The Revolution Begins
Add comment November 9th, 2004
Archive for November, 2004
AMMT Anti-spam Measures
A few days ago, I had had enough of comment spam. I had been using the anti-spam word list in my WordPress discussion options to “trap” suspected spam for moderation, but I was getting over 100 per day in my moderation queue. So I grabbed the IP Blocklist plugin from Charles Gagalac and activated it. Basically, it checks to see if the comment is coming from a known spam relay host. Poof, no more comment spam.
That being said, I’m a little paranoid that it might be killing regular comments as well. If you’ve tried to leave a comment, but my blog won’t let you (and you’re not a spammer), please email me and let me know. My @gmail address can be found near the bottom of my menu bar.
[Update: Hmm… just tripped across an excellent page about combatting spam in WordPress.]
November 8th, 2004
Slate: Moving to Canada, Eh?
Slate attempts to ring in with the definite last word in about moving north (although I can’t say I agree with all of what’s said about my country): Moving to Canada, Eh? - Let Slate help you decide if it’s really for you. Amusing, if nothing else.
Meanwhile, the folks over that the Joy of Tech have a new cartoon. I sense a meme.
But please, here’s a word for any Americans thinking about living (or even visiting) Canada: leave your troubles at the doormat. We’re generally pretty mellow folks up here, and it has nothing to do with the decriminalised marijuana. Life is too short for political or religious idealogues that create warring factions. Let’s just all meet down at Tim’s for hot coffee and donuts, complain about the weather, and hit the trike/ skidoo / mountain bike/ 4×4 trails. Just don’t forget the dog, your favourite fishing rod and some Backwoods Off from the Canadian Tire. (Tongue is in cheek, but only just slightly.)
November 7th, 2004
ONLamp.com: Which Open Source Wiki Works For You?
O’Reilly’s ONLamp brings you an article by Shlomi Fish (what a cool name!) introducing several types of wikis: Which Open Source Wiki Works For You?
An old idea–user-writable web pages–has taken off again recently. Wikis are becoming more popular as tools for communication and collaboration. There are also several dozen packages to create them. Shlomi Fish compares features of several popular open source Perl, Python, and PHP Wikis.
Personally, I like TWiki, as it gives me all enough high-end doodads and sprockets for everything I want to throw at it. It is a bit of a pain to set up, though, and the documentation is thorough, but confusing. (It took me nearly an hour to figure out that I had to set the preferences by actually editing the “Preferences” wiki page.) I had PhpWiki there first, but the default installation lacked a number of things (like support for media files) out of the box. MediaWiki (used for the Wikipedia) is way overkill for my needs.
I do want to mention another of my favourites, though: ZWiki. If you have a Zope installation, give ZWiki a whirl. I was able to set it up in two minutes flat, and it uses the built-in security and products of Zope for most of its power and flexibility. I’ve used it for various online courses in the past, and have found it just the right balance of ease-of-use and tweakability.
November 7th, 2004
CivicSpace: New Map of North America
Heh. This is worth the cost of admission: CivicSpace Labs: New Map of North America.
Update: Tim Bray has yet another map, one induced by sleep deprivation and accompanied by an explanation: Link.
1 comment November 4th, 2004
Someone at CNN.com has a sense of humor
Found at Joi Ito’s Web: Someone at CNN.com has a sense of humor…. Just doing my part to spread the love.
[Update: Apparently, the culprit is someone at Netscape, a CNN partner.]
As for the election, I’m very disappointed. Kerry may have been a bit wooden, and may have not been as repetitive and focused as the populace would have liked, but four more years of Bush is terrifying —not just for me, but for the whole world, it seems. Say what you will of Dan Gillmor, but I believe he’s right when he says:
There’s no secret about what’s coming. We don’t have that excuse this time.
1 comment November 4th, 2004
NewsForge: Even tastier del.icio.us
Short but sweet article on Newsforge about an Even tastier del.icio.us. I use the Firefox extensions quoted within all the time, and I’ve learned (mainly through guesswork) about constructing URLs for adding tags. This article gives a few more hints about ways to use del.icio.us effectively, including a method for backing up your bookmarks and using the OS X client cocoal.icio.us. (But enough of the icio.us jokes, already!)
Since setting del.icio.us as my browsers’ home page, I must admit that I’ve found a hundred really interesting sites that I would never have tripped upon otherwise. This is not to mention the exploration of tags and other people’s bookmarks. If you haven’t given it a whirl yet, I highly recommend it.
Add comment November 4th, 2004
Globe & Mail: Court says “Kemosabe” not racist
According to an article in the Globe and Mail, the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission spent a shift watching old re-runs of the Lone Ranger in an effort to determine if the term “Kemosabe” was a racist term. They decided that:
[…] while the western TV series treated native Americans in a disrespectful manner, the term Kemosabe is not a racist term. “The board concluded Tonto is the Lone Ranger’s partner and friend. He is clean-cut and well groomed and, although he speaks a form of broken English, he is neither dumb nor stupid,” Justice David Chipman wrote.
1 comment November 3rd, 2004