blog.oddy.net

It is a given side effect of blogs that as soon as you have one, the spammers of the world find you’re out there and start posting inane and useless stuff as comments on your site. Wordpress has a very good span filter in the form of Askimet, but it helps to keep the spammers out before they even get to post, but using anti-robot technology.

One such option is provided through the use of key words displayed as distorted images whenever a comment is requested. Known as CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) this technique was invented out of Carnegie Mellon University in 2000, and does a very creditable job. However, to gain extra value, this has been refined into reCAPTCHA, which utilizes CAPTCHA to assist in the process of digitizing the text of old books, thus generally adding to the amount of good information in electronic form.

To get more info, go to the reCAPTCHA site.

I’ve recently switched my Gallery to use the excellent Zen Photo web gallery. This is simpler than Coppermine, but retains enough of smart navigation to be very usable. The presentation is very slick too, with lots of interchangeable themes to choose from.

In making the change, that meant I also had to create a new Wordpress widget to replicate the existing Coppermine widget, and display a random image from Zen Photo in the sidebar.

To get hold of the Zen Photo Wordpress widget, and to get updates, go to my widgets page.

There are an increasing number of network attached storage (NAS) devices, each of which offers at the minimum access to a hard disk drive in an external enclosure. Some devices also offer additional facilities such as active data redundancy (see the earlier post on the Drobo storage robot), but with the Synology DS207+ device, you also receive a whole lot more.

The product runs a cut down version of linux, which makes it adaptable, and capable of running many useful services in the mode of an independent server. Web services run to serving html pages, a photo album/gallery, an FTP server, etc. Barring some noise from the fan unit used to cool the motherboard and drives, there\’s very little to complain about this device.

For more information, see the official Synology site…

Synology Inc. :: Products :: Disk Station DS207+

This site has been hosted using the popular blog publishing system from Wordpress. It’s very easy to use, the themes can be customised easily, and it doesn’t try to be all things to all people. However, in the interest of keeping all things fresh, I have been looking at alternate CMS systems, including XOOPS, Drupal and Joomla!

Actually, there are probably several hundred CMS applications now available, both commercial and open source. As a result, trying to pick the ‘best’ CMS for your site is almost impossible. To make the decision easier, I decided to turn to the web, and look for some comparative reviews. And the best place I’ve found so far is CMS Matrix.

Run by Plain Black Corporation, the site was created in an attempt to provide a comprehensive list of CMS systems. It is a place where someone can search on very specific criteria and see a list of CMS systems that match that list. I’ve certainly found it useful!

I have been looking to install a net nanny type application for sometime on my home network, mainly to provide some protection for the kids against the less salubrious websites that are out there.

Received wisdom (mainly from the local ISP) is that I should install a dedicated nanny application onto each PC that I have, and keep each of these up to date as and when the software and the black/white lists change. And this of course is good and sensible advice.

However, I am generally too lazy to do all of the above, and besides, I didn’t want to slow down my connection even more with another application clogging up my MB and CPU. So I started looking for an alternate solution - a net nanny enabled router perhaps?

In the end, I came across this instead - OpenDNS | Providing A Safer And Faster Internet. So, how does this work?

Well, OpenDNS replaces your normal DNS resolution servers, as provided by your ISP. Instead, you go to a special set of DNS servers, which intercept any bad sites and instead send you to a nice warning page instead. Like this…..

In addition, because you access the site through a unique ID, you can also configure OpenDNS to provide additional functionality. Like:

• Phishing protection
• Domain blocking
• Adult site blocking
• Web proxy blocking
• Domain whitelisting
• DNS statistics

And, best of all, this comes at a dollar value of $0! Frankly I think it’s a brilliant solution, and it works on each and every PC on my home network, and on any guest machines as well.

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I have been using Wordpress for the past couple of years, and I’m pretty happy. It certainly makes writing new articles for this site nice and easy. To make life even easier, as I’m scouring the web for useful bits of information, I often want to blog some interesting site there and then. To do this, I’ve been using a convenient little extension for Firefox, called ScribeFire.

However, over the past few weeks I’ve started to have trouble - first of all ScribeFire started to report errors in the API calls, and then when I tried to reregister with my site, it reported that my username and password were incorrect.

Smelling an upgrade rat, I started to track down 2 possible causes - a new version of the ScribeFire extension (1.4.2), or a recent upgrade to Wordpress (2.2.2).

To help track things down, I obtained a copy of the PHP XMLRCP 2.2 library, and built a simple wordpress xmlrpc test script (which can be found here if you are interested).

What this told me was that Wordpress was rejecting any xmlrpc calls containing newline characters (\n). To fix this, I just tracked back into the xmlrpc.php file, and then up to the wp-includes/class-IXR.php library. Inside this standard library the IXR_Message is instantiated as follows:

function IXR_Message ($message) {
$this->message = $message;
}

To strip out the newlines, this is replaced by….

function IXR_Message ($message) {
$this->message = preg_replace(’/\\\\n+/’,”,$message);
}

This doesn’t seem like and ideal solution, but it does work (this post was written back in ScribeFire!)

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After many years of decent service out of the Horde webmail application, I’ve found an alternative.  The RoundCube webmail project attempts to bring all the convenience of AJAX to the web application - an email was always the application in need of this treatment.

The GUI is quite simple, clean and clear.  In fact you can quickly forget that this application doesn’t exist on your desktop at all, as this snapshot shows….

The overall feature set is pretty basic so far (it lacks certain key functions such as pre-filtering of the messages into folders) but that doesn’t detract from the overall positive impressions that I’ve had so far.

This certainly isn’t the perfect webmail application (yet) but if you want to see AJAX making email on the web much nicer to use, then give this a go.

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If you have a website, and need to upload file, you usually use FTP (secure or not) or some local web file manager. The web file managers are usually fairly lame, so I’ve been on the lookout for an AJAX based one for a while. The Relay Directory Manager is the first example of an AJAX based file manager that I have seen - you can find it here

It is still in beta, and the upload bar and buttons can go a bit wonky, but it’s not bad - in fact I find it very useful indeed. Best of it’s open-source

The buzz around this new product has been astonishing - and it’s only just been released. For $499 US you get a small black USB 2.0 unit that can hold up to 4 SATA disk drives.

So it’s a big off-host data store? Well, that and much more. This isn’t just a simple off-host disk, or even an array of disk (like RAID).  It’s actually an intelligent component in its own right (and that’s why this is a robot).  No matter the number of disks installed (up to 4 SATA drives) the Drobo makes them appear as one big drive.  The capacity is subdivided into data, backup and expansion spaces, and the robot manages the location of the data seamlessly and transparently (it is claimed). All of this means that you shoudn’t lose data even if a disk fails; you can add extra capacity on-the-fly by slotting a new disk into a spare slot; you can replaced a disk without having to reconfigure the system; and so on…

For the full skinny, go straight to the website….
Drobo | Products

The only question I have, is when is it going to arrive in the UK? And can I pre-order one now? If I can get my hands on one of these devices, I’ll let you know exactly how well this great new idea turns out to be….

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If you need to have an email address to join a website, but want to avoid all the spam that can accompany that action, then you might be interested in this website.  Guerrilla mail allows you to create a temporary email for 15 minutes, which should be just long enough to get hold of the supplied password.  I’m sure there are plenty of other users that you can imagine if you put your minds to it!

Guerrilla Mail - Disposable temporary e-mail address

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