I’ve had no spam on the log in the couple of weeks since I implement registered only comments, but registering to leave a comment is a pain. I’ve taken an idea I’ve seen tossed around on the WordPress support forums and enabled a validation code on the comments. The code is simply the first word of the article title that is being commented on.

As always, the patch to wordpress is available here.

I’ve been thinking about scripting information retrieval for another project that has been shelved for a while, but had done little work towards implementing anything. Last week a friend asked how difficult it would be to build an email auto-responder that could provide sports scores on demand to his Blackberry. In response to the challenge, I wrote Globecord Secret Agent Man (aka GCSAM, named after the know-it-all 007). Thus far the agent can:

• Respond with NFL scores from current and prior weeks for all games or just games in which a list of teams played.
• Lookup current stock prices. Portfolios can be stored so quotes can be called via a group name instead of having to list each stock every time. A default can also be set to a request for “stocks” returns the user’s default portfolio.
• Retreive the 5-day forcast for North American cities.

Next I’ll be adding news headlines with the ability to ask for full article text, movie listings, and sports scores for other leagues.

Perhaps I should pickup a Blackberry myself.

The Toronto area had its first big snowfall of the season today, which brought out the plows. Argh!

I was browsing the www.indigo.chapters.ca site doing some last minute Christmas shopping today. Being the 23rd of December, I wanted to find which of the many stores in Toronto had a copy of Prime Obsession in stock. There’s no easy way to do that though; the interface limits lookups to three stores at a time. Worse, it takes several steps to add a store to the search list. If the data is there, a good user interface will make it available. In this case, a search by city or region would be far more effective than a three step process to locate an individual store for a search. The site is generally pretty well laid out, so it’s surprising such a poor function made it into production.

Each of the guys at the office has a dual head box running Fedora Core 3 for displaying Big Brother and other monitoring tools. We use Matrox G550’s for video, since they seemed to provide the most consistent output on two analog monitors.

There is a minor problem with the driver that Fedora ships: it disables analog output on the DVI connector. The problem appears the first time the machine is restarted after everything is up and running. The issue is easily resolved by installing the mga drivers from the Matrox website.

I’ve posted information on using BBMRTG to integrate MRTG results into Big Brother over on Pleiades.

It seems I underestimated the spammers. I also misunderstood the comment posting system in Wordpress: I thought that updating the comment_status field to ‘registered_only’ meant that only registered users could leave comments. That’s not what happens. Values of ‘closed’ and ‘open’ appear to work as I understood, so I’m not sure what the other value was meant to do. The result was spammers could directly access wp-comments-posts.php and freely post their advertisements for online poker sites and viagra.

This evening a modified the Wordpress code to enable the ‘registered_only’ setting in the comment_status field to work as I thought it should. It doesn’t appear to break anything, but I haven’t extensively tested yet. The patches to wp-comments.php and wp-comments-posts.php are on the Pleiades patch pages.

It seems the spam wasn’t a single pass, so I’ve had to turn on comments for registered users only. I’m sure there’s spam bot that will register itself out there too, but I don’t want to block comments yet - although why not, I don’t know, given that no one but spammers has commented yet.