Comment spam – what next?

Interesting … today, I stumbled across a whole discussion about comment spam when I went over to the Movable Type site to see if there were any updates to it. I’d mentioned a while back about the strange comments that I’d seen here and how I’d deleted them but couldn’t get the entries to rebuild. The entries not rebuilding was a separate problem (Norton Personal Firewall :p) but the comments turn out to have been comment spam. At that point, it made no sense to me at all as to why somebody would leave a weird comment on my site but I deleted the comments anyway in principle since their site URL always seemed to be a porn something or something like that. I simply assumed that they were trying to get people to visit their site by way of these inane comments. Turns out that it is more complicated than that – most people seem to think that these obnoxious comments are actually a way for these spammers to up their Google ranking!

Now that I knew of the situation, I wanted a solution – some way to thwart these idiots who would try to use my site for their own purposes :p Fortunately, the Movable Type discussion also had a link to a blacklist plugin by a guy named Jay Allen. The plug-in seems to be extremely easy to install – just upload three files, run a web-based configuration and you are done and instead of relying on the not so efficient IP banning, (which I never used with the previous comments I deleted since each comment was from a different IP … ) the blacklist plugin actually scans the comment content to see if the comment is acceptable or not. Of course, I haven’t had a major problem with comment spammers (I’ve probably got less than ten spam comments) and so probably need not worry about this at all. However, I hear some people have gotten "hundreds" of comment spam for one entry and so I want to make sure that I don’t end up in the same situation. So I’ve installed the blacklist plugin and will now await eagerly to see if it does indeed work or if it will block all my usual commenters out too :p

Back at last, back at last …

Yes, I’m finally back … actually, I’ve been back for a while but there have been problems but where to begin? 🙂 Guess I’ll begin at the beginning itself and then go on till the end as I think the White King said to Alice :p I initially was away from SM, my other blog and general coding due to the fact that I’d met somebody online and I was spending every moment I was online with her 🙂 Then she decided to move to Sri Lanka in August and we got married soon after she got here and then there was a whole heap of other things to do. My wife Laurie is not a Muslim nor is she a Sri Lankan and so, my parents were dead set against the marriage – but to be fair by them, I didn’t tell them of the marriage beforehand. I sprung it on them after the fact so that they wouldn’t be able to guilt trip me into reconsidering – cowardly? Probably :p Anyway, my parents wanted to have nothing to do with Laurie or I and so we had to find our own place.

I’d anticipated this and had already rented out a house and had also gotten time off for two weeks from work and so Laurie and I were able to spend the time setting up house and attending to the hundreds of little things that needed to be attended to. The daily nitty-gritties are probably going to be way too exhaustively detailed for me to go into right here but if you are interested, you could always take a look at Laurie’s Sri Lanka blog since she has detailed everything that happened every day since she got to Sri Lanka 🙂 Anyway, since we were at a new house and had no telephone (except for my cellular) let alone dial-up access, I was again offline for several weeks except for the brief periods I had to come into work to attend to various things.

Then I finally got back to work around two weeks ago but still was not able to attend to my blogs since I had so much piled up work that needed to be attended to – among other things. In addition to that, I discovered that SM had a problem – I could not rebuild old entries and I wasn’t sure what was wrong. The network at work in the meantime had become extremely slow (I am still trying to figure out what the cause is – whether it’s a file sharer or one of those all too frequent worms) and so I was unable to do much online stuff such as trying to debug my Movable Type installation for SM. I tried replacing all the Movable Type files in case I’d made some sort of a mistake when I switched hosts (which I’d done just before Laurie came down BTW), I tried moving the Movable Type scripts to a different location on my server, I tried playing with different configuration options, I referred to the MT forums for days on end on an extremely slow connection – all to no avail.

I had installed Norton Personal Firewall just after I’d gotten back from vacation/marriage but I had not thought to test out rebuilding SM without the firewall. Or at least, I’d remember when I wasn’t at my computer that I should test without the firewall but never do it. Finally, I hit upon an MT forum entry which specifically mentioned that rebuilding and other activities on MT get affected when Norton Personal Firewall is on and how to get around it – disable the popup ad prevention feature in Norton Firewall. I did that and finally I was able to use my MT installation fully again – and this was on Sunday 🙂 Incidentally, the reason that I needed to rebuild all my old entries was because somebody kept on leaving strange and apparently pointless comments on one of my entries. I still have no idea what that was about .. unless they wanted people to visit their URL and while the comments and the URL’s were usually the same, the IP the comments came from was always different. Anyway, I deleted all these comments but could not rebuild the old entries due to the problems I had but now all that is done.

And yes, I’m back and hopefully will be posting more and will also start working on all those coding projects too but since I will not have Net access except from work, things are still going to be a bit slow – I still need to find a way to update my main site since that’s updated via Blog – I guess I should move my Blog installation to my work machine … So many things to do .. so little time :p

Rants and writings …

Yes, it’s been quite a while :p I’ve switched hosts, moved servers and at the same time been so swamped by real-life events that I haven’t had much time to write here or to do much maintenance except for the bare minimum on the site. I might not have written this entry either except for the fact that I’d just gotten up in irritation after reading what caused this entry to emerge and then sat down at the computer to do something else. But be that as it may, here is my rant :p

I’ve been reading Robert Ludlum for close to twenty years now and I’ve always enjoyed his work. I started with "The Bourne Identity" and was almost immediately hooked and have since then read all of his books in print (except for the last few in his collaborative "Covert One" series …) and have almost all of them in my collection. I just started reading his latest – "The Janson Directive" and I must say that the prologue left me less than impresed .. in fact, in full rant mode :p This probably is due to the fact that Ludlum struck pretty close to home in many fronts but still, I just am not amused by the tack he’s taken. The opening is about a terrorist attack in a fictitious island in the Indian Ocean close to Sri Lanka. However, what irks me is that he’s modeled this island after Sri Lanka but has made certain changes which irk me. In Sri Lanka, there is an ongoing ethnic conflict between the Tamils and the Sinhalese but what does Ludlum do but put the conflict in his story between Hindus and Muslims and of course, the Muslims are the terrorists .. is that because "everybody" knows that Muslims are terrorists or is that because that would sell more books? I don’t know …

Then of course, Ludlum decides to move Adam’s Peak which is in Sri Lanka, to his fictitious island and call it Adam’s Hill but with the same kind of history and here of course, he mentions Tamils and Buddhists as being part of the island’s population – though they never get mentioned anywhere else in the prologue. Then there is the whole matter of this bogus island’s history – it had been ruled by the Dutch (not the British mind you since the Brits might still object to how things go in the book – but the Dutch are safe enough to vilify I assume ..) up to fifty years ago and the Dutch governor at that time had been shot by an independence fighter. And I will not even go into the usage of the word "kurakkan" (which is actually a Sinhalese word used to describe a kind of grain grown in Sri Lanka) to mean root crops .. though I guess I just did.

I know, all of this might seem trivial things to anybody who is not from the area and who probably isn’t a Muslim but it all points to a certain type of mindset and a certain form of vilification by "established" authors. I am from Sri Lanka, I love my country and don’t want it to be used by some idiot somewhere to model his fantasy playground upon. If he wants to do it, then let him use the truth but then again, I guess that would be too much to bear … Ah well, yes, I know .. I get upset at trivialities perhaps .. but that’s just me :p

Server trouble and other miscellanea

I’ve been unable to publish the entry I made on Monday for the last few days because my host has been in the process of upgrading their server. At first, it was CGI trouble in that I could not execute any CGI at all and then it was the inability to access mySQL from Perl. I did some investigating yesterday and discovered that they didn’t have the DBD::mysql module (which allows you to connect to mySQL databases via a Perl script) was not installed. So I let the people at the hosting company know and it turns out that they’d overlooked this particular module – so I guess it was a good thing that I mentioned it to them instead of waiting patiently for a few more days for the problem to go away by itself :p Anyway, it all got sorted out and I was able to finally publish my entry from Monday, yesterday.

However, since a few days ago, my e-mail volume has suddenly and strangely dropped. Granted, most of the e-mails I’d receive in the morning when I checked e-mail for the first time was spam, I still think that I’m suddenly receiving less e-mail. Maybe they set up a spam filter while they were at it – I hope not since I hate spam filters because they don’t let me decide what is spam and what is not and stops everything before it even gets to me. I guess I’ll need to look into that some time soon but not today since I’m going to be particularly busy (and out of office) today.

So where am I going? I’m going to do a story about what we in Sri Lanka call a “communal” incident – basically an incident involving two or more ethnic or religious groups. This particular incident is interesting in that it happened in a majority Muslim fishing village (Muslims are generally a minority in Sri Lanka since they constitute about 8% of the total population) where there was one lone Sinhala family (the Sinhalese are the majority in Sri Lanka since they constitute about 70+% of the population). There was a dispute about land which escalated to violence and the end result was that the Sinhala family was driven off from the village. They went to their relatives in a neighbouring Sinhala village and the people there got agitated at what happened and they came back to retaliate. There were clashes and the end result was that three Muslim youths were killed. This happened over a year ago but the anger and the hurt is still there under the surface.

I’ve talked to both sides and as is usual in such a situation, I get conflicting stories from each side which puts the blame on the other. However, both sides blame the police saying that the police was on the side of their enemies and that if the police had done their duty, the problem would not have happened in the first place. Reading between the lines, it seems to me that the whole thing is mostly political since the mayor of the city (as well as the MP – Member of Parliament – for the area) is a Muslim. The whole land problem seems to have started because he was being a typical politician and told both sides what they wanted to hear … plus, the man who seems to be mostly involved in this all from the Muslim side on the scene, seems to be a major supporter of the mayor. There is more to this and I’d like to write it all down at my leisure when (or should that be if?) I get back from the shoot.

Is there some doubt as to whether I will return from this shoot? Probably not but then again you never know since it is still kind of touchy situation and it is possible that something I say and do will set things off :p I do intend to push this as much as I can to do a story which shows the sheer stupidity of such a situation where people think it’s a religious or ethnic problem and blow things out of proportion when it actually is just an altercation between two individuals. But I guess we’ll see how it turns out …

Of work, vampires and various other things …

I stayed at home since I felt like a little bit of rest since I’ve not been feeling too well the last few days – plus, I’ve been at work for almost everyday for the last month or so. So it was time for a little break :p Incidentally, I need to learn to keep my mouth shut – or at least not be totally honest all the time <vbg> This friend of mine from work asked me about my site since he’d seen some of the PhotoShop work I was doing for the SM layout and I gave him the URL – I didn’t realize till after I’d given him the URL that I talk about work and the current situation with the boss etc. here. Of course, it’s no big deal since he’s a very good friend but the problem is that there is the possibility that somebody else from work will visit next and then somebody else and so on till the site becomes an open secret and before I know it, the boss himself will be reading it :p Ah well …

Since I was at home today, I actually managed to get a lot of work done on this new project that I got started on. It’s basically a tagboard system which runs on your server but anybody can sign up for their own tagboard off your server 🙂 The source is based off an existing system called QBoard but they decided to opensource it and put it up as a project on SourceForge. I had picked up the source a while back but couldn’t install it at first because the installer was a bit clunky – I began cleaning up the installer to suit my need, then spoke to the main developer and offered to give him my changes and he added me to the SourceForge project and so I actually sat down today and wrote a full-blown installer for it in PHP :p It all seems to work pretty well but I’ll probably have to do a little more testing and then it’ll probably get released on SourceForge.

Other than that, I’ve been watching the DVD collection of "Kindred: the Embraced". When I first saw the show (must have been five or six years ago) I thought that it was pretty cool but when I saw it this time, I was struck by how bad the show looked and how cheesy the acting was :p At first, I wasn’t sure if it was the second viewing or if it was just the mood I was in but now I think maybe it was just the original show which was so bad. I don’t think I’d seen the original the first time but it was on the DVD collection and I watched it. Of course, I watched the original yesterday (when I was feeling really bad) and I watched three more episodes today (when I was feeling better) and so I am not so sure if my frame of mind had something to do with it or not :p But I kind of like the three episodes I watched today and am again becoming hooked on the story …

The old order changeth …

As you may have noticed, all things Jen have disappeared from these pages except for her old entries :p I was going to remain silent about her departure since I would have had to talk about somebody else in here if I were to talk about the reasons and the events behind her departure. But now Jen has seen fit to publish a set of lies, half-truths and slander at her site [Update: guess she doesn’t like it when somebody else talks about her :p Here’s what she originally had to say] about me and I am getting tired of her doing this whole oh-look-poor-Jenni-all-alone-in-the-world-and-so-put-upon shtick and am going to say my side of the piece 🙂 Incidentally (this is for Jen’s benefit :p) she might see fit to revise certain bits of her entry after reading this (she has a habit of doing that but more on that later) to make herself look good but I have to warn her that I have screen shots and copies of her page as it stands now and will publish them here if she does do so :p

First of all, I didn’t need to "run a script for my password" as she says because she gave me her GoDaddy password to do name server setup for her hosting business since she couldn’t figure out how to do that herself – I have no idea why she needs to lie about me having her passwords, unless of course, it makes her statements look stupid and a blatant bunch of lies :p Secondly, she gets so drunk at night she can hardly remember what she did towards the early hours of morning (such as asking me to transfer farook.org over to my own name since *it’s my domain that she bought for me*) and incidentally, she does not stay up for my sake – if you really want to know why she stays up, you might want to go over to her other domain. It’s just interesting that somebody who keeps on saying that she hates liars, turns out to be such a big liar herself but then again maybe she just hates the competition :p

I realized she was lying about almost everything during the recent *hacker incident*. She had originally plagiarized an entry from an online source and the hacker caught her at it (read the comments). Then she goes and edits the entry to look as if she had had the link to the original entry all along. I would have been taken in myself except for the fact that I was using BlogMan and had the original entry (without the link) on my machine and I asked her casually if she’d had the link there originally because I didn’t remember seeing it and she tells me brazenly that yes, she’d always had the entry there. I then realized that I couldn’t trust her to be truthful and when she wanted to move and wanted me to pay for the UHaul (knowing full well that I didn’t have a credit card) and then got angry at me for not paying, I decided that it was time to get out. Weirdly enough, my credit card arrived the next day and I got my own hosting and moved my domain over to my new host since I knew she would be vindictive enough to shut down the domain if she could.

True to form, she sends out an e-mail (ostensibly to all her hostees) saying that anybody who uses MT on their site will have their account deleted on Wednesday (today over there in the US) if they don’t remove MT or move – and I was the only one who was using MT on her server (or at least she thought I was still on her server :p). Then she sends out the same e-mail again a couple of days later *in case somebody didn’t get it* – probably because she saw that my site was still up. She must have gone to delete my account today and found that she couldn’t get offline and then gets even more vindictive and starts a whole bunch of lies. Ah well …
They have a saying here in Sri Lanka that "if you lie with dogs, you wake up with fleas" – I guess the same holds true for the female of the species … I’m just glad that I never did :p

Spring comes early …

Well as you can see spring has sprung early at SM :p I’ve been changing stuff around since I’ve been using the default MT layout for ages and wanted to have something different and unique here. So I set to work with PhotoShop yesterday based on an idea I had day before and while the final result is not exactly what I had in mind (I couldn’t find an image to fit what I had in mind), I am pretty satisfied with what I finally got here 🙂 I need to add a few touches here and there maybe to the borders to make them kind of individual and then use the same borders on all the archive pages but that should be about it.

I’ve been doing a lot of website related work recently since I’ve been consolidating everything to my domain at farook.org. Of course, somebody e-mailed me to tell me that farook.org is blocked from his work and that he won’t be able to read my site(s) from work any longer and I have no idea what prompted that particular action on the part of his employers. I am just curious as to why my domain was blocked but then again, strange are the ways of employers :p But getting back to web site changes, I would like to make SM the site which leads to all matters personal for me and keep The Developer’s Corner as the development/coding related site. So expect to see stuff being moved around during the coming weeks :p Once I get all that done, then I want to add a few more sub-domains for various non-development related stuff but I guess I shouldn’t get ahead of myself and wait till I actually have something in place before I talk about all that 🙂

Interpretations, innuendo, insults, invective and inalienable rights

There have been raging debates here at SM the last few days and while I am not going into the whole debate myself (I stated my position at the very beginning when it all started), let me state a few personal things so that everybody understands where I am coming from and where I stand on certain issues. I believe in the right for people to express their opinion – I will defend somebody’s right to express their opinion even if their opinion does not tally with mine. Personally, I believe we should live and let live and that our opinion/stand while right for us, might not necessarily be right for somebody else. I do what I think is right and everybody should be free to do what they think is right. And here, spare me the arguments about how a serial killer might think going around killing people is right but that doesn’t necessarily make it so – as long as you do what you think is right and don’t harm either yourself or others, I think each person should have the right to their own opinion and freedom.

One of the things I love about Jen is the fact that she is never afraid to state how she feels – even if that might fly in the face of popular opinion. She states how she feels about a certain issue and will back her stand to the hilt with arguments and facts. But she isn’t above listening to the other side of the case either and I love her for being who she is. Yes, she and I might not agree on certain subjects but that does not necessarily mean that she has to see things my way or that I have to see things her way – we are both individuals with minds of our own and we are perfectly willing to let each other have our opinions and to understand the fact and to respect that. To me that is part and parcel of being a human being and interacting with other human beings – the willingness and ability to listen to other people’s opinions and to respect them but to stand by your own convictions if you think what is right for you is not what is right for somebody else.

With a little help from my friends …

My announcements of departure (never to be seen again :p) might have been a little premature – while I was indeed hurt and was determined to leave all things Net related behind, I heard from so many friends online (both via comments and through personal e-mails) that I could actually feel the love and I feel I would be an ingrate indeed if I were to turn my back on such a lot of people who wish me well 🙂 Plus, the situation which led to my declarations of departure and doom and gloom has also kind of resolved itself and I can look back on it with a bit more equanimity and a lot less sorrow, anger and pain. So I guess what I mean to say is that you will have to put up with my blathering and verbose style of writing for the foreseeable future and I’ll probably get back to the software development in a few days too – too many things piled up to get to it right now.

Incidentally, does anybody remember Wet, Wet, Wet? I know that The Beatles originally did "With a little help fro my friends" but it’s the cover version by Wet, Wet, Wet that I remember better. But even that has been ages since I’ve heard their version – guess I should go to Kaza and see if I can find it …

Of friends and the past ..

All the testing on BlogMan yesterday meant that I made no post here at all but to find out all the techy junk, you’ll have to read the other blog :p I have found a new friend who is one of those select few who enter my "inner circle" :p I make friends easily but I don’t let most people know about the weird stuff that goes through my head – OK, you may beg to differ since I write about a lot of things here that are totally weird (or maybe not – depending on how you look at it <g>) but then again I don’t write about *everything* here. There are things I leave out – personal stuff, the weirdest theories I have about the world and reality etc.

I feel a bit of a duality here and also feel me going off at a tangent (and not talking about what I originally intended to talk about – but let me save that for another day and follow this thread of thought …) Now most of the time, I say my life is an open book and everybody is free to know anything about me. Heck, I write about almost everything in my life on this journal … but that’s not quite true because for the longest time I never spoke about my former marriage, my ex-wife or my son. The reason I carefully left those things out has nothing to do with how I feel about privacy at all but rather to do with Sri Lanka and how things are perceived here … basically it was to save my parents from heartache and embarrassment (though I can never understand why *they( should be embarrassed about something that I did) in case somebody from Sri Lanka or our family read this journal. I’ve decided to totally let go recently though and so am willing to talk about even the stuff that I didn’t talk about earlier.

Again, my comments need a little bit of explanation – at least about the Sri Lankan society bit. Here in Sri Lanka, everything is stratified and compartmentalized – you marry from your own class, own race, own religion and anybody who strays outside is an embarrassment and usually ostracized by their family. I have never cared for this kind of behaviour or this kind of society and didn’t really worry about how others felt when I got married but then it became evident that this was a source of great mental agony to my parents and to spare them any further anguish and embarrassment when dealing with our relatives, I refrained from talking about my marriage and later divorce on my journal. Then I came back to Sri Lanka and my parents wanted me to get married again and that made it an issue again because a person who has been married is sort of "devalued" in the marriage market. I have always had problems with the fact that my former marriage was not mentioned when my parents wanted to find a bride for me and I always intended to let the girl know before everything was finalized if it ever came to that because I wouldn’t have felt at all comfortable in getting married to a girl under false pretenses. However, that never came to be fortunately since I told my parents that I wasn’t interested in marriage at the moment :p

OK, I see I have really strayed now … But I guess what I was trying to get at was that these pages are an open window into my life and I talk about everything in my life (at least now) here but that does not mean that this is the sum total of my thoughts and experiences. There are still areas that I will not talk about here just because it involves other people and that’s the issue I really wanted to write about today but since I’ve already written at length, let me save that for tomorrow 🙂