Everything Else

11/24/05: Happy Thanksgiving. Post updated and bumped. It's certainly been an interesting year.

First off, if you've previously installed my idiocy level extension for Mozilla Firefox, please upgrade to the current version here.

I've changed the web service query to point at the Department of Homeland Insecurity website rather than Boyzoid's blog - he was very gracious under the circumstances but did mention something about getting 25 million hits to his web service, so please help out by upgrading the extension asap - I've also changed some of the text and made the graphics purtier, and also made the extension compatable with the upcoming Firefox Version 1.5.

Now I've got a few things to say about all the interesting comments appended to my extension at the moz page.

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So I've been taking a course at the local uni entitled "History and Philosphy of Science." It's a 300-level course that has no prerequisites, and fulfills a graduation requirement. I enjoy the lecture, and the discussions are lively enough. The reading is, however, a different story.

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Had a site outage while moving the site to a new host - pretty cool outfit called Linode that basically gives you a disk image of any one of several distros using UML (User Mode Linux), thus giving me the cost advantage of shared hosting while having actual, real root on my server. (Tried a different host using BSD, but the way it was chrooted broke ports and several other things). So you know, there is a world of difference between chroot and UML, a difference worth investigation.

More later.

These have been few and far between, but to be certain a lot has been going on in the background. For one thing, I needed to work on my understanding of b2evolution, which as it turns out is very well-documented and easy-to-maintain code. I've also been checking and killing referral spam on a pretty much daily basis. I'm tempted to take the referral block out of the sidebar entirely, but I kind of enjoy banning the creeps, and it also forces me to maintain my website.

So here's an update, and there are a couple of obvious changes that should be apparent... that's all I've got to say for the time being, but will be posting more in the near future. Thanks for reading.

Open question to the community: is there an effective, ethical, and legal way to prevent these people from doing what they do? If they aren't filling up my mail with C14L15 and V*I*A*G*R*A ads (more amusing was the one that promised that I could "Increase by one full cup size in two weeks - guaranteed!" to which my reply was "To hell with that - lots of pizza and beer would work fine on me and be a lot more fun than some stupid pill."), the spammers are screwing up my referrer stats, hijacking domain names - for example, one of the referrer spams I had was a soccer website registered in the dot-org namespace - or otherwise finding ways to piss off 99.8% of the population in the search of a fast buck.

I'm kind of wondering if there isn't a clear psychological profile developing of these people - "sociopath" comes to mind but I'm no shrink. Any shrinks out there are more than welcome to add their ideas, as well as lambasting me for using the term "shrink."

Anyhow, I guess the best solution to spammers is to wrap them in barbed wire and fire them into the Sun. Unfortunately, that's neither ethical nor legal, and hardly practical, so let's put our heads together to find a better solution, neh?