HERE appears to be no perfect way to protect oneself from hard-drive crashes. Physical problems, which arise time after time, are always uncalled for, so backups are the best way to prepare and become immune to disaster.

This morning I woke up to find my home computer frozen, having heard suspicious rhythmic noises coming from the box. The hard-drive was dead indeed. The ‘knuckle’ noises confirmed it. Although I have my data stored in three seapare locations, I will still need to find a replacement, then restore programs and settings. It has only been 12 months since my previous hard-drive died.

ORDPRESS is finally most determinded to put a stop to comment spam. The introduction of rel='nofollow' never seemed to have done the trick. Yet, in then absence of this attribute, which was controversially introduced by Google (much like XML’d Site Maps), who knows what a jungle we would have lived in today.

The new spam prevention mechanism will be capable of serving all sites in principle (via API‘s), not only WordPress-powered sites. Meanwhile, I volunteered to be among the testers, but further details are not intended to be disclosed. I can only say that spam flagging is collaborative, much like Google Mail filtering (mentioned and recommended to the audience in my recent talk on security).

The spam protection plug-in presently has a test-bed on this domain. The following link will get things going, i.e. get spam to surge in:

http://www.schestowitz.com/Spam/

Prepare yourself to the end of comment spam!

Related items:

• Black Hat Search Engine Optimisation
• Spammers Map
• Spammer’s Death

Photo from around 1984

ORDS have leaked to my ear that I may have won this year’s rowing competition at the Midland Hotel health club. There is no official announcement yet, but I am rather excited to have heard it. I will definitely take a shot of the prize after the official ceremoney is held.

Having worked out consistently for 10 years, I am now managing to win a pleasant reward almost every year, which I am ecstatic about.

That’ll keep everyone away for a few hours

O anyone who wonders why I have not posted in 24 hours or so, I am working on a new Mandrake Linux machine at home (photo). The work primarily involves setup, customisation and data migration. The nature of my ‘disappearance’ is symbolised by the amusing picture above.

I have been settings everything up so that I can seamlessly work from all locations, including a Ubuntu machine (photo) at work and the SuSE machine (photo #1, photo #2)¹ at the University. In this state of affairs, I can handle data quite uniformly, keeping files and settings in a single place. I also need to work on installing some peripherals like scanner, digital camera and a Palm handheld. Linux on the desktop has made so much progress recently. Installation is, quite frankly, easier than that of Windows, assuming no prior experience with Windows. It is no wonder that Dell is beginning to ship pre-installed Linux machines, much as I predicted a several days ago and also mentioned briefly some months ago.

¹ I’d post pictures of my children when I am old enough to have a family. In the mean time, may computers be equivalent to kids ? I’ll take the risk making that perverse ,very sarcastic statement!

previosuly mentioned one site that was using my GPL‘d theme.

Further on that particular aspect, somebody in Panama bought schestowizt [sic.] dot com only a few days ago. Should I feel flattered as my site is only 13 months old? Can this registration be an attempt to ‘absorb’ IBL‘s from some misspellings? I continue to wonder, but I came accoss an article titled “Para-Sites that Live Off Misspellings of Bigger, Better Sites” Just to clarify, my family name is very rare so it could not have been a coinidence.

A quick whois.net record lookup returns:

Registrant:
   Unasi Inc. (SCHESTOWIZT-COM-DOM)
   Galerias 3
   Zona 5, Panama 5235
   Panama
   +1.3094067818
   +1.3094067818
   info@domaincar.com
   
   Domain Name: SCHESTOWIZT.COM
   Status: PROTECTED

Administrative Contact:
   Unasi Inc. info@domaincar.com
   Galerias 3
   Zona 5, Panama 5235
   Panama
   +1.3094067818
   Fax- +1.3094067818

Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
   Unasi Inc. info@domaincar.com
   Galerias 3
   Zona 5, Panama 5235
   Panama
   +1.3094067818
   Fax- +1.3094067818

Record last updated on 13-Sep-2005.
Record expires on 13-Sep-2006.
Record created on 13-Sep-2005.

Domain servers in listed order:

Name Server: NS1.MY-NAME-SERVER.COM
Name Server: NS2.MY-NAME-SERVER.COM
Name Server: NS3.MY-NAME-SERVER.COM

As I compose this item, I am told by Trevor from nntp://alt.www.webmaster that the same guys snatched a domain that he had dropped. I suppose it is indeed just a case of so-called ‘para-sites’, which I consider to be flattery.

I actually noticed that my site keeps climbing in Google quite rapidly. For example, a search for ‘roy‘ had me ranked 248^th in June, 151^st in July, 99^th in August and now I appear in the top 50! Google sourcers have recently shown some interest in me; specifically, the position of System Administration/Software Engineer that maintains the google.com site. I wonder if I am permitted to blog about this. After all, I am still employed by the University…

OR anyone with interest in the subject of security and data recovery, I hereby link to finalised slides from my presentation yestersay.

• PC Security in a Connected Environment (XHTML)
• Basics of Data Recovery (XHTML)

Both parts were composed with the audience of Ophthalmic surgeons in mind. Expect them to cover the subjects at a relatively shallow level. I am pleased to say that my session is said to have been “well-structured and delivered”.

I sometimes get curious as to the background of some authoritative figures. Here are some interesting facts, which should not be treated as gossip, but strictly as objective facts. Bill Gates at his early days is described in an outdated mini biography, a snippet of which lies below:

His (Bill’s) great-grandfather had been a state legislator and mayor, his grandfather was the vice president of a national bank, and his father was a prominent lawyer.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, who now share a large Boeing 767 passenger plane, appear to have come from so-called “academic families”. Page’s father, Carl Victor, is a computer science professor at Michigan State University, where Larry also began his studies. Brin likewise, but it is the University of Maryland where his father Michael works on mathematics. His mother appears to have worked (possibly still does) in NASA.

The facts above make one wonder if a family of overachievers is a pre-requisite for success. I hope this is merely a coincidence that which not broadly reflect on reality. I can honestly confess that my parents were never educated at a high level. In fact, computers are known to them only at a fundamental level, e.g. Web surfing and Microsoft Word.