Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Spit or Pee, You Choose
January 14, 2005

Something I heard on the radio this morning put me in mind of Zobmondo, a crazy board game in which players must vote on whether a person will choose one extreme option or another.

The issue on the radio was related to tobacco chew spit. Apparently, some bozo had stolen a truck, and when he went to take a drink of the soda that the driver had left in the cup holder, he met with quite a surprise. He ended up calling 911 because he was so nauseated, and that’s how the police caught him.

Sick of this Crap
January 13, 2005

Every time I update Spam Karma it takes significant tweaking to get it to work. Today, it’s just plain dead.

This is a real problem since I had been recommending Spam Karma to everyone with WordPress as the ultimate comment spam solution. But I can’t do that any more.

Site Upgrades
January 13, 2005

I did a WordPress upgrade today. Another 1.5 beta from CVS. There are new fields in the database that made things go wonky. If you upgraded and you’re having trouble registering users and adding comments, you’ll need to actually run the upgrade.php script in the admin directory.

I also did an upgrade of Mom’s site last night. (Hi, Mom!) I set the Presentation to “Default” so it looks all Kubrick-y. I’m sure it wasn’t a big deal, but putting it back is just a matter of setting the Presentation Theme to “Classic”.

Along with the changes to WP 1.5, I’ve made a bunch of updates to OSA, which is currently the spam protection I’m running here. It seems that the WP devs added a lot of filter stuff to the commenting engine, and there’s really no telling if it will stay stable until release so that OSA would continue to work. That is to say, it doesn’t look like they’re finished updating the code. Last time I looked through trackback, it didn’t even use the code that they’re currently modifying. Hopefully, that’s all up-to-date by now.

Delphi Components
January 12, 2005

I’ve been looking at some delphi components that would help write an editor of some description. Yesterday I was yammering about how Edit Pad Pro isn’t quite the editor I need it to be. So I put some research into what it would take to get my Delphi 2005 installation up to snuff for building a brand new editor. I found some good components.

MS Anti-Spyware and Edit Pad Pro
January 11, 2005

I’ve installed Microsoft’s Anti-Spyware, and I have to say that I’m impressed with it. I also installed Edit Pad Pro, and we’re still having issues.

The spyware detection features of Microsoft’s Anti-Spyware are nothing new. I’ve been using AdAware for a while, and it does the same thing. But the real-time protection is pretty cool. Basically, it installs some system hooks that notice when programs write to certain vital system files. I have a good example of the protection this provides.