kasia in a nutshell

It appears that comment spam is here to stay, and attacking the source produces little to no results. Best we can do is get rid of the pesky trash they throw our way and move on with our lives.

The more we delete - the less reason they have to continue, so with all this diligence why is the spam still around? Because not everyone appears to care. Those who don't are the ones providing the spammers a reason to continue flooding our personal web space with their greasy messages full of slimy urls. I see no reason why anyone should put up with spam in their weblog unless it's pure, old laziness. Enough is enough, there are plenty of ways you can deal with it.

• Just delete them as they arrive, this is easy if you only get a few and becomes tedious and bothersome quickly.
• If you use MT, Jay Allen's mt-blacklist is your friend. Install it, use it, learn to love it.
• Close off older entries to comments. This will cut down on your spam considerably as the weasels usually arrive via google searches. Jeremy has a tip on that.
• Require registration to comment - I hate this one, but if it's the only way for you, whatever, just do it.

Sounds like bothersome, tedious work? That's because it is, but when you open your site to the public and allow them to leave a mark on your pages you have to take the responsibility to make sure your site is not hurting the community -- otherwise you're just a selfish amoeba and need an attitude readjustment. If you don't want to do this, don't enable comments, simple as that. Just like running a mail server brings forth the responsibility of making sure spammers cannot use you, so does running a weblog, a guestbook or a forum site. Make sure spammers have no reason to target us.

One may ask, is this reallly such a big problem? You bet your sweet linux box, here's a sampling of weblog authors who appear to not give a hoot:

A few thousand words on India or a few dozen casino links?
Addicted to DSLReports or just spam?
Happy New Year and happy spam!
Good advice can I have some viagra with that?
Apparently Safari MT bookmarklet solution is playing blackjack.
Typepad isn't bug free but this entry is sure full of spam!
You also missed a hell of a lot of spam.
I don't know what this says but I know spam when I see it.
Live Journal users are not immune.
The spam post.

This just in a quick google search, I could probably dig up a few hundred more if I was so motivated. Maybe if I do a set of links like this once a week some will get embarrassed enough to clean up their act. If they notice.. not like they noticed all the spam they're hosting.

Note: If you're an owner of one of the above weblogs and came here from a trackback ping I left you, hiya, I'm glad I got your attention, now clean up please, you're helping spammers.

Posted by kasia at 07:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (2)

Every color theme I pick looks beautiful on the powerbook and utterly sucks elsewhere.. so you know what? You should all just buy macs.

Er, actually, I've a bunch of stylesheets and will add a cookie-setting-style-sheet-switching thingy given time and motivation tomorrow. For now I might just keep switching them every hour or so to drive my visitors crazy.

How can anyone do graphical design on a mac? There's obviously some distorted view of the universe using these machines, because the ugliest color combinations look just fine.. It's really quite depressing.

Posted by kasia at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (20)

These looked a lot better on my powerbook, now that I'm at work I see they look more yellow than tan and frankly too bright. So tonight I'll create several versions and see what works best.

I should learn that macs make everything look a lot better than any other pc.. I've noticed this before.

Posted by kasia at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

After neglecting it for months, I have finally upgraded my gallery to something more current, mainly version 1.4.2.

It appears that previous versions have a serious security issue, so if you're running gallery, grab a newer one. The upgrade process is dirt simple (essentially, untar over old files, re-run config and upgrade albums through links on the page).

Thanks to David for a reminder to get off my behind and do this.

Posted by kasia at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I'm attempting to do something a bit more interesting with my stylesheet and since I don't feel like setting up a test copy I'm doing it on the live one.

Update: No, this isn't the final look, I'm just playing.

Posted by kasia at 11:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Diego muses on the percentages of very qualified women vs men in fields like Computer Science:

if, say you have a CS class of 40 people, maybe 5 at most would be women. But of those five women, two would be very good. And there would be maybe three, at most four good computer-scientists-in-brewing on the boys' side.

There is actually a very simple answer to this. A woman has to work twice as hard and be twice as good as the average man to get anywhere in a male-dominated field. I know only a few female programmers but they're all very good if not excellent.. can't really say that for majority of the male programmers I know.

I had a perfect example of the different expectations today as I was upset over what I felt was a mistreatment at work and one of the reactions I received was "you're being bitchy".. It wouldn't have occured to the same person to say that if I was a man, but there is always a slant when the other gender is involved.. This is probably not a intentional or even a conscious decision, it's just how our society has predispositioned us to think.

Women have to be smart and tough to make it in CS. That's why the percentages are so much higher.

Posted by kasia at 09:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

Richard Stallman was nice enough to give a talk at the Greater Hartford GLUG meeting. It was tempting enough and I braved the drive through Hartford during rush hour and attended. I'm glad I went. Everyone knows the history of gnu and linux but it's always good to hear it from the proverbial "horse's mouth".

Stallman is a good speaker, throws in enough humorous references to keep the crowd interested and is anything but boring. I suppose I could summarize his stance on non-disclosure agreements (they're bad), free software (free as in freedom not free beer) and general state of software development today, but that's really easy to find on the web in numerous papers and books he's written, so I won't.

I agree with much of what he says. I believe in open source, I think software patents are ultimately evil and I think the government has no business bending over for corporations and passing laws like the DMCA. I don't think *all* software has to necessarily be free. There is room in our communities for both. I can't imagine excellent products like Photoshop (gimp is nice, but it's not photoshop) and autocad would ever come into existence if all software was free. Support fees only go so far for products like these. Companies other than hardware manufacturers need an incentive to create good, professional software and income is probably the best one of them all.

These companies have the right to write software, keep the source private and charge money for it, but they do not have the right (this is in my view, not in legal terms) to tell the users how they can or cannot use their software. They should be responsible for flaws and lack of quality. Most of all, they do not have the right to invade, control or do anything to the user's computer just because their software is on the machine. I think it's a quote from "Good Omens".. "The devil should learn to write agreements from the software manufacturers".

The halo on Saint InGNUcius's head? I was right.. it's a hard drive plate.

Posted by kasia at 07:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

.. states that a closed door and a cat exert a gravitational force of attraction at each other. Due to this force an action of closing a door will produce a reaction of a cat scratching at it. The location of the cat in reference to the door (side a or b) is not relevant.

Posted by kasia at 01:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (4)

If one ever searched for a perfect candidate for the professorate of absent-mindedness they would come up with me at the top of the list. My picture should be in the dictionary next to the definition. I should be awarded the honorary title just based on the first thirty years of my life. When you combine that with my amazing powers of observation (not) and the incredible ability to be oblivious to my surroundings it's a wonder I survived into adulthood. Particularly considering all the experiments I did when studying electricity through home-made lamps and assorted lethal devices around the age of ten.

That's all normal (for me) but it is amazing that I also happen to be an inexhaustible fountain of useless knowledge. Have a topic? I probably know some completely weird and useless factoid about it. When I was in grade school I used to win quiz contests with one half of my brain focused on some incredibly stupid and dangerous experiment and the other half wondering if the cute boy from the other team likes me. I can name authors of books I never read, Latin names for plants I've never seen and quote from movies nobody cares about. All this before my first morning coffee.

I'm often asked "How do you know all this".

I don't know. Really, it all just accumulates in my brain pushing out useful information, like simple regular expressions, the last location of my car keys and the fact that I promised to finish up a certain project. And that's just an example from today's afternoon, morning was more exhaustive.

It's not easy to reconcile these things. How can I remember lyrics to songs I haven't heard in fifteen years but not remember a simple algorithm I've used many times in the last three years? I can name the capital of Manchuria but didn't notice a coworker came by and left a note on my desk while I was sitting there (no headphones involved). I can say "happy new year" in Cantonese but forget my mom's birthday.

One of the childhood stories my mom loves to tell everyone involves me at around the age of twelve, a small storage area and a vacuum cleaner she sent me for. I went there, didn't see it, came back, "no, no, it's there, look again". I looked.. didn't find it, she came with me, the damn thing was right in the middle of the room and only a blind person could miss it. I'm not blind, I'm just incredibly oblivious to my surroundings.

There might be some medical term for this - but for once, I don't know what it could be. Maybe it's part of the Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder.

Posted by kasia at 07:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (4)

Jeremy, Derek and I running the New York Marathon together. Me dressed in shorts, pantyhose and an evening-wear blouse.

No, I did not smoke anything before bed.

Posted by kasia at 08:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

This is only useful to those who use Scarab bug-tracking software and are not happy with its e-mail handling options. Might also be useful to those who wish to mock my perl (I'm a Java-programmer, dammit).

Scarab e-mail filtering script. That write-up probably leaves a lot to be desired, but it's a start. This filter has been in place at work since mid-December and so far everyone is satisfied with it.

Posted by kasia at 09:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I cannot imagine anyone out there hasn't figured this out yet.. but postfix just totally and completely rocks. After years of dealing with the hell that is sendmail this is a breath of fresh air.

I wanted to configure postfix to listen on two ports (smtp and 26) for those whose ISPs block outgoing port 25 and turns out it was a one liner change.. how great is that.

In master.cf:

26 inet n - n - - smtpd
# postfix reload

Done.

Posted by kasia at 03:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

It appears I missed a whole new trend in online discussions. Me! The queen (well, former) of IRC and forum discussion boards! Lately, the flamer on usenet! (It was one post and they really got under my skin, I already repented).

::emotion depiction::

When did this happen? It's not that I'm scared or bemused or even petrified by a new trend.. it's that it completely and utterly went right by me and I didn't notice it until very recently. What happened there? Am I no longer on the memo list?

Man, I guess this is what it felt like to our parents.

*sigh*

er, ::sigh::

Posted by kasia at 11:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Maciej "Why I like Poland". That was an unexpected joy to read.. I haven't been to Poland in fifteen years and I'm quite sure it has changed more than just a little since the fall of communism but it's good to read about all those little things I remember so well.

What I miss most about Poland and think about on regular basis? Common courtesy.

No one enters a store, house or a train until all those leaving have a chance to leave. I hate how in US people always push their way in.

On a train or a bus, a young person would never sit while an older one is standing (or a man when a woman is).

A pregnant woman or one with a small child is not only given the right of way, but also a first place in long lines in stores. During communism and food shortages, lines would last for hours (that's each person waiting for hours on end to buy something as basic as toilet paper) but this courtesy was still always observed.

One would never enter someone's house in their outdoor shoes (or your own house for that matter, that's what slippers are for) that's just beyond rude.

I still do all these things and get the funniest looks from people sometimes when I give up my seat in a crowded room to an older person. After fifteen years, I'm still very much Polish. I wish more people were.

Posted by kasia at 08:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (1)

This is a really cute tshirt but someone made a boo-boo..

"There's no place like ~/" would have been much more logical.

Posted by kasia at 06:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)