My personal experiences in handling comment spam are limited, as often is the case. Very few individuals have had the opportunity to test the full spectrum of any given type of software or product (a classic example are laptops, of which they are many models and manufacturers). Only an exhaustive trial, in turn, enables to give a good and comprehensive review.

As regards faults or statistics or reliability, these can rarely be accounted for unless a careful, systematic, and prolonged study is conducted. As a result, the suggestion I make will suffer from a relatively narrow scope. By all means, I am not proposing the best prevention methods for comment spam. I can merely add my 2 cents, speaking about my evolutionary experience with a few spam prevention tools, plug-ins, or paradigms. I shall also provide some links to a variety of popular tools that I am less familiar with.

Read the rest of this entry »

A computer-generated face, which the BBC uses in a promotional trailer, has been dropped despite initial arguments in defence of it.

A promotional trailer for digital TV – which some viewers complained was “horrific” and “disturbingly psychotic” – has been dropped by the BBC.

The Faces campaign, which featured a giant animated head made up of smaller heads, generated 1,300 complaints.

Follow the links at the top and judge for yourself. I think the imagery might only be unnerving to children, unless one considers scenes from Silence of the Lambs.

Little can be good sometimes

INIMISATION is an important key to a happy life. Not necessarily minimalism, but a simplification rather.

Several years back, I identified the need to find the right key (among the large set) as quickly as possible. I wanted to optimise the ‘fetch time’. No fumbling, no mistakes. Given the amount of time we spend pulling keys out of our pockets, wouldn’t that seem reasonable? Many would repeat this belt-and-braces exercise about a dozen times a day.

Think what keys you truly need and when. I typically carry just 2 keys and 2 swipe cards. That is all I need in most circumstances. In total, they are weighing at about 30 grams and are invisible in the pocket. My PDA is quite discreet too: no bigger than a small cellular phone.

Wallets likewise. I carry coins or bills when required. I pour all change in my pocket and empty in all in central ‘repository of change’ when I get home. No bloat due to wallet! Pockets are emptied, the pants become lighter and there are never hard or sharp objects nearby valued organs.

Is coffee really getting that popular? First I heard about coffee beer from Nestle and now it’s Coca-Cola with real coffee included in its cold drink.

Also see: Coffee art gallery

Image teaser for the coffee art gallery

The days of Sega and Sonic are sorely missed
and appear irreplaceable in its Japanese place of birth

BOX 360 is a gaming console from Microsoft, which has hit the streets just weeks ahead of Christmas. The Xbox 360 brought with it great anticipation among games enthusiasts, so sales were expected to be exceptionally high. Nonetheless, it has been revealed that Japan is reluctant to embrace the Xbox 360:

“It’s not going to be a big hit in Japan,” said 26-year-old Kentaro Okamoto, one of the first Xbox 360 buyers. “I buy every new game console… but normally Japanese customers only buy a machine when it’s made by Sony or Nintendo.”

In a similar article which comes from the BBC:

Microsoft has launched its Xbox 360 games console in Japan to what seems like a more subdued response than it received in Europe and North America.

[...]

Sales of the first Microsoft Xbox in Japan have always lagged behind Sony PlayStation 2, which was launched two years before it.

It sound as though this model will make a complete 360, having solved none of its previous shortcomings. As a publicity stunt perhaps, it is understocked on the shelves though.

On top of it all, we recently heard of some serious bugs and great trouble surrounding the Xbox 360, which perhaps was unready for prime time. Consequently, lawsuits begin to loom over, which put the product’s reputation in jeopardy.

Open Source enthusiasts might be happy to hear that a “Linux on Xbox 360″ project has already been initiated. Microsoft are actually losing money for every unit that they sell. Profit is expected to be made using games sales. Having said that, units that are sold in vain give game programmers the illusions that the Xbox is popular, which urges more involvement. It is a similar case to Windows workstations that are wiped clean to give way to Linux, yet are still counted as Windows sales.

Related item: Is Nintendo Dying?

A surprise birthday gift from last year

Y birthday is coming up next Saturday. There will be no fuss, but a Christmas party instead that night. I can recall last year’s birthday quite vividly, but I can’t say I enjoyed it. The photos reflect poorly on that very reality.

I never liked getting older, especially because I was among the oldest kids in my class (a December born). I tolerated rather than celebrated. I hope and expect that this year’s birthday will be yet another ordinary day, at least in my mind. Perhaps I can fool myself… thinking that I never truly mature by letting it pass by quietly. We digress…

“Joy O’ Joy. You got mail. 10,000 of it…”

S if hijacked Windows boxes were not enough to attribute spam to Windows, have a look at the following story. As it comes from The Register, it is not reluctant to point out that mail floods were initiated by a Microsoft Small Business Server:

The problem was attributed to an improper server configuration, causing five servers to send out more than half a million emails to Dublin solicitors. The deluge of mail originated with a publishing company’s email marketing message, which was sent to solicitors. When some solicitors attempted to reply to the mail, a fault in the solicitors’ configuration of Microsoft Small Business Server sent the original email to their entire email database tens of thousands of times.

Putting the factors above together, Microsoft can no longer deny the fact that spam sometimes originates in their improperly-built operating system. The Windows advocates would argue that the server was configured badly, but should it not be intuitive and protect the users from themselves? Fortunately, there is no doubt in my mind that Dublin lawyers all use Windows, which makes it a dog-eat-dog situation.

Let us hope that the sysadmins have learned their lesson and realised that mail should not be administered by ‘Toy O/S‘. Other companies have learned that mail is better handled by Linux.

[HP’s] Schulz said that HP’s entire email infrastructure… is run on Linux and delivers in the region of three terrabytes [sic] of mail annually.