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MT-Keystrokes

Rewinding a bit on the new comment registration required policy, have decided to experiment with MT-Keystrokes, a Movable Type plugin that inserts JavaScript into pages which looks for actual keystroke input into form fields. All the captcha goodness, without the accessibility problems raised by image captchas.

So… the comment form is back in plain view for now. Will run this way for a while; if successful, could end up sticking with it and backing off on the registration policy for customers. Will have to wait and see whether spambots end up at the doorstep.

Thanks Nick

Music: Can :: Babylonian Pearl
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Brokaw Lunch

Had the pleasure of sitting in on an impromptu lunch visit by Tom Brokaw to the J-School, who spoke off-the-cuff on a variety of topics and answered questions posed by students. I knew he was an articulate speaker, but was amazed at his insightfulness — reflective, provocative, even-handed. A few quotes from memory (wish I had taken notes):

On the persistent stonewalling of the press by the Bush Administration: “This is nothing new, and has always happened during Republican administrations. Republicans tend to run their ships like corporations, with an accompanying degree of secrecy. Democratic administrations tend to run themselves more like sophomore dorms.”

On video games that integrate the daily news into combat and other scenarios, letting users “play” the news: “I’ve always been a free-speech absolutist, but technology lets speech come crashing down into society in ways that it never has before…” (he went on to talk about the absence of quality editorial oversight in “information sources” such as video games).

On the slow-but-steady adoption of the internet by mainstream news organizations: “Given the tremendous possibilities for new ways to present information, traditional media have shown an astonishing lack of imagination…”

On the notion that news was of a higher overall caliber 30 years ago. “A great deal of it was totally one-dimensional, e.g. ‘There’s a be-in in Golden Gate Park today, here are all the freaks on public display.’ Much national news was presented through the prism of a bunch of middle-age white guys pulling levers from the East coast.”

On the popularity of commentators such as Bill O’Reilly: “On a big night, O’Reilly pulls three million viewers. I consistently pulled 10 million on a routine night.” (He took care not to sound like he was bragging, just putting the numbers in perspective).

Fascinating afternoon.

Music: African Head Charge :: High Protein Snack
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Y!Q on SearchBlog

Yahoo! has a new live search function called Y!Q that lets site owners embed marked links into sections of web pages. Users clicking the links get a small popup box with top contextualized results. Because blogs etc. deal with multiple topics per page, Y!Q lets you cordon off sections with DIV classes which interact with a JavaScript library. If you use a publishing system like Movable Type, it’s a simple matter of surrounding the summary insertion code with appropriate Y!Q tags and rebuilding. Pretty nifty, though it does add a bit of weight to pages.

Implemented Y!Q for John Battelle’s SearchBlog today.

Music: The Seeds :: Flower Lady And Her Assistant
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Pardon Our Dust

Birdhouse is in the middle of an ongoing transition to a new server. As of tonight, I’ve moved about half of our customer domains over, and all is well. Tonight I moved birdhouse.org (and hosting.birdhouse.org) to the new box (pardon our dust if you stopped by during the transition; had to fix a few paths in the blog).

Multiple reasons for the transition:

One is speed; the new server is beefier, studlier, mas macho. Just moving from a 1.7GHz Celeron to a 2.4GHz P4 doesn’t sound that dramatic, but try commenting — we’ve gained about 5x performance in some operations. Still 1 GB RAM, still redundant 80 GB drives.

Another is ease of use (both for me and for customers). Control panels are becoming the norm for consumer hosting, and we didn’t have one. By moving into a truly massive datacenter (20,000 servers, anyone?), we’re able to piggy back on economies of scale – we’re now using cPanel/WHM for most account management tasks (sadly replacing all of the blood sweat and tears, home-brew shell and PHP scripts I had built to manage the old server). Same goes for Urchin stats to augment awstats, which we provide now (awstats will remain the main stats package). Same goes for the Fantastico über-installer (customers can now set up their own galleries, guest books, and weblogs rather than relying on me…)

Another is email. I’ve grown to truly love CommuniGate Pro. It’s fast, it’s solid, it’s supported, it’s used by some of the biggest ISPs in the industry. But I pay per-seat for the CGP license, and Stalker recently doubled their fees (“focusing on the enterprise, blah blah blah”). If you’ve ever wondered why some hosts offer 30 email addresses where Birdhouse offers 3, now you now. As a small host, I can’t afford to compete without doing everything open source. cPanel will allow me to offer a butt-load more addresses per customer, and provides integrated mail management for customers so I don’t have to provision and customize accounts for them. That’s groovy, but not without a downside — I’m spoiled by the completeness of CGP by now, and have been less-than-impressed at the comparative absence of controls in cPanel that Stalker builds in, and annoyed by certain assumptions cPanel makes. But overall, this move is a big win for Birdhouse mail users — more accounts, more user-level control, better customer interfaces. Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you.

The cPanel system works so differently than from a vanilla server that it’s been impossible to move everyone over en masse, so I’m transitioning one account at at time. We’ll get there soon, and I’ll be able to breathe again. Famous last words.

Music: Tom Verlaine :: Harley Quinn
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WordPress Link Farm

David Weinberger has an interesting post on the discovery that the WordPress web site has been hiding a link farm in their pages, gaming Google for profit and, in the process, weakening the effectiveness of one of our most useful tools.

So, IMO, WordPress made a mistake. The mistake definitely wasn’t making money. It was making money in a way that works against the interests of the Web community.

Music: Richard and Linda Thompson :: For Shame of Doing Wrong
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I Can’t Roll My Eyes Hard Enough

Last week, cleaning up after a catered event at work, noticed that people were throwing away some large, very solid, easily-reusable serving platters. I asked, “Doesn’t the catering company want them back? Shouldn’t we save them?” Response: “Nahhh…” And that was it. I said something about landfills, and the janitor rolled his eyes at me, looking for confirmation from another person in the room that I was, indeed, crazy.

This week, a team of 1,300 scientists has released the most comprehensive analysis ever conducted of how the world’s oceans, dry lands, forests and species interact and depend on one another.

Many of the world’s ecosystems are in danger and might not support future generations unless radical measures are implemented to protect and revive them. The five-year study, commissioned by the United Nations and a number of businesses and independent groups, arrived at a mixed prognosis for planet Earth: Its deteriorating environmental health still is treatable, but only with aggressive and expensive corrective measures. In the 219-page report, scientists looked at 24 different “services” the Earth’s ecosystem provided people and found that 15 of them are in trouble. … “Human actions are depleting Earth’s natural capital, putting such strain on the environment that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted,” the authors said.

And still, the merest suggestion of care causes half of America to roll its collective eyeballs.

Music: Yo La Tengo :: Little Eyes
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Lord of the Hissy Fit

Hissy What is it about romance novel cover art that makes it seem almost inherently laughable? Is it the airbrushed paintings of lust disguised as love, depicted through perpetually heaving chests (both male and female) on impossibly fit bodies? Or the dashing-but-flaccid titles that sound almost computer generated?

Longmire (“The Internet’s leading source of wasted pixels”) has spent many long hours re-inventing the romance novel (or at least the covers), with hilarious results. “Lord of the Hissy Fit” and “I’m About To Let One” top the charts.

Thanks Paul

Music: Wings :: Silly Love Songs
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Terms of Service

At long last, added a Terms of Service document to the Birdhouse signup process. Wanted to keep legalese out of it as much as possible, and common sense in. What I ended up with was cobbled together from multiple sources (all of which I found to be in wide usage), with my own modifications plus contributions on Harassment and Background Processes from mneptok.

Music: Odetta :: Goodnight Irene
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Operation Resurrection

Lunatics are preparing to storm the asylum:

Norm Olson, senior adviser to the Michigan militia and pastor of a strong right-to-life church in Wolverine, said Tuesday he had put together an unarmed coalition of state militias that were prepared to storm the Florida hospice where Terri Schiavo has been left to die, and take her to a safe house.

Olson said he needed only the OK from Schiavo’s father, Robert Schindler, either directly or through his attorney David Gibbs, to put the plan, called “Operation Resurrection,” into action on Sunday.

See also: 22 Things We Learned from the Terri Schiavo Case

Music: John Fahey :: Coelacanths
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Tagging Non-English Spam

Have recently noticed a huge uptick in the amount of non-English (especially Chinese) spam, which slips through the SpamAssasin nets much more readily than English spam (at least it does in most Western SA setups; not sure how different things are for, say, Chinese hosts).

Turns out you can tell SpamAssassin to give higher ratings to messages written in languages other than those you’ve explicitly sanctioned. Higher ratings mean more likelihood of messages getting tossed to /dev/null or saved in a junk box. In your local.cf or user_prefs, just add:

ok_languages en de la th sv

(e.g.) to accept messages in English, German, Latin, Thai, and Swedish. Full list of language codes here. Works a treat.

Music: The Seeds :: 900 Million People Daily