I decided that while I’m at Harvey Mudd, I might as well learn to unicycle. I missed previous opportunities to learn how, but this is my last chance. Today, in an hour and 20 minutes of practicing, I managed to learn how to balance and ride for about 10 feet before falling off. I was hungry and dehydrated by the end, since I chose to do this instead of eat breakfast, so I think with a little more preparation I can do pretty well. I’ll make sure to stop by and practice once in a while.
Archive for September, 2006
ALP is awesome. It was a little low for a while, but today’s comic is awesome:
Karolina turned me onto a piece of software that I have been seeking for years: Processing. It lets you program in Java to do cool things with graphics without much effort, especially if you know Java. I always wanted something that would me be bored and make fractals or something. I should program that.
This post is also a test of the feeds.app plugin for movable type for an indeterminate blog.
I just tried to use the MT-Protect plugin to password protect a blog of indeterminate name and location. It takes the cake for being in the top 10% of unusable software. In fact, Movable Type in general ranks high on that list; installing software extensions for it requires you to manually unpack the plugins while logged into the server, and then insert obfuscating tags into all your code templates. To password-protect the blog, I actually had to tell it “Enable Protection” in 3 places, and then I would have had edit all of the file templates (half a dozen more of those), and even then I wouldn’t use the Movable Type author database, you had to use some other website.
Movable type has its own development problems to boot. Useful plugins such as Cross-Blog posting require their own plugins to depend on (and they’re outdated, but that’s another problem). In all, it sounds to me like MT is going down, not up for all its convolution.
I finally got one. And it’s the shit. So what if it gets kernels frickin’ everywhere? At least I have deliicious popcorn.
Eagle-eyed stalkers may have noticed a growing spam problem on my blog. It probably started when I was linked from a Blogger blog, a site which I understand suffers from rampant spamming. To combat this problem, I installed a spam filter that looked for keywords and other attributes in the spam. It worked relatively well, but not perfectly; a few messages a day would get through. Then it seemed to stop functioning properly, because things that should have been detected were not being caught.
My new solution was the installation of a plugin uninterstingly called CCode and TCode. This plugin scrambles the identity of each plugin by putting an extra variable on each comment page. The key to this tactic is that the spammers do not crawl the webpages the way a normal browser would; they just submit requests directly to the the comment program with variables common to all movable type blogs. So, the spammer picks up the “standard” variables for a comment, submits a request to the commenting page… and is rejected because it didn’t include the “secret” code for each page.
Obviously, if spammers catch onto this tactic, then it’s exceedingly easy to beat; simply visit the page, pull the necessary variables off, and then continue with business as usual. Such is the failing of any scheme that is integrated completely without requiring human intelligence to authenticate. Nonetheless, right now it works perfectly, and when it fails, I’ll probably put in one of those scrambled-word images that have been used to verify human intelligence for years now..
