Here is an arbitrary list of items which contribute to hassle and even distress:

• Monolithic content management systems such as PHP-Nuke (and its derivatives or siblings) still attract spam. My forum section has begun eating spam on a daily basis and it is very time consuming. I restore from backup every couple of days, merely reverting to an older database state.
• The blog’s CAPTCHA filter has been cracked, so I must cope with over 100 spam per day.
• Some people post incoherent comments which are not only characterised by poor grammar and typos. It makes one wonder if click-and-point sobriety tests should replace CAPTCHA-based filters.
• With the increase in the number of Windows zombies on the Web, the amount of junk mail that I receive doubled within a few months. I am not alone in this, so I at least find some sympathy.

Speaking of which, the following showed up in the news last night:

Spam zombies give UK ISPs the fear

A massive 96 per cent of 50 ISP respondents cited the proliferation of botnets - networks of virus-infected PCs under the control of hackers - as a key business issue.

According to industry analyst firm Gartner, seven in 10 items of spam originate from infected PCs.

Let us take a moment to thank out friends at Microsoft. Owing to their so-easy-to-hijack operating system, we all choke on spam.

• Lawsuit against Google over PageRank got bloggers humming. It was a mastery of incompetence. One such lawsuit was apparently successful, so algorithms that discriminate (not deliberately so) can lead their operator to paying fines.
• Judging by one of the OSDL mailing lists, to which I have been subscribed for while, the OSDL mailing lists (much like xmms-dev) mainly attract spam, kooks, and posers.
• Outlook Express or Outlook (same codebase; same rubbish; one word less) are a bit of a handful. I am tired of receiving E-mail where responses, are top-posted (’jeopardy-style’ composition, i.e. answer comes first, then the question).
• Making your software exclusively available for Windows is like selling and displaying your merchandise at a garbage site just because most prospective customers reside.
• Digg version 3 does not discourage dupes as effectively as it used to. It makes it somewhat inferior to its predecessor. But I digress…

S time progresses and computer hardware matures, there appears to be a worrisome trend. Backward compatibility, and sometimes practicality and simplicity, are being compromised. Applications get ever more bloated, attempting to be the entire world, and more.

Take, for example, media players that extend infinitely. Some of them turn from simple music players into a fully-blown video player, a Web browser, a music store, a sound mixer, and even an editor or playlist manager that is fairly sophisticated and employs greedy engines. From something small that occupies a megabyte of RAM and does its work reliably, the application can soon devolve into a complex resource pig.

There ought to be support for plug-ins that facilitate lightweight use, but the idea is often discarded, quite unfortunately. This, as a matter of fact, is one of the arguments for backing Open Source development, with healthy user and developer communities. Hooks can accommodate extensions that do not distract maintainers of the core and do not truly detract from its quality (e.g. stability).

For this reason, to use a personal example, I use Thunderbird as what it truly is: a mail client (as well as Horde’s mail facility for Web-based access tot the accounts). I don’t use Thunderbird for newsgroups and feeds. These are ‘plugs’ for gaps which Thunderbird merely attempts to fill, while retaining simplicity (and thus its lack function). So instead, I use a highly-versatile tool, KNode, which was created and designed to accommodate newsgroups in its entirety. It is designed to deliver the functionality at its best. For feeds, I use a pro-feeds application rather than some off-the-hook ‘application’ or a Web service. Truthfully, I tried alternatives such as Feedlounge, which is Web-based (I was even a project tester briefly), but it was just too slow and it lacked function that I already had in RSSOwl, which I help test as well.

The front page of Slashdot on April 1^st, 2006

FTER Slashdot’s transition to proper CSS-based layout (it used to be heavily based on tables), a contest is run to select the new, permanent site design. Here are some of the latest design contenders. Some of these designs are included as actual Web pages, whereas others are appended as PNG-formatted screenshots. Shown above is the Slashdot front page as of April 1^st this year.