Author Archives: daniel

Interview with a spammer

The Register’s Interview with a link spammer.

When Sam begins a spam run, he has one target, though he’ll accept any of six. Principal one: come top of the search engines for his chosen site’s phrase. “But you’ll accept coming in at 1,2 or 3, or if you come at 8,9 or 10. Actually, 8, 9 and 10 have better conversion rates. I don’t know why. Maybe the eyes fix on it when you scroll down the page.” And the cost of doing it? Once the code is written, pretty much zero. “Bandwidth is cheap,” he says. “You set it going in the evening and come back in the morning to see how it’s gone.”

So what beats them? Sounds like captchas (those distorted images requiring a human to type a letter)

So what does put a link spammer off? It’s those trusty friends, captchas – test humans are meant to be able to do but computers can’t, like reading distorted images of letters.

There’s several WP plug-ins that will do them; I haven’t tried it yet. But I will soon.

Life at Google

A guy called Mark Jen is blogging about his life at Google. A couple of his early posts included a bit too much financial info, and were pulled, but are quoted here. Didn’t look that compelling to me, but then, I’m not a stockbroker.

Unlike the official Google blog, he gets a little critical of the company at times, such as taking a swipe at employee benefits.

then look at all these other fringe “benefits”: on-site doctor, on-site dentist, on-site car washes… the list goes on and on with one similarity: every “benefit” is on-site so you never leave work. i’m not going to say this isn’t convenient for us employees, but between all these devices designed to make us stay at work, they might as well just have dorms on campus that all employees are required to live in.

One to watch.

The Google blog has announced they’re starting to index TV, by the way.

Office Object Library problems

One of the machines a program of mine runs on is still NT4 and Office 97. It seemed to keep working okay when I was on Win2K/Office 2000, but now I’m on WinXP/Office 2003 it’s crashing when calling the Excel object library to open an XLS.

MS have documented that this can happen after re-compiling with the Office 2000 libraries or later (though I’m sure it didn’t happen with Excel 2000).

“This behavior is by design.” Application errors by design. Yeah. SURE.

Excel application error

Apparently the solution is to use that normally-considered-evil late-binding; DIMming as an Object and using CreateObject.

But it didn’t seem to work for me. So I dug out an old copy of Office 97, installed it into a separate directory to Office 2003. Removed the reference to Excel 11, added Excel 8 instead (EXCEL8.OLB), recompiled and all is well.

The joys of .htaccess

For those who merely dabble in Apache, .htaccess seems a little like black magic. Yet it’s so useful… it can do default (index) documents, redirection, password protection, custom 404s, blocking image stealers… everything! This set of pages serves as a useful tutorial for doing it all.

No auto whiteboard

Butchers paper photoWhen you’re away on a weekend for a workshop, at a location off the beaten track with no provided technology other than 240 volts… and your IT resources are limited to what you bring yourself — a couple of laptops — and your group spends 48 hours scribbling notes all over butcher’s paper…

The way to capture that in its pristine, messy, original form is to bring along a digital camera with a decent resolution. Put the papers on the floor in the light, turn the flash off to avoid a strong reflection, and snap away. Worked wonders. Rotate them all to face the right way, rename them to something sensible, burn to CD. Presto, all the scribbling, to accompany and cross-check with the notes typed-in as it went.

Doesn’t help people’s messy writing though.

Gatesy-baby! Argh! My eyes!

Well, I think we now have proof that Bill Gates is not a crazed megalomaniac billionaire. If he was, he’d have had all copies of these pictures destroyed, and anybody involved killed.

Bill Gates in Teen Beat, 1985Bill Gates in Teen Beat, 1985

Apparently these pics were taken for a magazine called Teen Beat, around 1985.

(Via Monkey Methods, whose commenters are debating whether it was 1983 as first claimed, or if the fact that there’s a Mac in the background means it must have been after 1984.)

Update 19-Oct-2005: Snopes says these were publicity shots taken for the release of Microsoft Windows in 1985.

Comment spam vs nofollow

More comment spam hitting us at the moment, but curiously the comments don’t seem to have URLs with them, so I’m not sure what the point is. They’re all purporting to be from non-English-speaking e-mail addresses, and many in broken English, with a generic compliment about how marvellous your web site is. Odd.

Meanwhile, Google have come up with a new <rel=”nofollow”> attribute for links to help fight comment spam. And they’ve got a bunch of blogging heavyweights to back it, too, including the MT/TypePad, Blogger (duh), MSN Spaces and the WordPress gang, which might well cover a good proportion of blogs running today.

Now, W3C ratification, anybody? Oh pah, who cares?

Introducing the message exchange

The company I work for is called eVision, and their main product is called MessageXchange. (See what happens to your spelling when you’re looking to find a good .com address?)

It’s basically a B2B message broker… messages go in, messages go out, and in the middle they get conditionally routed and transformed. The upshot is you can set up to hook up a bunch of systems that use completely different types of message… one system’s PurchaseOrderCreate in a fixed-length FTP’d batch file can happily go along as another system’s PurchOrdReq XML HTTP message.

The clever bit is in the monitoring, letting you see what’s pumping through the system at any time. And the fact that the whole shebang is configurable through a web interface.

It started out as a software package… well, not exactly a package, not in the MS Office sense, but a system you’d plonk on a Windows server or two and away you go. I haven’t been directly involved, but over the past year they’ve rejigged it as an ASP… a paid hosted service, that is, so that if you don’t want to run it on your own boxes, you pay to access it on fully maintained servers instead.

At the same time they’ve expanded its reportoire to cover a lot of the new and emerging XML standards such as ebXML and RosettaNet. As well as some of the more ancient, creaking standards like EDI.

Handy stuff. The whole B2B area must surely grow, it’s a no-brainer for reducing the cost of commerce. Will be an interesting area to watch. In fact I might get one of the guys to expand a bit on some of these topics…