My old friend Randy has mentioned, in a post called Aaden. Adan, Aden etc. that he recently got some unwanted, unfriendly comments on a blog entry he posted over two years ago, Bad Baby Names. Randy was caught commenting on people who bestow unique and precious names on their unborn offspring.
Shopping for a new computer and some work to set it up kept me busy on Saturday, when I wasn't working on the house.
My Canon G3 digital camera and Sony desktop computer stayed in Winnipeg with Claire. I got a Canon Powershot 410 before moving. I bought it at Shopper's Drugs. It runs on 2 AA batteries. It didn't have a DC adapter and I didn't want to use battery power while the camera was transferring files to the computer over a USB connection. The Canon adapter is expensive and it would have been a special order - which I wasn't going to wait for. A card reader was a less expensive and quicker option. It works to transfer the .JPG files from the camera card to the computer. It seems to be a simple and faster way to move images - plug the card into the reader, and the reader into the USB port, and copy the image files on the card to a new folder or file on my computer. From there I can crop and compress images with MS Photo Editor and attach them to emails or upload them here. I couldn't install the Canon image management software on my Pentium MMX Toshiba, under Win 98SE. The Canon software, which I had been running on the Sony before I gave the computer to Claire, had useful features for organizing files and getting thumbnail views, but I think there is nothing special about that. I can probably get the same functions in Photoshop - it's a question of finding something that works on this machine, or waiting to get settled in and getting a more powerful home computer. Meanwhile I can shoot, save and send so it's all working.
When my future ex-wife started using the Internet, and when her mother and aunt started using the Internet, they used to forward email chain letters to me. I sent them information about web sites with information about virus hoaxes and urban myths, and explained how to bookmark them (I like bookmark - a much better word than Microsoft's Favorite).
Wolfgang Stiller had a site at www.stiller.com/hoaxes.htm. He called his site Stiller Research. Quite a few pages linked to his hoax information page. He had developed a shareware virus checker called Integrity Master. He seemed to be a serious and knowledgeable person, regarded as an authority on viruses, data security and virus hoaxes. Googling the name brings up the president of the North European division of Alcan, an artist in New York, a mountaineer in Colorado Springs, and lots of hits relating to virus information - most of them going to stiller.com. He may be the mountaineer in Colorado Springs.
His hoax page is gone. Googling Stiller Research still brings up hits at stiller.com, but it has become a link farm. Nothing but ads. The page source suggests the site has been taken over by hitfarm, a notorious adware site.
Wikipedia's start page has a daily featured article, an entry selected as the article of the day. For football fans, on November 7, 2005 the featured article is about the Arsenal Football Club which plays in the FA Premier League in England.
The French urban riots made the front page of the Free Press today - a picture of firefighters trying to put out the fire in a burning car. The news coverage is still neglibible. Wikipedia had a problem with the story over the weekend - competing rewrites and disputes over whether the article overstated the role of Islam in the rioting. They had an objectivity flag on the story on Sunday, but they have worked that out. Their article is now called 2005 French Urban Violence.
My friend Randy, who is an academic librarian, recently posted an entry with a section on criticism of Wikipedia. His entry is called Various. He cites an essay called the Amorality of Web 2.0 by Nicholas Carr. I have to agree that the linguistic and cultural implications of Wikipedia are being oversold by the usual assortment of technical writers, visionaries, dreamers and loons. I also agree that the quality of the entries is inconsistent but I think it is not as bad as some of these comments suggest.
Over the last few days I fixed the template for the page (Individual Entry Archives) with the Comment Entry fields to fix Typekey Login for commenters. I also experimented with some MT plugins - Stylecatcher, MTProtect, and CCode/TCode. I also spent some time redesigning and editing my web pages.
After trying out different font families, I kept getting the same result as I mentioned in my last entry. Putting two spaces after the period (.) at the end of a sentence did not make a difference. After some research, I realized that this is a function of HTML, my font settings and my justification settings.The entry editing screen is a text editor. When the text is published in HTML, extra spaces are not counted. There is an HTML tag that will insert extra "non-breaking" spaces, and there are ways of automating that in external text editors, perhaps also by MT plugins. Many authorities favour using a proportionally spaced font and letting HTML sort it out. There are some reasons not to use two spaces, because in some applications, the extra whitespace can cause problems. It doesn't seem to matter in an HTML page display in a browser window.
Many claim that the practice of putting two spaces at the end of a sentence started with typing teachers, not grammarians or printers. It was useful to add the extra space in typing with a typewrite, in a monospaced face, and that was considered as good practice. It may still be useful in processing text for output in a monospaced font-face. Adding the extra space in a text processor for HTML output requires special characters. Typing the spaces in the text processor has no impact.
I have been committed to Movable Type, but I have had some problems with it. When friends like Randy with history and good connections in blogging talked about changing to WordPress, I tried to compare the products. I think SixApart and MT will lose ground if SixApart doesn't address some problems. I don't want to spend time on importing entries and writing new stylesheets and templates for a WordPress blog. For the time being, the balance of convenience favours staying with MT and hoping for improvement.
My blogging has slowed down this summer. I have been spending more time cycling and reading, and less time at the keyboard.
The spam situation has improved. There hasn't been any spam on the blog for a long time. What I mean is that is that the spam attempts also seem to have dropped off. The maintenance on the spam logs was not time consuming, but it was annoying. I run MT Blacklist without getting Blacklist updates. I culled the list to a few dozen strings and a couple of dozen patterns. For a while, the log showed I was getting hits, but it seems to have dried up a few weeks ago. I also run Spamlookup and Keystroke which take care of everything that Blacklist doesn't block. I think a lot of spam was probably coming from a few sources and they may have just taken me off their lists when they couldn't get a hit.
Movable Type is beta testing MT 3.2. I am going to wait until they have a stable commercial release, tested to work with the plugins that I use, and then upgrade. I don't want to move to another platform unless another platform offers clear advantages.
I got an email from Garth advising me that he had been blocked from commenting on my blog. It turns out that he had used the word socialist, which was blocked by the text string "cialis" in the Blacklist. Cialis is some kind of drug or herbal - I don't know what it is but it has been promoted through blog spam. I have been using a combination of MT-Blacklist, SpamLookup and MT-Keystrokes. I have cut out a lot of stale URL's from MTB, but I still run it to screen for proven text strings found in spam relating to gambling, porn, drugs. SpamLookup and Keystrokes have been pretty effective. I think they basically take care of everything, but there is some question about server load running SpamLookup under a moderate spam attack. MTB intercepts incoming comments first.
This is the opening part of one of the more flamboyant email spams I have received, another variation on the Nigerian or West African Bank fraud, I think.
I spent several hours last week setting up the Sister Jane site, converting Word documents into text and marking up the text with html tags, and organizing the site and the pages. I decided to create a style sheet. The basic idea was to use the headers to break up text sections visually as well as logically. I used borders and background colours in the headers to turn them into visual bars. I applied a couple of levels of indentation to the text. After that, I took the same style sheet and applied it to the Sea of Flowers site with a different colour scheme. The results aren't fancy but the sites seem to be more readable and slightly less generic.
The colour scheme on Sea of Flower site was inspired by the Dutch flags in the documentary on the Canadian Army's fighting in Holland in 1944 and 1945 on Global last Saturday night. I like it and I have applied it to the blog too, as you can see.
I found a couple of related articles which complain about the flaws in Microsoft Word's grammar checker. This one at the Chronicle of Higher Education points back to Sandeep Krishnamurthy's online article.
I find the grammar checker is useful at finding my common typographical mistakes like extra spaces and double words. It can get annoying because it tries to correct matters of taste and style - the passive voice error, and the use of which and that. I end up ignoring the suggestions most of the time. I should be able to change the settings but that means time with a manual and fiddling with the program. Configuring Word is not simple, and that is a drawback.
I was first forced to use Word to share documents with co-counsel on a case I did a few years ago. I hated it instantly. It does insane things to paragraph formats based on hidden commands. The last versions of Wordperfect for DOS and the Lotus versions of Wordperfect for Windows (6.1) gave the user much more control. However Word has become the standard and many clients and contacts require documents in Word format to open and print them. I tend to work in text and convert to Word only when it is required to print or send the content.
It's Wednesday, and for the last 4 of 5 weeks, perhaps longer, that's porn spam day. It doesn't show up on my site, but my Blacklist log shows the comment and ping denials. I get a few email notifications telling me that some made it into moderation (until I installed MT-Moderate for Trackbacks, some pings showed up on the site).
My friend Randy Reichardt, a librarian by profession, blogged about the Gorman controversy in separate entries today and yesterday. Michael Gorman is the president-elect of the American Libary Association. In December 2004 he wrote an essay in the LA Times which criticized Google's project to digitize entire libraries. His article was discussed in some blogs. Some of the discussion was thoughtful and well-informed, some was polite and some wasn't. People sent him clips of some of the more colourful things some bloggers were saying. Then he wrote a piece in the Library Journal online dismissing blogs and bloggers. (Information and relevant links in Randy's entries linked above).
Before e-mail spam started to arrive in torrents, it used to be fun to read some of the messages. Now, most of my spam is screened by my ISP and autoscreened in Mailwasher, and I clean up the rest when I see an obviously suspicious return address or subject line. One in a while I still read one for fun.
The Nigerian Bank scam (also see this link or the RCMP web warning) is so well-known that it ought to obvious, and the pitch is stale. Sometimes the con artist ads a nice touch.
Steve has changed servers. His domain name is still the same, and the domain name registry has been configured to redirect users to his new server. Old links seem to work, and my browser is redirected to the new location of his home page and weblog. He reports that he can't run his own custom blog CMS any more, and he is using DocBook for his blog now. He saved the posts entered under his old CMS and imported them into the newest version of his blog. (Update - February 14/05: Steve has taken down his web page and blog for the time being).
Mike has launched a Wordpress blog called Meanderings. His cycling exploits can still be seen in his Cycling Log. The log stopped in November, but a cyclist's spring is only a few weeks away.
My cell phone died before or during my Sunday ski with Steve on January 23.
The spam drought ended over the weekend. The gambling and pills people started sending comments - all blocked by MT Blacklist. The porn stars started sending trackback pings. A few got through but I have cleaned them up already, and updated the blacklist with their latest domain name and some other new strings. I installed an MT Plugin called DisguiseTrackbackURL which is supposed to make it impossible to identify the correct URL to ping for Trackbacks without actually opening the Entry in a browser. It sounds promising and it should work will work unless the spammers decide to read the default java script and train their bots to add the extra characters. If they still spam me I will have to think about customizing the Disguise script.
There hasn't been much spam on my blog for months, because MT-Blacklist was keeping it out.
This started as a post about shovelling snow and skiing, and turned into a rant about the quality of data available on the Web. I wanted to check the amount of snow that fell during the two storms of December 30 - December 31, and January 1 - January 2. The correct answer according to news stories published in the Winnipeg Free Press was 26 cm and 15 cm respectively. They seemed to have a reliable source - perhaps a meteorologist. The Free Press also prints a daily weather feature, and the snowfall information wasn't there. Not for the last day, or the last week, or the last calendar month. I couldn't get the information on the Internet either.
I have been trying to see which browser functions are slower in Firefox than in Windows IE. Some of the interface with MT seems to be as fast as when I use IE, but some pages are slower in Firefox. Some of the administrative pages that build a list - the comment approval/editing list, or the Blacklist item list - seem to take a long time compared to the same page in IE. But Firefox seems to build an entry list very quickly. WTF?
Steve has simplified his blog by writing his own basic CMS. No trackbacks, comments submitted by php mail, no spam. Just content. He makes writing his own CMS sound as easy as installing MT. He could market his CMS to engineers as Nano-blogging. The word minimalism may not register with engineers. His choice to blog lite is appealing when I look at the grief Randy is having with his blogs after he upgraded to MT 3.121. Imperfect CSS, pages not displaying in any browser ...
It was the ads. I became furious at the ads cluttering the pages I was reading. In the early versions of Netscape, I could turn off images to speed up page loads, which was handy when I was using a 14.4 K modem, and even a 56 K modem, on a dial-up account. That capability has disappeared in modern browsers, and setting a browser to ignore images would ignore content. There are hosts of pop-blockers but no effective ad blockers for IE. Ad blocking in IE is generally limited to blocking new windows (pop ups) and banners - images of specific size at the top of a page. There is a product called Webwasher which tries build a blacklist of banned sites which was promising but configuring it was a problem. There is a free classic version, with no help files and the full version is not cheap. Finding a real IE ad blocker on Tucows or the Web is just a nightmare. Lots of cookie-cutter pop-up blockers, lots of shareware from little.wannabe.dot.com ventures.
After a few days of using IE again, I am missing features of Firefox. Tabbed browsing was good. I miss the Adblocker which showed the feeds connected to a web page and allowed very fine control. I could block a feed to one ad, or block all feeds from a source by wildcard. I had a problem using it on sites (eg the NY Times) which had several feeds because I had to reopen the tool for each block.
After trying it for a few weeks, I have given up on the Mozilla Firefox browser. I have kept the Mozilla Thunderbird email program.
