The last couple of weeks have had their share of ups and downs...

On the down side, my last time flying was very frustrating.  I spent the whole hour doing touch and goes, and I wasn't happy with any of my landings.  None were horrible or unsafe, but none were great either.  My problem appears to be just before the flare through touchdown.  I would have thought by now, that I could grease all of my landings.

Computing was also frustrating. All of my web sites (Blogdom, Dealdom, and Witsdom) and my e-mail were inaccessible due to name server problems at my dynamic dns (DDNS) provider, ZoneEdit.  Given that the service is free, has a really good user interface and lots of features, I can't really complain too much that the service was down for a few days, but it was frustrating nonetheless.

Comment and trackback spam continues to be a real bummer.  Now that I have the e-mail sending working again on the server, each spam creates double work, as I now have to delete the email as well as the actual spam.  Why can't people be good and nice?

And, as I have for the last few years, I find myself sick at the end of the year.  On the plus side, at least this year I didn't get sick until after Christmas, but on the minus side, I'm sick for New Year's.  Fortunately, it is just a cold, but I still feel lousy.

On the up side, we had a nice trip north.  We spent the first few days with our friends Andrew and Laura and their precious daughter Hannah in their beautiful new home.  They were gracious hosts - even allowing us to spend a night in their house after they had left town to visit relatives.  We had a nice lunch with some of our old DataFlow friends including Dick and Steven.

We got to see Robby a couple of times and went back to our old cul-de-sac to have dinner with our neighbors Dave and Peg.  We also got to briefly say hello to other cul-de-sac neighbors including John, and Grant and Robin.  Sadly, the visit was tarnished by a remark made by Peg's dad which really hurt my feelings.

After having lunch with Robby on Christmas Eve, we dropped in on Burnie and Dave's annual Christmas Eve extravaganza in their amazing new home.  It was really nice getting to visit with Dave and Burnie, as well as getting to see Mike and Roxanne.

After leaving Dave and Burnie's, we drove up to Virginia to spend a few days with our dear friends Bob and Wendy.  I say friends, but they are really more like (good) family than just friends.  Bob's parents were there, as were their children Shawn and Tammy, their spouses, and their babies.  It was a real treat getting to see them all.

On Wednesday, we drove to Jeanie's parents to pick up the dogs, as Jeanie's parents had planned to drive up to Hickory the following day.  We spent the night, and returned home on Thursday, taking the US 1 route rather than our normal one.  I liked the US 1 route.  There is a bit less four-lane, and an extra town or two, but it is much more direct, with much less traffic than we typically encounter on the Interstate.

Jeanie and I both enjoyed this movie featuring Adam Sandler.  While the overall plot line was a bit predictable, there were some funny scenes, and it offered a good message.

The effects, props and scenery were all well done.  The DVD extras were interesting and well produced.

Definitely worth the price of a rental and the time to watch it.

Sometimes, I really don't quite understand why I keep changing the structural elements of the blog.

Sometimes, I really don't quite understand why I keep writing new entries, but that's a different issue for another day.

Anyway, this idea of social bookmarking has me intrigued. So, I decided to add a couple of easy links for a couple of popular sites, digg and del.icio.us

It wasn't as hard as I had anticipated.  I created a new MT Template Module that contains the actual code to generate the links.  The key was to use the <$MTEntryPermalink$> and <$MTEntryTitle$> tags to construct the references.  I got put on the right track from an entry which gives specific examples for Movable Type on Dave Taylor's great site Ask Dave Taylor.

As an example, my code for digg is:

<!-- Start Digg -->
<img src="http://www.blogdom.org/images/digg.png" alt="Digg It!" /><a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<$MTEntryPermalink$>&title=<$MTEntryTitle$>" title="Digg It!" target="_blank">&nbsp; Digg It! &nbsp;</a>
<!-- end Digg-->

I then simply had to add calls to the new module in the entrybody module and the Individual Entry Archive module and then rebuild the site.

I'm still not super happy with the asthetics, but, it'll do for now.

I doubt I'll add any more, as I doubt I'll ever have an entry actually submitted to either, but, it was an interesting academic exercise.

Jeanie rented "The Lake House" with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. Kinda strange, but interesting nonetheless, nicely acted. Definitely not your run of the mill romantic movie.

The last two entries were old entries I had started, but never finished, much less posted.

I have four more waiting in the wings.

What I sometimes do when I don't have a lot of time is start an entry and outline it, with the intention of fleshing it out in the near future, and then getting it posted.

Of course, we know what they say about (g00d) intentions...

My latest listen was Company Man by Joseph Finder, read by Scott Brick...

Okay, somewhat formulaic, reminiscent of An Officer And A Gentleman, but reasonably entertaining. Probably not the best use of time, but better than sitting around bored.

For years, I have used StatBar as my Windows status bar.  It is a great little program - small, simple, and free.  I only have two complaints with it: it hasn't been updated in years and it is a bit of a CPU hog.  It also doesn't have a clock, which is a bit of an annoyance.

For whatever reason, today I decided to look around to see what other options there were.  One program which looked interesting was WinBar.  It is quite similar to StatBar in pretty much all respects, except it has a clock and may be a bit less of a resource hog.  On the down side, it only has indicators for num caps and scroll lock, not for insert.

Since I went to the work of installing WinBar and deactivating the automatic startup of StatBar, I guess I'll use WinBar for a while.

I found one other program which appears to be absolutely amazing - Samurize.  It appears to be incredibly powerful and configurable.  My guess is it could do everything I would want and then some.  Unfortunately, it is a bit too configurable.  I spent a bit of time looking at the site, tutorials, forums, etc., but I'm afraid that it would take me days to figure out how to configure the program to do exactly what I want.  It does appear to be in active development, and appears to have a large community creating plug-ins and added functionality.  The other issue with Samurize is that many of the plug-ins attempt to execute code which is flagged as potentially malicious.  Without knowing the authors, and without the sort of self-policing provided by the open-source community, I am wary of allowing the flagged code to execute.

While I was searching, I did find a site with a good list of free PC programs to fill various needs: http://www.cronc.com/resources/ is the main page which has links to sub-lists, http://www.cronc.com/resources/recovery-system.php is a list of system type utilities.

Last week was definitely family oriented.

The week started with Robby's arrival on Sunday morning.  Robby spent the week visiting with Jeanie and me.

On Friday, we loaded up the truck with Robby, the dogs, and lots of presents for our trip to Savannah for the annual Christmas / Birthday party.

We had a nice visit with Jim and Kim Friday night.

On Saturday, we had all but one of Mom and Dad's nuclear family present - two children, two children in-law, three grandchildren, two grandchildren in-law, and four great grandchildren.  Quite a crowd!

We had lots of fun opening presents and enjoying each other's company.

On Sunday, we headed home and then relaxed until it was time to take Robby to the train for his trip home.

All in all, a very nice week.

Robby came to town on Sunday for a week long visit, and yesterday, we decided to do the tourist thing.

Jeanie, Robby and I started our day with an aerial tour of the island, piloted by yours truly.

Robby and I then headed off to Fort Clinch, while Jeanie went off to do her own thing.  Fort Clinch is an example of a "Third System" US fort, although it has a number of characteristics which do not conform to the standard.

The fort itself was interesting.  For our $2 (each) admission (in addition to the $5 (per vehicle) park entrance fee, we received a double sided tri-fold pamphlet which was reasonably informative.  The visitor's center had additional background on the three systems, as well as the history of Fort Clinch.  The fort itself had some facets that were in good repair, and others that were in various stages of restoration.  The highlight of the visit was the docent in period costume, who was extremely knowledgeable and patent in answering our questions.

All in all, a very nice day.

So, I learned a few new things today.

You know those challenge dialogs which ask you to look at a distored picture of numbers/letters, decipher them, and type them into a box, something that a human can do fairly easily, but is extremely difficult for a computer to do; typically as a method to prevent automated computer entries into a web page?

Well, those things are called a CAPTCHA, which is based on something called a Turing Test.

Well, doing a Google using CAPTCHA as the search phrase yields lots of hits.  While the top rated ones seem to be related to CAPTCHAs written for .asp or .net, if you hunt, you can find ones for perl or php.  Here is a link to a php script.

Doing a search using: captcha movable yields lots of hits including a nice implementation specifically for Movable Type written by James Seng called MT-Scode.  Its installation is a bit more involved, and requires the installation of a couple of additional modules on the web server.

MT-Scode Quick Links:
- Download latest mt-scode
- You need GD for this plugin to work
- You also need GD.pm

I also found the very interesting Six Apart Guide to Comment Spam which frowns on CAPTCHAs because of their negative effect on accessibility, but offers lots of good suggestions to managing/mitigating comment/trackback spam.

The big question is my mind is...

Do I implement a CAPTCHA, which would take quite a bit of time up front but which should allow me to re-enable the subscriptions and significantly reduce the time I spend removing spam, or do I just spend the few minutes a day with MT-Blacklist to delete the spam and rebuild the blog?

Considering that I've yet to have someone complain about the removal of the subscriptions - or the fact that they didn't work for so long, at least for the moment, I think I'll stick with the latter, but at least I've now documented an alternative, should I get inspired...

When you think of online places to buy stuff, do you think of eBayonly when you think of online auctions and collectables?

If so, you are potentially missing a great place to buy everyday items at great prices.

For example, yesterday, I needed a new battery for the remote for my Canon G3 PowerShot camera.  It takes a CR2025 coin cell. 

You can get one of these for a few dollars at your local Walmart or Target.  But, you have to drive there, and you will (most likely) have to pay sales tax, and you'll end up buying a lot of other stuff you really didn't need.

Or, you could, as I did, jump onto eBay, and get 10 - buy it now - for $4 shipped!  What, you may ask, do I need 10 for?  I don't know, but when I can get 10 for about what I'd pay for 1, and never have to leave my house, why not?!

I've found eBay is great for typical things like batteries and cell phone accessories, and well as for more obscure things like a wheel cover for a 1992 Dodge Stealth or wooden Q-Tips (which are no longer available in stores).  Of course it's also great for coins, stamps, or that one last action figure you need to complete your set.

Happy eBaying!

So, you're going to do some online shopping and you know where you want to make the purchase from.  Before just typing in the url, why not go to Dealdom and see if there is a link to your vendor of choice.

It costs you nothing.  It is safe - it's just a link, no personal information is gathered by Dealdom.  And, Blogdom, via its association with Dealdom, gets a (very) little commission.

Everyone wins, right?

Happy Holidays.

I continue to be vexed by spammers exploiting the Subscribe To Comments hack by ScriptyGoddess.  Apparently, someone has designed a robot which opens a specific entry, enters an email address, selects the "subscribe" radio button, then "clicks" the submit button, adding the email address to the subscription list.  Unfortunately, the existing Subscription hack does not integrate with MT-Blacklist, so even if the actual comment gets blocked, the subscription gets through.

As a bandaid, I have blocked an entire Class B IP address range from which the vast majority of the attacks have originated.

The ultimate solution would require upgrading to the current release of Movable Type or going back and unfixing sendmail on the server for the email spam doesn't get sent.

While I was poking around yesterday trying to solve the sendmail / spam issues, I realized that one of the other blogs I host had never had MT-Blacklist installed.  Turns out that part of my server utilization problem was the massive number of comment spams going through a separate instance of MT-Comments for that blog.  Since the primary author of that blog hasn't posted in almost two years, I just disabled MT-Comment as a bandaid.  Unfortunately, there are over 20,000 comment spams, and MT-Blacklist chokes when asked to perform a mass delete on anything much over 25 comments at a time.  It really bugs me to have that many comment spams feeding search engine rankings, but, I'm not willing to spend the time it would take to clear them out 25 at a pop.

SPAMMERS SUCK!

So, the good news was I got mail working on the server again.

The bad news?

Apparently, someone has come up with a new exploit which generates copious amounts of spam email.  I'm afraid quite a bit of spam went out before I figured out what was going on.

The exploit targets the Subscribe To Comments hack by ScriptyGoddess.

Apparently, some clever person figured out that they could directly access the emailtolist.php file which generates the email notification.  Somehow, they can use this even for posts which have comments turned off.

After I figured out what was happening, I changed the name of the file, and the references to it in the comment templates.  I believe the exploit is based on the specific file name, so I am hopeful that I can retain the functionality, without having it exploited again.

Arrg!

So, another vexing problem solved!...

For whatever reason, I've been more interested in working on the mechanics of the blog lately...