Gecko Bloggle

Well, I was going to make this a comment to Hugh’s rant about comment Spam, but his comments are… clo-… oh, right.

JamesOff.net has a WordPress Anti-Spam RBL checker that he’s working on:

I have written a WordPress plugin which checks the IP of the poster and deletes their comment immediately when it is added if it is listed in an RBL (like spamcop or spamhaus).

Unfortunately WP still generates the email saying the comment was added, I’m not sure if I can stop that. An alternative might be to prevent users with RBLed IPs from being able to access the comments form, but if they still try to hit the wp-comments.php file directly I’m not sure if I can hook it that early

[edit]
Actually, our friend JamesOff has finished the first working version of this plugin for WordPress. Looks like it can be capped and added here

After some stuff I was doing over the weekend here (largely due to the DNS for my web site and email aploding for some reason), I found two really great tools. One of them is totally free, and gives you a full report of everything you ever wanted to know about your DNS setup if you’re running a domain.

DNS Report.com is free here.

Browsercam has a service that will browse/crawl your site, and take screenshots as it goes. They can do six browsers, three OSes, with Flash or withou, and they’ve now added Remote Access (you take over one of their machines and test your mouse-overs and stuff). It costs money (they’ve got a free demo period, and they’ve got this weird $10 for an hour and $39/mo) thing.

Archive.org is just plain nuts, for two reasons.

1) They’ve got tonnes and tonnes of shows and stuff (live shows), for free. No, really.
2) Almost everyone uses SHN (Shrink) format for lossless encoding.

Of… live… shows…

Lossless.

Crystal clear recordings of german guys going “Whoooooo!” through every song or something.

But hey, lots Doughty live sets in there.

If you skip past all the crap about “maybe that’s why mothers are more attuned than fathers” stuff, there’s some neat stuff about the idea that the limbic and basal forebrains (your emotional freakout center) being rewired after childbirth.

I’m not so sure about the reliability of the study though, since it was reported at the “Society for Neuroscience.”

I mean, I’m all for neuroscience and stuff, but just cause I am, can I be the Vancouver Branch of the “Society for Neuroscience?”

Of course, these are people who compare virgin (huh?) rats and mommy rats running around killing crickets.

Maybe it’s not the childbirth, but the sex.

Anyhoo…Click here for full story

Little note to the “Dallas Morning News:” Maybe. Just MAYBE the reason why dads aren’t as “in tune” as your average mom, is that nobody’s ever stared at a dad like his manhood is at stake if he doesn’t get his screaming kid out of their favourite restaurant. I’m also pretty sure there’s no record of a dad showing up at the hospital with a loose jaw ’cause his wife clobbered the bejeesus outta him for not “shutting that brat up.”

Okay, rant off.

Workrave is a little thing that I used for a while there that would remind me to look at something other than a computer screen once in a while. Like, the floor, or the cat, or passing cars.

I finally figured out what I did with Ripley’s old blog entries.

Started a week before 911 happened, and is an archive from the stuff I put on Blogger.com before I moved to my very own server.

Anyhoo, here’s the oldies: Click here!

:: Tuesday, September 11, 2001 ::
Looks like things are probably settling down.
I was sent away from a building that’s too close to what was considered by someone to be a target (200 Granville, next to the Pan Pacific building).
The [VF] list is zipping along at full speed. Posting information as we can. We’re all pretty wired, but the fact that CNN television doesn’t get flattened by having 1/2 of North America watching it proves that TV is not dead.
Yep.
Thumbs up, kiddo.
:: Zen Render 2:43 PM [+] ::

1. What’s OL?
2. Thingie?
3. Shoes?
4. Super Socko!

Asterisk is doing a Linux-based PBX that does VOIP.

Nifto.

Turns out it was IE55SP2….

NUTS!

Thanks to Virtual PC 2004, I created a little 1GB partition on my data drive (which looks like the “C:” drive to the virtual computer), and then installing Win98SE. That still takes about 20 minutes to do, just like it always did back in the day. So then I go looking for IE55 (not 55SP2, or 55SP1), and had a heck of a time finding that (I did, thanks to FileMirrors.com)

The fun part was when I enabled the hyperthreading under XP, and then assigned the Win98SE VirtPC to the “2nd” cpu.

Good times, good times.

We’ll see now whether or not I actually got 5.5 like I think I did, or if it’s actually something else.

Still, kinda fun. In a sick demented sorta way.