Vista According to the Bastard Operator From Hell

One of the best reviews of Vista I’ve seen yet:

“You should go to Vista.”

“So you like Vista?”

“Not really, no. I run a Vista simulator.”

“Virtual Server?” the Boss asks.

“Nah, I just turned on all the flashy crap in XP, changed the background image, took some memory out of my box and clocked down the CPU. Then broke Media player. Works like a charm.”

“So you don’t like it?”

“No. But it has does have one advantage.”

“What’s that?”

“It causes a clean reinstall of XP which is generally good from a defrag point of view.”

Blatantly copied, unedited, direct from the Bastard Operator From Hell

WP23 - My first glance

Woohoo! The blogroll default links are gone and replaced with something useful!

Nice job guys and gals!

I exported this blog and imported to my home server running XAMPP and the WXR played really nice. I’ve heard stories about crappiness with WXR (WordPress eXtended RSS) but I haven’t had a problem.

I haven’t played with the UTW tag importer yet - I don’t have UTW on the XAMPP build. I might set up a sub-domain of my self-hosted site and have a play later.

Beat The Spammin’ Bastards Into The Ground!

Are you a spammer? Yes? I’ve got a wish for you. I wish someone would create a virus or similar that I could send to your server and nuke it permanently.

Are you a comment spammer? Yes? Read above!

Yep, I, like many many other people hate the comment spammers. I love anti spam applications. Akismet is one of the best. It’s not perfect, but it’s damned good. So far it has blocked over 15,00 spam comments on this blog and 47,000 (!!) on my self-hosted blog. I have Spam Karma 2 helping out Akismet on the main blog too.

Reading the guest bloggers on Lorelle On WordPress (a great read!), John Pozadzides shares most of my feelings about the spammers. On his blog he has introduced a Terms Of Use which he says is working well for him. He asks why we don’t all have them. John, that’s mainly because I don’t get the readership that you do and don’t have a huge comment spam problem. If I did then I would certainly contemplate employing one.

As a postscript to his post he says

(PS - have you installed a HoneyPot yet? Well, what are you waiting for?)

I didn’t know what a “Honey Pot” was, so went and looked. Very simply put, it’s a wider audience intended version of Akismet:

Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.

To participate in Project Honey Pot, webmasters need only install the Project Honey Pot software somewhere on their website. We handle the rest — automatically distributing addresses and receiving the mail they generate. As a result, we anticipate installing Project Honey Pot should not increase the traffic or load to your website.

We collate, process, and share the data generated by your site with you. We also work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers. Harvesting email addresses from websites is illegal under several anti-spam laws, and the data resulting from Project Honey Pot is critical for finding those breaking the law.

Anything I can do to help out killing off spam I will most certainly do. Thankfully, in the site that John linked to was a link to a WordPress Plugin called httpbl. this does the job of Honey Pot without having to work it outside WordPress. This means it’s the usual upload and activate routine. Nice and simple, a five minute job.

If you’re self hosted then go get the plugin, install it and join the war against spammers!

Blogging Is Addictive

The side of the box says it all:

Thanks to Random Ramblings for the graphic.

Why Corporations Ban JPG In Email

So, you’re at work and a friend sends you an email with a couple of pictures attached. When you receive the email, no pictures. Whilst not surprising, it’s still annoying:

“Why? They’re harmless. It’s photos of his new car. Nothing sinister. Please can I have the pictures?”

The admin refuses. You call the admin all sorts of names thinking that he’s a grumpy nerd who simply spoils everyone’s fun. Actually, he’s not. Apart from the obvious, these files aren’t work related and they could be porn (yes, it happens!) there is a potentially more sinister reason. The image JPEG could have files hidden within it. These files could be anything, plain text, a virus, an MP3, instructions for blowing something up. Worse than that, most anti-virus applications don’t recognise the embedded file and ignore it without flagging it to the user.

Here’s an example. The Windows 98 Blue Screen of Death image at the bottom of my previous post isn’t as innocent as it looks. Embedded within that picture there is a hidden file that looks like this:

And this is the content of that file:

Think I’m kidding? I’m not. This post, this image:

Try it for yourself. You will need Winrar or something to open a RAR file. (Windows users) Right click and save the image to your desktop then right click it on your desktop and choose Open With, locate “Winrar” in the list and click. I won’t give Linux users instructions as they are 1337.

Scary isn’t it! That’s why Admins ban jpeg attachments. And because all IT admins are complete bastards…

Geek Tattoos

I am a geek. I freely admit that, have no problem with it at all. Why? Because I’m not a nerd. What’s the difference? Well, there’s two versions:

A Geek is a nerd with a social life.

And this version from Wil Wheaton’s son Ryan that I saw this morning:

Nerds don’t know they’re nerds, but geeks know they’re geeks, and they embrace it.

So, when you get a Windows 98 BSOD tattoo you MUST be a geek. There’s no way not to embrace it with a tattoo like this.

Found via ModBlog, this is the exact text from a Blue Screen of Death, circa 1994. I’m really not too sure what it’s supposed to mean. Perhaps Paul was just bored, or maybe he was feeling nostalgic for the death of yet another Windows 98 installation.

Just in case you’re interested, this is the where he got the text. Even the memory address matches:

Update: The first comment here is from Sam Rulz, the tattoist who inked Paul’s arm. She has written about it in her MySpace blog here. Awesome information, thanks Sam.

The Evil Of The Dot Doc Format

Everyone’s heard of Microsoft. Everyone’s heard of MS Word. Some people think that MS Word is the most evil piece of software ever created. I suspect this was written by a Linux geek:

* Proprietary format which can only be read if you’ve got specific software
* Are helping Microsoft take over the world
* Unnecessary
* BLOATWARE

As most people that use Microsoft Word (not corporate users) tend to use a ripped off version, it’s only helping MS take over the world as “everybody” uses it.

Unneccessary? Bullshit. The computer generation needed a decent wordprocessor. Microsoft provided that. Did you ever try using Word Perfect?

Proprietary format? Maybe. But there are many many other applications that can read the .doc format this argument is pretty much moot.

Bloatware? Yes. This fact I can’t disagree with. Write something in MS Word and then copy and paste the full text into a WordPress blog bost “write” window. You won’t see the bloat, but the extra code that gets put in can really screw with the post.

These recommendations are from the original post for freeing yourself of MS Word:

1. For any file that’s plain text with no fancy formatting (italics, bold etc), send as .TXT

2. For text files with fancy bits in, send as HTML (.htm), or as an early form of rich text format which you have reason to expect the other person has something generic to read it with.

3. For photographs, use .JPG (which is surprisingly compact)

4. For images which are solid graphics, use .GIF or .PNG (.PNG is better and is free of the patent/copyright problems associated with .GIF)

All reasonable suggestions with a couple of major problems. Most of it is utter shit. While I agree with all the points given these recommendations do absolutely NOTHING for the person that wants to write a letter and then print it.

1. Plain text will not support the layout formatting that most require for letters.
2. Most people do not know how to write HTML. Who the hell wants to spend a couple of hours writing HTML to format a letter, print it and then delete it. I’m sorry, but Word is just so much better at it.

As for recommendations for 3 and 4, who uses Word for photos in the first place? Nobody with any ounce of sense. If the user is taking photos from their camera then the camera usually comes with some sort of imaging software that does the job. Solid graphics? Not usually created with Word anyway!

My recommendations?

If you want to avoid MS Word altogether (and it’s no bad thing if you do!) use OpenOffice. It’s free and it does 99% of what MS Office does anyway.

Image manipulation? The GIMP. Again, it’s open source and allows you to do most of the things you need to your photos and graphics.