Author: Edward Caissie

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Public Pandemonium

Names are very personal and for some very public. Shakespeare still said it with the most simplest of phrases:

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

That quote can be applied to so many different ideas one being the spelling of a name. A person’s name; a group; or, a place.

The Beatles made it a point of their choice of spelling. Led Zeppelin played on the spelling of their name. Would their music or their creativity be any less if they followed conventional spellings. I actually think it would. Choosing a variation of a name’s spelling to gain an artistic impetus is every creative author’s right; and, with that I will reiterate: I AM JELLYBEEN! Taste the sweetness of artistic license.

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Desk Mess Mirrored 1.0.5

Desk Mess Mirrored has been updated to version 1.0.5 and is now live at WordPress.org!

This version adds additional functionality with an author page that allows for multiple contributors to have their own styled author page matching the existing user specific comment styles. Stop by own home site at BuyNowShop.com and view the theme in action.

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Blog Comment Spamming

Although I use a few different methods of controlling these unwanted comments, I am truly getting tired of having to deal with them on a near daily basis.

I have been keeping track of the root IP addresses these comments are originating from. I am also finding a great deal of these IP addresses are from places that apparently have little regard for what they are being used for.

For those that only occasionally splog my blog I generally will manually remove the comments from the logs, but for those that are insistent and continue to be annoying, I will simply ban the IP address, or range of addresses. Some of these offenders have been banned at the server level, which is on a case-by-case decision.

So far, there have been several Panamanian IP addresses; quite a large range of addresses apparently originating in Russia; and, a couple from China. This is also quite unfortunate as there is a remote possibility that a legitimate reader would like to post a legitimate comment, but now they will have to deal with their Internet Service Provider (ISP) to start the process of clearing their name (read: IP address).

I see this as a very serious ongoing issue that world ISPs need to address. To date, I have not seen any relevant success with notifying administrative contacts (as noted in various DNS records) for these IP ranges.

I can only suggest more site administrators start banning these comment spammers at the server level; and, perhaps a critical mass of blockages will finally get through to these ISP companies. They are just as responsible for the spamming as the actual individuals who are issuing this unwanted time wasting text.

How do you handle comment spam?

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Flock of Tweets

A Flock of Tweets, I have no idea what to call them to be quite honest. To me, a flock of tweets, is what you get when your tweet reader fills with too many tweets of no consequence or interest to oneself because you were being polite and reciprocatingly following another twitter user. Although many people use twitter based literally on their “What are you doing?” catch phrase, I think there is a great deal more potential to twitter being used a a real-time communication tool. David Pogue of the New York Times makes great examples of this in my humble opinion. Although I was thinking of a different story he wrote, here is a more recent article regarding twitter.

I would also say I am a little picky about whom I follow on a continual basis. I like to read tweets that interest me and my interests are varied and tend to change as time passes. If I stop following a person on twitter it is typically for no other reason than my interests have changed. But, and I must stress this, I will also stop following a person on twitter if they are the author of a Flock of Tweets, because for the most part to me they are just simply flooding the timeline and consuming space I would much rather see used for tweets of relevance.

To each his own and may you always find a tweet to reply to.

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Long Time No See

Life has been quite busy with several projects either starting or continuing forward. I do not believe in multi-tasking, but I do believe it is very possible to address several projects at a time. Each one getting my complete focus when I am working on it.

A small business wanted some graphic design work; and, a custom short-run print job. Done.

A self-hosted WordPress installation needed a bit of help sorting out a couple of issues with a theme they have installed on their web site.  I shared some code and a few suggestions on what they could look at to address their needs. Their site is looking good with the implemented changes.

The iPhone development project is still progressing on schedule although it is consuming more time than previously expected.

The iPM project is taking shape, more information to follow.

Although this time it was nearly three weeks since I wrote, I expect to get back to my minimum weekly entries soon.

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Had I Known

I recently visited a forum logged in with my user account.  I was surprised, but not necessarily shocked at the reduced activity on the site.  What shocked me was when I logged in with my administrator account to see the almost 15 pages of newly registered accounts not activated.

For clarity’s sake, I was against turning on administrator approval only for new members on this forum, and as such I made it clear to the forum owner I would not be involved in the registration process in any form or fashion.  The owner had brought in another individual and granted that person full and complete administrator privileges and together they would handle the new member registrations.

The last new member was approved Jan 28, 2009! I scanned through the inactive member list and although a great deal of the newly registered account names were most likely spammers or other disruptive individuals, there were also several names that would fit well with the current member base of the forum.

To say I am disappointed would be an understatement.  Myself, and others that work under the JellyBeen banner, put a great deal of time and effort into re-establishing the owner as the primary administrator; as well as, upgrading the forum to the most current version of the forum software.  It truly is a shame to see the other administrator barely making a weekly appearance, and the owner showing up only slightly more often.

I agreed to make the owner the primary administrator and to upgrade the forum to the current version at the time. Beyond those two primary goals being accomplished, I also offered to help explain and coach in managing the forum.  These offers were politely refused, and I was given the impression the new administrator would be taking care of those matters.

In my opinion, this was not done.  The forum is no longer running the most current version (released over three months ago), and the members appear to be dwindling away.

My apologies to those that were involved, had I known this would be the end result of all the work that was put into this project I would not have accepted it in the first place.

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PC or Mac

It’s not so much a question of which operating system or hardware I prefer; the actual monitor, keyboard, and mouse that I use for either are mostly interchangeable and therefore not of real consequence.

The question now is: what do I want to accomplish in this session?

As to surfing the ‘net, I like using Internet Explorer by Microsoft and it would seem almost sacriligious to put IE on a Mac.  I haven’t tried the new Safari version 4 (still in beta as of this writing) but that may change my surfing preferences … we’ll see.

Most of my design applications are PC based, so graphics are done on the PC. I’m still investigating text editors for the Mac, and will reconsider XHTML, CSS, and PHP coding once I find an editor I like for the Mac.

XCode development is obviously done on the Mac and quite honestly, as I’m still learning my way around an Apple branded computer, I am still finding the Apple SDK package to be quite easy to work with and much more intuitive than some PC packages I have used.

PC or Mac?  I can’t decide, can you?

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Aging

I was wandering about the Internet today catching up on various web sites and other interests when I came across a post in a forum by a gentleman describing himself as old. I find these posts interesting and refershing to some degree. The post itself is not too unheard of, nor were the replies recognizing that age is not always a chronological measure, but this thought came to mind:  

Age is relative, counting it is the key. Knowing I’m old means knowing I’m alive.

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Mac or PC

I guess I will be sitting down to my work area from now on asking myself that question: Mac or PC?

The reason why: I just purchased and finished setting up a Mac mini.  It’s a cute little machine, a great little starter Mac.  This is my first Mac and so far I am quite impressed with everything they fit into the box, especially as small as the box is. I plugged in a standard USB keyboard, and a standard USB mouse, along with an analog 17 inch flat panel monitor and turned it on.

After following the prompts I connected to the Internet and then started poking around changing a few settings and making sure the time was correct and the timezone matched my own.  Most of the workings are fairly intuitive which I somewhat expected given how well I have adapted to my iPod Touch.  I was a little surprised when I found the update application program, ran it, and found 675MB of updates required.  I’m writing this post on my main PC as the mini Mac (my wife’s choice of words, and I like them, too) is still working away at installing the seven updates it found. I was thrilled that it connected via Wi-Fi and that I have a fairly decent high-speed Internet connection.

If you have both a PC and a Mac, leave a comment on which you like to blog with … I’d like to know.