CogBlogged Tagged ‘MLX’

Yes, what is with the weather? Even here in Arizona, the last two weeks have brought tremendous rain to the desert, doubling are average, flooding the dry washes. Up north, the mountain tops are getting snow by the foot. And this week, the projects here habe been coming down in torrential buckets (as opposed to buckets of torrents?). Why spend even more time blogging? I need a break from the coding! It relieves me! Whatever. I am still short staffed with absolutely no sign of any change on any horizon, meaning I am floating my projects and the ones that Colen had supported before be moved to a cushy job at ASU. These means a big slowdown, or grinding halt to working on the supposed open source version of the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). I have a deadline now to drive me, as I am offering to build one for [...]

How refreshing it is to catch some comment feedback that is not spam. Package #1463 Areal Weighting with Thiessen Polygons was created by Water Resources technology faculty member Lisa Young: a brief tutorial that demonstrates the procedures for determining areal weighting from point precipitation gages using the Thiessen Polygon Method. While I have no clue what this is, apparently a colleague in Indonesia found it useful, and left this comment: I am a lecturer of principles of Meteorology at DIploma Program RS&GIS, Geography Faculty, GMU, Indonesia. Your flash file of Poly.Thies. has shown clearly about the method. I have used it in class. It iwll be good if the layout is made better and clear/more interesting. Thank you before That pretty much balances out cleaning 1000 spams of phentermine flaff.

Spammers can hid, but they are not invisible. On Dec 10, I invited readers of this blog to send us some Trackbacks to MLX Packages… while I am eager to see this technology used, this was actually a bit of bait. Our regular MLX spammer bit the bait completely. Within a few days, they triggered 1200 identical Trackback insertions of the same URL. I allowed them to think their tactic worked, but this was all a ruse to get them to stick their spam roach feet in the honey pot, where they left some incriminating and useful bits of information (the spam has been cleansed in one click). The evidence collected clearly indicates that this spammer is a CDB reader. Lovely. I have been advised not to bait and taunt spammers, and to allow them to continue their bully like tactics. Fortunately, I did not take this advice, and recently [...]

We’ve promoted many different times (see the Breezed NMC Oct 2003 presentation) the notion that weblog Trackback technology provides a simple, and working now, method to connect descriptions of usage of learning objects stored in “thingamotories” (or “repositories if you like). Or, as we deemed it Learning Object Reuse Acknowledgment (LORA). Yet. while well received, it is not happening anywhere. We run a summary of all MLX trackbacks and it is pretty meager, 47 total in more than 18 months we have enabled this feature… and I am responsibile for about 40 of ‘em. it’s pretty simple. If you compose a weblog entry (especially in MovableType, were the pinging is built in) and link to any MLX URL, the blog publishing platform checks all URLs for an embedded RDF ping address. Upon finding it, it transmits to the source (the MLX) 3 tokens of information that “trackback” to your newly [...]

After 3 or 4 extensions, December 8 is the final deadline I have set in the sand for our 4th and final Great Maricopa Learning eXchange Package Race. As outlined in previous presentations, we set up an incentive program to entice people in our system to contribute their learning activities, teaching materials, project summaries to the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). We merely tracked contributions within a set date range, a rather simple database exercise and provide software prizes to the top producers. We obtained software by begging some vendors (thanks much to Macromedia, Anystream, and Apple) or using our New Media Consortium (NMC) software discounts to obtain others. We started out awarding prizes to our colleges that contributed the most new items within a set period Nov 2002 – Feb 2003 expecting to do this as a one time affair. However, after noting a severe drop off in contributions right [...]

I actually managed to grab a few hourts the last few days to focus on the openMLX, the supposed open source version of our Maricopa Learning eXchange. We have a “de-Maricopized” version running (this does not have the latest changes), but I am doing the new developments on another copy of the MLX. This works well, as once I can bang them on the R&D version, I just merely copy the updated .php and assorted files to the other versions. All of the customization is carried in an external configuration file. There is some deadline pressure mounting, as I hope to have a copy of it running in Auckland for my November visit to new Zealand (check out the inverted CDB!) as well as another grant funded project group in our building that has some good needs for their own MLX. Today’s work was re-routing the method for generating the [...]

I hope this is the last on MLX spam for a while. I’d rather be writing code for adding features to it than trying to fortify the moat. And I guess my finger pointing at domain registrars was off base as pointed out by some comments earlier today. Somebody out there must be responsible. My hourly spammer’s last submission was about 8 hours ago. Maybe they have homework to work on. Or they figured out the futility (in my dreams) or they are reloading for a different tact. Or picking other victims. One should never be confident they have plugged every hole. In a way it was a learning experience. I found some new ways to create activity logs, tools to display and add functionality to them, some some cool thinks about hashes. Update Oct 4:: They are back. Good morning spammers….

Yes, I have been a bit obsessed lately with the roaches who have been spamming our Maricopa Learning eXchange. This is not all I have been doing this week, but it grinds away. I have a latest fix which will be secretive since I believe the spammer is a reader here (“howdy!”)- but so far, from the new spam logs I am running, they are going directly to the dung heap. From the patterns I recorded up to now, it is apparently the work of one spam roach, and this roach has likely written a script to do this, or they just enjoy cutting and pasting their spam into forms. His/her format is sadly predictable. In a way, I set one trap. We now have a spam key hat is generated from the comment submission form, but it is embedded in the for as a hidden form element. Any script [...]

The fight goes on. Spammers keep trying to thrust their links to pharmaceutical and gambling and whatever crap.com sites via the Maricopa Learning eXchange comments. Today, some hours were spent making sure all new comments were not made visible, so after submitting the form, they should see that nothing has been added. Don’t you think a spammer would get a clue they are wasting their time? Nahh, that assumes some level of intelligence. Their spam is going right into the can! I have things in place to ensure the submissions are coming from our form and not spawned by a script. They latest tool is an email notification that will go to the MLX package owner, and allow them a one click option to trash a comment or make it visible. It should be running tomorrow. It sure woudl be nice to develop some new resources than waste time with [...]

I just got a message from one of our faculty member’s who got a notice that her Maricopa learning eXchange “package” on Creating a Webliography was blessed with a comment from “Casino Gambling” offering tons of wonderful and exotic URLs for various substances and things I had never heard of. So into the database I went and quickly rooted out a few more (also FYI, Spammer, I have a filter on you, splfffffffff!). We have been ready to roll in a tool for package owners to have delete control on comments, so now I have a reason to finish that task. I guess getting a web site spammed is some sort of sick, twisted, form of recognition… that I would rather not waste my time dealing with. Is there no end? I wasted time again this morning with a spat of Chinese URl wiki spam. Maybe there will be a [...]