Back again …

I’ve finally decided to come back to blogland :p When I started to write this entry, I thought I’d never been away from blogging for this long since I started blogging way back in ’99 or so (or was it earlier? :p) But then I took a look at the archives for this site and realized that at least here, I seem to have had a habit of cyclically going offline for long periods. The last time was in October of 2003 and and I didn’t come back till April 2004! So I guess this time is a much faster recovery … that is, if I keep on writing after this and not stop again after this entry or a couple of more entries.

So what has been happening? A lot actually. Around the end of October both my sister and sister-in-law (Laurie’s sister) paid us visits. While my sister’s visit was brief, Laurie’s sister and her family stayed with us for a while and we really enjoyed the visit. Of course, having guests in the house meant going sightseeing, going shopping and so on and time really passed by in a blur.

Then in November, I got a new job through the help of my friend Tracie (thanks Tracie :)) and finally left my previous employer – I’d been with them for close to five years (the longest I’d been with any one employer) over two different periods. I always will remember them with warmth because I truly felt at home there but I was going nowhere there since they really didn’t have anything to keep me occupied full time. My new job on the other hand, keeps me so occupied that I am exhausted at the end of the day :p I work for a hosting company as a remote systems admin now and since I’m administering servers, I am on alert most of my working hours in case one of the servers decides to act up. While it’s not very physical work (I sit on the couch staring at my computer screen the whole day :p), it’s mentally exhausting because you can never really relax. But I’m getting better at it and learning to relax a bit more than I did at the beginning, when I was too scared to look away from the monitoring screen for even one second lest something go wrong with the servers and I might miss an alert :p

The new job, the new schedule, the changes in work habits etc. have kept me busy and away from blogging (or even doing any other stuff like coding …) for the last couple of months. I now seem to be finally getting into a new groove (which I hope does not become a rut :p) and so am able to think about blogging again. Plus, I started blogging as an outlet for all the thoughts crowding in my head and also because I needed to, was compelled to write. But since I’m so busy now, the compulsion to write is gone. Indeed, I found that the couple of articles a month I was doing for two different magazines was getting to be draining because of all the research that I had to do. So I gave up most of my writing too (I still write for one magazine – but that’s on an occasional basis) and become a gentlemen of leisure … albeit without too much leisure time :p

That brings us to about yesterday 🙂 I spent most of my spare time yesterday cataloguing my DVD collection. I’d been keeping tabs on my DVD’s using an application that I’d found online (what geek doesn’t? :p) but had stopped updating it like three years ago. And since we’d been buying a lot of DVD’s recently, I found that we had a lot of DVD’s not in the system and worst still, that we were buying duplicates at times because I didn’t have an updated system! So I finally decided to bite the bullet and update the system. I started with around 220 DVD’s in the system and now have 456 after I’d entered almost all of the new ones :p I still have about 10 more to go which are mostly Tamil or Hindi movies which aren’t in the database of selectable movies of the application that I use – DVD Profiler. So I’ll have to entere those manaually – I’ve become really anal about making sure that the cast and crew information is as correct as possible so that I can do an offline cross-reference of any actor, director, writer etc. based on the movies I own. So, I guess I’ll just have to do a lot of IMDB refrencing to update the last 10 or so movies – yes, that’s something I found out yesterday … even Tamil and Hindi movies are in IMDB! Granted, they don’t have as much information as the Hollywood movies, but they are still there and that’s probably one of the easiest references for referencing Bollywood or Mollywood movies too 🙂

Later in the evening we watched "Ocean’s Twelve" on DVD. Yeah, I hear you going, "What? It’s not out on DVD yet!" :p These were pirated copies of the movie – and bad pirated copies at that since somebody had shot it in a theater (probably) and the camera was slightly slanted and so the whole movie was slightly askew :p Then there were all the French titles, place names etc. which made the story a bit difficult to follow since I like to know all the details :p The movie was good but the ending wasn’t breathtaking – in fact, I could see it coming a mile away. I don’t know whether Hollywood writers are becoming more predictable each year or if I’m just beginning to see the patterns better but I can predict what’s going to happen in a movie more and more easily as time passes. The last movie that I can remember surprising me was "The Sixth Sense" and even that I was able to figure out what was happening before the movie ended.

Speaking of "The Sixth Sense", is M. Night Shyamalan’s career going in reverse or what? He came out with his best movie as his maiden offering and it has been steadily going downhill since then. "Unbreakable" was good but left me feeling as if there was something more – as if I’d seen only half a movie and there was an untold story I was missing. "Signs" was just a bad movie – no two words about it. The story was atrocious, so lame that it probably wouldn’t have floated even in the beginning days of science fiction. Come on, aliens who are afraid of water? I read something very similar in one of my first Sinhalese science fiction novels when I was like thirteen and even then, I was sceptical of that whole idea :p I haven’t even bothered to see "The Village" since the guy at the video store was like "This is the same guy who did ‘Sixth Sense’? But this is such an awful load of crap!" ‘Nuff said 🙂

Blacklists keep on rolling :p

After the release of WPBlacklist 2.6, I got a couple of reports about a problem with the path in the installer utility. I had put the path in for my server where the WP installation is in the root server and had not tested things out thoroughly enough to catch the fact that this code would fail if somebody had WP installed in a sub-folder. I’d created a fix and was about to release a bug-fix release when a few other problems caught my eye. So I fixed all of them but then got caught up in some other stuff and didn’t have the time to test any of the changes till today. I guess comment spam is on the rise again because I’ve been getting a lot of reports from people who’ve tried the WPBlacklist plugin and found the error. So, to stem the tide of complaints, I decided to quickly test my changes and release WPBlacklist 2.6.1 :p Enjoy!

Update: Since everybody seems to link to this entry for WPBlacklist, I thought I’d add an update to point to the WPBlacklist page which actually has the latest version, which at the time of this update had a release of WPBlacklist which was 3 sub-versions ahead :p

Spam free at last!

WPBlacklist 2.5 works like a charm, even if I do say so myself :p For the last couple of days, it has been catching and deleting all spam comments posted to my site without me having to lift a finger 🙂 I get e-mail notifications of comments deleted and what entry in the blacklist triggered the deletion and this lets me refine my blacklist even further by adding any missing stuff (like the author IP or e-mail) to my blacklist so that if the spammer tries again with a different set of URLs or something, he’d still get tagged by WPBlacklist. Yes, as you can see, I’m really pleased with my own work :p Now, all I can think of to add to WPBlacklist is a feature which would automatically harvest details such as author IP, e-mail, URL etc. from automatically deleted entries and add them to the blacklist so that I don’t have to even worry about doing that bit manually based on the e-mails that I receive. That’s not a top priority at the moment though since so far WPBlacklist 2.5 has been 100% effective in combating all comment spam posted to my site …

The blogger’s bane …

Comment spam is increasingly becoming a major problem 🙁 There used to be a time when I’d get maybe one or two spam entries a month but of late, there are days when I literally get flooded by spam entries. I had written/modified the WPBlacklist plugin soon after I shifted to WordPress just because of this problem. I had been using a blacklist plugin while using Movable Type and I knew that I’d probably get hit by comment spam if I wasn’t protected on WP too. The blacklist plugin seemed to work and I was content for a while but a couple of weeks back, the latest problems started.

I’d been offline for a couple of days and came back to discover that I’d been hit by around a hundred spam comments on various posts scattered over my blog. Fortunately, WP makes it fairly easy to remove comments en masse and an SQL command was even simpler in this particular instance because the spammer used the same URL for all of his comment spam. Once I removed the spam however, I went back and took a look at the spam itself and discovered a few things:

1. The spam was from many different URLs
2. The particular site s/he was spamming for was not in my blacklist
3. I had set the WP option which marks a comment as spam depending on the number of links in the comment to look for five links.

So, I went ahead and added the URL for the site to my blacklist and lowered the link threshold for spam to two. I thought I was safe but that wasn’t the case as I discovered a couple of days later.

I again got hit by spam but this time, I was online when the attack started. I discovered that the new spam comments had only two links and they were getting through WP’s spam protection. I went back and checked the wording on the threshold setting and it seemed to indicate that if I wanted two links to trigger spam blocking, that I should actually set the count to 1. Or so it seemed at that point though I’m not really sure about that since I’ve messed about with that setting a bit since then and it seems to work either way now. Or something. Anyway, I was able to stem the flood of comments to about 75 on this round and nothing got really published except for a couple in between me changing settings since all the comments got held for moderation that time.

I was kind of wondering about my blacklist plugin by this time though since I did have the URL in the blacklist and the blacklist didn’t seem to catch the spam – it was just the built-in moderation in WP based on the number of links in the comments which was putting the stuff in to a queue to be moderated. I decided to add a few more variants on the URL in case the one I had originally added didn’t work and wait for further developments.

A few days ago, I got attacked again. This time, all the comments went into moderation since I had the link count set correctly but when I went in in the middle of the attack and removed the link count check, I started getting comments which were published. So, my blacklist plugin for some strange reason wasn’t working properly! Or maybe the spammer was using a method which bypassed the blacklist checking? I don’t know … I’ll have to take a look at the blacklist plugin again and see what transpires – guess I’ll have to do that soon though since based on the regularity of the attacks, I probably should have one occurring in a day or two …

Done, done at last! Thank God almighty, done at last!

The last entry for this site, which was made somewhere in June, was never published at all due to the fact that Blog wouldn’t cooperate :p I finally got that entry to publish today after getting most of the major problems in Blog. Actually, I’m kind of happy to get Blog working again since now, I use one application, Blog, to post to both my WordPress site and my non-WordPress site :p That is kind of cool.

A lot has happened since I last posted here and I’d probably have to make a humongous entry to catch up with all the stuff that has happened :p I just don’t feel like making the aforementioned humongous entry due to the fact that I’m not feeling totally well today. So I guess I’ll do the Cliff’s Notes version of what has been happening so far instead :p

OK, I left my then employer and joined a new company somewhere in May. This new company had been a project of my then employer’s and I’d been involved in the project for about a year before they decided to go off and form a separate company and they wanted me involved. I did get involved but found that I’d taken on way too much than I’d bargained for. I found myself doing systems administration, HR duties, procurement and a heck of a lot more besides when I had actually been hired on to be their lead developer. Things got a bit too hairy for my tastes and so, I went back to my old employer (who now is my new employer … again :p).

I’ve been here at my new/old employer for a couple of months now and things have been fairly hectic since I’ve had to do a couple of proposals as well as a full promotional video for the Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) of Sri Lanka. I really enjoyed the work on the ICTA video since it was something different from the usual run of the mill stuff I get to do. Unfortunately, till about a week ago, all this stuff meant that I was kept fairly busy since I also had taken up writing for another monthly magazine here in Sri Lanka (in addition to my existing column on a different monthly magazine :p) and what with trying to do all that and keep up with my comics, movies, TV shows and so on, not much time was left over for doing other things … such as coding.

Since I couldn’t post here till I got back to coding and got Blog working, that presented a bit of a problem as far as posting on SM was concerned. Of course, I really didn’t have much time to worry about SM and so, I’d think about getting back to the code, but really wouldn’t do it :p I’ve finally been able to get back to working on Blog – mostly because a friend needed Blog working more so than because I needed it working :p – and so, hopefully, I should get back to posting here too. We’ll see …

And then it happens …

I’d tested the WP blacklist plugin quite extensively and it all seemed to work fine on my notebook machine and so I uploaded it yesterday and set it up for this site. And of course, I never tested the plugin on the site since it had worked before :p That is just asking for things to fail and fail they did – and most spectacularly too. Anybody who tried to post a comment probably got hit with a long string of PHP errors and not much else. Ainslie, who’d tried to post a comment earlier and couldn’t (due to a different error – this time due to me trying to set up permalinks with a nice directory structure :p) let me know about the problem and when I tried it, sure enough it wouldn’t work. So tried to fix it on the server itself for a bit. Bad idea! I finally simply turned off the blacklisting on the server and went back to my local machine. I could duplicate one of the PHP errors on the local machine and after a bit, I figured out what was wrong – there was a logical error in the code where I was checking for IP bans. If there were no IP addresses in the ban list (when I originally tested, there was of course an IP address entered for testing purposes), you get a PHP error. I fixed the code, tested on the local machine and it seemed fine. So I upload to the server and try again … another error! So I recreate the blacklist that I use on my local machine off Jay Allen’s blacklist file and try again and this time I get the error on the local machine too :p So I took a look at what was happening and it turns out that the blacklist that I’d originally imported off of had a few of the regular expressions modified so that they wouldn’t throw a fit with PHP. Unfortunately, when I pulled the list from Jay Allen’s site, I got the stuff as Jay Allen had them and PHP seemed to gag on that. I finally figured out how I should modify the fetched blacklist to play nice with PHP and ran through another round of testing and everything seemed to work fine. So back I went to the server with the blacklist and finally it all worked fine 🙂 Ah well, I’m glad that it works fine now – or at least it seems to … So I guess it’s time to add a few more plugins to the mix to see how soon things will break again :p

The fairest of them all …

Yes, I’ve finally switched … and not only have I switched, but I’ve switched in a big way :p I switched over to using WP yesterday and since then, I’ve updated my install twice – first to the WP 1.2 RC2 that was available for download yesterday and today to the WP 1.2 final. Not only that, I’ve also in this timeframe, written a script to import all of my MT entries, categories, users and comments to WP and a plugin to allow me to blacklist comments posters so as to get rid of all that pesky comment spam.
Sure, there was an existing WP script to import from MT, but I hated how it worked and there was already an existing hack for the blacklist functionality but I hated having to modify the source files and then having to do that again when I upgraded to a newer version – so the plugin takes care of all that nicely 🙂 And now I want to get cracking on Blog so that I can get back to posting here via Blog but that looks as if it might take a while since the blacklist plugin is keeping me busy these days. But then again, the first release of the plugin is ready – I’ve actually installed it here already and it seems to work fine :p So maybe it’s time to move back to Blog …

And the winner is?

Yes, there have been no entries since I said I was thinking of moving to a different publishing platform :p And the reason is that I’ve been busy checking on each of the contenders I mentioned. Incidentally, I should mention that the folks over at pMachine were kind enough to give me a free copy of ExpressionEngine as part of their switch program 🙂 I didn’t really expect to win when I applied but I did and so I gave ExpressionEngine a try as well and while it is all they claim to be, it has a few things missing which made me decide not to go with it. Plus of course, there is the whole "commercial" thing – it’s a commercial app and while I got this release for free, I don’t know if all future upgrades will be free or not and so I’m a bit leery about it. The biggest thing that I missed in ExpressionEngine was the fact that it had no support for an external blogging API. So if I’d switched to EE, then I wouldn’t have been able to blog from BlogMan or Blog any longer.

As for the other contenders, I think I dropped Nucleus at the outset after discovering that their comment spam filtering features weren’t as good as I wanted them to be :p So that left just b2evolution and WordPress. My initial choice was actually b2evolution since it supported multiple blogs and WordPress didn’t but later I learnt that b2evolution’s multiple blogs weren’t really multiple blogs but some form of separating entries using categories – of course, I might be wrong here since it was something I read rather than know for sure due to firsthand experience :p However, it looked as if there was a lot more work being done on WP than on b2evolution and so I settled on WP.

Once I’d settled on WP however, the real work started :p It turned out that WP imported MT entries but first having the user export the MT entries in MT itself and then reading that exported file. However, that didn’t work for me since I’m on a really slow connection at the moment and the export would always fail before it completed. So I decided to write a script which would import the MT entries into WP on the server itself by transferring the records from the tables on the MT database to the tables on the WP database 🙂 It actually ended up being fairly simple to implement but I had to install Apache, PHP, mySQL and phpmyAdmin on my machine before I could get to work :p Once all that was done though, it took me one evening’s work to actually get the script to the working stage and a few more hours of tweaking saw all my MT entries transferred over without any problems (at least that I could see …) to my WP database. Of course, then began the task of converting my WP template to be as close to the MT original as possible but I think I’ve got that covered now as well. All that remains is to put a comments spam moderation system into place and I’m ready to go.

Here’s the kicker – WP has a lot of comment moderation options but I still like Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist best of all 🙂 I want something like that! Now the thing is, I find I work really well with PHP since it seems to be an extremely intuitive language to me. So, I’m going to work on the code for an existing WP hack which actually works a lot like Jay Allen’s plugin and try to see if I can actually make it a plugin for WP. If I can (or once I decide I just can’t do it or it’s too much work :p) then I’ll do the final bit of switching over to WP. Till then bear with my comments on switching :p

Movable Type and Moving My Typing :p

As you are probably aware, I use Movable Type to maintain this weblog. At least, it is MT which handles the actual publishing though I do use my own offline application (BlogMan) to do the composing of the entries and getting them to the server :p The folks over at Six Apart (they are the ones who develop MT) have been talking about a new release of MT – 3.0 – for a while now and I’ve been looking forward to the new release myself. The first pre-public release – they call it a Developer Edition – was announced over the weekend and a veritable storm broke over major parts of the blogging universe :p

The reason? Ben and Mena Trott – the folks behind Six Apart and MT – had decided to go over to a paid model for this iteration of MT. Unlike a lot of the people who use MT, I am neither personally acquainted with Ben or Mena nor do I use MT that much – it is simply the backend handler for SM since I actually do all of the posting from my own application. However, I do like MT and the features it provides. On the other hand, the limitations of the free release under the 3.0 licensing does make me wonder about continuing to use MT and I’m already looking for replacements. This however is a personal decision based on the fact that the free version of MT might be too limited for me to continue to use it and the fact that future license changes to MT might mean that the free version will be even further feature-atrophied.

As far as Ben and Mena’s own decision regarding MT 3.0, I’m kinda divided. A lot of people seem to feel that Ben and Mena lied to them and that they were being devious in their later decision to change some of the original terms after they were released. I personally don’t think this is the case. Granted that I don’t know the people involved, their concern over having to switch over to a paying model seems to be genuine. But switch they must if they are to survive – this too I understand. As a software developer, I can understand the problems they face. On the other hand, I do think that charging US$ 100 for a personal package which doesn’t give that much more than the free version is a bit excessive as well – especially given that the new release of MT 3.0 does not have that many features added. Yes, there are a lot of changes behind the scenes that will mean more goodies in the future – but nothing for your average user just yet.

Then again, on the other hand, this *is* called a Developer Edition and is aimed mainly at the developer and so the average user shouldn’t really get bent out of shape – not till they do the public release and continue to charge them large sums of money for not many features added :p It really seems to be one of those grey areas that cannot be really categorized as one or the other – there are too many variables … not to mention all the heated emotion that gets in the way of cool thinking. But I do wish Ben and Mena best of luck in trying to take MT along on a new direction.
As far as I’m concerned, I’ll switch to something new soon. I’m looking at a few alternatives at the moment but the one I choose must meet a few criteria that is important to *me*. What are they? Well, first of all, it should be able to import my existing MT entries and comments :p Then, it should support the Blogger API or the MetaBlog API so that I can connect to it via Blog or BlogMan to continue to post offline. Next, it should support comment spam filtering and blacklisting since I seem to get a lot of that stuff :p Finally, it would be nice if it supported a few of the template tags and the calendar feature from MT that I kinda like … but that last is not a must 🙂

Of course, before people suggest (does anybody even read these entries anymore anyway? :p) alternatives, I guess I must mention what I’m looking at, at the moment 🙂 The top three contenders on my list are: WordPress, Nucleus and b2evolution. Each one has strengths and weaknesses but I believe all of them are open source projects and so hopeufully will not suffer the same fate as MT. There is a fourth contender, ExpressionEngine, but that is a commercial application. However, they do seem to be taking advantage of the current furore over MT and are running a sort of competition where the first 1000 people to send them an e-mail get a copy of ExpressionEngine for free :p

Incidentally, I’m not looking at the core or base install of WordPress or Nucleus :p Instead, I’m looking at Wuh Wuh, a souped up version of WordPress, and Nucleus Extreme. I’ll keep you posted as to my findings 🙂

Return of the Prodigal

Yes, I am not dead …yet :p And I had to think long and hard about where to post this one since my main blog at The Developer’s Corner has been inactive as well for the longest of times. I finally decided that the post should go here since this post has nothing at all to do with development but the original dilemma arose from the fact that I did have a lot to say about why I haven’t done any development work in a while :p Ah well, guess there are always going to be such cases where you can’t figure out which blog gets the post when you have multiple blogs. Maybe I should go back to a combined blog? This might actually make sense when I combine Blog and BlogMan (whoops, that sounds like a development related statement … see what I mean?)

Anyway, the situation has been like this – my routine has changed so much that I really haven’t had much time for blog entries .. there is always just too much to do. So I kinda stopped making SM entries and then The Developer’s Corner went into neglect as well since I didn’t have time to code any longer either. I’ve been working on two different fronts – one is my regular job and the other is a separate project that I got involved in as part of my job. This second project has gradually taken up more and more of my time until during the the last month I was even working weekends to get things ready for the Sri Lankan elections which were to be held at the beginning of April. The elections have come and gone and things have calmed down a bit now but I still don’t seem to find the time to update my blog or to do any coding since the two jobs continue to go on. I have decided to try and make more regular updates though since otherwise my two blogs that I seemed to be so religious about updating would just die a natural death. However, I think I really must think about combining The Developer’s Corner and SM. This actually would allow me to make more frequent updates and still try to somewhat keep things on topic since the topic can once again be anything at all :p

So what have I actually been doing? Well just last week, my friend Robin and I were discussing old DOS games – games that we both used to enjoy but hadn’t played in ages. The nostalgic trip down memory lane got me thinking about some of the games I really loved and suddenly, I had a hankering to play some of them. I’d already tried to play a few them, like Gods, on Windows XP but had found the game to be slow and I didn’t really feel like going through that again. However, I suddenly realized that there might be a virtual machine or an emulator around for DOS which might allow me to play the games as they were meant to! My search resulted in me finding DOSBox – an emulator for DOS on Windows (as well as a host of other platforms actually …) – just what I was looking for! My tests with DOSBox were less than satisfactory though since Gods still seemed to run much slower than I remembered. However, I did bag a whole bunch of old DOS games from the Web since there were a lot of abandonware sites which had all my old favourites for download 🙂

Somewhere along the way, I stumbled across an Amiga emulator – WinUAE. I have no clear recollection as to how that happened now. I realized after some reading that all I needed to run Amiga games was this emulator, an Amiga ROM image and some other little bits and pieces which I was able to get together fairly quickly. I found that there was a whole slew of Amiga games available for download and that all of my old DOS favourites were there in Amiga format too 🙂 Unfortunately, my first attempts at getting an Amiga game running on WinUAE weren’t very successful but this was mostly due to my total lack of knowledge of both Amigas and WinUAE. I finally stumbled upon the correct way to set things up in WinUAE so that I can run a game and my first game was Deliverance. I was so hooked by the game (yes, even though it was ancient :p) that I played it till about midnight on Friday!

Over the weekend, I perfected my configuration of WinUAE for playing Amiga games and was able to get a few of my old favourites like Gods, Lemmings, The Lost Vikings and Chaos Engine working just fine on it. The game play is as good as ever, there is no speed difference and the best thing of all, the games take only a few megs on my hard disk! What more can one ask for? :p