Escaped Thoughts

Over the last couple of weeks, my comment-spam filter has been breaking down. Considering how basic a test it was, I'm pretty surprised it held up as long as it did; it relied on the fact that the strategy of the bots was very dumb: grab the page, parse it, and submit. It happened so quickly that it was pretty easy to distinguish from a valid comment, since rarely do real people submit a comment within a handful of seconds of loading the page. Now, as I've been expecting for some time, the bot pattern has changed to: grab a bunch of pages to parse, wait a minute or so, then post to all of them. They are even smart enough to make sure that although they are rotating through proxies to prevent IP-filtering, they always match up the proxy that requested the page and the proxy used to post the comment, so there's no obvious attack point there.

So now I've implemented another silly trick that shouldn't really work in general, but will in fact catch all of the spam that's been slipping in recently. Hopefully that will hold until I decide what my next big gun will be.

Category: Geek

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Yesterday was the anniversary of a very special day: that's right, it's was the anniversary of Kentucky's official statehood. And what's so special about that, you ask? I'll tell you: it set things up so that exactly 210 years later, I would have the exceeding good fortune to marry a wonderful native of that state. And here I am four years later, and still thrilled with my luck. Kentucky knows how to grow them right.

(And a happy belated anniversary also to Duncan and Kris, who have excellent taste in wedding days if I do say so myself.)

Category: Life

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I just spend 10 or 15 minutes trying to figure out why I couldn't get a mini ethernet network set up between my laptop and my iMac (to transfer some large files without waiting forever to do it over the wireless network I use for most things). No matter what I did, I just couldn't get the machines to see each other—in fact, I couldn't even get the iMac to show the ethernet port as anything but inactive. I even unplugged and replugged the network cable, to make sure it wasn't something stupid like a loose wire.

If only it had been something that stupid, instead of something much, much stupider. You see, I'm very used to my G4, with the tower on the floor next to my desk, and the monitor on my desk. And because I haven't yet decommissioned the G4, the tower is still sitting next to my desk. Right next to where I set the laptop down. And the iMac really does look like it's just a monitor. I think we can all see where this is going...

Lesson learned: plugging in the ethernet cable is good, but it's even better to plug it into the right computer.

Category: Geek

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