Three posts I posted over the past week or so each received some Trackback Spam today: 
The bizarre thing is that the URI of each of them is http://spam.com Which is the SPAM (ie, the food, Spiced Ham!) homepage.
I came across an interesting bug in iCal/Missing Sync/PalmOS the other day. It seems that PalmOS does not like the first character of a field to be the null character (\0). Having such a character in a field is okay if you are just viewing a record, but if you edit such a record you will get a nasty crash. It actually took me quite some time to figure out what was going on, but more importantly, how to fix it. I was lucky in a sense, as the records I was having issues with were all Contacts (Address Book entries). To begin with I thought it was a problem with Agendus, and I tried reinstalling all of my data and applications. No good. Eventually I figured out what was actually going on. As far as I can tell, it all came from the import of data I did a week or so ago. Except that at least one record other than these was also affected. To solve it was simple. Drag the affected records out of Address Book and then drag the generated file back in. Apparently Address Book’s Export As vCard has better data checking than the import. Come to think of it, it may have been the ABImporter I used.
Daisy Duke Dances For You. Best. Thing. Ever. (Thanks to Ash Green for the link!)
Spam has become the bane of the connected world. Whilst it is simple for a human to be able to decide if an object (email, comment, trackback) is Spam, it appears that computers have a harder time of it. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that Spam exists at all. It relies on some sort of a payoff for the Spammer: for email Spam this must mean that people actually buy the crap they advertise. My Gmail Spam folder is bulging as we speak: I seem to get around 400 Spam emails per month. Almost all of these are automatically picked up by Gmail’s Spam filter - but this filter also picks up several Ham (or legitimate emails) in the average month. The majority of these are bounced emails: almost by default all bounced replies end up as Spam, since a common occurrence seems to be for Spammers to use real (other people’s) email addresses as the From: address, resulting in a whole bunch of Undeliverable Mail messages bouncing back to that person. Usually, this is not a problem, as most people I email I get the address right. However, as I have just taken over administration of a Sporting Organisation’s member list, I now get several bounced emails each time I do a mailout - I’m going through pruning addresses each time, but people’s addresses are often lapsing. Profit from comment and trackback Spam is a little different. Rather than getting people to buy things from them, these Spammers rely on clicks or links to make money. The second has been largely overcome in many circles by the rel=”nofollow” tag, however, unless use of this is universal, Spammers may still make money. The way linking makes money is largely by improving PageRank™, or prestige in Search Engines. The first one relies on users to click on links, and visit sites. If enough users do this, then it could concieveably make a significant amount of money for the Spammers. I’ve had some comment and trackback Spam where the URI isn’t even valid, so I’m not so sure how well this works for Spammers. I seem to have overcome the issues I had with comment Spam - just requiring users to have JavaScript activated seems to be enough for now. And if the Spammers catch on, then I’ll re-implement the catchpa. That leaves trackback Spam. This is the one that is causing me the most grief now. At least it’s not as bad as email Spam (in volume, anyway) on my blog. I’ll get around about 6-10 Spam trackbacks in a given month. I’m not sure how many Ham trackbacks I get - not too many, IIRC. I may turn trackbacks off, if I cannot come up with a decent solution.
When editing RewriteRules, it’s important to remember this: rules which appear first tend to take priority. For instance, I discovered that the rules for http://schinckel.net/200_n_/page/_n_/ style URIs were missing. What was happening was the .htaccess file was finding the closest rule it could. The trick for finding what it’s actually doing under Blogsome is to have this code in your template:
{foreach from=$smarty.server.argv item=var}
{$var}
{/foreach}
This code will print out what the server is receiving. In the case of the URI: http://schinckel.net/2005/page/2/ it’s being sent:
wpblog=schinckel&year=2005&monthnum=&day=&name=page&page=2
The important part here is that the name of the post is being set to ‘page’. Clearly, this is not desired behaviour. The RewriteRule that should apply to this instance looks something like:
RewriteRule ^blogs/([_0-9a-z-]+)/([0-9]{4})/page/([0-9]+)/(.*)/ /wp-inst/index.php?wpblog=$1&year=$2&paged=$3 [L]
I don’t know exactly what the [L] stands for, but it needs to be there to stop Bad Server Errors™. The key thing to know here is that this must be before the greedy rule that was already grabbing the URL, and Rewriting it of its own accord. In my case, that was the line that looked like:
RewriteRule ^blogs/([_0-9a-z-]+)/([0-9]{4})/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?([0-9]+)?/?$ /wp-inst/index.php?wpblog=$1&year=$2&monthnum=$3&day=$4&name=$5&page=$6 [L]
I made sure my new rule was before this. A good place is where the other rules for subsequent pages of posts are. Of course, this rule only works for yearly archives, you’ll want one for monthly and daily archives (if you are a nutter who posts more times per day than fits onto your front page…):
RewriteRule ^blogs/([_0-9a-z-]+)/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/page/(.*)/ /wp-inst/index.php?wpblog=$1&year=$2&month=$3&paged=$4 [L]
RewriteRule ^blogs/([_0-9a-z-]+)/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([0-9]{1,2})/page/(.*)/ /wp-inst/index.php?wpblog=$1&year=$2&month=$3&day=$4&paged=$5 [L]
Of course, on Blogsome, you cannot alter this file yourself, but I’m sure these changes will be implemented soon. If the link earlier in the post still gives you “No Posts Made”, then you know it hasn’t…
There are two main tasks that are required to implement a Comment Spam Protection system. The first is to disable comments for all people. The second is to enable it for people who legitimately want to comment. A very simple way to solve the first task is to remove the action from the form tag. In my template, the code looked like this:
<form action="{$siteurl}/wp-comments-post.php" method="post"
id="commentform" name="commentform">
...
</form>
(Obviously, I’ve removed most of the code for brevity.) Deleting the contents of the form action works to a certain extent, except it creates invalid code. Another option is to replace the action with another URI, such as http://www.google.com. The second task is to re-enable it where appropriate. Since most Spammers use an automated system of some sort to generate comments, and these bots don’t use JavaScript, we can just write a JavaScript that puts the right value back in. This will prevent a user who has JavaScript disabled, or who is in an old browser, from leaving a comment. I’m prepared to live with this. Anyway, I don’t usually add script tags directly into a page, but in this case I will, just to make it easier. After the close of the form tag, insert the following:
<script type="text/javascript">
document.forms[0].action="{$siteurl}/wp-comments-post.php";
</script>
Of course, if this isn’t the first form in your document, for example your search form appears in the source before this one, then you’ll need to change the number of forms[_x_] accordingly. You could try using document.getElementById("commentform").action, but I think there’s an issue with this method not being available until the DOM is complete, which it isn’t at this stage.
Metakit for Python Apparently, this is the system that Address Book is made on. It would be nice to be able to hook straight into the Address Book database via this, but I’d still need a GUI for adding/editing the Player data.
On the way to get a new brushcutter on Saturday, we saw an Ice-Cream van being fixed up by the RAA. Since I had a brand new camera-phone, I just had to take a photo. 
I ended up using a program called Serial Mail for the first mailout I did. I’m really hoping it works, as there isn’t really a way to tell if it has or not. It’s currently sending them as I type this. I really think I’ll end up rolling my own - there’s some limitations as to the system I used (a typo/bug means I can’t get people’s birthdays!), and I really think I can do better. I think I’ll write my own templating interface, rather than use a Draft (although, this is a good idea). And it just uses AppleScript calls to do all of the generation - I think I may try to hook straight into the APIs. Which reminds me - I came across someone who mentioned it’s possible to make ‘proper’ custom fields in the Address Book Database - which wouldn’t be accessible through the standard application, but would allow greater flexibility. Like to define a field as only being able to have a particular value, such as a Coaching or Referee Level, or Gender. A custom program that can work with custom fields, and do mass-mailings. Something to do in the next holidays. I wonder how long this thing is going to take to send all of those 146 emails?
I’d forgotten this was how I’d removed the Operator Logo last time: I registered with SMSpup.com, and Australian Web-based SMS service. If you register you get a couple of points, and you only need one to get an operator logo. Then make a custom operator logo, with no background, and make it so it is just whitespace (a single space works well). Then choose your provider, and then click Preview. You may need to re-choose the provider before clicking Send. All done. When you receive the Operator Logo, it will default to being active, masking the YES OPTUS that was there, or whatever your provider displays. If you ever want it back: Menu âžž Settings âžž Main Display âžž Operator logo âžž Off