Nozell, rhymes with Oh Hell

The daily comment spam is getting worse and worse — easily 100+ per day. It never makes it to the website because WordPress is setup so I need to approve all postings, but it is a PITA to weed
through the spam to find the occasionally real comments.

I’ve seen on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog that in order to post, you need to type *his* first name in one of the forms. Not rocket science if a human is making the posting, but perhaps just difficult enough for the spammer’s script to fail. The other nice thing is you can always change the question to something equally as trival. Say, “what the the color of the sky?” or “3141592 is my favorite number, what is my favorite number?”

Jeff Barr posted an entry on exactly how to do that in Wordpress. The only thing that was a little tricky was the change to wp-comments-post.php was on line 22 in my copy of the file. The difference because the file is a DOS format and emacs displayed it with ^M^M at the end of each line (essentially halving the
number of line Jeff saw.

The changes work for me…

Yesterday I listened to [Adam Curry’s](http://live.curry.com/) Daily Source Code and the Dave Winer collaboration, [Trade Secrets](http://secrets.scripting.com/).

Last night poked around with [ipodder.org](http://www.ipodder.org) and downloaded all the ’stock’ content that came with the [get_enclosures.pl](http://www.ipodder.org/) script.

IT Conversations audio is a gold mine! The only problem is not having enough time to listen to everything that interests me.

I don’t have an ipod (or an [Apple ipod + HP](http://h10049.www1.hp.com/music/us/en/ipod_flash.html)), but the car does have a CD player, so get_enclosures may need to be hacked to burn a daily CD.

I wanted a nice simple way to mirror my daily bookmarks that I’ve added to [del.icio.us](http://del.icio.us) into [WordPress](http://www.wordpress.org)

Stephen Eyre’s [dailydelicious](http://www.dot-totally.co.uk/dailydelicious.txt) was close, but
not exactly they way I wanted it. He used the RSS feed, but that doesn’t give a good daily cutoff.

So, I present Yet Another Daily Delicious php script: [yadd.php](http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/yadd-1.0.TXT).

It asks for just today’s bookmarks using the published api, parses the XML, generates nicely formatted HTML and creates a WordPress entry.

Here is the writeup from the code:
- - -

-marc


For my piece of mind, please backup your wordpress database before proceeding. I don’t want my instructions to cause you to lose data.

• Grab my mt blosxom flavor files and add to your $datadir. Right-click to save these files:
  content_type.mt date.mt, foot.mt , head.mt, story.mt
• Edit story.mt and change the line “AUTHOR: marc” to whatever
  username you will be using.
• If you are using the blosxom clicktrack plugin (00clicktrack),
  disable it.
• Visit your blosxom site using the mt flavor:
  http://yoursite.local/cgi-bin/blosxom?flav=mt and save it into a
  file named import in your wp-admin directory. You may want to try
  this: lynx -dump http://yoursite.local/cgi-bin/blosxom?flav=mt >
  wp-admin/import.txt
• Take a look at the import.txt file you just created. There are some
  things you may want to fix now rather than after the import.
  • Lines are wrapped at 79 characters, so long URLs or entry titles may be broken.
  • If you have a habit of using a bunch of dashes to separate text, the importer
    may get confused and think it is the beginning of a new entry. Consider replacing
    - with =
  • All the categories will be something like /nh (based on the pathname). You may want
    to remove the leading slash. You can fix this after import and well as build up
    a category hierarchy, so it isn’t a big deal.
• Follow the standard WordPress instructions for import-mt.php.
• If you don’t like your categories named with a leading slash (eg:
  /nh), then edit your new WordPress categories.
• Start going through your posts and clean up any messes…

Andrew Sweger has come up with an cool use for
blog + RSS — educating people about one GNU/Linux debian package per
day.

I have set up a service that publishes the name and description of
adifferent Debian GNU/Linux package every day. My goal is to
encouragepeople to explore Debian more and discover great software
they might notknow was there (with over ten thousand packages, it’s
easy to overlook a few gems). It is implemented using a LiveJournal
free account called “debaday” (sounds Australian to me now). Please
feel free to pass thisinformation on to other groups you think may be
interested.

Anyone can read an HTML version of the current postings at:
http://www.livejournal.com/
users/debaday/

The service is also freely available as as RSS feed at the following
URL:

http://www.livejour
nal.com/users/debaday/data/rss

I’ve added it to my Amphetadesk feed…

There are no
raises at HP this year, so please go
bid on my auction.

width="151" height="92"
src="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/i-heart-my-vax-vms-forever.jpg">

Thank you ;-)

I recently picked up through my company’s employee purchase program a nice HP 318 camera. It is only 2.31 megapixel, but it works out of the box with debian (thanks gphoto2 and gtkam!), has a CF slot so with a 256M card it can hold almost 300 pictures at its highest resolution. The kids and I have been going crazy taking pictures of pretty much everything.

Self portrait

The Beast

Picture of our living room rug — suitable for screen background (click t
o download)

An Xmas editorial I really like.

I had almost forgotten about Lotus Agenda when I saw a pointer to Mitch Kapor’s blog where he talks about his new open source project PIM, Chandler, that is ‘in the spirit’ of Agenda.

Way back in the late 1980s/early 1990s I worked in the then DEC/Digital VMS (now OpenVMS) development group and PCs where first showing up on engineer desktops. Microsoft Word 2.x and Lotus Agenda were pretty much all it was used for. The nice thing about Agenda was you could just dump in random notes and it would semi-automatically index, sort and categorize them. So a “email Rich project functional design doc” would make a todo entry under email, link to Rich’s email and also be searchable by ‘functional design doc’.

I have hundreds of email messages (RMAIL files read by evolution, mutt and just plain Mail), status reports (in Microsoft Word format as required by my management chain), notes to myself (simple ASCII text), personal and business contacts (Palm Pilot synced to Evolution Address Book as well as the corporate LDAP). To be able to search for all references to “Joe FieldPerson at onsite at BigCompany” would be a godsend.

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