Miscellaneous Blog

There’s a Blogmeet in Manchester next weekend! Organised by Claire Sudbury, there’s already a day-long agenda.

Part 1 – Tea and Cakes.
3pm onwards in Kro Bar, Piccadilly Gardens (across the grass from the disappearing fountains).

I did a cake test. These guys do the best cake by far. Felix (aged three-and-a-half) agrees. They’re also very handy for people arriving on trains.

(Part 1.5)
(we might do a little tour of Manchester in between cakes and proper food, but that’ll be an ad hoc affair)

Part 2 – Proper Food.
7.30pm (table booked) at Efe’s Turkish restaurant on St Peter’s Square. It’s in the little row of shops opposite the library (striking circular building).

The food is inexpensive, quite varied, and good. I’ve eaten here several times. Not particularly adventurous, but a safe bet when catering for unknown tastes.
Give me a nod if you’re considering this. I’ve booked a table, but I need to check on numbers. I don’t need firm commitments, just an approximate idea.

Part 3 – Drinks.
9.30pm onwards at “Mother Mac’s” pub, Back Piccadilly, off Oldham St.

Small, peaceful, friendly. Crucially you can get a quiet drink in here on a Saturday night, which is a bit amazing for the city centre. Probably because it’s well hidden down a back street. And it’s a proper pub with proper prices, rather than a too-shiny too-expensive see-and-be-seen noise-fest.

It looks like there will be a better turnout that the meetup.com meets of a couple of years ago. I hope Norm will be there.

I wonder, do the writers of the Oracle WTF group blog realise that some of the developers whose code they’re slagging off are reading their blog? I work with some of them, and they’re not the sort of guys you want to mess with

There are reasons why I don’t blog about work. The biggest is that I know that some of my work colleagues read this blog. I got enough stick from them for this post.

Over the past few days my weblog has been repeatedly hit by a crapflooder, using randomly-generated text and a large number of URLs for either news or entertainment media sites, presumably in an attempt to flood my blacklist with junk and render it useless.

I have been unable to derive a regular expression that can filter out all his garbage without causing a lot of false positives. Short of disabling comments altogether, I’ve unfortunately had to implement some extremely aggressive filters, which will have to remain in place until this bozo gets bored and gives up.

So if you’ve tried to comment, and found your comment blocked, that’s why. Replace whatever word or domain it takes exception to, and try again. If you just give up, the spammers win.

Sorry for the inconvenientce

David Edelstein has this to say:

What is it about spam that makes even a laid back, tolerant person’s blood boil? What is it about spam that makes someone who�s against the death penalty even for child molesters and serial killers start ranting about burning spammers at the stake? Sometimes our hatred for spam borders on the irrational… but hate it I do.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels like this. I’ve occasionally advocated nuking the whole of Florida (where many of the spam cartel are said to reside), but the collateral damage might be too great. Read the whole thing, as they say.

I’m getting sick of comment spammers.

I’ve had the idea of whipping up a PERL script to throw up a page of spoof mailto links, all containing fake email addresses, but using domains taken from my MT-blacklist banned domains list (purged of ones like niu.edu and wikipedia.org). I’ll put an invisible link to each page, make sure my robots.txt tells legitimate spiders to keep out, and wait for address-harvesting bots to slurp up the addresses.

I like the idea of using spammers to spam other spammers.

The comment spammers are now spamming me with the URLs of www.wikipedia.org and www.niu.edu. I can only assume this is a crude attempt to degrade the usefulness of MT-Blacklist by filling people’s blacklists with legitimate sites.

Remind me to remove those two URLs from my blacklist as once they stop appearing in my rejection logs.

<Norwegian Football Commentator>
Kylie Minogue, Rolf Harris, Sir Les Patterson, Angus Young, Dame Edna Everage, Bouncer, Skippy! Your boys took one hell of a beating! One hell of a beating!
</Norwegian Football Commentator>

Commiserations to Norm and Michael Jennings.

Just because I don’t have a cat doesn’t mean I can’t do cat blogging. I shot these two on my trip last month to Switzerland, in both cases while I had time to kill waiting for train connections. I didn’t manage to identify the name of either cat, but both are believed to be of class Ca4/4i

I spotted this fellow sitting in a front garden towards the end of a baking hot afternoon in Capolago in the Ticino. I had been up the Monte Generoso rack railway to escape from the heat, and had half an hour’s wait for the local train back to Lugano.

This cat resides in the restaurant opposite the station in Glovelier. It’s demonstrating the irrational feline desire to get onto or inside anything strange and new, in this case my camera bag.

They’ve redesigned Blog Explosion yet again. This time they’ve added a ‘surf by category’ option which is intended to give a higher chance of serving up blogs you might actually be interested in.

I wonder they should try some kind of Bayersian analysis (the same method as used by spam filters) to compare the text of the target blogs to that of your own. Then I might see only blogs that mention the words “Mellotron”, “Cthulhu” or “Re4/4″.

It’s still running into the perennial problem, most of the blogs it serves are still crap. I think this is because blogs as a whole obey Sturgeons’ Law, only squared. There appears to be an unlimited supply of vapid personal diaries or angry rightwing ranting. Where do all these people come from? And why can’t they find something better to write about?

I’m off to Switzerland for two weeks. Since I can’t de-spam my blog while I’m offline, I’ve disabled comments for the duration. See you in two weeks time!