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For the past week, I’ve been getting more comment and trackback spam than ever, so this weekend one of my projects was to do what I can to slow down the spammers. I started out with the Six Apart Guide to Combatting Comment Spam, and the Movable Type manual. (The guide is a bit behind the times so you have to refer to the manual as well.) In my first round of addressing the comment spam issue, I’m trying to take measures that won’t affect users. The first step is renaming the trackback and comment scripts. I doubt it will help but it certainly won’t hurt anything. ...

Courtesy of Billmon: Let’s see. We’ve got: Israeli Jews fighting Lebanese Shi’a and Palestinian Sunnis; Palestinian Fatah militants who’ve stopped fighting Hamas militants, but only because they’re both fighting the Israelis; Saudi Sunni fundamentalists issuing fatwas against Hezbollah Shi’a fundamentalists; Egyptian Sunni fundamentalists backing those same Hezbollah Shi’a fundamentalists; Iraqi Sunnis killing Iraqi Shi’a and vice versa; Iraqi Shi’a (the Mahdi Army) jousting with Iraqi Shi’a (the Badr Brigade); Iraqi Kurds trying to push Sunni Arabs and both Sunni and Shi’a Turkomen out of Kirkuk; Turks threatening to invade Kurdistan; Iranians allegedly shelling Kurdistan, Syrian Kurds rebelling against Syrian Allawites who are despised by Syria’s Sunni majority but allied with the Lebanese Shi’a who are hated and feared by the House of Saud and its Sunni fundamentalist minions. Oh, and American and Israeli neocons threatening to bomb both Syria and Iran. ...

You may know that I’ve been eager to buy a new cell phone for awhile now. My phone is now pushing three years old, and I’ve been out from under my contract with Cingular since December, 2005. The thing that has kept me from buying a new phone is Cingular’s lack of interesting new models in the lineup. The phones I’m most interested are the upgraded Motorola RAZR (V3i) and Motorola PEBL. Cingular still offers the old RAZR V3, and only T-Mobile offers the PEBL. I can’t get service from T-Mobile where I live. ...

According to Bob Sutton, the essence of wisdom is “strong opinions, weakly held.” I feel a bit gratified by that because I was just explaining to a coworker the other day that I will fight hard for the things I believe, but if you can convince me that I’m wrong, I’m perfectly willing to fight hard for the things you believe. I didn’t know that made me wise, but I’m glad to hear that it does. I think that if anyone really looks hard at the number of times that they’ve been wrong about something they really strongly believed, they would not have high confidence in the things they believe at the moment. Everybody seems to be wrong at least half the time. ...

I’ve been following the Digg feed for a few months to keep up with the big news in the tech world. If something important happens, it usually gets Digged, and plenty of other interesting, more esoteric links make it to the top as well. Unfortunately, the site seems to be turning to crap. It seems like more and more right wing and left wing propaganda get Digged enough to make it into the feed lately, even though such content is completely out of bounds for the site. The larger point is that once anything becomes popular enough, the incentives to game the system grow to the point where the gamers basically ruin it for everybody else. ...

Discussing the various game/book bundles available: So you can get the Bible, or cheat codes, or a book by people who think they’ve figured out the cheat codes to the Bible. (Via slacktivist.)

Last week at work we were having a discussion about reporting, and I shared one of my principles when it comes to data collection, which is that logging is nearly always preferable to counting. Let’s say I’m required to produce reports that show how often every entry on a weblog has been viewed. There are two obvious options for doing so. I could create a table called entry_views that has columns for the entry ID, and a date field to record when the event occurred. If I had some identifying information for the viewers, I could store that in the table as well. ...

I am once again trying to keep up with too many feeds, and it’s time to pare down. This time, I’m removing most of my few remaining feeds from sites about politics. It’s not that I don’t care, but rather that I just don’t have any more energy for more of the same every day. I know exactly which politicians I support, and if they do anything really noteworthy, I’ll find out about it from news sites. ...

In a weird turn of events, last week the New York Times ran an article about my home town, Orange, Texas. As I’ve mentioned before, the town sustained a lot of damage from Hurricane Rita last October. Times writer Dan Barry was dispatched to write a feature about the losses the town has suffered, both from the storm and more recently when a man from the town was killed serving in Iraq. ...

This week I have to look into ways to get filter out more comment spam here. I dutifully mark things as junk, but that doesn’t actually do anything other than get rid of the junk comments I’ve marked. Looks like it’s time to dig into what’s available for comment spam prevention with Movable Type.