geek@work

Two Muslims walk into Rebel Sports and start trying on back packs. One turns to the other and says, “Does this make my bomb look big?”

I’ve installed a plugin from FFoC that allows you to dispay images from your Coppermine image gallery.

Over the Xmas break I purchased a Kinoca-Minolta Dimage Z2 digital camera and the random images are the result of this.

Thanks to Gudlyf I may have cured my comment spam problem, I’ve just cleaned out over 600 of the bloody things and don’t want to have to do that again.

The plugin for WordPress is simple enough to install and seems to be working so far.

This plugin displays an image with some random text that the commenter has to enter in order for their comment to go through. This should cut down on any bots out there from spamming your comments area and perhaps remove the need for comment moderation.

NOTE: This version now includes the ability to generate phonetic-English text if you don’t want to (or can’t) create an image. See the README for details.

UPDATE: I seems to work, I haven’t had a single comment spam since installing this plugin.

When flashing your BIOS ensure that the jumper to allow flashing is set to on, otherwise you will end up with a corrupt BIOS and your wife breathing down your neck asking when the computer will be fixed again.

Once again..if it aint broke don’t try and fix it!

If you get the message “unable to load himem.sys” when starting your computer, once again don’t panic. Unplug the keyboard ,straighten the bent pins in the plug, and reboot the computer.

If you get the error message “NTLDR is missing” when starting your machine, don’t panic, just take the non-bootable floppy out of the drive and reboot, DUH!

I’m getting enough comment spam now to warrant writing a script to redirect them, is there any one out there that is interested in using and testing it when it’s done, unfortunately this will be for PHP capable hosts only.

Up to now the WordPress comment spam filter picks them up and puts them into the ‘awaiting approval’ queue which is fine if you only get a few but hopeless if you get more than a few and need to check for false positives.

After a bit of investigation I’ve found that most of the spammers are using annonymous proxies so there is no way to filter using REMOTE_ADDR, REMOTE_HOST, HTTP_VIA, HTTP_X_COMING_FROM, HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR, HTTP_X_FORWARDED, HTTP_COMING_FROM, HTTP_FORWARDED_FOR, HTTP_FORWARDED, HTTP_REFERER, or even HTTP_USER_AGENT as they either don’t exist, are easily spoofed, or are the proxies address which they change at random.

I finally found out how to query the lists of spam servers and open proxies that mail servers use and will write a PHP class and associated include file to run it. If the potential spammer appears in over a certain number of the lists I will return a 404 error otherwise if they only appear in only a few lists they will be redirected to a page explaining what has happened in case some one’s ISP has ended up on one of the lists.

Warning: Blatant suckup follows.

I kept on forgetting that my hosting company Servage has a scheme where for each new customer I refer to them, I get two months credit toward my hosting balance plus 200 Mb of extra web space. The new customer also gets 200 Mb of extra storage (2300 Mb total).
Thanks to Dave David over at Fuddland I got two months free hosting after I suggested Servage when he was looking for a new host.

Some of the features are:

• $7.50 US a month
• Unlimited POP3 Mailboxes
• Unlimited IMAP Mailboxes
• Unlimited E-Mail Forwarders
• SMTP Server
• Online Mail Access (Webmail)
• Catch-All Mailbox
• 2100 MB. Web Space
• 82 GB Transfer
• Unlimited FTP Accounts
• Unlimited MySQL Databases
• PHPMyAdmin
• PHP Support
• GD Support
• SSI Support
• CGI/Perl
• Private CGI-BIN
• Apache ASP Support
• Shockwave & Flash
• Microsoft Frontpage Support
• 1 Domain Included free (or transfer)
• Multiple Domain Hosting
• Unlimited Subdomains
• Own Cronjobs

Go on, you know you want to sign up and help pay for my hosting, all you need to do is say you want to use the coupon cust147.

Yeah right, how the fuck was I supposed to work this out, thank god for Google.

Not Enough Disk Space .
During the installation of the Reader Rabbit’s® title, the message “Not enough disk space” appears. This typically occurs when attempting to install the program to a hard drive that has more than 2 GB’s of free space. The remainder of this technical note describes how to install the program.
Follow the procedure below to install the program.

Verify the system meets the minimum system requirements for the program. If the requirements are met (or exceeded), continue with Step 2.

NOTE: If the system does not meet the minimum system requirements, the program may not install or run properly.

Insert the Reader Rabbit’s® disk into the proper drive and begin the installation.

NOTE: If the installation does not begin, consult the instructions that came with the program to continue.

When the Welcome dialog box appears, click Next. The Software License Agreement will appear.

Click Yes to agree to the terms of the license agreement.

At the Choose Destination Location window, press and hold the CTRL key and click Next. The Select Program Folder dialog box will appear.

Release the CTRL key and follow the onscreen prompts to continue installing the program

I had some fun at the expense of a former classmate from Massey University.