Up until a week or so ago I used 91.5 as my iTrip frequency in Melbourne. Most of my driving is in the inner West and inner East and it worked fine until ‘Vega 91.5‘ muscled in on my bandwidth.
I’ve now switched to 95.3 and it seems to work okay. Anyone else have suggestions for frequencies that work well in Melbourne?
The blog comment/trackback anti-spam refinement continues.
I’m testing the WP-Hashcash plugin, which inserts Javascript code to calculate an authorisation code into the comment. Since comment spammers don’t actually use the comment forms (at least I hope not; not until they start using people to enter the comments), this means only real comments get through. Well, real comments from people with Javascript running. If they don’t have Javascript running, they may be out of luck. Hopefully that applies to nobody these days, and I think this solution is less painful than a captcha-based one.
But trackback spam is still a problem. One available option is to block direct access to the WordPress trackback PHP, but this isn’t very effective, since most current trackback spammers however are clever enough to call the “real” URL.
A version of Auto shutoff comments modified to close trackbacks on posts older than 28 days, however, seems more effective. I don’t particularly want to shut comments off (especially since the above plugin effectively stops comment spam), but trackbacks are less compelling to keep open.
Together with previously discussed .htaccess entries to block big bandwidth thieves, this appears to be a fairly effective set of anti-blog spam measures. For now.
Tony: Rae actually discovered we can change our phone picture quality to high over the weekend so I’ve fallen in love with my phone all over again.
Daniel: Woo hoo! (Must put my phone contract expiry in my diary. Upgrade to camera phone top priority.)
Tony: The latest crop, the ‘i’ models for Nokia, have 1.5-2 mega pixel cameras now. Very very impressive.
Daniel: So by the time I upgrade, I’ll probably be able to get 3mp, which is what my Real Camera has! But even 2 is plenty for web use.
Tony: When I went to Canada all those years ago I had a 2MP camera and thought it was the bees-knees. I’m leaning more and more towards the phone being the great convergence technology. I can put a 1G SD card in to my phone now to turn it in to a more than adequate MP3 player, it even plays AAC files. A 2MP camera would do just fine for snaps. It already has the calendar feature and all my contacts. I probably won’t get another PocketPC when this one falls over.
Daniel: It makes a lot of sense, because making phone calls is really the killer app for mobile technology. I’ve long taken the view that I’ll carry a phone no matter what, so the more features I can pack in there, the better.
Tony: Exactly. The phone and keys are the two things you always seem to have on you.
Daniel: I might turn this conversation into a GR.
Tony: Cool.
Reg: IE7 beta 1 breaks third-party toolbars!
Scoble: Only old versions of toolbars. It doesn’t break new ones.
Reg: Yes it does!
Scoble: No it doesn’t!
Reg: Yes it does!
Scoble: No it doesn’t!
Reg: Yes it does, you said it does!
And they quote an email from Scoble that is without any context, and thus proves nothing, unless you assume that the content of the email is directly in reply to the subject line. And now Scoble claims the mail isn’t real.
(Oh yeah, the recipient of the email gave the Reg permission to publish it. That’s nice. Shame the recipient doesn’t own the copyright; Scoble does. Well, if it’s real.)
Orlowski at the Reg then speculates that this somehow means the end of Scoble’s Microsoft blogging career. Talk about drawing a long bow.
Guys, IE7 is a beta. The first beta. You can expect this kind of stuff in a beta, and provided MS have pledged to fix the issues, it doesn’t matter one jot. I’d be more concerned so little progress has been made on standards-conformance, and why they put out a beta before doing more on this.
From the forthcoming book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, here’s an article about how Google got started.
How to deploy Visual Studio .Net applications to Linux. (via Brad)
Now maybe I can sell off my old BBC B, once I get a Beeb emulator working. Shame I might never recover my old Ultima clone that some friends and I were working on in 1988.