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.

Firefox, RSS & Newsgator

Seth Godin points out how Firefox makes it easy to work with RSS. An even better application of this idea is to combine it with the fantastic free online RSS feed tracker/news aggregator, Newsgator.

Newsgator manages your feeds online and offers a ‘Subscribe in NewsGator Online‘ bookmarklet so whenever you see the radar image on a page you want to track, click the bookmarklet and it’s automatically added to your Newsgator account. Now you don’t need to clutter up your bookmarks/favourites – just visit NewsGator to check all your feeds at once. Or you could set an ActiveWord to take you there.

What’s that? You don’t know what ActiveWords is? Stay tuned. Or better yet, download the 60 day free trial of ActiveWords (go for Active Words Plus to get the scripting engine) now. Tell Buzz that Tony Malloy sent you.

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.

Pornzilla

As everyone knows, the web is the best place for finding and viewing high quality pornography in the comfort of your own home. Or internet cafe.

Pornzilla is a collection of tools for surfing porn with Firefox. These bookmarklets and extensions make it easier to find and view porn, letting you spend more time looking at smut you like.

I love the tools including the one that allows you to “… find galleries similar to one you have open without using the keyboard”

They need funding:

“Since nobody has contributed to our testing budget, these tools have only been tested with free porn sites.”

Is it good that they’re being kept off the streets? Perhaps you’d like to give the authors jobs?

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.