You know, I’d dearly love to get my hands on the scum-sucking vermin that continue to spew comment spam at my blog. 10 minutes, a small room and a cricket bat… that’s all I ask.
Failing that, I’ll just settle for doing a mass deletion of their comments every few days. It takes me all of two minutes, maybe, to log into the server and run the following in the MySQL client:
DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = "0";
That’s it. I think WordPress 1.5 has a mass deletion option via the WP admin interface, or I’d take the ten minutes it requires to write a script to do it via the WP admin interface myself.
March 1, 2007 — Update: Obviously, WordPress features since this post have made this unnecessary, and I’m not even 100% sure if this would still work. If you still have WordPress spam problems, make sure you’re using Akismet and the Bad Behavior plugin. They work a treat.
One thing I’ve noticed about my new iMac is that it seems to be a bit sluggish when downloading files. I don’t have any definitive evidence of this yet, but I’m downloading files from Magnatune right now from an album that I bought. On the iMac, I’m downloading the Flac copy of the album, on the Linux box, I’m downloading the WAV copy.
I started the download on the iMac first, and about a minute later I started the download on the Linux box. I’m using Firefox to download the file on the iMac, wget to get the file on Linux. So far, I’ve gotten about 82 MB on the iMac, and 157 MB on the Linux box.
I’m going to have to do some tests later when I have more time. Both machines have 1 GB of RAM, are connected to my home LAN via 100 MB Ethernet, and have roughly equivalent processors - the iMac has a 1.8 GHz G5, the Linux box has a 2.0 GHz Athlon CPU. Neither machine is running anything particularly intensive, or downloading anything else.
Has anyone else seen this, or am I crazy?
I’m a bit wary of built-in speakers, as a rule. I have two 17″ LCD monitors with built-in speakers that I’ve used, maybe, twice. They’re terrible. Horrible. I wouldn’t wish them on anyone with an appreciation for music, or sound in general.
So, I was a bit pessimistic about the iMac’s built-in speakers. I figured they’d be so-so, but that I’d probably end up hooking up a normal set of speakers to the iMac to get decent-quality sound.
I’m pleased to say, my pessimism was unwarranted. I just started streaming some tunes from Magnatune using the plain ‘ol iMac speakers, and it sounds groovy.
By the way, have I mentioned my blog at ZDNet? You can find it here. Or, if you’re in the mood to read my more technical columns, you can find many on UnixReview.com, and book reviews too.
If that weren’t enough, I still contribute weekly articles to Linux Weekly News… Be sure to check ‘em out when you have a moment.
My new toy arrived yesterday. It’s a 20″ iMac, 1 GB of RAM, 160 GB hard drive, SuperDrive and the Airport Extreme card built in. It’s quite nice. In retrospect, I probably should have sprung for the 250 GB hard drive, but I was already spending quite enough as it was. (I’m used to building my own machines, so I’m kind of a cheap bastard when it comes to spending money on new computers… I usually bring in a new computer for less than $1K…)
I’ve dubbed him Zaphod, in honor of Douglas Adams, since Adams was a major proponent of Macs. Haven’t quite figured out what place in the household that Zaphod should live in. He looks terribly comfortable in the living room, but I’m thinking upstairs in the workroom would be more productive.
So far, I’ve spent several hours installing software using Fink, so I can use some of the tools I’m used to on Linux - NcFTP, wget, etc. I’m quite pleased that Fink uses Debian’s dpkg and APT front-end so I don’t have to learn yet another set of package management tools.
I’m still getting used to a few shortcomings in the OS X interface — namely, the lack of the ability to cut and paste using the middle button instead of having to highlight, click “Copy” and then “Paste,” and the fact that OS X only has one workspace… I love the feature in Xfce that allows you to scroll between workspaces by using the mouse wheel. I wonder if there’s a utility to give the Mac workspaces?
Linux users who want to burn DVDs should check out Coasterless DVD burning. At the risk of self-promoting, there’s also an article I wrote on the subject over on UnixReview.com.
Once everything is set up, burning DVDs is actually surprisingly easy…
I’m annoyed with Apple. At least, I’m annoyed with the insane wait times to get a Mac Mini and the misinformation I got from one of their reps.
I ordered a Mac Mini back in January, and knew I’d have to wait until mid-February to get it. Then I decided I’d really like to have the wireless and BlueTooth options, so I called and asked “will it delay my order significantly if I change it now?” For some insane reasons, most companies can’t just change an order. Oh, no… they have to cancel one and start a new order. When there’s minimal wait time, that’s no biggie.
Well, the Nice Lady told me it would delay the order about 48 hours. With a wait time of three to four weeks, I could live with 48 hours, so I said “go for it,” and waited for the e-mail confirmation to roll in with my new order confirmation. I didn’t get that, so I went to Apple website the next day to check my order status.
My estimated ship date had been pushed back from February 18 to March 3. 48 hours my ass.
So I called Apple and asked “what the heck?” (I really did say “heck” because I have to do some phone support in my “day” job as well, and I try not to be abusive or mean to people who have to answer phones. I know customer agent X isn’t going to have any control over what customer agent Y told me the day before.) Basically, I got “sorry, nothing we can do.” Well, they offered me a whopping $25 discount on my order. I said I’d think about it. I thought about it, and decided that it wasn’t worth the wait, and called to cancel today. They offered me a whopping $40 discount if I’d keep the order, but wouldn’t give me a discount on any computers that they could actually ship before the end of February.
So, I’m mulling my options. I wanted a Mac Mini so I could work with OS X, and so I could possibly pull in a few extra bucks writing about OS X. I also wanted a tiny computer that wouldn’t take up too much space, since I already have an ungodly number of computers as it is, and it’s getting kind of crowded…
So, options:
- Say screw the whole thing and save my money.
- Buy an iMac 20″ computer locally. It costs more, but I was planning on buying a large LCD monitor anyway, so it would even out.
- Buy a really large LCD monitor and beef up one of my existing computers a bit.
- Go bug nuts and buy a G5 tower and LCD…
- Give up computers entirely and see if there are any Amish communities accepting new members.