I’ve been noticing a sharp upturn in comment spam including bizarre references to gmail servers, such as www2-2.gmail.com and I can’t figure out what’s up.
The comments are archetypical spam comments, but the message, instead of containing links to products, contains several similar links to gmail servers. I generally still shoot on sight, but I’m curious what the purpose is. If any of you have been leaving comments like that, take the time to explain why, please?
My local PBS station is carrying this show, and I caught three episodes last night. It’s a passable mystery, though I have to admit I’m usually at least 15 minutes ahead of the detectives, so I can’t say it’s plotted very well.
But it was good to see Felicity Kendall in action again. Sigh. I really had something for her back when we were both young. Good Neighbors. I scoured the video stores for episodes of Solo. And she still looks good today. Deeper Sigh.
Now, if they ever did a buddy series with Felicity Kendall and Lis Sladen, I don’t think my heart could take it.
I just filled a 30-gallon paper recycling tub with old magazines. Constitutes a bit of a breakthrough for me, personally. I’ve finally internalized the absolute fact that history does not depend upon my personal archives.
It’s part of a continual war on clutter that I’m engaged in. I’m in the process of reclaiming my house from the detritus of 15 years of living in it (and 50+ years of living, period). We’ve joked here in the manor that we would enter DIYNet’s America’s Biggest Packrat contest, but it wouldn’t be fair for professionals to compete with amateurs. (To put that comment in context, I’ll point out the 30 gallons of paper recycling came out of one closet in the manor, and the closet is still overfull, and even has some magazines left in it.
Through it all I’ve had one constant guiding question. “What Would Hellen Do?” I’ve had more imaginary conversations with Hellen Buttigieg than I can count. If you’re not familiar with her, check out her TV show, neat. (And if you’re not, it proves you haven’t been paying attention.)
Slowly I’m slouching towards a less-encumbered life. RPG collectors may want to keep an eye out; I was in that hobby almost when it started and I’ve got five boxes of material slated to go to auction as soon as I can clear enough space to take some decent photos of it.
Since i throw rocks without hesitation, I should be equally quick to acknowledge progress.
Drupal 4.7 includes a new module installation bit, which is a very big step forward from the previous version. It’s actually friendy, something I’ve not run across very often before. Since I’ve compared Drupal and Joomla before on this blog, it’s only fair I do it again.
Add new module to Drupal:
Add new module to Joomla:
The two procedures are similar in complexity. Though Joomla doesn’t require you to copy the files up there first, it does require you to fill out a form with the file to upload. Joomla’s still seems subjectively easier because you do it all from within the web site’s interface, but the difference is hardly significant.
Now if only Drupal had a “remove” function that would clean up after the installation. The tables the module requires are still left in the db. If the module installer is well written, that won’t be a problem, but Drupal leaves the install code up to the module writer, rather than having every install follow a standard procedure. Makes for a high risk of variability in the installation of modules.
Nonetheless, it’s a distinct step forward for Drupal. Well done.
I’ve been having intermittent email outages at a client site that I’ve been trying for months to diagnose. Finally managed to get my hands on enough information to do so, and I find the problem is spamcop.
The client has a lot of field people, who have yahoo email accounts. The web hosting service the client’s domain is on subscribes to spamcop. And among the million or so email yahoo emailers is a spammer.
So, spamcop blacklists one of the Yahoo email servers, effectively shutting down communication between my client and the field people. Server blacklisting is effective when aimed at an organization, but in the case of Yahoo, or Google, or any one of the large concentation email servers out there, it fails. It punishes thousands, even millions, of people because of the misdeeds of one, hardly an efficient measure.
Yes, I’m familiar with the contention that this sort of “death penalty” is meant to be sure hosts police their customers. But it’s hogwash, pure and simple. If we start with the assumption that a company can predict with 99.999% accuracy whether a potential customer is a spammer (completely bogus, I’d expect a number far less than 90% to be more likely) that still means that one customer in 100,000 will get misdiagnosed. Which is still enough to keep a server like Yahoo or Google blacklisted forever.
Remember, the spammer doesn’t care if the server gets blackisted; he just moves on to another server. It’s only the poor suckers who have built a contact list based on that email address that get burned. It’s like nuking Kabul to get bin Laden; you kill lots of innocent bystanders while the real target slips away, laughing.
Yes, spam is a problem. But so is this. Yes, if they hang ’em all, they’ll get the guilty. But before you applaud, think: that means they’re going to hang you, too.
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Aug | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 | 31 | ||||