software

Akismet

I didn’t get much comment spam the first year or so that the main Contra instance was on WordPress. (The LiveJournal instance is a mirror.) I moderate all comments from new commenters, and now that the daily comment spam rate has crept from three or four up past thirty or forty, I figured it was time to do something.

So yesterday morning I installed Akismet, a server-side comment-spam detection plug-in for WordPress that applies a Bayesian signature scheme to incoming comments, and bins the ones it considers spam. Installing it was effortless, and for personal blogs like mine it’s free. (For commercial entities the Akismet service is $60/year.) So far, in about thirty hours it’s identified 80 spammy comments, which remain in the bin so you can scan for false positives if you want. Everything Akismet has fingered so far has proven to be spam. However, I’ve gotten no genuine comments on my WordPress instance since installing it. If you posted (or tried and failed to post) a comment on my WordPress instance today or yesterday, let me know. If nothing is in fact interfering with legitimate comments, this thing is a godsend, and if I sound a little nervous, it’s only that it feels maybe a little too good to be true!

[UPDATE 12/10:] Well, four comments successfully posted, and nothing spammed that shouldn’t be (or not spammed that should have been) suggests that Akismet is a win and I should stop worrying.

The MacSlow Cairo Clock Black Border Problem

Nov 18th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

I’m slowly coming out from under something very like bronchitis, but I wanted to get this item posted because I see nothing about it online: When Mac Slow’s excellent Cairo Clock is installed under Ubuntu with all the desktop defaults, it does not overlay itself on the background correctly. (See screen shot at left.) This was initially a head scratcher for me, because the very same version of Cairo Clock (0.3.4) works perfectly under Ubuntu 10.4.

What I didn’t realize is that in the process of tweaking Lucid Lynx this spring (before I installed Cairo Clock) I changed the Visual Effects option from None to Normal. The clock requires something in the GNOME desktop visual effects mechanism, and when I changed Visual Effects to Normal instead of None, it worked as expected, clipping to the clock face with a nice transparent drop shadow.

The option is in the System | Preferences | Appearance dialog, under the Visual Effects tab.

Nothing more than that, and not a big deal. I’m posting it in case some other Ubuntu noob has the same problem and can’t figure it out. If I can save some poor guy an hour and some hair this easily, I will.

Odd Lots

Oct 1st, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

The base for the Geiger-Muller tubes used in all of the early Cold War era Victoreen counters (including both tubes now on my bench) is called a standard Peewee 3-pin, JEDEC A3-1. Many thanks to Jonathan O’Neal for sending along this link to a detailed spec sheet (PDF) for one of the tubes. Now I can wire up the counter I’m building for initial tests.
A couple of people have suggested using a Leyden jar instead of ordinary capacitors to collect charge for my (supposedly) steampunk Geiger counter. I imagine that a Leyden jar would be more period, and it’s certainly a good excuse to build something that I saw in every single one of the kid books on electricity I read back in the early 60s. Not real portable, though.
There is indeed an organization that helps to keep Latin functional, 2000-odd years from its original coalescence as a major world language. No psychic powers points for guessing that the organization is…the Roman Catholic Church. (Thanks to Michael Covington for the link, which, I must say ahead of things, is in…Latin.)
And Finland just racked up a huge mess of cool points with me for being the only country in the world that broadcasts the news in Latin. (Thanks to Aki Peltonen for the link.)
Jim Furstenberg put me on to photos of a round dozen Victorian submarines. The site looks to be a marvelously engaging time-waster, er, experience broadener. (Have done much of both in recent hours.)
Google just announced its own URL shortener, which will do some reasonable screening against malware. I have avoided using URL shorteners for that reason until now.
Furthermore, the new Google URL shortener will generate a QR code for you if you tack a .qr onto the end of the shortened URL.
Amazon is creating an Android app store. Peculiar? Not if the next (or next after that) Kindle generation is more than just an ebook reader.
I’m proud to say that my good sister Gretchen long ago declared that she is raising free-range kids. I wasn’t quite sure what she meant (Carol and I have none of our own) until I read this. Bravo! Now, can we make zero-tolerance policies in schools a felony? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
The other day I mentioned to Carol that, with “Drumlin Circus” taking on a certain steampunk flavor (it’s certainly nothing like “Drumlin Boiler”) I would probably have to buy a top hat. Her reply: “Um…you already have a top hat.” I looked on the high shelf in the closet, and shore ’nuff! I bought it for the 1999 Coriolis Millennium Christmas Party at the Biltmore Hotel in Scottsdale. I wore it exactly once, and then forgot about it. So what’s next? Spats? Or my seriously ahead-of-the-curve Chester A. Arthur facial hair?

Odd Lots

Sep 27th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: bricoleur, a person who creates bricolage; that is, who pieces together useful things from odd bits that are just lying around. In other words, me.
Now, this interests me: Modkit, a GUI IDE for Arduino, with drag-and-drop “blocks” for program structures (inspired by MIT’s Scratch language for kids) and function calls. Alas, I don’t have any good way to test it (nor time to take up Arduino tinkering, as much as it appeals to me) but this is definitely headed in the right direction. I’m not sure I’d prefer it all out in the cloud, but that’s what seems to be in vogue these days.
Sometimes the universe is so startling that it looks fake. Like this.
I’m thinking that I’ll be toting an Android someday, and I was pleased to see the logo for the Android port of Firefox, called Fennec. When my father was in North Africa during WWII, he and his buddies at the AACS radio station in Mali killed time by attempting to tame the local desert fox population, generally by applying K-rations. What the fennecs thought of K-rations was not recorded, but as best I know they were not driven to extinction in the process.
I’d had this insight some years ago, while listening to one side of lame cellphone conversations in supermarkets (triggered, I’m guessing, by the invention of Bluetooth earclippie headsets) but evidently there’s some research behind it: Overheard “halfalogue” conversations are far more distracting than conversations heard in full. I know! Put it on speakerphone!
The guy who ran the UK Segway operation rode his scooter off a cliff to his unfortunate demise. Gravity’s a bitch, and overconfidence kills. (Thanks to Michael Covington for the link.)
Back when I was in college I saw a truck carrying uncounted cartons of head lettuce hit a low railroad viaduct and split open, and heads, well, rolled. Over in Japan, they’re working on the dressing side, with a major mayonnaise spill.
And from the same site, a writeup on a new Las Vegas hotel that makes significant use of solar energy, even if they didn’t actually intend to. (Did FLW have this kind of trouble?)
From the Gadgets I’m Sure I Will Never Use Department: In case of emergency, well…

Daywander

Sep 20th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

I think a lot of the air is going out of the whole pirates thing; surely I thought there’d be more pirate talk online yesterday, but saw virtually none. Dare we hope that declaring a holiday for a meme may be the kiss of death for that meme? I’m not sure what else will work, as they don’t respond to DDT anymore. So perhaps somebody needs to declare International Walk Like A Zombie Day. I’m open to suggestions on dealing with vampires. Suck Like A Vampire Day? They already do.

The pirates themselves are still out there, even if they’re not talking much. I got a note from the Jolly Pirate last week telling me that he has finally filled a 2 TB hard drive with MP3s, mostly downloaded from Usenet. The collection comes to 350,000 songs. He just grabs whatever gets posted, no matter what it is, and looks for duplicates when he’s bored. (He admits that about 10% may still be dupes; I’m thinking that figure is higher.) This is boggling; I wouldn’t have thought that that many songs had ever been produced in all human history. But what’s more boggling yet is that all 350,000 will fit on a $100 2 TB SATA drive. I asked him how long he’s been gathering them, but have not heard back yet. That’s just under 100 songs per day for ten years. (My guess: he’s been scrounging songs from his friends by the thousands.)

I’m anal about filenames (I’m the Degunking guy, after all) and not a hoarder to begin with, but I’ll bet others have that problem too. Perhaps someone should write a utility that compiles a database of Bayesian signatures for each MP3 file, so to easily spot mostly similar (but not bit-for-bit identical) song files having different titles. Easy Duplicate File Finder doesn’t do this. I’m not an expert at such things, but it might also be able to suggest excessively similar photos (like the endless hundreds we have of various Pack members) that might be deleted and never missed.

I’ve been using the minuscule and frighteningly response Atlantis word processor for odd documents lately, and turned on the sound effects just for jollies. Atlantis plays small sounds at certain times, including a very realistic typewriter click on each keystroke (trust me, I know what those sound like!) a typewriter bell when the line wraps (ditto) and an odd little “mew” like a kitten when it encounters a word not in its dictionary. It also plays a sound like a car horn the first time you touch a key after pressing either Caps Lock or Num Lock, which is surprisingly useful, especially for people like me who watch the keyboard as much as the screen while typing. For awhile I found this annoying, but at some point I ceased to notice it, and now when I type on close-lipped Word 2000 it “sounds funny.” Odd how quickly we adapt to small changes in our environment, quickly making them the norm. Or maybe I just miss my old Underwood Standard.

I had the strange notion today that when I finally get around to building my Geiger counter, I’m going to craft an oak-and-brass case for it, with fluted knobs, shiny trim and whatever other odd touches might be necessary to make it a steampunk artifact. Of course, then I’d need to get with my sister to design the rest of the outfit to match. (“Does this Geiger counter make my butt look small?”)

The shingles rash is spreading around the entire left half of my torso, and is so touchy now that I can’t lean back in my computer chair. So be glad you’re not here; not only am I growing contagious but am also uncharacteristically grouchy. I’ve been making some good progress on the first novella I’ve attempted in almost thirty years, but it’s increasingly difficult to get into flow with the constant electrical-ish prickliness on my back, which morphs into a weird sort of pain with any kind of contact. So I may have to set Drumlin Circus aside for awhile, and continue to gather research on the Pleistocene megafauna. (In the story, all the circus animals are megafauna now extinct on Earth.) I learned yesterday that there was once a 6,000 pound giant wombat, and am trying to get my head around the concept. Whatever else our early human ancestors did, they certainly ate well. For awhile.

Odd Lots

Sep 9th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

It keeps a very low profile somehow, but this NOAA site is the first place I go when I want to see what a hurricane is doing. We’re a little short of hurricanes this year, but I’m good with that.
This is what a pharmacy sign looks like in some parts of Europe. Thanks to Terry Dullmaier (in Germany) for the link. Terry didn’t know if the middle neon part goes off to indicate that the pharmacy is closed. Anybody?
I’ve discovered a great little free clock app for Linux, called the Cairo Clock. It can run in 24-hour mode and is skinnable, with about two dozen different skins available, some of them pretty weird. The skin I like is called Radium, and it (by choice) has a negative weirdness factor: It looks like an old wristwatch I got from my grandfather when I was a kid, which had radium paint on the hands and hour points. The second hand actually ticks forward and then falls back a little, as second hands driven by mechanical escapements used to do. I’d run it on Windows if I could.
From the No-Models-Were-X-Rayed-To-Produce-This-Calendar Department: The now-famous X-Ray pinup calendar floated as a promo by EIZO was a fake, albeit a mighty impressive one.
Bill Higgins put me on to NNDB, which is a biography site and useful for that alone…but take some time to poke at their mapping mechanism, which plots connections between significant people both living and dead. Cool factor 11 out of 10; making the maps useful probably takes more practice than I’ve been able to give it so far–and you must keep in mind that every relationship charted is somebody’s opinion of something.
There is a natural bridge on the Moon. (And I thought Straight Wall was impressive!) Thanks to Darrin Chandler for the link.
Numbers may be hard to grasp; precision and scale are even harder. This animation may help a little. (Thanks to Chuck Ott for the link.)
I don’t care how silly an idea it is. These guys get points for…something.

Odd Lots

Aug 30th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

Well, I got the Mallo-Ware bowls I bought from eBay, and they were in better shape than they looked in the listing, and Dash has clearly busted his last bowl. Which leads to a thought: I used to prowl garage sales for entertainment, halfheartedly hoping to find something useful. (I once got a completely functional early-50s tube tester for fifty cents.) Now I just decide what I consider useful and go to eBay or Craigslist.
Adobe’s Flexnet copy protection system evidently writes to the MBR, and thus can make a system unbootable if it gets in a wrestling match with something else that also wants to be there. Flexnet, in fact, looks disturbingly like a rootkit from here. If I wasn’t sanguine about moving up to Adobe CS before, I sure as hell don’t intend to now.
Courtesy of Esther Schindler (who apparently was the editor who commissioned it) I give you a crackerjack tutorial by Tom Bunzel on how to do pivot tables in Excel.
From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: A luthier is one who makes or repairs stringed instruments. From “lute,” which is one of the most ancient instruments in its class.
Now that Apple has anointed the slate category, the usual suspects are coming up with their own surprisingly interesting takes on the concept. This is my favorite so far, and brings up the interesting question: Why not include both FM radio and TV tuners? If these things are to be travel toys, that’s a must-have. (I also want real GPS, not just cell-tower interpolation.)
Here’s a list of 100 resolutions (102, actually) that anyone aspiring to be an Evil Comic Book Overlord should make. Resolution #2 is particularly important: “My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.”
My daily spam count felll significantly (about 30%) a few days ago, and I wonder if this had anything to do with it.
Somebody told me about this years ago and I didn’t pay attention. I have one of these in a drawer. Will attempt when time allows.
I used to call Hoag’s Object the “Here’s Looking At You, Kid” galaxy. I’m amazed that so few people have ever heard of it, or seen photos. You no longer have an excuse.
If the chemical elements played rock music (or if rock bands were set up like the Metal Men) this would be their periodic table.

Daywander

Aug 21st, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

We’re at a dog show in rural Greeley, Colorado, a little north of Denver–and right smack dab next to a huge cattle feedlot. Now, I’m a caveman and a realist–manure is the price we pay for beef–but that stuff sure do stack up and make its presence known. We kennelled QBit and Aero to simplify show logistics, but it’s funny not having Aero with us at a show. He’s a champ now, and the spotlight has shifted to Dash, who at 15 months already has 11 points (of the required 15) and one major win (of the required 2) toward his own championship. Aero was always a shy dog, and fearful at the outset. This cost him points early on, but Dash has never had any such problems, and it’s (remotely) possible that he could score a big enough win this weekend to make him a champion while still technically a puppy. (He won’t reach his majority until 18 months.) Master groomer Jimi Henton will be helping Carol make him and Jack look their best, and we have high hopes.

I just finished a dozen Lucerne eggs and I’m still alive to write about it, so the big contaminated egg thing may not be as horrible as some are making it out to be. But half a billion eggs, sheesh–and that from one company. Am I going to give up eggs? Hardly. My sole gripe is that Lucerne’s are the only eggs I can find locally in Medium, and I’ve titrated myself to a pair of Medium eggs scrambled for breakfast as what best carries me until lunchtime without any energy lapses. So I may have to fall back to a single Extra Large until I can scare up a different brand of Medium eggs. And while eggs are on the table here, does anybody see size Small or Peewee eggs sold at retail? (As best I know, these are generally sold to food producers for cakes and such.)

I bought and have been tormenting a new-ish WYSIWYG EPub editor product called Jutoh, from the guy who gave us the free ECub editor. It’s available for Windows, Linux, and Mac, and I’m testing it under Windows and Ubuntu. My first impressions are generally good, though the product still has a couple of thin spots, foremost of which is an inability to import .DOC files. More on it once I have a chance to get a couple of projects through it.

It may sound odd, but I’m pleased that Jutoh is not free software. It’s only $22, which is trivial–I’ve spent more than that just having an indifferent lunch with Carol at Village Inn. I don’t want to see the category of inexpensive commercial software die out. For a long time it seemed that software was going to cost either zero or a thousand dollars, which would mean that few solo software geeks would attempt to field an innovative utility that would not sell for hundreds but might sell for tens. I bought Atlantis some time back for $45 and love it–it generates the best EPubs of anything I’ve tried so far. (Jutoh is still in the running, but the race has barely begun.) Free software can be superb but all too often evolves slowly, if at all. Zoundry Raven, on which I write this, hasn’t been updated since 2008…though I must balance this by citing the free ebook manager Calibre, which is updated every couple of weeks.

We have lost the Star Hustler. Jack Horkheimer has gone off to see what the stars look like from the other side, and as little as I saw of him (I’ve not watched much TV in the last 40 years) I will say that he did a spectacular job making observational astronomy compelling to ordinary people, especially young people–and as goofy as he seemed sometimes, he never made me want to kick his teeth in, as all too often happens with Bill Nye. Science should not be full of itself (nor, alas, full of something else, as is the case far too often) and Jack was not. Keep looking up…maybe you’ll spot the light of the Big Bang glinting off the top of his head.

Odd Lots

Aug 10th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

7 comments

My installation of Thunderbird 3 has correlated with a lot of weirdness, not only in system performance but in taskbar “stalls” in response to clicked links in messages. I’ve heard a lot of people having trouble with it as well, and we are apparently not in the minority.
How can I have lived the last ten years as an SF writer and never heard of John Titor, Time Traveler?
Stephen Hawking has told us that we must abandon Earth or die. Agreed. Now, Dr. Hawking, would you please invent us a hyperdrive already?
No, bichons are not groomed this way. (That’s for miniature poodles.) Thanks to Jim Strickland for the link.
Microsoft is working on a tablet prototype with keys on the back surface, opposite the display, so you can type with the fingers that you’re using to grip the device. (Thumbs remain on the front.) This looks better than it tells; do follow the link. Will it work? No opinion until I try it.
If anyone here has not yet been to thereifixedit.com, Go. There. Right. Now. (Via Make.)
Many people have sent me a link to this item from City Journal , which may indicate that some sense is finally creeping into the nutrition world. Sugar and grains may be killing you. Meat, eggs, dairy, and animal fat are probably not. I’ve known this from my research for a long time. Now, to get the government to admit that they’ve been slowly killing their citizens for over 30 years…
Not convinced? Fructose seems to be the preferred sugar of cancer cells.
Still not convinced? The inventor of Cheese Doodles just died at age 90. So much for salt and fat being deadly. (The food dyes worry me more than either.)
Pete Albrecht points out that LA coffee shops are beginning to unplug their Wi-Fi access points and plaster over all their wall outlets. They’ve found that people buy more coffee and snacks when they actually talk to one another. No shirt, Sherlock!
Formufit: PVC pipe fittings for when you’re not using PVC pipe for plumbing. Fine stuff!
I think that what we’ll miss most about our deathwish-afflicted newspapers are all the silly headlines.
And anyone who has ever scratched his or her head over that famous if gappy Latin expression “Et in Arcadia ego” should look at the variations here. (I find myself thinking of a paraphrase of another classic expression from junk mail: “You may already be in Arcadia!”)
Heh. As long as Carol’s beside me, I am.

Insight Is Gone From Ubuntu…

Aug 9th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

73 comments

…and in fact from everything else based on Debian. Not six months after I saw Assembly Language Step By Step, Third Edition hit the shelves, the Debian team decided to pull the Insight debugger package from their seminal Linux distribution, on which Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint, and several others are based. Come Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx at the end of this past April, and suddenly people reading my book can’t work through the examples, because the software that I used in those examples (for single-stepping and examining registers and memory) is no longer available for their version of the OS.

This isn’t new news, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to finesse the problem ever since I heard about it mid-May. I got a number of queries this past week, suggesting that I had better get on it. (This is why you haven’t seen much from me in recent days.) Assuming at first that Insight had been dropped just to keep the distro CD-size, I tried to install it under Lucid from Software Center (not found), next a deb package, and finally from source, but nothing worked quite right. As the months have passed and more and more people are installing Lucid, I’m getting more and more mail about this. It’s a serious problem: A lot of the skill of assembly programming lies in debugging at the instruction level, and much of the tutorial depends on being able to run a debugger. Insight was that debugger. It’s GUI-based, rather than purely textual, and I think it’s a great deal easier to grasp, especially for newcomers.

So why didn’t I just use gdb?

Um…I did. Or at least I thought I did. Insight is an odd case. Most people assume (as I did) that it works the same way that Nemiver, KDbg, and DDD work, as independent front ends for gdb, passing textual commands to gdb and getting textual data back for display. Not so: Insight is gdb, and therein lies (in my opinion) most of the problem. What Insight’s originators did was take the gdb source code and add a built-in GUI, using Tcl/Tk. In effect, they forked gdb and produced a new custom version that contains all of gdb (at least gdb as of 2007) plus a windowing visual wrapper.

That in itself is unorthodox but not necessarily damaging, though forking something as fundamental as gdb should not be done lightly. Still, if you do it, you have to do it well, and I’m seeing indications that Insight isn’t nearly as clean a product as it should be. The Debian team spoke tersely; see the bug report and resolution here: “RoQA; insane packaging; unmaintained; low popcon.” (Yes, I read “popcorn” at first too.) More details may be found here. (Warning! DDG: Deep Debian Geekery.)

Quick translation:

RoQA means “Request of Quality Assurance”; basically, Debian’s QA team decided that the package was too broken to keep in the Debian distribution and requested that it be removed.
Two release candidate (RC) bugs were reported by the Debian team to Insight’s maintainer, but no one there responded. This is odd, because the maintainer is none other than Red Hat.
An NMU is a non-maintainer upload, which is when a package is sent to the distro team by someone other than the package maintainer of record. It is often a sign that the maintainer has abandoned the package, especially if the maintainer never acknowledges the third-party fix.
“Low popcon” is a reference to Debian’s unique “popularity contest” system for gaging how much individual distro packages are being used. Insight got 36 votes, which, in browsing the rest of the stats, seems low but not fatally low.

The real problem is that “insane packaging” issue. Insight contains embedded copies of software that is maintained by others and would be better linked in as libraries. The embedded bits “age” with respect to the current release of the OS and its libraries, eventually getting out of sync to the point that the package will not understand the current system well enough to function correctly. Tcl and Tk are either part of or easily installable to any Linux distro there is; you do not have to cut’n’paste them into your program source. With old software copied into its sources the package may build correctly, but might not necessarily run.

That said, the right way to approach the problem may be no more complex than taking the most recent release of Insight and making a proper Debian package out of it. The version I used last year in Karmic Koala goes back to 2007, and that’s the version pulled from Debian. The July 2009 release may be better. I’ve read enough on building Debian packages to know that I’m not the guy to do it, but I hope that somebody with better Debian chops will eventually try it, so that we can tell if Insight was just wounded, or if it’s really and quite sincerely dead.

In the meantime, the best fix appears to be falling back to Ubuntu 9.10. More here as I learn it.