Phosphorus and Lime

I have an old Toshiba 2800 laptop that I inherited. It came with Windows XP home installed, but with only 64 MB RAM is slower than a mail-in rebate. So I decided to move it over to one of those small Linux distros.

I tried Puppy Linux and that failed. So I tried DSL (Damn Small Linux) -- and that froze, too. The Ubuntu live CD loaded -- in 40 minutes!

Then I found this note on the web:



Don't know what the difference is. But it worked. Also solved my problem with Puppy Linux. So if you're having trouble loading Linux on a Toshiba laptop, try that.

One more note: hit esc on load to enter bios and page down to change PC Card Controller mode.

Just ran into this (while browsing a site boycotting the new James Bond.)

I was looking for one of these a while back. I forget exactly why now. Anyway, now I found it. (And it looks as though it's been around for a while!)

keywords: images, graphics, morph, morphing

There was some buzz recently in the blogosphere about spammers breaking Gmail and I noticed myself that more spam (3-4 per day?) were making it into my inbox. It appears, however, Google has got the problem back under control. I'd guess that I'm still averaging 1-2 spam in my inbox a day. But I just looked in my spam box and I'm averaging about a dozen spams today. (Any false positives? I didn't notice any but I confess I don't look all that hard.)

So it looks, for the time being at least, that Google turned the tide and kept it manageable. How much of this is a result of my own spam marking, I'm not sure. But I'm appreciative in any event.

Still contemplating the problem of form-based web spam. Wondering just now whether there weren't some event based challenges that might thwart spammers. A trivial right-click task, or something like:

copy and paste the animal from this string into the field below:
monday/lion/bank/green


Word categories, terms, and delimiters could be easily randomized -- three chances, impose a time penalty for wrong guesses, reset challenge. You might even color code responses to give a bit of a visual cue to viewers (though this would present a numerical pattern that would be a vulnerability.)

A nuisance even if it works, but a stopgap that, if properly implemented, might qualify as an effective reverse-Turing test and require quasi-AI to break.

A couple notes:

1. affected rows

In updating a record using PHP/MySQL where the data is not actually changed, PHP will return 0 rows affected. To get around this, there is a flag that can be set when establish the db connection. Details here:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-affected-rows.php#33509

2. MySQL 'INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE'

I wrote a function that does this the long way by trying to select the row then inserting or updating based on the result. This is probably much more efficient. Details here:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/insert-on-duplicate.html

keywords: php, mysql, insert, update, affected, rows, duplicate

A slight encapsulation of the PHP mysql_query function. I used to add this line to all my scripts:



Now I use this:



A little more descriptive when things don't go as planned.

keywords: php, mysql, fx, query

I'm working on a more serious, commercialesque website and wish to incorporate some open source GPL libraries, so I've been trying to figure out the implications. This from the Wikipedia entry on GPL:



From the horse's mouth: GNU General Public License v2.0

keywords: GNU, licensing, open source

Thinking out loud:


 

There are terrorists among us, and they're not calling each other on unencrypted cell phones to talk in broken English about the next skyscraper they're going to level. They're spammers -- and if Bush wanted to do something useful with $200 billion, he could have thrown it at this problem.

Anyway, a few interesting blog entries I bounced between today as I researched PHP solutions that sum up the state of the art:

The State of Spam [Karma] (unknowngenius.com)

Bad Behavior 2 Roadmap Update (wordpress.com)

weblog spam (diveintomark.org)

Spam Karma looks the most promising of the solutions on offer, but I'm going to tinker with Bad Behavior since it's GPL and is about the only thing I found for PHP that sounds half-way effective and not tailored to wordpress.

On a tangential thread, I came across this:

ripple monetary system (wikipedia)

Whuffie (wikipedia)

ripple project (sourceforge)

Interesting concept. Afraid we'll never really see the proof.

keywords: spam, karma, wordpress, whuffie, ripple

Need to make some room on the page.

My revised template for library-like include files. Simple enough, but since adopting the form as my standard, I've found development speed and quality has improved noticeably.



keywords: PHP, template, library, include, function