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WP-plugins.net domain name for sale!

Dave — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:38:29 +0000

Update: Sold.

In the last installment of our Boring Geek Updates™ series for the year and as part of my general strategy of complete WordPress disengagement, I finally decided to do something with that long-neglected pet project of mine: WP-plugins.net

Namely: sell it.

As you can tell from the ‘beta’ sign and the outdated reference to an ongoing update process, to be completed ‘any time now’, this site has long shifted out of my personal field of interests. Don’t really have the motivation, definitely don’t have the time.

But, maybe you do!

If so, now is the time to make me an offer.

In a nutshell:

For whatever price you pay, you get: full control of wp-plugins.net (I’ll have it transfered to your registrar), all the code that sits on it and currently powers both frontend and backend, plus the entire plugin database.
What you won’t get: hosting (you gotta have your own server), full ownership of the code (some of it is already GPL’ed, so I can’t do anything about it, but you can still use it however you like) and I will most likely remove all plugin authors’ email information from the database, unless you can make a compelling case for me not to.
I would like it if: you have plans for the site that involve a certain continuity with the existing service. Whether you keep the entire thing as is and just maintain it or entirely overhaul it with new and exciting features, I’d just like to be sure this domain doesn’t become a cybersquat in a month or two. Basically, if you can prove some loose level of involvement with the WP development community (really: anything will do… You are not interviewing for a job here), I’ll be much more likely to take your offer into consideration.
I have frankly no idea how much this domain/site should go for. ~~Which is why I’m asking you to send me an offer, by email~~ (update: domain sold, please do not contact me about it), with whatever amount you think fair (along with a two-line plan of what you intend to do with it, see above). For reference, just note that I have routinely gotten (and declined) offers for advertising deals running about $1000/year… Which pretty much sets a starting price (but then again, make a convincing case if you can’t afford that much and maybe the spirit of christmas will overcome me and I’ll let it go for less than that for a good cause).

Update 12/19:

Credits: whatever you do with the domain (as said previously: hopefully something for the common good), I would appreciate credit (name + link anywhere on the site will do). Then again, if you have a strong case not to, just take it to me and we’ll see: this is a “would like”, not a “must”… Either way, please let me know.
Deadline: I’ll accept email offers until Monday 8pm GMT. At which time I might contact a few of you for additional information or clarifications on your plan, then let everybody know shortly afterward.

Anyway, all interested parties please send your short and honest offers to the following address: wpplugins4sale@gmail.com.

Thank you and happy eggnog-drinking binge!

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

WP-plugins.net domain name for sale!

Spam Karma goes GPL

Dave — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 18:29:04 +0000

Geek news warning: sane people and anybody for whom such acronyms as PHP or GPL merely evocate some brand new drugs the kids might be into these days: you are probably better off skipping this one.

I’ll try to keep it short.

Spam Karma 2 is now released as GPL v.2. This essentially means you can do anything you want to it, except claim you made it (copyright and attribution notice must remain there). You should also note that any attempt at deriving some ill-deserved profit from it through harebrained web marketing schemes will earn you both my long-standing scorn and a nut-shriveling decrease to your actual karma.

I suppose another angle to that post’s title could be:
Officially discontinuing Spam Karma’s development: so long and thanks for all the fish
as this is what this truly is about.

But, such a title would be slightly misleading (and no doubt heavily quoted out of context): Indeed, I am hereby officially announcing that I will no longer support, maintain or further develop Spam Karma (beside some very occasional, very limited poking, until the transition to a self-maintained project is completed). However, thanks to the magic of free software, all the unsung heroes of the Open Source world will soon rise to take over and bring you a stronger, better, more closely supported version of Spam Karma!

Okay, what’s more likely to happen is that nobody will really bother taking over, except perhaps a handful well-intentioned but utterly clueless beginner coders who will quickly find themselves overwhelmed by the task and next be seen running away screaming at the top of their lungs. Hey, I’m not blaming anybody: I wouldn’t waste my time on a non-paying, open-source community project either…

But on the off-chance that you would (and trust me it won’t do anything to help you get laid either), I have set up a Google Code repository, which could become the jumping point to some magnificent community-based development effort (or not). If you are interested in participating in any way, contact me (mail or contact form) with a *brief* description of who you are, what you can do and what you wanna do. I don’t need a resume (I am not hiring), just a very quick idea of what level of responsibility you’d be willing to take on the project. I’ll put in the first couple people that seem to know what they are doing (and do not sound like they’ll be selling everything to Russian mafia-owned spam sites) as administrators of the project, and hopefully from there on, things will work by themselves…

If you think you’d like to tackle any aspect of SK2 development (including possibly porting it to other platforms), here is your chance. Speak now or go back to more fruitful and life-rewarding endeavours forever.

Oh, and as for the “reasons”, well, here they are:

1) Life.
Much as I love the challenge and excitement of coding an anti-spam filter and thinking up new tricks to defeat parasitic life-forms of the web, I just don’t have the time anymore. And to be honest, if I did have the time, I probably would have other challenging, exciting new projects I’d rather tackle. I’m fickle like that.

2) WordPress
I will really try to keep that one short, because I could probably write a novel of that. And it wouldn’t be a very interesting read.
In a word: WordPress kinda sucks nowadays. Its retarded upgrade rate makes it nearly impossible to keep up, in turn making it a constant security threat on my servers. And each time I finally cave in and install one of those “mandatory security upgrade”, it also installs 600 Ko of other theme compatibility-breaking fluffy crap that I never asked for in the first place. Usually setting the ground for the next cycle of security-exploit-rushed-upgrade. To sum up, it’s become incredibly bloated and tedious to support. Replacing it on my own servers is very high on my list of things to do (which means somewhat in the first 1000 items).

Having no interest for WordPress anymore, I have thus very little interest for WordPress-related development.

As for WP coming bundled with its own anti-spam plugin, I could also go on for hours on that. The fact that a community-based open-source project is used to distribute a commercially licensed piece of software doesn’t make me particularly happy. But frankly I haven’t cared and still don’t care enough to even raise a stint. At any rate I know lots of people (me included, obviously), aren’t convinced by the way Akismet works and are happier doing the filtering on our own servers, so there is definitely room for SK2-like plugins out there.

Anyway, thanks everybody for your support all these years and let’s gather a round of applause for our brand new Spam Karma GPL Edition!

Update: in addition to the Google Code-hosted project, there is now a dev mailing list set up on Google Groups, go check it out and feel free to sign up if you are interested in SK2′s future development!

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Spam Karma goes GPL

This is all getting really boring…

Dave — Sat, 03 May 2008 16:53:32 +0000

Don’t you think?

I mean, the alcohol, the drugs, the neverending nights of feral sex, the uninspired blogging… it gets old, really.

Alright, so maybe not the booze, drugs and sex part. But the blogging part: definitely. I don’t mean the part about writing inane crap that nobody in their right mind should care about, in between two intense navel-staring sessions. I don’t think I’ll get tired of that part any time soon (I’m trying though). I mean, the sterile format that this blog has come to follow.

Oh, trust me, I am very aware of it. Sure, I have many excuses as to why my posting rate has dwindled to the levels of Bangladesh’s strawberry production on a bad monsoon year… Work, life, love (or pursuit thereof), happiness (idem) etc. But we all know there’s more to it. Truth be told, blogging here bores me, most of the time. There are a couple reasons for that, chiefly among them are:

This blog started out on the wrong foot.
When I decided to open my first self-hosted online space, it started as a bastard mix of for-friends-only (“hey guys, long time no see”) news reports and travel-journal (“lookee all the whacky things they have here”)… Both rather boring genres in the long run, neither something I really felt like doing much. But I have been pulled toward these roots ever since.
It is read by all the wrong people.
Quite expectedly (although I originally never intended it to be), this has become the place where all people who either have invested some DNA into me, or were court-ordered to stay at least a continent away, come to get their life update on Dave. Knowing that both your genitors (hi Mum! hi Dad!), extended family, past love interests (and potentiall future ones) are all reading this, puts a serious cap on any attempt at spontaneity.
And therefore… I write elsewhere.
Yes, I know, it hurts, but I have been seeing other people. In other locales, other languages even. Usually with completely different style and contents. Don’t even try to search the web: believe me you won’t find it. Those other writings are all that this isn’t: personal, fun, hyperbolic, unauthentic, uncensored etc.

Then why bother?

Good question. I suppose because this still serves a purpose for some writings, in some contexts. Also because I hate giving up. And closing that blog before I turn 50 would feel like giving up.

But things need to change. Not sure what, but they do.

Still working on details. I technically have about 10 days before the official 5 year anniversary of this blog. Do not expect grand announcement or sudden changes, just be warned.

Sorta.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

This is all getting really boring…

We are going down…

Dave — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 18:39:11 +0000

My not-so-great hosting company having unilaterally decided to move the cluster my account resides on. This website, and all other websites on my account, as well as email and everything else, will be out of reach for about 8 hours starting at 10pm PST.

This sucks, unfortunately there isn’t much I can do (not like DH bothered offering any temporary hosting elsewhere: just a very helpful “going down tonight, deal with it” announcement).

Back in 24 hours.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

We are going down…

Big in Estonia

Dave — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 17:12:34 +0000

Because Big in Japan is so 1995, I am proud to announce that I am now also officially Big in Estonia. Secondary to my being featured in this month’s issue of arvutimaailm, a computer magazine so big in Estonia, it doesn’t even bother putting its content on the internets.

The article is signed by Elver Loho and features, as far as I can tell, some collected ramblings of mine on miscellaneous items of computer security and spam, as well as a scarily huge photograph, that must by now adorn the wall of every single Russian mafia hitman east of the Volga. My command of Estonian being unfortunately very low, I can only assume the article bears no reference to my habit of drinking a bowl of fresh kitten blood every night before sleep. I will try and post the PDF here, but need to make sure it’s ok first (and also get the final version, as I only have a working layout).

Which reminds me there’s been lately a couple articles, newspaper columns and books bearing mention of my name and/or one of my miscellaneous ongoing evil plans. Unfortunately, I have been pretty bad at collecting clippings for my mom’s trophy wall and haven’t really kept count, but I still wanted to recommend Maria Langer’s book, since she was so kind as to send me a personal copy (long, very long ago now… sorry Maria…).

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Big in Estonia

Google Ranking, World Domination etc.

Dave — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 12:49:51 +0000

I have only one ambition in life.

Well… Two ambitions, but the other one is more of a long-term goal. For now, I just want to become the first search result on Google for my given name. This in itself being a crucial step in my larger world-domination’s plot, since we all know Google controls the world already.

As it is, I already have pole position for my old ‘dr Dave‘ moniker. But, and you read it here first, I am hereby setting in motion the switch in online identity from ‘dr Dave’ to just plain ‘Dave’.

No, I wasn’t sued by the American Board of Medicine, or any equivalent local institution. Beside, that Honorary Ph.D. in Curse Removal and Sexual Healing from Kinshasa’s University of Black Magic is all but legit.

However, crazy as the idea may sound (I have a hard time believing it myself), I might one day not too long from now be a bona fide doctorate student: it is likely that my honorary ‘Doctor’ title would by then confuse many people (not that it hasn’t already) which was never the intent. Hence the shift to unambiguous, simple, likable ‘Dave’. I’m guessing there are only a couple millions of us out there, someone has to be the one.

So, how are we doing on the Google front? Well, guess what: not so fucking bad!

Six, if you count them, six people (or things) are standing in the way to intercontinental online stardom.

Of course, I could rely on the quality of my content, my shining bright personality and ever-increasing public appreciation to slowly climb to first place. But I know better.

Instead, I have devised an infallible 6 Steps Program that shall shortly take me there, whence I will finally be able to rest and contemplate the world at my feet, laugh and move on from that Internet fad once and for all.

Please allow me to develop. Note that for obvious reasons, I cannot allow my now mortal enemies any extra link publicity and you will therefore have to Google their websites for yourself. Do it while you still can:

First on the list, right above this site on the Google results page, is a site devoted to learning that quaint obsolete little language they used to call “HTML”. I believe only minimal course of action is warranted, seeing how nobody cares anymore about learning HTML. Achieving that cool blinking text effect on their personal webpage no longer requires such lengths. They all have MySpace now and showing off their bad taste to the rest of the world, requires but a few clicks of the mouse. HTML is dead. Just to be safe, though, I did start spreading a couple nasty rumours about HTML 5.

By the way, did you know HTML 5 was originally a Microsoft standard and is coded through children slave labour in Malaysia?
My first serious serious opponent on that merciless race to the top is Dave Shea. And it saddens me that I have to do that to him, ’cause he’s a rather cool guy, whose feed has been sitting in my aggregator for years. But let’s face it: who cares about CSS anymore? Boring web accessibility nazis, that’s who.

Cool sites are made in Flash with Ajax and a metric crapload of dynamically-generated drop-shadow webtwozero buttons.

Plus he updates his blog even less often than I do, which is saying something.

Anyway, strychnine-laced camembert is on its way. We’ll all miss you D.
Just next, comes Dave Letterman. Who I also kinda used to like. Although that was a time when I was also into Miami Vice and collecting pin’s (hey, everybody was into collecting pin’s, back then), so I guess my appreciation might be different nowadays.

I don’t plan on doing anything about Letterman: I’m relying on his weak heart to take care of itself by the time I’m done dealing with the rest of that list. We will miss you also, Mr. Letterman. But you gotta realize Jon Stewart is much funnier than you these days, it is time to go.
The next two spots on the list have me completely stumped. Who seriously remembers that stone-age utility that allowed your MacOS 1.2 to speak with DOS 0.02a, over copper cable networks? The only people still running computers old-enough to have a need for Thursby’s “DAVE” software, are my grandma and Dave from 1991. And they both haven’t heard of that crazy worldwide network thing yet, so what’s the point in advertising online?

There again, probably easiest to wait for the latest Finder 7 mac users to die of old age (most already did, of a stroke, upon catching glance of the latest Intel Macs running Windows in Parallel) and that software to gain its final resting place in the Museum of Obsolete Technologies.
Dave Winer, on the other hand, might take longer to retire or die from natural causes. Luckily, I am said there are already a couple lucrative bounties on his head. A quick rundown of my blogosphere acquaintances revealed that over 70% were ready to pitch in for the expense of hiring a professionally trained ninja assassin and sic him on Dave. Most of them would have done it themselves, actually, but they all had this really urgent paper to write about the latest cute-kitten-dressed-in-a-starwars-outfit YouTube craze, sweeping the Interweb right now.

Waiting for the Social Web to develop sentience, acquire a will of its own and strangle him with its bare digital hands, might work too. But I’m just not sure I want to wait that long.
Disappointingly first on that star-filled list of Daves stands, last on my way to absolute power, a highly forgettable early 90′s movie, featuring its namesake US president molesting every single romantic comedy clichés in the book, living in a far, far away, fairy tale White House where, I kid you not, Gandhi is Vice-President (boy, did we go a long way since then).

Since a quote speaks a thousands snarky comments, allow me to cite one of the movie’s many enthusiastic fans on IMDB’s website:

I’ve recently had the opportunity of viewing “Dave” and thoroughly enjoyed it. As did the whole family. Three of my grandchildren watched it and I didn’t have to explain a thing. No sex (well none worth worrying about), no violence, and not too taxing on the brain, a wonderful tonic.

Frankly, I don’t know how to tackle that one. But failing any other plan, I believe murdering all pre-menopausal women in the English-speaking world, might somehow reduce this movie’s faithful viewership on the Hallmarks Lifetime Channel to a near-zero, thus ending its repugnant dominance over my given name.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a dastardly cunning plan to set in motion.

Yours faithfully,

Dave.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Google Ranking, World Domination etc.

Followup on WordPress Security Issue

Dave — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 10:25:54 +0000

Time for some Q&A here…

Below are a few of the most oft-heard questions/statements about my previous panic-level-3 announcement regarding a serious security issue in WP and how to easily fix it temporarily (one checkbox to untick)… Along with answers:

“Is this a joke/hoax?”

Is the date the 1st of April?

“How critical is it?”

Critical enough.
Not all WordPress users are at risk, but I don’t suppose that would be of much comfort to you if you belonged to the 30% hackable installs.

“Will you tell me more about this exploit? I swear I won’t tell anybody else! This will stay between you, me and the World Wide Web…”

Frankly, if you do not understand why I won’t even be giving the slightest hint of what the exact problem is before enough people have applied the temporary fix (disabling ‘user can register’, under Options >> General) and an upgrade has been released, you are the last person I should be telling to about this.

“Are you a WordPress official? a WordPress developer? Anybody with a title I can trust?”

Absolutely not. In fact, less than ever.

“Why don’t you leave that up to the Big Guys Who Know What’s Best For You®™ and go back to getting smashed on gin somewhere under a Parisian bridge then?”

Take your pick:

Because over the past year of distant involvement in the WP community, I have come to question and, well, often outright disagree with the way the Big Guys Who Know What’s Best For You®™ handled similar problems in the past.

Because, all modesty set aside, I am not sure how their strategy for handling such problems (which I have seen in action in the past) has proven better at containing disaster than the one I adopted here.

Or perhaps simply because, as some Big Guys Who Know What’s Best For You®™ have implied in one helpful bit of Shoot-the-messenger communication, I am an attention-craving moron with nothing better to do with his time than scare his fellow WordPress users into unchecking one single option in their admin screen.

“Why do you relish so much in fear-mongering, FUD and…
OMFG…
What is this?
Snakes!!!! There are motherfuckin’ SNAKES on WordPress!!!
Ahhhh! do something!!!”

Right.
Why in the world would anyone want to make their security announcements sound too important?
All apologies for that bit of hysteria. Let me go back and add a few soothing pastel tones and some muzak to the original post.
Let’s rephrase too:

Hello, there’s a teeny itty bitty problem with your WordPress install, feel free to do something about it, but don’t worry too much otherwise, it’s all good man.

There. Better?

Now, seriously, to those who have been equating my behaviour with shouting “bomb” in a crowded airport: get. a. fucking. grip.
This is the internet, not an airport. Computer mice stampede rarely kill anybody. And I’m sure even the most cheetos-infused computer nerd’s heart muscle can take the news without prematurely collapsing.

Making it sound serious is a) the only way to spread the news b) perfectly justified given the fact that, you know, this is pretty serious.

Truthfully, I don’t think there is much harm done in upping the amount of caution people display when using server software. Such exploits are common, and not solely a WP problem (all server applications have had similar issues at one point or another). Lack of awareness in the general public, if anything, is the danger. Sorry if that doesn’t really bode well with some people’s marketing pink-cloud vision of the world.

Just consider yourself lucky I didn’t use:

(directorial credit: Leftjustified)

“You mean you didn’t just write that thing in a fit of aimless panic to scare other people out?”

There again, despite what some well-meaning people seem to have charitably been hanging on my head, I have given a bit of thought to the problem before deciding the best course of action was to invite people to disable an option in their admin tools. And for those who really care, here is how I see things:

An exploit in WP was brought to my attention. It was neither the first one, nor probably the last one. Exploits are an unavoidable byproduct of major projects, they are not a fatality: you fix them and move on.
My very first reaction with this, was telling Geoff Eby, who discovered it, to contact WP devs and take it to them in private.
As would sometimes happen, it seems, the answer wasn’t really overwhelming, and it appeared some devs (suspicion confirmed ever since) even considered this to be of the “Not WordPress’, Somebody Else’s Problem” category. A position I reckon everybody has recanted ever since, but that threatened to be the official position then.
Now, I am sure a fix will eventually be released. It will be the fourth upgrade this year. And I bet you the whole “major security issue” thing would not exactly be put in large blinking letters on top of the official download site. Ya know, you don’t want people to panic and start thinking there may be a problem or anything.
I have absolutely no stats to confirm that, but I can also bet you there are still thousands of installs of WordPress that haven’t even installed the previous security upgrades. “Too bad for them”, I hear you say? Well, sure, it’s not very smart but you can’t blame them for eventually tiring of following announcements and refusing to sort out themselves between minor bug-fixing releases and major security-plugging ones (a difference that’s pretty much inexistent in all WP official channels).
As a result, I get word every day of one WP install or another that’s been hacked, usually using an exploit supposedly fixed months ago (just have a look at some of the comments in the previous post).
I would be amazed, alarmist tone notwithstanding, if more than 50% of WP installs throughout the world were upgraded to a safe version by the end of the Summer.
On the other hand, the second the patch is released, every malicious coder with two bits of brain will know exactly how to exploit older versions and will go to work.
The fix I invited everybody to apply (namely: uncheck the ‘allow user registration’ option in WP’s General Options panel) is both simple and does not reveal the exact nature of the exploit. Not only do I trust it to be more widely applied than a full-on upgrade by the less computer-proficient users, but it will ensure, by the time the upgrade is there and the exploit publicized, that much fewer vulnerable installs remain.
So, think of it as a two-step process where we can afford to raise awareness and offer a simple temporary fix without risking to help script kiddies too much, then release the usual half-ignored patch and not have to watch the entire WP world crumble as dozens of unprotected blogs get defaced by 12-year old pimply teenagers.

Or, you could just follow “protocol”, discuss the exploit at length in private developer mailing lists, safely out of sight from the general public (but well read by possibly every last malicious coder in the world) and release yet another semi-silent security upgrade while hoping good people hear about the news before the bad ones do…

But feel free to ignore this ranting of a madman: after all, perhaps I was just bored and figured this would be the best way to have some fun, without incurring serious cavity damage in an airport security room for mentioning snakes while boarding.

For anything else, feel free to contact your nearest WordPress Official for further word on what to do. I’ve done my bit.

Update: WordPress upgrade 2.0.4 should now patch this bug. If your version of WordPress is equal to or higher than 2.0.4, feel free to ignore the warning above. If not, then you should/MUST upgrade (more details in the comments).

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Followup on WordPress Security Issue

Critical Announcement affecting ALL WordPress users

Dave — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 15:10:40 +0000

If you are running WordPress as your blogging platform and if you have been trusting enough to leave User registration enabled for guests, DISABLE IT IMMEDIATELY (in wp-admin >> options: make sure “Anyone can register” is not checked).

Additionally, delete or disable ANY guest account already created by people you are not sure about.

Leaving it open and letting people sign-up for guest accounts on your WordPress blog could lead to incredibly nasty stuff happening if anybody so desired. And trust me I am not exaggerating this. So don’t wait a second to disable this option and please relay the message.

WordPress dev team has been notified a while back and I dare hope they will soon start acting on it, if only by relaying a similar announcement through the official channel (as well as, of course, releasing a proper patch).

Sorry for the shrill hysterical tone, but this is a big deal. However, disable that one option and you are fine, no need to panic further

[cheers go to Geoff Eby for discovering and bringing this insane security exploit to my attention]

Update: a small follow-up addressing comments and concerns I have received ever since this last warning, is posted here. Feel free to ignore completely unless you really care about inner WordPress politics (yawn).

Update 2: WordPress upgrade 2.0.4 should now patch this bug. If your version of WordPress is equal to or higher than 2.0.4, feel free to ignore the warning above. If not, then you should/MUST upgrade (more details in the comments).

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Critical Announcement affecting ALL WordPress users

春風

Dave — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 01:08:49 +0000

What better occasion than a charmingly rainy Spring Sunday afternoon to take care of a long due tidying-up of my blogroll (that list of blogs found under the Links tab above)…

In fact, it was mostly an occasion to crash on the couch, procrastinate all day and do some reading while nibbling on the relics of yesterday’s food orgy, but having accomplished one tangible task, no matter how trivial, gives me a faint sense of accomplishment and somewhat helps relieve the guilt.

First off, I finally ditched the “linkroll”, as you are all probably subscribed to the same dozen blogs I and everybody on the net goes to, to get their fix in “quirky” humorous pieces of web lore. Real links of interest will make it into posts of their own from now on. But anyway, I do suspect your first motive for visiting this blog is not to find the latest in kung-fu-fighting cat movies or dorky teenagers lip-syncing to cheesy eurodance.

I started adding a few of the newly discovered blogs that had been sitting in my aggregator for long enough and that I felt deserved sharing. For those wondering: my criteria for inclusion rest on a complex equation involving personal appreciation of blog content, frequency of updates, degree of closeness and chances of survival on the long term (tired of having to clean 3-month stillborn blogs off my list all the time). If you are not in there but think you should be, it may be an overlook, or I haven’t gotten around to (still in progress), or I simply don’t think the rest of the world should particularly care about your latest family daytrip to York. Which doesn’t mean I don’t: my personal list of feeds is literally a dozen times the size of the one above and I read all of them.

Then I struggled to remove some links in order to keep the length manageable. To an overwhelming majority, I just cleaned up broken links and clinically dead blogs (three months and no post usually means there is no point sending readers to your blog, no matter how great it used to be). I had to make a couple harder decisions regarding blogs that update very infrequently… There again, it doesn’t mean I don’t have them on my aggregator, but I know firsthand how frustrating it is to go through someone’s blogroll and get a string of ghost blogs that have obviously lost their maintainers’ attention…

I also dropped any attempt at keeping these lists ordered by “freshness” for now, as this meant relying either on blo.gs (whose “temporarily” disabled search hasn’t let me add a new link in months: good thing they do not belong to a major, err, search engine company) or the equally broken pingomatic.com‘s API. While limiting the list to the last X updated blogs was an elegant solution to uneven updating rates, its half-broken implementation was cause for many blogs in my list to stay hidden beneath the fold. Back to randomized order until I find the motivation to code this myself.

Anyway, I hope I didn’t forget anybody and I will be working on adding new links as they come…

The title of this post: 春風 (harukaze: spring wind), refers to the lovely spring breeze no doubt currently cleaning the Tokyo skies to a spotless blue as it does every year. As for here, sure we got winds, but they ain’t clearing any skies, let me tell you.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

春風

Better leave at the top of your game…

Dave — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 17:07:55 +0000

Wherein the author enumerates much meaningless data and uses them as springboard for some slightly more topical meandering…

1,059 WordPress plugins currently sit on wp-plugins.net. Not bad for a project that was half-shunned by the official WP pubah(s) from the very beginning. Kinda getting worried by the amount of bandwidth this is eating off my quota right now (read: somewhere in the 200% vicinity). But we’ll cross that bridge when it starts falling.
11,232 SK2 downloads for the year 2006 so far. There again, not bad for a plugin that doesn’t happen to be the one packaged by default in WordPress 2.0.
968 comments (mostly Trackbacks and Pingbacks, as I closed comments on this page a while back) on SK2′s homepage. Can’t help but notice an uncannily high percentage of posts from Germany. Is SK2 like, the David Hasselhoff of anti-spam plugins?

As you can tell, despite being on cruise-control mode, the Deliverables Department of UnknownGenius Corp. is doing nicely. As for where it’s heading, I suppose I may use the occasion to offer a quick update:

The short answer is that it is going nowhere.

The longer answer is that, ultimately, I will be phasing out all WordPress development (and most web coding, actually) from my activities.

For those who care about the Why, I will try to provide some elements without delving too deep into the multiple layers of frustration and unrelated motives for my general disinterest toward WordPress at the moment:

Recently, Skippy summed-up quite nicely the building frustration in the WP community. Mine has been growing along a similar path and, after voicing my concerns a few times last year, I eventually decided to save me the time and energy and silently started shifting out most of my WP-related activities. Like Skippy, I take issues with the way WP development is “managed”, I also have serious concerns about the increased melting of public open-source code with semi-private interests, as reflected by the blatantly commercial marketing strategies of recent releases. Don’t get me wrong: I am not one of those open-source zealots who considers it a crime for software authors to make a dime off their work, I just do not like the way it’s done here.

On a wider scale, I guess I am getting tired of the whole “Web 2.0″ micro-bubble, the underwhelmingly banal concepts it rests on and the mix of greed and naive enthusiasm that propels it. I was there the first time around, and believe me: little else of durable value was invented during that era beside the Skyy & Red Bull cocktail. Oh, I’m sure a few people will manage to make some cash this time too, and I certainly wish them all the success they deserve. But I see little reason contributing my time graciously to help selling Automattic to Yahoo or some other acquisition-hungry greying Bay Area corporation, which is what developing for WordPress increasingly felt like, as of late.

Please do not panic (and do not listen to the well-meaning people that might be inclined to tell you otherwise): I am not dropping Spam Karma nor wp-plugins.net any time soon. I will keep doing as I have over the past few months: maintain and improve as mandatory, without any sort of long term planning (in the positive or the negative) as long as things remain stable. If push comes to shove and I really have to make a decision, I will at the very least ensure that the legacy of these projects is maintained, and you will long be blogging on neuro-quantic interfaces before you have to worry about alternative ways to ward comment spam off your blog. If anything, I have no intention to stop my blogging, and WP remains, at the moment, the best option for my needs, so you can find reassurance in my own necessities.

As for other tentative projects of the past (WPPM, minor WP plugins etc.), I am saddened to say that the chances of resuscitation are inching closer to zero with each passing day. I have toyed with miscellaneous new ideas (including starting the new blogging platform of my dreams from scratch), but decided that, in the end, this wasn’t the direction I wanted to take with my time. Sure, I have to refrain an impulse to start coding, each time I pass the now-defunct one-click install FAQ, but really, it’s all for the best. Of course, if some generous benefactor shows up with $3,000 in cash and asks to see the most kick-ass WPPM 2 s/he’s ever seen, I won’t be difficult to convince (I’m a fairly venal ilk of genius these days), barring that unlikely event, we shall say new coding adventures will be kept for brighter days and a very distant hypothetical future.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Better leave at the top of your game…

That startling void in my world…

Dave — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 15:25:44 +0000

Will any of you sharp visitors throw in a supposition as to which part of my stupid laptop is not working as it should, today?

As you no doubt caught on by now: a glyph crucial at communicating in writing most linguistic constructs of latin origin, is outright missing from this post’s body. That tiny plastic thing on my laptop that usually allows for input of this particular symbol, is constantly snapping out of its spot, foiling all plans to lay my thoughts in a straightforward phrasing without using such unnatural turns of words. My vocabulary has abruptly shrunk to dramatically small proportions. And with it, so has my sanity.

Having no motivation nor skills to commit a full book in this fashion, I shall stop torturing my brain for words, right this instant, and ask you to kindly wait until I fix this quandary for a dispatch of any actual worth.

And thanks go to this guy for unwittingly prompting today’s trifling contribution to this blog.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

That startling void in my world…

Commenting Guidelines: the Rules of Doh

Dave — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 18:41:23 +0000

If you hold back anything, I’ll kill you.
If you bend the truth, or I think you are, I’ll kill you.
If you forget anything, I’ll kill you.

In fact, you’ll have to work very hard to stay alive, Nick.

Do you understand everything I’ve said?

Because if you don’t, I’ll kill you.

Rory the Breaker

I’m deeply sorry that my first post of note in weeks must be about such a pedestrian topic, but I feel it is time to publicly edict certain rules about commenting on this fine piece of thought-challenging writing we call our blog.

Ironically, while strait-laced spam (you know the kind: congratulation on the neatness of your post punctuated by a recommendation for this interesting site about horses playing texas holdem’ with mature grandmas) is no longer an issue, “semi-spam”, or plain non-spam-but-moronic comments have become a real problem. I blame Google, and the thousands clueless imbeciles it washes up on my shores daily.

For the first time in History, it is possible to get a glimpse into the collective IQ of a sizable share of this planet’s population. And trust me: it is rather depressing. Not that I had much doubt left, but this shall go a long way in reenforcing my personal opinion that, as a species, we are frighteningly dumb. How we managed to make it thus far is beyond me… and a strong argument in favour of Intelligent Design theories… I mean, there has to be a God out there. A God that, for some unfathomable reason, is personally attached to the survival of a species who considers “I like cats!!!!11111″ and “u R s0 kewl!!!” to be the best possible use of nigh-boundless, worldwide inter-communication.

Don’t get me started on Google queries.

Anyway, I have vaguely toyed with the idea of withdrawing altogether from Google (supremely ironic, considering how I am currently in the middle of a tedious exchange with their support to understand why this page suddenly disappeared from all query results), but there still are many pages on this site (especially technical ones) that serve a precise purpose for some Google queriers (those usually do not leave brainless comments either), so the solution would be a little overkill. Instead, I have simply decided that, from here on out, there will be no leniency in my approach to moronic commenting.

Most likely, if you are reading this, the rules below do not even apply to you: semi-regular commenters to this blog are free to do whatever they want. I am only concerned with those one-hitters who leave me scratching my head, wondering whether that incoherent sentence left on a 2-year old post is spam, an attempt at communication by an alien civilization or just further proof that trained chimpanzees shouldn’t be left alone with an internet connection…

I used to let these random comments be, on the basis that they didn’t hurt anyone (except maybe my sense of taste, but then again, it’s easily offended, so)… On further reflection, I decided that it does bother me to have my comment sections slowly filling with irrelevant, illiterate, off-topic junk. I see no reason to put up with this crap under some non-existent right of morons to express themselves on my pages.

Let me spell it out for you:

If it’s spam (as in “buy this or that” spam): I’ll kill it (duh)
If it’s overly self-promoting (and I don’t know you): I’ll kill it
If it contains URLs that have no relevance to the post you comment: I’ll kill it
If it’s completely off-topic (e.g. contact form material, or comment answering another post): I’ll kill it. And if I’m in a good mood, I’ll answer it through the proper channel.
If it’s thoroughly off-topic without other redeeming qualities: I’ll kill it
If it contains more punctuation than alphanumeric characters: I’ll kill it
If it is written in SMS-speak: I’ll kill it
If it makes any use of l33tSp34k in a non-ironic way: I’ll kill it
If it can be summed up advantageously by a lesser variation of: “oooooh… pretty… me likes…” on a post that has long been archived: I’ll kill it
If you are an MSN Spaces user, chances are I’ll kill it, but only because you will undoubtedly meet most, if not all of the above criteria (surprise me…)
If your comment looks at me in the wrong way and I’m in a foul mood: I’ll kill it
If I have any doubt about your comment fitting in one of the above categories and better things to do: I’ll probably kill it, just in case.

In fact: you’ll have to work really hard not to get your comment killed.

Well, “hard” that is, unless your cognitive abilities are somewhat above third-grade level, in which case feel free to blissfully ignore the above rant and keep on commenting in peace: enjoy the quieter surrounding.

Thanks for your time.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Commenting Guidelines: the Rules of Doh

Spam Karma donations: You Rock!

Dave — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 18:15:44 +0000

Less than a week ago, we were launching our major campaign: “A bullet for every Spammer, a lifetime supply of quality gin for dr Dave“.

We called for your generosity in helping make this dream come true (especially the drinkable part).

The results are in.

You, people… how shall I put it… You people… well… you truly and utterly rock. All of you. You are the best users a comment-spam plugin developer could ever want. And I’m not saying that because I am currently typing this atop an air mattress floating on an olympic-sized pool of gin, a feeding tube taped to the corner of my mouth. Although it might be helping.

I know I said there were no hard milestones in funding and I am usually loathe to boast of donation figures, but I feel I must make an exception and mention here that, for the past week alone, your donations have totalled a little over 800 US dollars, shared between dozens of people, spanning from $2 to $50, all equally humbling as a developer.

Do you realize how many days of uninterrupted drug binge this money represents? In fact, you may never hear from me again.

I have compiled a list of all donators (past, present and hopefully future): if you have donated at any point, please go look for your name and ensure it’s there, the way you want it (I wasn’t able to dig URLs for some people despite my best detective work). For those interested in paying for additional exposure, a small extra fee will get you a laser-engraving of your name and website on a prominent part of my liver.

Also: I will be contacting shortly all those who offered their time to help with SK2 documentation and support.

As for Spam Karma’s release schedule, here is a tentative roadmap:

SK2.2 Beta is now available for download. Among other things, it fixes tons of miscellaneous compatibility issues with exotic server installs, WP versions and browsers. It also incorporates some small tune-ups and improvements that should help deal with recent spambot advances (although nothing radical yet). Note that it is still a beta: only install if you are comfortable with a certain risk factor and make sure you religiously upgrade to final as soon as it’s out.
If testing of the current beta doesn’t reveal flesh-eating tendencies, a Spam Karma 2.2 Final should be out by next week-end.
By then, I will be running a second donation drive in order to fund my trip to Borneo, where I shall be attempting to capture enough monkeys to ship along with every future version of SK3 (all part of the plan to use P2P blacklisting).
Failing that, a 2.3 version of SK2 should happen sometime in March that brings some amount of Naive Bayes filtering to the mix.
And then there is this large iron padded door over there, behind which our research staff is hard at work on classified anti-spam weaponry. Unfortunately I cannot let you in at the moment.

In the meantime, keep the suggestions coming and let me know of any bug you spot in either betas or final versions of Spam Karma.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to collect my check and go snort a pound of cocaine off a hooker’s cleavage.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Spam Karma donations: You Rock!

The State of Spam [Karma]

Dave — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 04:12:48 +0000

First blog update on Spam Karma, WordPress development and Spam in many months, and a crucial one at that. Being notoriously verbose to the point of irrelevance, yet with lots to say today, I have tried to provide a telegraphic sum-up below, feel free to skip and go straight to the parts you may care about (hint for the busy ones: the plot thickens mostly around part 6 and 7).

And now for the details:

1. How well is SK2 stopping spam currently?

If you’ve been using SK2 for a while until now, you know it’s working pretty damn well. Over the past year, on the different blogs I manage (some of which receive a steady stream of both legit and spam comments, TBs and PBs): over 99% of spam was caught and under 0.1% false positive (pretty much zero, actually).

The only spam comments that made it through, were usually spams posted manually: that is, where a human would browse to the site, maybe even read the post and post a topical comment looking nearly like ham, save for a blatantly “commercial” site linked in the URL field. These were nearly impossible to stop, as SK2 works 90% on detecting spambots and relies only moderately on blacklisting (which helps to keep its false-positive rates extremely low).

These “manual” spams, though, never were much of an issue, as the essence of spam is automation, without which it loses all its appeal: Assuming it takes a few seconds for an admin to manually moderate spam, and given the numbers of bloggers vs. spammers, anything under hundreds of spams per seconds, is just not worth a spammer’s time.

Also one important thing to understand is that SK2 learns and improves: Flagging the spams it let through, helps stopping the next ones. It is fairly normal for a fresh install to let a few spams through at the beginning, but flagging them and thus allowing SK2 to build its blacklists and pattern lists, should immediately improve the catching rate dramatically.

2. Then why have I seen so much spam going through lately?

Unfortunately, as some of you might have noticed, SK2′s performances as seen from the outside, seem to have dropped suddenly over the past few days. While the bulk of the spam still remains at the door, a meaningful percentage now manages to fly right through SK2′s basic filters. And given the numbers involved, even 1% of all spam attempts is a lot to deal with. There again: SK2′s blacklists learn, and conscientiously flagging each uncaught spam should help keep things under control, but this is still a major quality drop from SK2′s usual performance.

The reason for this sudden burst, is a new breed of spam, or more likely, of spambots. It is confirmed now that some spammers have gotten hold of much more efficient spamming tools. Ones that bypass some of SK2′s strongest filters without trouble.

Also of note is the fact that Trackbacks and Pingbacks are absolutely unaffected by this issue (although a small unrelated bug was fixed in the latter SK2.1 releases and you may want to upgrade again from the site: more on this later).

3. How does this new spambot generation work?

This is a very difficult question, since it involves lots of guessing and detective work. Pretty much like in a war, we do not have access to the enemy’s weapons designs. A very uneven war, actually, since the enemy does have access to ours.

There are ways, though, to gather information about what spambots do, and try guessing how they do it.

[long and uselessly detailed technical droning: you probably want to skip that if you aren't an anti-spam plugin developer yourself:]

First of all, these spams do not present most of the idiotic traits of their lower colleagues: they do not try cramming hundreds of URLs or inserting hundreds of easily spotted junk keywords in the comment content. Instead, they use only the dedicated name and homepage fields to sneak in spam URL and keywords. The comment content is often perfectly innocuous, sometimes even topical (by copying parts of another comment or a trackbacking post). All in all, these spams could easily be missed by a human moderator who wouldn’t look carefully at the contact name and URL.

When dissected in the http server logs, the spam looks strikingly human-generated: queries for all the files (pictures, css, favicon and javascript included), sometimes a valid referrer URL is provided, links are followed (e.g. from the frontpage to a specific post), the user-agent, of course is valid and claims to be a regular browser. Timestamps generated by a single spamming IP even seem to point to a typically human erratic way of browsing. Most importantly, the spam bypasses SK2′s Javascript filter, which indicates an ability to parse javascript.

However, looking closer at timestamps and a host of other small details, I am fairly certain these aren’t posted by a human, but are indeed a new breed of spambots. There are many ways I can think of, to make such a spambot with javascript-parsing ability and other “mimicking” skills… In fact, I’m just surprised it hadn’t been done before. But this new development is also worrying, as it seems to indicate that spammers have finally gotten hold of real coders to do the job: whereas previous spambots could have been the work of any random script-kiddies with half a brain and a vague knowledge of scripting, these seem a bit more thought out in their design and their implementation. This is particularly worrying as I do not know of any anti-spam system currently that I, or a somewhat similarly skilled coder (that is: not that incredibly skilled) couldn’t force through eventually.

So far, the overal dumbness of spambot programmers gave anti-spam plugins a very easy edge. Things will change if real coders start taking an interest in this no-doubt very lucrative market and starts churning out efficient spambots program to the spam monkeys. And do not doubt a second there aren’t or won’t be such black hat developers in this market (the same way there are in other domains of internet spam)… Even if Mark Pilgrim was slightly off the mark in his apocalyptic sum-up of the situation, he was certainly right on one point: there is huge money involved, certainly enough to pay the hourly services of a decent professional coder… perhaps even [cue ominous strings on the soundtrack] a coder already involved in the blogging community.

No, not me (unless I’ve been sleepcoding again).

4. Will any other anti-spam tool fare better than SK2 with this particular spam (or spam in general)?

First off, SK2 is hardly out of the game: even as it is, and with a few tweakings, it can easily be brought back to a satisfying, if not perfect, level of protection. Not to mention a possible harder, faster and better successor to SK2 (more on that later).

As for the rest.

You’ll have to believe me when I say I truly wished for a better offer in anti-spam tools. Far from seeing it as some sort of “competition” (to what? a product I am neither selling nor making any revenue off?), I consider diversity in spam-fighting tools the most efficient way to fight spam. The same way bio-diversity is your guarantee against viruses and germs, presenting a wide array of defense tools to spammers means they can less easily focus their attention on one in particular and try to break it.

What we really do not need, however, is yet another blissfully ignorant moron releasing some stupid 5-line, 3-year outdated, kiddie trick that will not fool a single spammer and waste hours of users’ time. Unfortunately there are a lot of these. So let me go through a quick roundup of what worked, works, and never worked, I’ll skip the details for today, so you’ll have to take my word when I say that:

Captchas: work. Despite the ultra-theoretical “captcha breaking” scheme urban legend, spammers aren’t about to break a captcha on your blog. The big downside of Captchas, is that they are extremely user-unfriendly, intrusive and most of all: hurt accessibility (how do blind users do?).
Pretty much any other plugins won’t work. Blacklists, “spam words”, stupid script renaming tricks and all: all pretty useless taken one by one. Some used to work years ago, all have been successfully broken by spammers. Some are even dangerous by the number of false positives they yield. Just save your time and skip them. Javascript payloads also likely won’t be working (I’d love to hear from anybody currently using such a type of plugin, but I’m pretty sure of this one).
Bad Behavior will not stop these specific spammers. For the simple reason that BB is not designed to filter spam. It is only meant to stop the 70% stupid bots that do stupid things. Unfortunately bots are getting smarter, and the ones you wanna worry about are in the top percent of these 30%, thus far out of reach of BB.
Akismet works. Roughly with the same result rates as SK2. Possibly a slightly higher catching rate, but also a higher false positive rate (which is a big no-no, in my opinion, but that’s up to you). Other concerns generally thrown around include privacy, reliability and terms of use (it is free, but you are entirely dependent on a third party server). My personal issue is that I am doubtful of the long-term resilience of a monolithic DB such as Akismet’s when confronted to both Denial of Service attempts and data poisoning. There is some breathing room until spammers turn their unbridled attention to these weaknesses, but the fact Akismet is now bundled with WP will only accelerates things.

As you can tell, there is scant little out there, only a few plugins that all fare somewhat on a par with SK2, all with their pros and cons. Most important of all, there is currently nothing I wouldn’t feel confident breaking through, was I to start in the business of spamming tomorrow…

Just wire the amount to my swiss account.

I kid.

6. Is there really nothing you can do?

Of course there is.

I have a very fertile imagination, and still a couple tricks to throw in the way of the spamming monkeys, spanning from small bits of tweaking all the way to major, insane and quite possibly break-through concept ideas. Very few in the middle actually. Problem being of course that the more potentially efficient tools would also tend to be the more time-consuming, hazardous ones.

Let me try to sum up the whole state of Spamdom such as I see it, with a tedious numerical analogy:

Say spam-protection goes from 1 to 100, where 1 is “sitting duck”, and 100 is “so protected that Houdini himself wouldn’t get a spam through”. Now let’s say most anti-spam plugins tend to hit somewhere in the 1-10 range, with a few, such as Akismet or SK2, hitting something like a 20 (perhaps also rising a bit as time and improvements went).
Simultaneously spamming techniques have also been adapting and improving, and it’s fair to say they are now approaching a 20, and steadily rising. Essentially, spammers are lazy (or pragmatic, depends on how you see it) and their target is to be just above the anti-spam barrier, not much higher.
Now, among the anti-spam tricks left in reserve, I’d say I got a few small ones that should without too much effort bump SK2 a few points up (with compounded effect, something like a 25), which is nice, but certainly won’t buy more than a few weeks/months.

Since they are also by far the easiest ones to implement, I am already working on them.

There are two other separate projects I’ve been toying, testing and prototyping with: a first one involving a somewhat novel approach to Naive Bayes filtering (definitely not on comment content), which would be a definite +10 on our SpamScale, and another, considerably more complex and difficult to explain in details, that could be crudely summed up as a P2P Blacklisting system.

That last idea I have been thinking through for a looong time now. I have some confidence that it may hold the key to the End of Blog Spam as We Know It… A definite +50 on our scale…

Of course, these last two ones, are also the ones that will take serious time investments before even figuring if I can do something with them… Which takes us to the one and only question you all care about:

7. Why aren’t you busy working on the next anti-spam solution before this spam thing becomes out of control?

Well, because as I said above, it is a lot of work. Work that would add to the top of the already heavy SK2-related workload I deal with daily. Don’t get me wrong, as I’ve stated previously: I love developing, I love developing SK2 and most of the time I love hearing from you (even if sometimes I get irrepressible urges to ram online manuals down some throats). But being a fully human carbon-based entity with little photosynthesis abilities, I happen to need food near-daily…

Also due to recent life changes, I am now a tad busier (being a full-time student) and much poorer (being a full-time student) than before. Hence the regrettable need I am in, to privilege works that either feed me or keep my university peers and professors content.

Can you tell where this is getting? No? OK:

To make it short, I am launching a Fund Drive…

The idea is simple: if you use SK2, if you like it, if you’d like to see more of it in the future, if you’d like this future to be sooner than never, if you’d like to help fund the crack habit of a starving student who also happens to dedicate way too much of his free time to eradicating spam, if you think this is worth a few cents, hell even a few dollars, if you can afford to spend this money without robbing your kid or your cat of their next birthday present… Consider donating:

There are currently a few thousands of you actively using SK2 (yep, crazy huh?)… I figure if we weed out the cheapos and those who honestly can’t afford it, plus those who consider their small use of SK2 not worth a monetary contribution (hey, I don’t pay for all my shareware… I’m nobody to throw you the first stone), that might still leave a few dozens of you? If each one contributes a few bucks, that should be enough for me to justify spending a few weeks working on SK3 rather than flipping burgers to pay for booze (and occasionally food and rent).

Non-monetary donations of any sorts are all gladly accepted: food specialties from where you live (especially if it’s distilled and drinkable, but the solid kind is cool too), postcards and anything else that won’t cause a police raid to my place at 6 in the morning… Note that due to recent health regulations, I can no longer accept your first-born child in payment for services, but thanks for offering.

If, like me, you are a starving student who cannot afford to divert any of your drug money to pay for my costly addictions, then consider donating some time. There will be need for it: mostly in doc writing (FAQs, user guide, maybe even a support forum at some point since the whole 2-hours emailing a day is becoming a bit tedious). Just put your name in and my people will get in touch with your people when the time arises.

If making a donation, please provide a nickname (if you don’t want your full name to be used) and your blog’s address, as I will probably make a donation page to list all those (if any) who donated.

8. Would you seriously stop developing SK if you don’t get money?

Of course not.

But it is unfortunately true that I will have to lower my involvement with anti-spam dev in favour of more, err, survival-oriented activities. Obviously, I’d much rather be paid for something I love doing (like squashing spam and spammers) than any random job… But it isn’t much of a choice.

I guess I should set some sort of imaginary milestones in terms of funding and how far/fast it would take me on the SK3 development trail, but I’d rather not look like a complete moron when all but a fraction of it will have trickled in at the end of the month… So I’ll just give you my word that I’ll do my best with what I get, and probably with what I don’t get either…

No matter what happens, I will be releasing SK2.2 (with minor tweaks and bug-fixing) at some point… Hopefully within a week… The two bigger components will honestly depend on how much interest they raise and the time I can afford to spend on them (we are talking at least month-long projects)…

Oh, and let me remind you that donations are not, I repeat: not, mandatory in any way whatsoever.
This is not a change in licensing: SK2 is and will remain free for all non-commercial use and redistribution (note that you can still use SK2 on a commercial blog, the only restriction is on packaging and distributing or otherwise selling SK2 for profit: in which case I ask that you contact me for permission first).

I also wanted to take the occasion to thank very sincerely all those who have already donated money, time or simply kind words through email: you have made my day on many occasions, and helped making it worth it so far.

Thanks a lot and do not hesitate to spread the word!

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

The State of Spam [Karma]

As if a million bytes cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Dave — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 19:37:34 +0000

A pretty bad week for databases.

After nearly killing a client’s DB yesterday (and spending most of my night restoring every bits and pieces semi-manually), I felt it wise to secure my own DB here. The one that stores this blog. Guess what happened then?

Yea, I blew the DB too. Or to be more precise: mySQL blew the part of the DB encoded in Japanese.

Here again I just spent half my night recovering everything that could be. Unfortunately all Japanese content for entries posted in June and early July is lost for good: not like it had much literary value, but still a bummer. And in case you are wondering about backups: believe me, I have backups, hundred of them… It just turns out that this piece of crap SQL isn’t even able to properly back up an exact binary copy of your tables that won’t screw up when it encounters encodings it can’t handle properly. So every single backup I have, is identically screwed.

My last personal piece of advice to any mySQL user out there, is to stay away from mysqldump do a freaking binary copy of the db files directly.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

As if a million bytes cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

WP-plugins.net Changes

Dave — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 16:53:10 +0000

So it’s 1am on a Sunday night, not much more has happened in term of exciting stuff ever since my latest week-end update (no more earthquake, no tsunami, no godzilla…), I am busy debugging code written by a maniac who apparently thinks that picking random combinations of three to six letters is a perfectly acceptable naming convention for all functions and variables in a multi-thousand lines program (and yea, I’m aware that this last bit means absolutely nothing to a rough 90% of my beloved readers: please color me equally stumped, albeit not for the same reasons)… It’s time for…

Techie Update of the Month

I have been putting in a bit of long-overdue work into wp-plugins.net, the ultimate WP plugins repository.

Namely:

No more ridiculously long loading time of the index page. No annoying clicky-clicky browsing either: thanks to the magic of AJAX (some fancy JavaScript stuff), plugin descriptions are loaded dynamically, without refreshing the entire page each time.
I finally made the permalinks google-friendly (well, human-friendly too, actually), as well as added permalinks per plugin author. From now on, a plugin can be accessed directly by using:
http://wp-plugins.net/plugin/your-plugin-short-name/
(e.g. http://wp-plugins.net/plugin/SK2/)
and an author’s complete collection, using:
http://wp-plugins.net/author/your-account-login/
(e.g. http://wp-plugins.net/author/drdave/).
Old permalinks using IDs still work.
Finally added Google Adsense contextual ads.

Before you start pointing out that Adsense isn’t exactly an “improvement” to the site, let me explain:

I am no huge fan of net advertising in general, not even when used to support a “community service”. If anything, I’d rather see such services supported through donations, as I don’t really buy into the general idea that covering everything in advertisement in the name of free service, is an acceptable trade-off for the loss of a mercantile-free landscape (whether a real physical one, with grass and billboards, or its online equivalent, with html and click-under banners). But that might be the idealistic tree-hugging in me talking.

Anyway, while very targeted projects like Spam Karma have been getting a small but steady flow of generous donations, a site like wp-plugins and its thousands of daily users has yet to generate so much as one spontaneous thank-you email. Note that I am not complaining here: I see the logic perfectly well, considering that, unlike a specific plugin which may do a lot, for few people, this site does a little, for many people. I wouldn’t personally think of making a donation as a casual user of such a site.

Hence: advertisement it is.

So far (from this week-end’s reports), it seems worth the unnecessary clogging of screen estate, in that it should pay entirely for my hosting bills at the end of the month, maybe even a Sapphire & Tonic and a bowl of ramen in Omoide Yokochou… which, when you think of it, is about what I would be paid for my hours in the fields, if I was an indentured servant and the year was 1705.

Which brings us to why this should be taken as an improvement:

Being an extremely venal ilk of Genius, I was starting to consider putting a brake on wp-plugins.net development. While closing the site was out of the question, spending any more time developing and enhancing it, became increasingly hard to justify, in light of my current schedule and alimentary necessities. In that regard, placing ads was/is an experiment, and the fact it seems able to sustain it own cost, means I shall finally be spending some time working on miscellaneous improvements in the near future. Which ought to make us all happier.

In conclusion, feel free to go have fun with wp-plugins.net, hurry up to add your WP plugin if that’s not already done and don’t hesitate to click through the ads if you see something you like (happily ignore them if not). Also don’t hesitate to contact me (through the form or in the comments) for bugs or feature requests…

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

WP-plugins.net Changes

Tags – Updated!

Dave — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 15:29:13 +0000

Not in a blogging mood today, so instead, I finally installed a new plugin to support tagging.

Much to say about tagging later on, but for now, go check out the tag cloud in the categories menu above. Cool innit? Slowly working my way through my old entries, only entries up to June 2004 are correctly tagged at the mo.

UPDATE: moved the tags over to their own page (and tagged a few more entries). It’s all here now.

Nifty innit?

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Tags – Updated!

Big in Japan

Dave — Mon, 30 May 2005 08:09:38 +0000

Gen, who works for Technorati Japan just kindly informed me that this blog sits at #37 on the Japan Top 100… Wow…
(it might not last, as understandably, there seems to be some discussion as to whether this blog really belongs in the Japanese billboard)

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Big in Japan

WordPress 1.5.1 and Spam Karma 2.0

Dave — Tue, 10 May 2005 09:24:31 +0000

WordPress 1.5.1 is now officially released. If you are a WordPress user, you really ought to upgrade. This version fixes many of the bugs and shortcomings that were introduced with the botched release of WP 1.5. It takes seconds to upgrade from 1.5 (just overwrite everything in your blog directory except the wp-content directory). Shout out to all WordPress developers and contributors… Great job guys…

With this, I am glad to announce the official release of Spam Karma 2‘s first public beta.

In fact, it is pretty much final-grade quality and could probably do without the “beta” label… I’m just a big fan of the greek alphabet.

Many of the lingering issues with the last alpha have been fixed, a few missing features have been added (it now supports curl for those whose host doesn’t allow url_fopen). Check out the dedicated page for details.

Now go and spread the word! there are still far too many clunky SK1.x in the wild out there…

Also, feel free to contribute to the newly-opened official Wiki page for SK2: your help is much appreciated!

Update: Ahem, it would appear I spoke a bit fast. There is a rather nasty bug in this update that can bork your RSS feed. I do recommend updating nonetheless (and follow instructions in the link above to fix the bug).

Regarding that bug, let me add a little word. Honestly, I considered skipping this rant (and I waited quite a bit to ensure it really was what I was thinking about), but I am just to aggravated to keep my mouth shut. Consider this my final word on that branch of topic, though:

Obviously, and as usual, this blatant bug could probably have been avoided with a bit of real-world deployment strategy and testing before release, but I won’t even bother restating my opinion on the matter… What bears mentioning, though, is the fact that I did report it personally, more than 2 weeks before the release date.

The bug is at least somewhat directly connected to this change. I noticed it, shortly after the code was changed in SVN, emailed Matt about it, didn’t really get much of a response (apart from an invitation to basically go and fix it for him) and considered it none of my business any more (I had way enough things to take care of at the time).

It didn’t even cross my mind, though, that this code, after being clearly reported to Matt as broken, could make it seamlessly and without apparent revision into what was supposed to be a bug-fixing release.

Quite frankly, I feel rather insulted, if anything…

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

WordPress 1.5.1 and Spam Karma 2.0

Service Announcement

Dave — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 18:10:59 +0000

I bet none of you did notice that smooth server migration (unless, that is, you were one of the poor fool who tried using either unknowngenius.com or wp-plugins.net during the past 5 hours). Everything should be back to normal now, please contact me if you notice anything broken…

Why’d I change?

While not exceedingly bad (compared to the worse I had), my former host, HostForWeb, really had sub-par uptime (2 or 3 failures a month on average), rather sluggish performances and downright asinine handling of the last DDoS attack on my server (upon seeing one single IP pulling my index page 50 times a second, they simply disabled my account in the middle of a week-end: that is just retarded)…

Renewing my contract for a year with HFW being out of the question, I went with Site 5 instead: they came heartily recommended and their rates for the amount of disk space (one of my biggest priority) is damn near incredible (I’m getting three times what I was getting on HFW, for the same price, and wasn’t getting such a crappy deal either). We’ll see if the rest is on par (so far, so good).

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Service Announcement

Introducing our new field reporter: Tracey

Dave — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 09:40:24 +0000

The sharpest among you, dear readers, may have noticed a surge in guest moblogging in recent days.

Indeed, Tracey has joined the powerful ranks of our secret organization, with the established mission to bring a dearly missing element of femininity to these testosterone-drenched pages.

In sticking with the stakhanovist ideals that power this blog, and because no reward shall go undeserved, we promised her a formal introduction as soon as she’d reach the magical threshold of ten posts. Immediately prompting her to deliver, no hold barred, shocking accounts of:

what she sees from her office window
what she sees from her office chair…

As you can see, the girl means business…

As long as she leaves gardening up to me, we should be able to find our marks…

OK, she didn’t solely post photos of stacks of paper and urban street parking: she also posted a mug shot of her charming ~~personal sex-slave~~ assistant.

But well before the fascinating insights into the merciless world of a Tokyo power-exec, or even her interesting tidbits on colourful local customs, there is one major reason you should keep an eye open for her contributions: the off-chance of drunken posting featuring nudity and/or behaviours outlawed in at least 15 US states (and punishable by death in 4 of them).

Giving Tracey a cameraphone and moblogging access is a bit like these tv spots for lavish shower products, featuring people lasciviously soaping themselves while the camera always manage to keep the naughty bits tastefully off-frame: there’s that improbable chance the cameraman might one-day trip and show a nipple… a towel fall off unexpectedly… who knows…

Except here, the chances are much higher and the cameraman more likely to be drunk.

But please let that not distract you in any way from the quality of her more traditional contributions to these pages…

N.B: She also has her own dedicated page, where she might one day tell you more about herself. It’s here. At the moment, it only contains the official press kit excerpts, but will no doubt soon be updated with more personable tidbits.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Introducing our new field reporter: Tracey

Angry Emails

Dave — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 03:48:41 +0000

I recently explained my decision to start packaging and distributing my own version of WordPress in order to make my life simpler, as to the distribution of Spam Karma 2.

Simultaneously, I had to deal with an outbreak of issues (or more exactly vocalizations on these issues: it’s unlikely the issues have been any more common than before. They were just given more attention on these pages) with Spam Karma 1.

I have taken the time to write a very detailed response to cover all aspects of the False Positives problem, and provide anybody coming to me with a comment denied by Spam Karma, with the Why?, How? and What Now? of their problem. The bottom line being that, while I’m sincerely sorry about these, I am not responsible in the slightest for the use people make of this program (especially considering how easy it is to screw up the install when you hold yourself too smart to read the docs) and even less so now that there is an upgrade available.

But I care, and think I have proven it in the past, to whoever bothered contacting me without resorting to death threats immediately.

There is, however, one way to make me not care about your problem… It goes a little bit like this:

Act 1 (Exposition):

From: ***
To: drdave@infamousgenius.com
Date: April 16, 2005 8:59:07 PM JST
Received: from some AOL customer by ***.mx.aol.com [...]

I resent being identified as and accused of being a “nasty comment” spammer. For YOUR information and edification I have never ever, sent or been involved with the sending of ANY spam. To find that I have been blocked/banned from a site as a result of YOUR program is an affront I won’t stand for. I would refer you to the remarks posted on your BLOG whatever for details of what I originally wroted that was intercepted by your program, and deleted. I fully expect that YOU contact the site administrator of the site I am apparently now banned from and straighten out the problem that YOU and YOUR software are directly responsible for. In the event I do NOT hear from YOU regarding this situation, rest assured I WILL file complaints with the FCC for interception and diversion of lawful communications be it direct or indeirect as a consequence of the code which you wrote and distributed with and for express intent and purpose of intercepting and diverting communications. I am truly sorry there may be issues with SPAM, but that in and of itself does NOT empower YOU or anybody else to interfere with lawful communications, period.
Signature removed for the protection of the criminally stupid

Act 2:

From: drdave@infamousgenius.com
To: ***
Date: April 16, 2005 9:04:04 PM JST

http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/false-positives/

Signature removed for the protection of my own mailbox

Act 3:

From: *** (yea: still the same, in case you have difficulties matching his inimitable style)
To: drdave@infamousgenius.com
Date: April 17, 2005 4:17:05 AM JST

http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/false-positives/

???

Nothing there justifies, or remediates the fact your program, or version thereof, has unjustifiably filtered out and mislabeled a proper communication, and further mis-identified me as engaging in unlawful conduct. Causing my name and information to be listed and blocked from a site for no reason.

You wrote the program that filtered my message, that intercepted and deleted such communication, and quite obnoxiously in scope broadly misjudged me to be a malcontent and wrongdoer.

You authored the accusation casting negative aspersions of my being a nasty comment spammer, which others see and believe to be accurate because a computer program said so, hence must be true regardless of fact.

I expect you to contact the administrator of the following site and clarify to them that, I am NOT a spammer and, did NOT post, or in this case attempt to post, a nasty comment or spam. That NO evidence involving my attempted posting supports the false-positive finding and accusation against me as set forth by your program.

[some random blog URL removed]

It is not my place to inform users of your program of false-positive discrimination issues, nor my place to remotely mention or suggest altering detection settings as described in your response page. You may disclaim any liability to users of your program for any consequential damage, however, I am not a user, and you cannot go around making and publishing false accusations of unlawful conduct, orcausing to be made and published as your documented program has clearly done. You can’t simply disclaim liability for harm or dismiss collateral damage to third parties as “innocent bystander(s)” caught up in some crusade.

As a consequence of your actions, direct or indirect, (i.e. the program you wrote and distributed). I have been falsely accused of a malicious and illegal activity (spamming) and unjustly harmed (denied access to a public forum). To whatever extent direct, commission with intent, or indirect, by neglect, error, ommision, or simply inadequate logic [more likely] the net result being the same, significant precedence abounds, it’s wrong. As such I don’t think it unreasonable to expect you to clear up what your program caused.

Signature removed for the protection of the increasingly criminally stupid

Act 4 (Denouement):

From: drdave@infamousgenius.com
To: ***
Date: April 17, 2005 12:50:51 PM JST

Dear non-spammer,

Not only do you seem to be lacking proper reading and cognitive abilities, otherwise you would have realised that this lengthy response I took the time to write (while I probably could have been doing much more enjoyable things, such as sleeping), did in fact answer your questions at length, but you are also highly annoying, if only by your constant use of pseudo-legalese verbiage in these highly redundant communications.

I will draw your attention to the fact that, unlike your completely unreadable emails, I paid particular attention to formulating my own answer in a somewhat easy to grasp, if not easy to read, form.

While I am certainly prone to much understanding toward whatever tone is employed by people contacting me on the spur of the moment, regarding these matters, my tolerance quickly fades away when it becomes obvious I am not dealing with some reasonable user, justifiably irritated by what he just experienced, yet able to comprehend the matter at hand if explained calmly, but with some perpetually angry and bitter individual, whose entire life seems devoted to bending the world to his liking, through angry communications and the use of big words.

Your tone and aforementioned use of ridiculously out-of-place paralegal terms, lead me to believe you are one of two things:
1) A lawyer or closely associated profession. a US-residing one at that. and quite likely of the ambulance-chaser persuasion too.
2) Just one of these thousands random morons inhabiting the US, who dream of suing their way through life and have successfully thwarted any attempt at creativity that has ever come in the past two decades and didn’t have 200 lawyers to back it up.

The fact that you seem to think you have something of a legal case here, would imply an absolute ignorance of the most basic tenets of the legal system, and therefore: 2). But I’m gonna give you benefit of the doubt and say that, after all, you might be a very stupid lawyer, or more likely, under the delusion that lots of redundant wording and liberal use of UPPER CASE is gonna impress me into sending you a settlement check before I go and personally contact each and every user of my software and remind them that, exactly as the documentation states, this software might actually stop a commenter that, despite their obvious lack of manners and potentially sub-average IQ, is not, in any way attempting to spam.

Well guess what? I am not very impressed. nor scared.

So please feel free to get in touch with my lawyer, but please be sure to bring an interpreter, because he only speaks Japanese. and he hates Americans too.

Just because you seem to be into that kind of legal grassfucking, allow me to remind you that we are talking about a software that is distributed with the explicit mention of “AS IS” and “WITH NO IMPLICATION OF LIABILITY WHATSOEVER” (see, I can use all caps too).

As to why your comment was stopped, since you might still be curious about that one (and probably didn’t bother to read through the link above, where you might have found an answer to that question):

Why I’d love to say there’s some sort of design in there to detect and thwart any attempt at commenting based on the IQ of the commenter. It’d be both exaggerating my skills as a developer and insulting the numerous other courteous and reasonable people whose comment happened to be stopped by mistake on any other occasion… Therefore I’ll give you the quick and entirely accurate answer: you are an AOL user (and while I can see how this might sound like a confirmation of the initial IQ-based filter theory, let me assure you there is nothing but the simplest of technology involved here, and this particular aspect is fully documented in SK’s manual).

To conclude this waste of 20 perfectly fine minutes of a beautiful sunny Sunday (well, at least in my corner of the world. Judging by your attitude, I suspect you might not be experiencing the same warm Spring weather, wherever you are hailing from), I will hereby kindly inform you that a properly anonymized version of this exchange will be gracing the pages of my own website, as you are reading this. There again if you feel like legally objecting to this, feel free to contact my lawyer: he is definitely worth getting acquainted with (ask him to tell you these great stories of how, as a child during the war, he used to be sent on vacation to Hiroshima island with his sister)…

Otherwise, please accept my sincerest apologies regarding your misfortune and receive my complete assurance that I will do absolutely nothing about it.

Oh yea, and do get a life.

Karmically Yours,
Signature removed for the protection of my own mailbox

Or, to quote one of my most eminent role-model in life: This conversation can serve no purpose any more. Goodbye.

Update: Because who doesn’t like a cliché movie-ending twist where the supposedly dead-and-buried evil guy springs back to life for a last ~~fright~~ laugh, you can check out the epilogue in the comments….

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Angry Emails

WordPress Upgrade available for Download

Dave — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 12:01:33 +0000

As I just lengthily explained, I have very little love for corporate hierarchies and all the folklore that goes with it. Ironically, the ostensibly “free” world of major Open-Source development never fails to irk me in the exact same way…

I have my theories about that, and they mostly have to do with the fact that Open-Source is full of the very same people, who, for one reason or another, might not have made it at the top of the corporate ladder in the traditional world, but are fiercely decided to enjoy the exact same privilege in their own version thereof. Less money, therefore a void to fill, usually by inflating the ego until it touches on all sides. These are all theories… But I do not care to expand on them right this second, if only to add very quickly that Open-Source Software is also filled with an overwhelming majority of selfless, dedicated, bright people, who, in the end, bring the balance way into the positive.

Yet, I do have my beef with many OSS practices in general, and practitioners in particular, but because I have yet to find the recipe for immortality (and just in case you are looking for it too, I can tell you so far that neither baths in young virgin’s blood, nor daily consumption of half a gallon of gin, work), I do my best to spend as little time as humanly possible on such crap. Sure I yammer. a lot. but I am also quite good at packing my marbles and moving to another side of the playground without sulking too much, whenever I really can’t take my little playmates’ bullshit any more…

In short, we, at Dr Dave Logs Inc., do our best to toe that delicate line between diva whims and lonesome-cowboy-fading-in-the-sunset attitude… something that’s not always easy (especially with these damn stiletto heels on). Mostly, that means staying on the edge of the soccer field, practice against the wall, address a few invectives at the lousier moves every once in a while, and go fill in for the team when there’s an emmergency. Nothing to be particularly proud of, nothing to be ashamed of either. We quite like it that way, and do not intend on stopping any time soon (neither the speaking of ourselves in the plural form, for that matter).

This is where the author stops, goes back and count number of preceding paragraphs. 1… 2… 3… and… 4 !… paragraphs of disclaimer…
I think we are good to go now!

When I went to bed yesterday, I was pissed. Very tired (physically, emotionally and mentally), and very pissed. I thought better than posting something then, and anyway, my eyelids firmly refused to stay open, which is kind of a problem to check what you are typing. But I was dead set on opening the shit sprinklers to full power today, as soon as I would have a second.

And then…

You know what’s ironic with my decision to stop my daily bottle of Tequila in the morning for a month or two?

You could expect this to make me somewhat cranky: what with the really boring immobility of my surrounding, the apparent emptiness, now that I only see one of each object, the awfully bland taste of my morning Orange Juice, when it’s not mixed with Skyy vodka, all that… Despite all that: I feel completely euphoric these days…

So euphoric, in fact, that I will not, as initially intended, post a ten-page rant on my current issues with the way WordPress development is done.

A rant that would have continued exactly where I left it a few months ago, when I went vocal with my concerns that lead devs were basically wiping themselves with the hands of plugin developers. Contending that, while all projects need leadership, the idea of community development is also for dialog to happen, not for one to decide and all to follow.

Hell, had I felt particularly mean, I might have viciously pointed how a little bit of humility sounded like a good idea at the moment. I would have pointed out why it is fucking rude beyond belief to blatantly ignore insistant, yet polite, requests for more disclosure, on all matters… And not talking about detailed bookkeeping either: very silly basic things, like giving some sort of a roadmap and timeframe that isn’t written on the back of somebody’s personal agenda.

All sort of mean things really…

And then I would have followed by the announcement that I was hitching a ride out of the WP game. Perhaps not a fork (god, oh no… the day I betrays my faithful chopsticks for a fork, feel free to stab me with either one), but at least a wise retreat to my own grounds, where I no longer have to depend on anybody’s whims but my own (and it may be a lot already, but I tend to have more patience with those).

That was more or less the plan…

Instead, this morning, I just brought my laptop out in Tokyo’s long awaited shiny Spring weather, sat in my garden, and took 30 seconds to write a blindingly stupid little script.

All that script does, is download all code from the SVN server sitting there, repackage it a bit (roughly: removing a few useless files), and upload it here. OK, it does a few other things, but I’ll only be able to tell you about this part in a day or two when I’m done with that part.

Why did I do this?

Because I was fucking tired of having a fairly decent plugin sitting on my server, while everybody kept on downloading an obsolete version that hadn’t been worked on for many months now, thus ensuring a continuous flow of insults to my mailbox. All that because the software it was meant to work with, 6 full months ago, still wasn’t able to release one simple, correctly planned, working version. And sure, “it will be out any day now”, I know that. But the fact that “nobody” deigned giving me a simple answer as to when exactly, meanwhile giving me to think, ever so faintly, that one possible reason to delay a release could be to basically pull the rug from under SK’s feet (I know: this is an unlikely one, but the mere thought is quite infuriating).

As it turns out, in the game of rude behaviours and unilateral decisions, I am not so bad either. Sure, it’s kinda childish, but certainly not gratuitous:

So, please, go ahead, enjoy and upgrade both WP and SK right now…

More to come soon.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

WordPress Upgrade available for Download

Redesign Complete

Dave — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 02:45:31 +0000

From our stating-the-blindingly-obvious department:

You might have noticed this website has just undergone a complete face-lifting…
For the sake of argument, we’ll say it’s not completely finished… But mostly, it is.

It should look good, or acceptable, on every browsers. If it doesn’t, please let me know. But as usual I can only stress how much better it’s likely to look on real browsers (not Microsoft’s twisted version thereof).

I still need to brush up the menu content at the top of this page (organize, add some more items, update my bookmark list etc), but everything else is now in place. And all modesty aside, I dare say it kicks major ass.

Let me use this occasion to invite longtime RSS reader to pay a quick visit to the online version… While I won’t be stopping to provide full-content RSS any time soon, there are in fact many other incentives to checking the page itself that are not visible in the RSS feed.

For your benefits (and the benefit of other less sharp readers who might have missed hidden jewels of this corporate behemoth of entertainment we run here), let me list a few:

Post layout: keitai logs entries are now automatically arranged along with text content to be shown in context and without disrupting the flow of entries
Theme colors have been carefully chosen after month of careful scientific studies: including ancient Chinese art of sacred color matching, Freudian color coding and clinical studies in text readability and its affect on optical nerve fatigue. For the doubtful among you: I bet you didn’t know it’s been firmly established by many studies that black on white background is less than ideal for text-reading on a computer, while a light shade of grey as a background is to be preferred (and you thought my choices were purely coincidental. ha!).
Comments: not only do I love to hear my distinguished readers pitch in on the conversation (we favor murmurs of assentiment and wild praises, here at Dr Dave Logs Inc., but we also tolerate the occasional ~~big fat hairy troll~~ dissenting individual), but also, thanks to Marc’s awesome Subscribe to Comment 2.0, you can get replies to your comments emailed to you automatically, which makes it much easier to have meaningful dialogs around here. (And am I the only person who cannot seem to get used to that ‘b’ after the ‘su’ in ‘subscribe’?!?)
Links: still need to add my last load of bookmarks. But I very regularly add to the link roll. You might have noticed that, out of religious beliefs, I hardly ever post entries only to point at something else (especially if something else is some random bit of Intarweb oddities that’s been posted about on 2000 other websites already), but it doesn’t mean I don’t have many cool links I like to share with you my belov’d readers. That’s what that Link menu above is for.
Alternate Language content: if you are curious to see how my brilliant writ translates into Japanese, German, Inuit or even French, I occasionally do post alternate versions which are only viewable (for technical reason) through the web interface… I’ll try to fix this to show in the RSS feed one day.
Meticulously organized archives: by date, by categories, by important topics (a list of dedicated static pages will soon appear above: give it a day or two).
And Most Importantly… Ageless pearls of wisdom: randomly picked from a vast collection and displayed in the header above. Consider making each one a guiding principle for your day (except perhaps the one that involves gerbils, duct tape and industrial strength vaseline).

I think that’s it for now (don’t you love blog entries that only talk about blogging).

P.S.: To all the masters of the backhanded compliment, you go and tell me in what freaking way this new design is any similar to Michael Heileman’s Kubrick… Sure I worked from his template in order to ensure I was perfectly code-compatible with the latest version of WordPress, seeing how it is the default WP 1.5 layout… But save for the most meaningless of CSS markups (not gonna try to reinvent the wheel by trying to pick another of the three other fonts available for web page, that probably wouldn’t even display on half the systems), it’s been majorly overhauled layout-wise, and completely redone, code-wise (I had my own needs).

Seriously, get real people: he didn’t invent drop shadows or grey side backgrounds. Neither did I. And I’m surely not gonna drop round corners on my entries because Kubrick happens to use them every-freakin-where… That being said, Kubrick is a mighty nice template (even if its css is hell to work with, and the utlra-broken-down file templating a big pain in the ass), not its fault if it’s now played out to the point of nausea on all corners of the web.

PPS: For those of you crazy enough to prefer the old layout, there’s a switch (that uses cookies to remember your choice between visits) in the More menu above.

As usual, mad props, marriage proposals and constructive criticisms are most welcome (especially the former).

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Redesign Complete

Redesign in Progress

Dave — Tue, 05 Apr 2005 06:41:42 +0000

Started playing around with a new layout for this blog.

Not the final version by any mean…

I had to separate the redesign in two phases. This is only the first phase: structural changes.

Second phase (actual theme change) will come later, when I’ll be done with the coding and can concentrate on finding inspiration (I cannot code on mushrooms: just doesn’t work).

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Redesign in Progress

Dave's Blog » Meta

WP-plugins.net domain name for sale!

Spam Karma goes GPL

This is all getting really boring…

We are going down…

Big in Estonia

Google Ranking, World Domination etc.

Followup on WordPress Security Issue

“Is this a joke/hoax?”

“How critical is it?”

“Will you tell me more about this exploit? I swear I won’t tell anybody else! This will stay between you, me and the World Wide Web…”

“Are you a WordPress official? a WordPress developer? Anybody with a title I can trust?”

“Why don’t you leave that up to the Big Guys Who Know What’s Best For You®™ and go back to getting smashed on gin somewhere under a Parisian bridge then?”

“Why do you relish so much in fear-mongering, FUD and… OMFG… What is this? Snakes!!!! There are motherfuckin’ SNAKES on WordPress!!! Ahhhh! do something!!!”

“You mean you didn’t just write that thing in a fit of aimless panic to scare other people out?”

Critical Announcement affecting ALL WordPress users

春風

Better leave at the top of your game…

That startling void in my world…

Commenting Guidelines: the Rules of Doh

Spam Karma donations: You Rock!

The State of Spam [Karma]

1. How well is SK2 stopping spam currently?

2. What’s wrong in the peaceful Kingdom of SpamKarmia then?

3. How evil?

4. Won’t anybody show up and save the day?

5. Is there really nothing you can do?

6. Then why aren’t you busy doing it, you lazy bastard

7. You wouldn’t leave us to die here, would you?

1. How well is SK2 stopping spam currently?

2. Then why have I seen so much spam going through lately?

3. How does this new spambot generation work?

4. Will any other anti-spam tool fare better than SK2 with this particular spam (or spam in general)?

6. Is there really nothing you can do?

7. Why aren’t you busy working on the next anti-spam solution before this spam thing becomes out of control?

8. Would you seriously stop developing SK if you don’t get money?

As if a million bytes cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

WP-plugins.net Changes

Techie Update of the Month

Tags – Updated!

Big in Japan

WordPress 1.5.1 and Spam Karma 2.0

Service Announcement

Introducing our new field reporter: Tracey

Angry Emails

WordPress Upgrade available for Download

Redesign Complete

Redesign in Progress

“Why do you relish so much in fear-mongering, FUD and…
OMFG…
What is this?
Snakes!!!! There are motherfuckin’ SNAKES on WordPress!!!
Ahhhh! do something!!!”