I’ve been using the excellent Wordpress blogging software for a year and a half now and it has been good - except for the comment spam. By the end of 2007 I was getting more than 100 comment spams every day and I was mighty tired of manually deleting them.

Then I found SpamBam by Gareth Hayes. I’ve been running it for two months now and in that time I have received no spam. None. Not a single one.

If that isn’t the best anti-spam plugin ever, I’ll eat my hard drive.

If anyone has tried to email me yesterday or today (19/20-Nov-2007), it might be an idea to re-send your email ‘coz I’ve fallen victim to Thunderbird bug #323875

In summary, don’t ever use T-bird’s “Undo Delete Message” function! Under certain circumstances it can destroy a lot of your messages.

After moving house, I have also had to move my site to a new hosting service. I was previously hosting it from home but now I am on Web City.

Apologies to everyone who has been trying to view this site, it has been down for almost 6 days. I’ve been rather busy packing and moving. Also I thought it more important to get my friend’s and family web sites up first.

Hey, how about that. I finally found an opportunity to do some Slashdot-style hyperlinks!

I really like this picture of me that Kai drew (sorry about the bad scan). I love the messy hair and the facial hair and the slightly insane expression. He’s really captured me well I think.

And look. He’s also drawn a chibi-version of me at the top of the page. How cool is that! Hmm maybe I’ve been showing the kid too much Anime.

PS. Kai says this picture is about the time I went upstairs to his bedroom and brought one of his toys down for him. So there’s a picture of me downstairs and a little picture of me upstairs in Kai’s bedroom. The hoops down the left are the stairs!

Here’s another unusual use for a phone camera. It’s a simple test to see if your TV remote control is working.

Since digital cameras are sensitive to infra-red light, you can simply point your remote at the camera and you will see the flashing of the infra-red beam on the phone’s screen, digital technology making the invisible visible!

I just want to relate an amusing story from this morning. It involves our cat.

I was just walking from my shower feeling all clean when squelch! I stepped in a fresh, warm pile of cat vomit on the lounge room floor. Lovely.

So I hopped on one leg back to the bathroom and got back in the shower to rinse the muck off my foot. Then I got some cleaning stuff and went back to deal with the mess on the floor. That is one advantage of having wooden floors, it would have been a real cleaning challenge on carpet.

Anyway, as I was heading back to the lounge room, I heard a shout. Kai had chosen that moment to get out of bed and as he was walking through the lounge room - you guessed it. So I grabbed him and carried him to the bathroom so he wouldn’t track the stuff through the house.

Finally I got both the child and the floor cleaned up before anyone else came downstairs. The cat of course did not care, he just wanted his breakfast.

Here’s a real weird issue I’m having with my computer’s power supply. My old PSU blew up last week so I went and bought a shiny new CoolerMaster “eXtreme Power” RS-430-PCAR.
Even though it cost twice as much as a generic PSU, I thought I’d get it because it claimed to be very quiet.

It was indeed fairly quiet - for the first hour. Then it started making a high-pitched squealing or whistling noise which set my teeth on edge much like fingernails down a blackboard. All the voltages tested fine and the PC was working perfectly, I just couldn’t bear to be in the same room with it because of the noise.

But now it gets even weirder. I sent the thing back under warranty. UMart were very good about it and replaced the PSU even though they said they could see no problem with it. However when I connected up the new unit, the squeal was still there. Bah!

So I tried it in my old PC where it ran perfectly for 24 hours with no squealing. The old PC’s PSU which is just a cheap Taiwanese thing, runs fine in my new PC so I have simply swapped them.

I’m guessing some kind of oscillation occurs when the PSU is loaded in a particular way depending on the type of motherboard. With all drives and stuff disconnected, it works fine on my old motherboard (an ASUS A7V266) but will squeal with my new Gigabyte 7VT600P-RZ. The squealing noise warbles when the disk is being accessed which supports the theory of the problem being related to the load. I’ve no idea what I can do about it but it just goes to show that buying brand name equipment is not always a good thing.

Hey, its my first blog entry about blogging!!

Blog comment spam is nothing new, I get about 30 per day but a couple of strange blog comments over the last week have made me pause, such as this one from someone called Adam Brody:

I Googled for something completely different,
but found your page...and have to say thanks. nice read....

I initially thought it was a genuine comment but a couple of things made me suspicious:

1. There was no email address given
2. The comment was for my vanity page which has the comment feature turned off
3. The wording was a bit vague, normally people give some idea of why they like my site or which article they are commenting about

I must say I approved the comment the first time, but when I got a second one, I checked my logs. Turns out whoever posted the comment didn’t even look at my site and the IP address matches some other comment spam I have recently received.

Then I checked Google and sure enough, there are loads of people’s blogs with exactly the same comment.

Due to the lack of links for porn sites, loan sharks or drug pushers, this would appear to be simply aimed at promoting the spammer’s own website and getting a little revenue from the Google ads therein. I don’t mind promoting genuine people’s sites but a vague comment cross-posted to every blog in sight is not something a genuine person would do.

UPDATE

While reading up on this a little, I found another theory from Pascal van Hecke that these posts are an attempt to manipulate my blog’s whitelist so future spams can evade detection. Not a bad thought.

Naturally as soon as Ubuntu 6.10 “Edgy Eft” was out, I wanted it. I went to install it on my test machine but found a little issue.

My test PC is an older machine and has 256MB of RAM, not a lot by today’s standards but should be enough to install a basic operating system right ?

Well, even though Ubuntu mentions 128MB as being the minimum memory requirement, the INSTALLER requires 256MB. My machine has onboard graphics, and the graphics eats 64MB of system memory leaving me with only 192MB. The standard installer will not run under these circumstances, it gets as far as the timezone configuration and then just freezes.

If you want to run Edgy with 256MB or less, you will need to get the text-mode installer which is available on the Alternate Install Disc. Which is what I have done. I now have a shiny new Edgy machine. I haven’t played with it much yet but so far it seems pretty nice.

If that last remote control wasn’t stupid enough for you, look at this one. It has a Boss Key !