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 …

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

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

Of phones and polyphonics …

While I’m kept busy at work during the daytime learning my new duties and getting ready to take over from Robin, my evenings for the past few days have been busy working with my new phone – the Sony Ericsson P800 :p I’ve been installing software, trying out backgrounds, categorizing stuff, moving data over from my Compaq iPaq and so on. I’ve now come to the ringtone stage of the customizations. The P800 supports a variety of audio formats for ringtones but I didn’t like the MIDI option since the tones were too soft and couldn’t be heard over traffic while I might be travelling on the bike .. or even in a bus. The same seemed to be true of the IMY (iMelody) format and I wasn’t sure how to work with AMR format or RMF format files.

At the same time, I wanted to have some songs as ringtones but not just the instrumental part and so that let out both MIDI and IMY and I think even RMF as well though I’m not sure about that particular format. So I dropped back to the old reliable WAV format that the phone also supports. The problem was that I couldn’t find any song ringtones online at all after a lot of searching though a friend of mine does have a couple on his Sagem phone – but the problem is that there is no way to get the tones out of his phone since he can’t beam the tones and they are too big to be sent via SMS. So I decided to try and create a ringtone on my own from an MP3 file segment. My first attempt produced a 2MB+ WAV file which was around 20 seconds in stereo at 44100Hz and in 16-bit format. So I began experimenting with all the different variables – I dropped the frequency down to 8000Hz, brought the bitrate down to 8-bit and suddenly the file was only around 200k-300k! Of course, by this time the volume was so low that I had to amplify it by around 15dB but this produced a lot of distortion in the final output.

I didn’t know enough at this point to figure out how to clean up the output file to get rid of the distortion (that would come later when I went through the help files and also went online) but I did do some normalization of the output. I later realized that going from stereo to mono would save me some space as well. That was all day before yesterday. Yesterday, I got a whole bunch of MP3’s I wanted to use and processed each one of them the same way that I’d done the original ringtone that I’d created but this time I experimented with the frequency and the final amplification on some of them. These turned out slightly better but not so loud but that was probably because I amplified most of them by 10dB instead of 15dB. I learnt after I’d done all of this as to how to clean up files which had become distorted due to amplification but it was too late to do any further experimenting. So maybe today I’ll see if that method can be used to clean up the files I’d created and still be left with a clear and loud ringtone …