Alden Bates' Weblog

I got bored, and looked up the domain information for some of the domains with which the one spammer keeps trying to bombard my site. It said the domains were registered to:

Phill, Jane (NIC-8754) contact61@support-4u.net
Jane Phill
142 W 44 Street
NYC
NY, US
10012
Phone: 2128523####

There's a number of problems with that information of course. For one thing, the phone number has too many digits (I've blanked the last 4 there). For another, the street address is for Osteria al Doge, a resteraunt who I'm sure would be appalled that their address is being used to register domains.

Fortunately by googling "Jane Phill" I found Spam Huntresses blog, which has more info: the spammers in question are the Bulgarian twins Iavor and Emil Zahariev . It's nice to put a name to the people who want to pollute my site. :)

Colin Baker seems quite impressed with new Doctor Who, though he tells Eccleston to shut up regarding the whole accent thing. I find it hard to imagine Colin with an accent like Eccleston's...

According to the Daily Record, he was also taken with Billie Piper. Down, boy!

Edit: It says "Ex Dr Who and local celebrity" on the main page of his column. International celebrity would be more like it!

Not content with using mt-blacklist to block spam comments, I decided to be proactive. This involved whipping up some .htaccess rules and scripts to catch and block spammers before they even got to the spamming stage. It works quote nicely - the script catches them when they enter, delivers a 403 error to them and bans their IP address from the weblog.

And then the traffic to my weblog decreased by 50%. Yes, 50% of the traffic to my weblog was spammers. That's just sad.

I can't say enough good things about Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist. Using Brad Choate's MTSQL plugin and some code from the forums on Jay's site posted by TweezerMan, I've added the current count of blocked spams in the right-hand bar on my weblog's index page. It only updates when I post an entry, but at the moment I can see it's reading 3583 spams blocked. The number will rise once I post this entry, of course, because at the moment some plonker is attempting to trackback spam me and MT-Blacklist is blocking them all. Thanks to Jay's plugin, I'm spending less and less time cleaning up after spammers.

Someday I'm going to invent a plugin which interfaces with MT-Blacklist and, when it receives a spam, causes the spammer's computer to explode, then gives them 15,000 volts to the gonads. Then I shall become very rich with donations from grateful bloggers. Huzzah!

Any resemblance between persons living or dead purely accidental, etc, etc. My apologies if this doesn't make sense to you. I was bored.

Drae Barclyas Mmeber,

Tsih eliam was stne by the Baalcrys srevre to vfirey yruo eamil aderdss. You msut cmoplete thsi prsseco by cikcilng on the lkni bwole and eniretng in the slaml wdniow yuor Bayalcrs Mihsrebmep nmuber, paocssde and mbaromele wrod. Tsih is deno for yruo prnoitceto - besuace semo of our mebmers no loegnr hvae assecc to theri emial aderdsses and we mtsu vreify it. To veyfir yoru eiaml aerddss and acsecs yuor bkna anuocct , ckc

Of course at the bottom was a cunningly crafted form styled using CSS to look like a regular link. The CSS didn't work in FireFox, only IE - yet another reason to make the switch to an alternate browser, people!

But come on, even with the "link" looking like a link, is anyone going to read the text above and think it's a legit email

I mean, I know there's no shortage of stupid people out there, but really. A chimp could spot that one.

Boing Boing: Pet pillows

Pet died? Make it into a pillow!

*eyes the cat*

Edit: the link on BoingBoing is dead, and I can't find anythign about the pet pillows on the site it links to... I suspect it was either a hoax, or they got complaints...

Some hours ago now, the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who finally played on TV over in England. I can only experience it vicariously, seeing as Prime TV here haven't even announced a date when the show will be screened, but I've seen both positive and negative reviews. Personally, though I've only seen the leaked version, I quite liked "Rose".

OTOH, Timestreams issue 5 is now up on the NZDWFC web site, so if you can't see the new episodes, at least you can read some good fanfiction. :)

I finally got around to playing this today - my brother gave me a copy for Christmas. I started playing the first park, but had to stop as it was suddenly 4 hours later...

Some initial thoughts:

1. I really like what they've done with the graphics. The whole 3Dness adds more reality, and the ability to ride the rides! They still managed to keep the same level of cusomisation as the previous two games though.
2. The ride creation is basically the same as RCT1 and RCT2, which is good. I much prefer those to the less intuitive method in Theme Park World.
3. Raising and lowering ground seems to be a lot harder. I tried to make a simple pond and ended up with the ground going everywhere.
4. It also seems to be slightly harder to get the people to ride the rides. They seem to either love a ride or stay away from it.
5. It took a while for me to work out how to train the staff - the only place you can do this seems to be in the Human Resources screen, by pressing the "plus" box next to the staff member. Also, staff can now get disgruntled - several entertainers quit before I worked out how to give them a pay rise.
6. More customisable shop produce! Looks more like the options in Theme Park World, actually. Although shops can now break down...
7. A golf course with more than 4 hole types - huzzah! :P
8. There no longer seems to be a people summary screen, so you can't get an idea of what the overall opinion of the guests is, other than the approval rating scale. The new variety of people is a pretty cool improvement over RCT2 though.
9. No sign of any VIPs yet... Must try making a fireworks display. :)

I shall have to waste some more time in this highly unproductive pursuit at some point...

Now that I've more or less gotten on top of my comment spam (with MT-Blacklist's invaluable help) I seem to be getting more trackback spam.

All of the trackback spam I've received has had HTML-style links in the excerpt. I'm now wondering if I can safely block any such trackback - Six Apart's Trackback specification doesn't say whether the excerpt is allowed to contain HTML, though it does say the excerpt will be truncated at 252 characters, which would cause havoc if at that position there are tags open. Unfortunately MT-Blacklist doesn't (currently) have any way to selectively filter a string only on Trackbacks and not comments. I may drop a suggestion in to the author. :)