Comment Spam

10/26/08 08:47:20 am

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When I first put comment forms on my site, I thought comment spam would be a big deal; something I'd have to write complex filters to deter, while still keeping watch for crafty bots that would surely get past the defenses.  So I started off with a homemade CAPTCHA and some content filtering rules that look for specific "bad words" - if you have too many of these words in your post, it'll be either held for moderation or rejected outright.

Nowadays, I have gotten rid of the CAPTCHA because it was pointless; a few spam comments had made it past, but once I added their key words to the filter, it seems like forever since I've gotten any spam.  Really?  Blocking spam is as simple as a word filter?  Seems that way.  I've read about all these complicated methods... hidden input fields, "confirmation" input fields, asking random questions... but why go to that trouble, and make your user jump through some silly hoops, when you can unobtrusively and effectively nail spam by checking the submission's content?

But... there is one type of spam that has managed to get past my filter lately... and I don't get it.  It's just a bunch of random letters.  There are some URLs, but they are composed of completely random letters as well.  What is the point of this spam?  Have blog-spamming advertisers given up on actual advertisements and decided to vengefully annoy us instead?  I'm rather curious here...  In any case, a little Googling and I've found the suggestion to add a filter for "five consonants in a row" to catch this kind of spam.  That ought to do it.

Chrome, Spore, iPhone?

09/13/08 05:39:24 pm

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Google released a new browser last week, called Chrome. Gave it a shot, and while it's certainly the fastest browser I've seen yet, it holds no real enticement for power users due to its lack of customization and extensibility. And while Google promises that add-ons are forthcoming, I can't see them being too pleased with a potential AdBlock for Chrome. Not that their displeasure will prevent the release of such things, but a nice part of Mozilla's approach is that you can find nearly any available add-on on their centralized site, and that top-recommended extensions - such as AdBlock - are brought to the forefront for your consumption. I can't see Google mimicking a distribution center like that without some restrictions. Still, if you want a very fast browser and don't care about add-ons and such, Chrome might be a good choice for you.

I have been playing Spore, which has sparked a great deal of controversy over its DRM restrictions, while failing to impress some anticipating reviewers. I for one enjoy the game, not so much for the gameplay which is indeed pretty simplistic (so far - I've heard the Space stage gets a bit tougher), but for the fun of taking your single-celled organism and designing iteration after iteration up into a full-blown creature of your own imagination. It's like building that monster out of play-dough when you were a kid, but then having it come to life. If you don't find fun in that sort of thing, then no, you probably wouldn't enjoy Spore. As for the DRM, I agree that it's ridiculous, but I love the logic leap that people make when they say, "well the DRM is awful, so I'm telling everyone to pirate it instead." While I won't say that such a sentiment is right, it's true: this generation can and will pirate something - music, movies, games - if it doesn't like the restrictions placed upon it by its owner(s). That's not going to change, and I think publishers would do themselves a favor to wise up and realize that things like DRM are only hurting their legitimate customers.

Finally, I got an iPhone. Well, not so much "got," as "was provided with." My cell phone is currently a courtesy of my employer, and up until now I was sporting another smartphone, the Treo 755p. It had so many weird problems I don't know where to begin listing 'em. Worst of all, it would often reboot upon receiving an incoming call. It would tell me I had "insufficient memory" when as far as I could tell, more than half the memory was free. It once erased everything on the expansion miniSD card I put into it. And as something of a finale, when I was gathering up my contact info to transfer to the new phone, I noticed it had - for no known reason - assigned my special ringtone for personal contacts to just about everyone on my contact list. In short, it was a device I could force into working, but never really enticed me to want to work with it.

Others in the office seemed to feel similarly only meagerly satisfied with their phones, so when they found out the new iPhone 3G supports MS Exchange (an essential), the switch was quickly approved. While I'm not an Apple fan (this is, in fact, the first Apple product I have ever owned), I must admit this thing is leaps and bounds over my previous smartphone in almost every way. I love how the browser is a real browser, rather than the poor excuse for one that most phones have which will ruin the page layout and can't handle Javascript or any other web technology more advanced than HTML. The touch screen in general is just a good idea too... I love scrolling with my finger, zooming in and out with double-clicks, and just pushing stuff to use it rather than having to navigate there with directional keys as I once did. There are some gripes as well - why no video camera? why no copy and paste? - but overall it's probably the best thing you can get for the money in smartphones.

Flash Forward 2008

08/31/08 03:55:03 pm

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Last weekend, Rirath and I attended the Flash Forward conference in San Francisco. It was our first time attending, but apparently in years past the conference has had multiple tracks so you could pick your speakers throughout the day. Not this year though; only one track, so you're all gonna hear from the same people whether you've any interest in them and their work or not. I know David Carson has quite the list of credentials, but there was little conveyed through his hour long presentation other than "here is my portfolio of print work from the 80s; let's all look through it together." Similarly, a couple of developers from Disney.com took an hour to tell you about... Disney.com, and how special and cool all of their Flash work is. Well, yeah, it's pretty impressive, but again, give us something to take away other than "look how cool our website is." Obviously they can't give away Disney's code, but tell us about how you made it, how the challenges were overcome; give the rest of us poor saps some advice. A few other presentations also felt more like a sales pitch than anything else...

But that's not to say there was nothing good going on. Surprisingly, some of my favorite presenters spoke more about ideology than about Flash specifically. Hoss Gifford gave a wonderful talk about user interfaces and simplicity; how there is such a thing as over-simplifying (I'm looking at you, Apple hockey-puck mouse), but that at times you have to insist on your design as the right choice (apparently the iPod click wheel received much criticism in early user testing, but they went forward with it anyway and now it's the standard that so many players try to copy). Lynda Weinman (of Lynda.com, of course) also gave a thought-provoking talk about education in the internet age. Our educational system really needs a revamp in light of current technologies and new learning methods; not all of the current practices need to go, but concepts such as on-demand and branching learning, and especially teaching students how to find knowledge rather than rote memorization of it, need to be integrated with the learning process.

There were others I enjoyed as well, and perhaps I'll expand this post (or write another) later. Well, I'll drop one more in for now, since you can go see his neat artwork on his site: Erik Natzke. Overall it was a worthwhile experience, though I would likely favor a return to the multiple tracks style of conference.

As for the website here, it may seem like I'm neglecting it, but really I'm spending more time than usual on it... offline. There should be some big changes coming along soon. In the meantime, forgive me if there aren't a lot of new skins being posted.

Vista, Comic Con, jQuery

08/02/08 04:48:02 pm

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I might've made this post last weekend, but my draft of it was sitting in an unsaved window when Vista decided to reboot itself in the middle of the night for updates. It's a new computer, so I hadn't turned that setting off yet, but it's always been something I hate about Windows - don't turn off my computer without my say-so.

On that note though, having had this computer for about a month now, I don't see what all the negative fuss about Vista is for. I can't name anything specific to complain about, and certain tasks are easier than they were in XP. I can understand that perhaps people were hoping for some innovation from Microsoft (...wait, really?), and this "Midori" project sounds interesting (if anything ever comes of it), but it seems like if you were fine with XP, you should be fine with Vista; it's just another iteration in Windows.

Anyway, on to whatever my original topic was... Ah yes, Comic Con. It came to town last weekend, as it does every year around that time, and it feels like the internet has descended upon San Diego. All the niche-popularity webcomic authors, media companies hawking sci-fi entertainment, anime product retailers passing out cat ears, and dorks dressed up as MySpace.com (true story) flood into our little downtown enclave... which isn't so little, really, but feels moreso when there are an additional 125,000 people in town.

Myself and Rirath attended the con on Sunday morning, browsed the expo floor for a few hours, and saw John Cho and Kal Penn (of Harold and Kumar fame) on a panel, where they were quite amusing. Neil Patrick Harris was supposed to be there too, but apparently skipped town to go direct a play in London, boo :P

Commentators are starting to wonder whether the "comic" is going out of "Comic Con," to which I must say, "you're only just starting to think that?" Last year was the first time I went, but it had the same feeling as this year, where the TV, movie and video game attractions seem bigger, louder and better than the comparatively plain comic book booths. Personally I can't say I'm opposed to this though; digital media is of greater interest to me. If the comic guys pull out of Comic Con, I'm sure they'll be missed... but not by everyone.

In other news, I'm working on some website development (...for this site, I mean), so I may not be updating with much content for awhile... but hang in there. I've adopted, and am really enjoying writing in jQuery. Javascript is such a cumbersome language that I'm usually reluctant to use, but jQuery makes it make sense. Why put up with some convoluted method of DOM selection in plain JS, when jQ makes use of the CSS selectors we already know? It's intuitive, which JS never has been for me before.

Cleaning Up the URLs

04/08/08 06:45:24 pm

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I have been tinkering with the site's .htaccess directives to change the URLs from variable-laden to "clean" versions, because it's user and search engine friendly. This might cause some links to go AWOL however, since well-defined redirection rules can be tricky business. If you find a link that's not taking you where you expect it to, please email me (or leave a comment on this post) with the full URL you used. Don't tell me about the links in the RSS feed though - I know about those already.

Winamp Classic Viscolor Tool

04/03/08 02:34:17 am

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I'm not highly skilled with Javascript, and it's somewhat amusing to me that it's an in-demand skill at all. Back in the day, we all hated Javascript because, as far as we could tell, its only use was for annoying, useless things like pop-up greetings or animated page transitions. But now JS is back in vogue, most often touted through "AJAX," and people... like it. Huh. Go figure.

Anyway, the point of my ramblings is to say I spent some time Javascripting over the previous weekend. Here is the fruit of my work: a viscolor.txt generator for making Winamp Classic skins. Up until now I have been making my viscolor files manually... it's stupid, I know, but it's why so many of my visualizers feature flat-color bars and backgrounds. But I went Googling for an automated maker, and didn't find anything particularly useful. When such a problem presents itself to me, I just do it myself. ^^;

So, hopefully that can be of use to any fellow skinners out there. If not, it's still useful to me. Huzzah!

...Oh yes, it doesn't seem to work in IE, of course... Maybe I'll try to fix that later. But really, use Firefox.

Edit: fixed in IE, mostly. But still, Firefox.

A Little Discourse - ASP

03/13/07 09:54:57 pm

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I have to use ASP for the site I work on (the site I am employed to work on, that is - not this one, of course). This was not my choice; in fact, this was the first time I'd ever used it. Though I am glad for the chance to have learned it on the job (perhaps the best way that I learn code: through analyzing, modifying and eventually wholly taking over a complex working example), I must say... I dislike it.

I think my main gripe is that it doesn't follow normal syntax structures. It tries to be "user friendly" with a more "human readable" syntax (or that seems to be the rationale, anyway). I, personally, have never known a code writer who complained of their choice language being syntactically hard to grasp, whereas conversely I've heard nothing but displeasure over languages that try to pull this sort of "easy to follow" nonsense. But maybe I've only known more-experienced coders? Is this sort of things supposed to be good for beginners? ... Wait a minute, why would a beginner start with ASP?

Which brings me to my next point - if you search for ASP-related questions, you're likely to turn up few [useful] results, or a lot of results for ASP.NET instead. It's not hard to understand why you can easily find so much more help on a language like PHP: people use it! *ahem* This is not to say, "no one uses ASP," but whereas PHP often comes standard on any decent hosting package, encouraging its increased usage, ASP tends to be a pricey add-on that only businesses want for no inherent reason. Yeah, that may be a bit too far for me to speak, as a n00b of the language. But bringing it back around to my point - your typical web scripting beginner is going to use what's at hand, and that is not likely to be ASP.

And even if that were so, is it a good idea for beginners to learn with what will become "bad habits" if they go on to any other language? Admittedly, after weeks of nothing but ASP, I'll turn back to PHP and write an if statement with a single = sign, or end a line without a proper ; delimiter. Oh the shame, the shame of it all!

Alright, I'm done here. Hooray for Asian Kung Fu Generation! Oh, and an aside, some new skin site links added recently: Shadows of Deception has a Clover skin that I've had for the longest time and was surprised to so suddenly find its owner. INERTiA is pretty small so far, but has good stuff - particularly some Death Note skins, which can't be found here ^^; (maybe later...)