a visitor wishes to write their own blog entry referral to me, citing my eloquent argumentative style on this important issue, without a good summary for copy/paste posting, they have to try and make up a summary. [...]

flickr foto I Can Snow If I Want Toavailable on my flickr The thermometer is pegging 35+ degrees, but snow is falling in nice big clumps this morning at our cabin in Strawberry. A big wet storm is sitting on top of Arizona, the second in a week (I am convinced somehow our weather delivery service has mixed up the shipments for Seattle and Phoenix, sorry if there is excessive sunshine up there). The paid professional liars we call “weather forecasters” had predicted only rain up here, with snow levels “above 7000 feet”, and we sit at 5900 and change. I am pleased by the continued lack of accuracy ;-) Falling snow instantly transports me to that place of kid-like excitement. Ah, the weekend is off to a wonderful wintery start, snow is falling, the wood fireplace is pushing out heat… life is good.

Submitted for the Colophon of the Week (once I look up a definition of what the heck a colophon is), from the Newsdesigner blog: This site was coded with rudimentary HTML, PHP, CSS and BEER. The 3-column CSS layout was adapted from one found at Position Is Everything. BBEdit helped wrangle the alphabet soup, and Adobe Photoshop rearranged the pixels. Most everything is powered by Movable Type, and Verve Hosting keeps all the ones and zeroes safely on their spinning platters. The typography: David Berlow’s Cheltenham FB and Giza, Matthew Carter’s Verdana and Georgia, and a touch of Franklin Gothic and Utopia. This site is best viewed with a stiff drink in hand and in any browser that is not Internet Explorer. Whew, that is attitude! Bark bark, woof woof! We like it. Written by Portlan Oregon “News Designer” Mark Friesen, this site is a must read for those who [...]

My latest 25 cent investment from the Pine Arizona Senior Center Thrift Store is “The Road Ahead” by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, Peter Rinearson. Far from being my hero, I was curious where the road he envisioned back in 1995 actually went. I’ve not read much yet, but flipping through, I have to grudgingly admit that there are less things to take potshots at than I had hoped. Sure the Internet was under-estimated then, but he gives it due credence, and the “World Wide Web” (in those days it was always spelled out and encased in quotes), while antique-ly in its grey screen glory, is given coverage too. Missing are the rise of open-sourcem software, the self publishing craze we are in the blog midst of (but who would have guessed?). A big gaff opens Chapter 5, “Paths to the Higway”: The truth is that the full highway is unlikely [...]

I forgot who’s WordPress blog I was surfing this morning, but a mouse hover over their RSS link turned the cursor to a question mark, and clicking the link actually auto subscribed that feed to me aggregator. The link was written differently than the typical link: feed://www.somedude.com/blog/feed/ That is correct, note the feed:// protocol on the URL. This was interesting as many newbies wonder what all the wonder there is about RSS after they click a “syndicate” link or an organge icon and see a screen full of geek code (raw XML). I did some googling but found nothing definitive on whether this was reliable, so I played a bit on my own site. At home, it worked perfectly on Mac OSX in Safari, FireFox, and even the protozoic Internet Explorer 5.2. Looking good! Not so good when I got to work on my PC laptop. No go in Firefox [...]

… would likely program my current project more efficiently. This is one of those textbook examples of how not to build software, but in then end, good enough will (hopefully) be good enough. I am working an updates to an online application system we developed last year for one of our professional growth programs (where faculty can apply for summer project funding). It worked last year as Colen, my then student programming assistant, coded about 5 days ahead of the people using the system (we have now sample applications from 2004 as models). There were some problems, especially in the convoluted process for group projects that called for updates this year to be more than switching some parameters in the configuration, and in the end I more or less tore it apart and rebuilt the system. The trick is preserving content for people looking at drafts and applications they did [...]

Yet another exmaple to show that weblogs can be more than just a place for teen diaries and cat fetishes, Steven Cohen has hoisted a presentation into Blogger format- see “Staying Ahead of Your Patrons With Weblogs and RSS”. Is it anything different than a garden variety PowerPoint slide show? No, not in terms of content- it is a linear series of bullet point screens, some with hyperlinks. But is that novel? Yes, because instead of pushing out a 3 Mb PowerPoint by email, it is just a few k to send a URL. Plus it can be updated later. Plus it can be made available to those not in the room and will be there for a long time. Plus it can get comments from others. Can your PowerPoint do that? But where is the familiar blue background, the cool screen builds, wipe transitions and woosh sounds? No comment. [...]

Worrisome. I just got Movable Type (2.661) comment spam on entries in one of my blogs where the database has been set via comment closing routines to turn the allow comments to the value that closes them. How is it possible for the roach to sneak in? I had hoped that was a complete shutoff. I stomped the roach swiftly with the steel toed boots (it just made that slimy soft crunching spineless sound) and have updated Blacklists (10,000th iteration). Update: My error, these were Trackback spams. Gotta shut down those old ones. Update: I just mass closed Trackbacks on a bunch of old blogs that are not used by attract the roaches. Done via direct MySQL statements (thanks phpMyAdmin): UPDATE `mt_trackback` set  trackback_is_disabled=1 WHERE trackback_blog_id=XX where XX= the database ID for the blog (browse the mt_blog table to grab these). Next, I turned off trackbacks older than September 1, [...]