Monthly Archives: June 2005

Computers/Technology, MobLog

IT Marketing

Leave a comment

My regular selection of updated software turned up today as part of my MSDN subscription. This time it also included a beta copy of the increasingly late Visual Studio 2005, plus a bit of advertising in the form of a lenticular picture of a caterpillar, I assume because Visual Studio will turn into a beautiful butterfly, or something like that!

Anyway, the caterpillar got added to my growing pile of promotional materials from various sources, so here it is alongside the Channel9 Guy I picked up on Tuesday.

Channel9 Guy with Caterpillar

Apologies, but the 3-D effect doesn’t transfer overly well to web, so you’ll have to take my word for it that it is suprisingly effective, certainly moreso than the similar pictures that fascinated me as a child. I have to say that it does make a change getting one of these instead of a pen, or the cardboard toads that Quest periodically send me, even if the pen is generally more useful than a 3-D caterpillar…

General

Big Site Updates

Leave a comment

You may have noticed over the past couple of days that the website is looking somewhat different. The primary reason for the change was as a result of a pretty nasty bout of trackback spam that occured over the first few days of the week with every single posting that allowed trackbacks being hit with multiple occurences plugging gambling sites.

Anyway, I’d been hearing good things about a couple of WordPress plugins, one called Spam Karma, that brought together a number of spam busting techniques, and the other, called Bad Behavior, took a different tack, in that it monitors the web requests, and identifies which are real people looking at the pages, and which are the automated spam bots that scan the internet looking for likely targets. Having spent a load of time removing the rubbish, I decided to check out the plugins.

This led to another problem, in that I hadn’t yet got round to upgrading WordPress from 1.2.2, as a result of the fairly heavy customisations I had made. So as of Wednesday I cleared the website down to nothing, and rebuilt it in WordPress 1.5.1.2, adding Bad Behavior and Spam Karma, hence the new look.

Thus far, the new version seems great, and a definite improvement. Plus I haven’t had to do any more clearing up thanks to Bad Behavior and Spam Karma.

Incidentally, if you want an indication of the size of the spam problem, the stats for both plugins are shown right at the very bottom of the page. As you can see, nothing has got through to Spam Karma yet, but that is because of the effectiveness of Bad Behavior, blocking hundreds of bots a day!

General

On Yer Bike

Leave a comment

For the past few weeks, our notice sheet at church has been highligting that Andy Witting and Jackie Lawrence are doing the London to Brighton Bike Ride for the British Heart Foundation. Having said that, most people know already as it has become quite common to pass one or other of them around the local area training (last time I spoke to Andy he was concerned that he’d only managed to get a block of time so far to do about half the distance so he’s not sure how he’s going to cope on the day!).

Bike Ride

It is worth saying that it is quite a challenge, so I am genuinely impressed at anybody willing to do the ride. I always remember when some workmates did it many years ago, especially the comments on what the final uphill stretch just before Brighton was like!

Anyway, I got an e-mail through from Sarah saying that she’d been asked to do it at the last minute and has just ten days to gather sponsorship and get prepared. If you’re not sponsoring anybody else on the ride, or even if you are, Sarah is taking e-mail pledges of support on her blog.

Computers/Technology, MobLog, Pictures

London Geek Dinner

1 Comment

So despite the efforts of South West trains, we made it to the Geek Dinner!

I met Howard on the train at Basingstoke, and it turned out that Sarah was sat opposite us on the train. Dave met us at Waterloo.

It was great to meet Robert Scoble, and also to hear some of his opinions as to the effect that blogs are having on the world. He seemed genuinely chuffed by the number of people who had come along (about 120, double the largest geek dinner held in the USA). It was a great opportunity to meet a load of other techies, and just generally chat.

Probably the funniest moment of the entire night, was Ian, who was convinced that Sarah couldn’t be a geek, until she pulled out her binary watch! You can read both Ian’s version and Sarah’s version on their respective blogs.

Aside from the good food, and general geekiness, it was great to be able to catch up with Howard now that Locutio is really taking off. Howard did make a bit of an impression on Dave however, with his Frankenstein style surgery to produce Zaphod Beeblebrox Channel 9 Guy!

There is a page up with loads of blog entries describing the night, and links off to pictures, plus pod casts of the night and Robert Scobles speech itself – well worth a listen if you have an interest in blogging. (Incidentally, I do pop up in the pictures, just to prove I was there!)

I only had my Nokia 3650 with me, so my pictures are not the greatest (roll on the arrival of my new phone), but I’ve added a few below.