And the battle rages on …

I wrote about Blue Security, Blue Frog and the fight against spam a couple of days ago. At that time, I mentioned how a spammer was trying to intimidate Blue Frog users and get them to stop using Blue Frog. I also mentioned that the Blue Frog servers appeared to be under attack at that time.

Well, it turns out that the two events were related. The spammer who was trying to get Blue Frog users to stop was the same one who was attacking the Blue Frog servers. He had gone as far as to get an employee at an ISP to filter all traffic to the Blue Frog site except from inside Israel, where their servers were located. If I was surprised at that – at the fact that employees at ISPs were corruptible and didn’t really take their responsibilities seriously – I shouldn’t have been. We are after all, human and utterly fallible :p

Blue Security had overcome that particular issue by moving their company blog outside Israel by pointing it to a TypePad account of theirs. The spammer had retaliated by launching a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack against the TypePad servers, denying service not just to Blue Security but all the other users of the service as well. Apparently, the spammer then proceeded to DDoS TuCows, Blue Security’s domain service provider, resulting in TuCows terminating their services for Blue Security.

Of course, this Yahoo news report (and probably others like it) seems to indicate that Blue Security might not have been totally blameless here and it looks as if people are actually blaming Blue Security for all this. I am not aware of the actual events that took place – besides, they say that there are three versions of the truth: his, hers and what really happened :p However, there are two things that I do find interesting – one, that major service providers (including registrars) will shut you down if somebody attacks you and you did not do anything. Basically, they are punishing you for somebody else’s misdeeds. Two, that people will find the most visible scapegoat for anything without actually bothering to find out who is at blame. This unfortunately, is typical of most people.

Sure, Blue Security might have been aware that they were being DDoSed and have pointed their domains at TypePad – if they did, that was reprehensible. It is also possible that they were never aware of the DDoS as they claim and that they simply pointed stuff at TypePad so that they’d have a site visible to the rest of the world. So why castigate them? Why is it that nobody talks about the spammer here and censures the guys who actually make the effort to go after spammers? I think it’s because this is not about who is right or wrong but about one thing and one thing only … money 🙂

TuCows is going to lose money if their servers are down and so they cut Blue Security loose – doesn’t matter that Blue Security was combatting spam and were a victim of the DDoS themselves. TypePad is angry because their servers went down and they look bad. Does anybody care that somebody took the stand against spammers? No. All they care about is their own businesses.

However, this situation has certainly made me go after the spammers with a vengeance 😛 I used to simply delete the spam in my Google and Yahoo inboxes. Not anymore. I report the spam with relish! If 10% of the people who were affected by this whole Blue Frog thing feel the same way as I do, the spammers have made a major mistake by launching this attack and they are going to find that it’s going to cost them …

Tech woes

There are certain days (and even weeks) when nothing seems to work right and everything goes wrong. This week has been one such week :p First, Laurie’s notebook computer suddenly developed a mysterious Windows issue and would refuse to display folder information. She decided to reinstall Windows over her existing installation hoping to refresh the Windows installation but not having to re-install all the apps. No such luck 🙁 The install ended showing a brand new Windows installation and no installed apps, prompting her to reinstall all apps.

Then day-before-yesterday, one of my co-workers lost Internet connectivity because somebody cut a cable in her area and knocked her broadband off-line. Then towards evening, my keyboard suddenly went on the fritz leaving me with no recourse but to type everything out using the on-screen keyboard. My notebook computer already has a faulty keyboard and I was using a USB keyboard and that was what stopped working day-before-yesterday.

So yesterday, I had to run off to the nearest computer store as soon as they opened so that I could get a keyboard and get back to work. Soon, after I get back to work with the new keyboard, my co-worker gets knocked offline again, this time because her power went off and her UPS went out as well. By this time I was settling in with my keyboard and discovered that the new keyboard was crap 🙁 The left shift key (the one that I seem to use the most often) gets stuck 50% of the time and I end up with everything in uppercase till I figure out what is happening and go jump on the shift key :p I tell you, there is no winning.

These are just a few of the tech woes this week – there are many more. Some software related and some hardware related. In fact, I’m anticipating a total system crash soon. That should prove to be the icing on the cake :p

Downloads away!

Software tools are such funny things. Sometimes they work fine, sometimes they give the appearance of working fine and sometimes they don’t work at all. Sometimes you put up with a few idiosyncrasies in the app because you believe that the app is overall sound and then you discover that the app is nothing but idiosyncrasies :p

Take the case of DownloadStudio from Conceiva. In my early days on the Internet way back in the nineties, my download manager of choice was Net Vampire. I would rave about Net Vampire to all and sundry and would install it on every machine that I worked on. Somewhere along the way, I switched over to FlashGet which at one time I believe was also known as JetCar (don’t ask me why :p). I used FlashGet till about a year ago when I began looking around for a new download manager – mostly because FlashGet didn’t integrate well with FireFox and the solutions around for making FlashGet work with FireFox didn’t seem to always work that well. That was when DownloadStudio came into the picture.

Now I must start off by saying that I’m a sucker for a nice looking interface :p DownloadStudio had a really spiffy interface and it seemed to do everything under the sun (and I’m a sucker for all-in-one tools too – it’s the little boy in me still hankering after that Swiss Army Knife :p). So I fell in love with DownloadStudio at once. It did integrate with FireFox and it seemed to work fine and so I used it for a few months without any problems. A few weeks ago however, my Internet connection started becoming really flaky. Downloads would fail all the time and would have to be resumed and the download manager became a really important tool. That was when I began to notice the cracks in the pretty facade of DownloadStudio (DS).

For one thing, DS would not retry a failed download even if it was set to retry indefinitely – it would simply give up after the first failure. For another, if I had a half-complete download and I changed some of the download properties (for instance, instead of downloading the file as 5 different segments, I set it to download as one segment), it would start the download all over again. Yesterday was the straw that broke the camel’s back – I had a 60MB download that I was nursing along forever. It would download 500k to 1MB and would fail and I’d have to hit retry again and then after a few minutes, it would fail again. At about the 50% mark, I decided to change the downloading from 5 segments to one segment – my mistake. It started the download all over again, argh! I had had enough, I began looking around for a new download manager.

After some searching, I came across Download Express and its big brother Mass Downloader from MetaProducts. Both the products integrate well with FireFox and what is even better, they can download multiple files at multiple segments and seem to have no issues with restarting after an error like DS does. In fact, I was able to download the 60MB file that I’d been trying to download the whole day in about four hours with no user interaction at all except for one minor change. I had set the job to stop on 10 retries and that’s what the job did after downloading about 20-30MB. I then set the retries to unlimited and the job completed just fine. Guess the pretty apps aren’t always the most reliable ones :p

Blogging, traffic and reasons

One of the writing forums I frequent also has a forum on blogging. Somebody mentioned BlogExplosion and BlogMad there recently as a means of increasing your blog traffic. Now I don’t particularly care about traffic to my blogs but I do like technology and so I decided to sign up for both and see how they work 🙂

They both work pretty much about the same. You sign up for free, create a profile, add your blog(s) to your profile and then you start earning credits by browsing the blogs of other members of the service. For each credit you earn, you get a visit sent your way by BlogMad or BlogExplosion. The differences between the two services are minimal. In fact, the only real difference that I see is that BlogExplosion gives you half a credit for visiting a member site but takes away a credit when a member visits your site. BlogMad on the other hand keeps it at a 1:1 ratio.

So how do they ensure that a member actually visits your site and stays long enough to read anything? :p That’s the tricky part. What both services do is to have little navigation bar at the bottom or top of the browser window while you visit member sites. Each time you go to a new member site, the navigation bar starts a little counter. You have to wait till the counter goes down to zero and then select a displayed number from a list of numbers to signify that you are actually doing the browsing instead of having a robot (or a macro) do it for you :p Of course, this still does not mean that the person actually reads the site.

And that’s the problem with both the services. I signed up yesterday and had 80 visitors from BlogMad (they give you some credits to start off with :p) and about 20 visitors from BlogExplosion but I’m not sure that any of them actually read my site. Or maybe I was just too boring for them to comment on :p Either way, I guess the issue is that there a lot of people out there who just want the traffic and aren’t interested in doing any real work to get it. So not sure that BlogMad or BlogExplosion works in the spirit they are intended to be used in …. Of course, that’s just my opinion 🙂

One-trick ponies and one-horse races

At one time, Microsoft used to be a one-trick pony. So did Google 🙂 For the longest time, even after they had started diversifying, Microsoft used to do mostly software. Sure they had Hotmail, but that seemed to be almost an afterthought more than anything else. Then came the revolution when they started getting into anything and everything – handhelds, mobile devices, pocket PC, smart phones. Of course, it was always mostly in terms of developing the OS for the devices and setting up the specs for each device rather than actually getting into marketing a device under their brand name. That too changed with the X-Box. That is where Microsoft stands today.

Google was slightly different (but then again perhaps not :p) They started off (at least appeared to but perceptions can be deceiving …) much more slowly but have suddenly branched out in so many bewildering directions at once. You had Google Desktop Search being added to the web search and then you had Picasa coming in to the mix. The next thing you know, wham! You had a whole bunch of Google services and downloads – Google Earth, Google Talk, Blogger, GMail, Froogle, Google Base and a host of others. This is in addition to the other stuff which is only hinted at or have not been completely rolled out yet – GDrive, Google Analytics, Google Calendar, Writely etc.

If you look at how the two companies have been progressing – MS has been building on their OS market and slowly expanding into new areas while Google has been building on their web presence and search engine superiority and have been moving in ever widening circles. It is inevitable that these two giants both end up in the same arena sooner or later. (And yes, everybody has been talking about this for ages and I’m not saying anything new here :p) Looks as if MS is finally ready to do something about the threat from Google though since they have come up with a whole series of "Live" services and tools which are web based.

There’s Windows Live Search – another attempt by MS to try to horn in on Google’s territory :p They tried it earlier with MSN Search but that didn’t seem to get them anywhere. This is supposed to be faster and better but I have no idea how since it’s just another search engine :p There’s also Live Mail, OneCare Live, Live Safety Center, Office Live and so on. Basically, MS seems to be going "web" full on. Of course, not having tested most of this stuff, I can’t really comment on it. One thing that I have tested though is Windows Live Messenger (WLM) and I must say that I kind of like it 🙂

I signed up for the beta because of the shared folder feature. Laurie and I send a lot of files back and forth – she edits my stories and I edit hers (mostly it’s the first :p) It’s a pain to have to open Explorer, find the file share, go to the right folder and then drop the file in and tell Laurie it’s there. I’d rather have the file automatically synchronized with her machine when I make any changes. This is what I thought the shared folder feature did. Unfortunately, it hasn’t turned out to be quite that :p When you add a file to a shared folder, WLM actually makes a copy of the original and places it in your WLM shared folder. So, after the first instance, if you change the original, nothing is synchronized with the other person you’re sharing the document with. I haven’t tried modifying the document in the shared folder itself but I have a feeling that the changes will synchronize then but that defeats the whole purpose of having documents in an ordered folder structure :p So not quite there yet …

The other annoying thing about shared folders is that if you enable shared folders – all your file transfers are done via shared folders. You can’t do an instant send the old way which is never updated again and do a shared folder approach only when you need it. It’s all or nothing. Other than that though, I kind of like WLM and it has performed without any issues on my machine so far. In fact, I’ve actually gone back to WLM and stopped connecting to the Messenger network via Trillian. Given that Trillian development seems to be stagnating, I might actually go back to individual IM apps again :p

The unfolding of the new age

Recently, there was all that brouhaha over the Microsoft Origami project – basically an ultra-light (sic) device which weighs only 2 pounds or so (that’s about 1kg for the metrically inclined :p) and runs a version of Windows XP and can run MS Office. I believe the original Microsoft spec was to have a device which can run on batteries the whole day and could be carried anywhere with you – the truly portable PC. However, the original devices don’t seem to be anywhere close to the target in battery life since if I am not mistaken, they are supposed to have something like two and a half hours of battery life.

So what’s interesting about Origami? It’s the fact that a few people online have touted this as the next-generation writer’s tool. I have to laugh 🙂 Come on, there have been electronic writing tools around for ages. Sure, some of them are not as portable as others but even as far back as 1997, I remember using the HP Handheld PC. It ran Windows CE, folded up into about the size of your palm, ran for several days on one charge and had a tiny keyboard. I still remember typing out a story on it while waiting for a connecting flight in the Las Vegas airport terminal.

Then there is the Compaq iPaq. It fits in your pocket and again runs Windows CE and comes with Pocket Word. I’ve plugged in a foldable keyboard and have typed out stories on that too. Sure, it’s not as good as the HP Handheld since the foldable keyboard needs a really flat surface but still it works as a writing tool. Heck, I’ve even written a couple of poems and songs using the touch-screen on my Sony Ericsson P800 – but a writing tool it’s not. Perhaps if you added a bluetooth, keyboard, it might work better 🙂

But why go to such lengths? There are such perfectly good writing tools like the AlpahSmart line of products. They are lightweight, easy to use and the battery lasts much longer than two and a half hours :p If you like the AlphaSmart range, then there’s also QuickPad.

Basically, there are a heck of a lot of alternatives out there for writers to keep writing on the go. (And I’m not even going to touch on traditional pen and paper here – mostly because I can never write unless I have a keyboard in front of me :p) But the Origami just does not look like the kind of tool I’d want if all I want is a way to keep writing on the go. It’s just too expensive, power-hungry and as yet, untested for it to be something that I *have to* have. Perhaps a few years down the line, once the product has matured, it will be the writer’s tool of choice. But not just yet …

So much software …

Who would have thunk there was so much software out there? I’ve been setting up a server for my friend and it’s been one stream of software joy :p First, I had to decide on Apache and figured I might as well go with Apache 2.2 since that was the latest. Then of course, there was the decision as to PHP – I decided to go with 5.1.2 since I wanted to be able to use some of the latest PHP features. Then, there are all the libraries that you need to get PHP installed. So it was a fun bout of software installing.

Once all that was done, I learn that one of the sites to be put on that server needs Apache 1.3 and that 2.2 would not do :p So, it was back to downloading and installing Apache 1.3.34. Now, it feels to me as if PHP 5.x is a bit more slower than the 4.x variety when I actually try using it and so, I find myself wondering if I should perhaps switch to PHP 4.x instead … Not sure if I really want to do that yet though. Sometimes there can just be too much software to deal with :p

In other news, over the last couple of days we’ve been catching a few movies when we had the time. We watched "Aeon Flux" and I’m still not sure what to say about the movie :p They had some really stupid (from a logical perspective) stuff in the movie – like an assassin who goes out on a mission at night wearing all white :p I guess from a stylistic perspective it made sense since she wore white and all the guys she went against wore black but do you honestly think any assassin or thief worth their salt would wear white at night? 🙂 The story itself was OK but I was mostly left questioning the weird stuff in the movie – such as a pool which is supposed to be their monitoring system and another assassin who has hands on her feet (yes, I kid you not) … But given that there appear to be slim pickings for science fiction movies these days, I guess I can’t really complain :p

Tags, categories and changes

After getting the latest builds of Blog to work, I have decided to remove Ultimate Tag Warrior from the mix here on SM. This is not due to any issues with UTW itself – it’s a great plugin and does the job well – but due to me realizing that UTW was overkill and that for what I was doing, it introduced overhead that wasn’t needed 🙂

Basically, I post all my entries from Blog. I never use the WP admin interface much except to remove spam. I do all my editing, posting and other entry management stuff via Blog itself. The only reason I was looking for a tag cloud mechanism was so that I could show a visual representation of the various topics covered on this site and let somebody interested drill down easily to only the posts that interested them. UTW allows you to do all that but in my case, I was simply converting categories to tags to do this. Since the categories are a built-in feature of WordPress, it occurred to me that I didn’t need the overhead of UTW (which would slow down XMLRPC to an extent) if I had a plugin which displayed a tag cloud based on my categories.

Enter the WordPress Heat Map plugin which does exactly that 🙂 After a brief search of the Net, I actually found a couple of different alternatives. The other one was the Weighted Categories plugin, which apparently inspired the author of the Heat Map Plugin. However, the Heat Map plugin appeared to be better maintained and supported and so, I went with that :p Incidentally, the author of the Weighted Categories plugin is apparently working on a way to make his plugin work with keywords instead of categories. I would be interested in that if it didn’t create too much overhead and worked without any issues with XMLRPC-based posting. But I doubt it … There is another plugin which supports keywords – the Keywords plugin, and the author is apparently working on tag cloud kind of support. Unfortunately, it works basically the same as UTW (just not as well :p) and so, I don’t see the point to pursuing that one either :p

Basically, what I’d like from a keyword tagging plugin for WP, is for the plugin to examine each new post, identify the keywords automatically and then add them as tags. Of course, at the moment, that appears to be too much to ask for :p The biggest problem appears to be identifying the keywords. Yahoo Content Analysis doesn’t do too great a job of it as I’ve mentioned before and while Tagyu does do a much better job, it is abominably slow and tends to end up in my XMLRCP session timing out before the analysis is done :p The best solution would be something that the plugin can do itself instead of contacting an external server but the implementation is the key ….

Magellan, Vasco Da Gama and Dr. Livingston

A long, long time ago (but not very far away ….) – almost at the dawn of time in fact – when Windows ’95 first came out, I hated it! I wouldn’t install it on any machines at work and if a machine came pre-installed with Windows ’95, I would format the hard drive, installd DOS and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and I’d be as happy as can be afterwards :p One of the reasons that I didn’t like Windows ’95 was the fact that I could do things via the command line much faster – I had everything in three-letter-named directories and everything was off the root, this was of course before we all became slaves of folders within folders within folders :p The other reason was that I hated Windows Explorer.

Eventually I came to at least tolerate Windows ’95 and even allow it to be installed on machines at work but I still hated Windows Explorer. It was at this time that I learnt of an application named PowerDesk ExplorerPlus from a company named Mijenix. It gave you a split window view so that you could have two explorer instances side by side and move and copy stuff to your heart’s content from one pane to the other. I loved the app and continued to use it through various iterations. I remember PowerDesk Utilities 98 – that was probably the first time I used the app. Then I remember PowerDesk 3.0 – so I don’t know if there was ever a PowerDesk 2.0 or not and if there was, I probably used it. The thing is, the feature set didn’t seem to change much even when it hit PowerDesk 4.0. I think somewhere along the way they added FTP support but that was about it.

Then came PowerDesk 5.0 and the app actually seemed to take a step backwards because it lost long filename support for a bit – not really lost it but it wouldn’t show the full long filename in list view – and that’s my favourite view 😛 But they got that sorted out. In the meantime, Mijenix had disappeared and the application suite bought over by a variety of different companies. I think 5.0 was with Ontrack and when it came time for 6.0, the new owners were VCOM. I didn’t much like PowerDesk 6.0 since it had these really ugly, huge toolbar buttons and didn’t seem to have much more in the way of added features than that. However, me being the software junkie that I am, I continued to use it. That is, I did till I learnt of Novatix.

It turns out that the original developer of PowerDesk ExplorerPlus had either joined a new company or set up a new company (not sure which) called Novatix and he had wanted to continue development on his creation – PowerDesk. So he’d bought the rights to the source code to the original app to start development on a new app which was named ExplorerPlus 🙂 So now you have PowerDesk and ExplorerPlus developed by two different companies. When I heard all this, I just had to try ExplorerPlus and unlike the stagnating PowerDesk, it turns out that they’d actually done work on ExplorerPlus! There was a tabbed browser interface so that you could have multiple Explorer sessions going on from the same interface, various UI changes and enhancements. I didn’t initially like the feel of the app much but I still gave it a try and it has won me over since then. So, I’m going with ExplorerPlus for the time being … let’s see how it goes …

Oh yeah, the title? They were all explorers (in case you didn’t get the reference :p) There is even a file manager named Magellan – I’ve given that a try too but didn’t really like it :p

Blacklists and other bits

I talked about this particular bug in the WPBlacklist plugin that I wrote a few days ago as well. I mean the one where a comment which had been held for moderation by the internal WordPress moderation system could be approved by the WPBlacklist plugin because it doesn’t check the status of the comment before running the comment through the blacklisted item list. I got bitten by this bug just yesterday when a spam comment which was held for moderation because it had multiple URL’s in it, was approved by the blacklist plugin because those URLs were not in the blacklist. I immediately added the necessary changes to the code, tested it out and uploaded the new script to my server. Since this is a bug which will affect others as well, I decided to release WPBlacklist 1.22.

However, I didn’t stop at changing just the plugin code. I also attacked another problem which had been bugging me – the fact that I don’t get a "held for moderation" e-mail when the WPBlacklist plugin holds an e-mail for moderation. This was due to the way the internal WP code worked and so I decided to change the code a little bit so that it worked the way I wanted. I’ve included the changes in the readme.txt file in the WPBlacklist distribution but in case somebody is interested, here is a excerpt direct from the readme.txt file … Umm, I tried posting that bit but it really messes up the paragraphs for entries here on SM :p So I guess you’ll just have to read the readme.txt file to find out what you need to do …