Puppet Slam 2008

The state and mood of the Democratic nomination race is pretty well summed up here. I stayed up until 2:30am on Tuesday night to watch the North Carolina and Indiana results fluctuate and stabilize into a major win for Obama. I had not been hopeful going into the night, simply because my hopes of being pleasantly surprised had been dashed by the two major contests preceding it (Ohio, Pennsylvania), and the polls indicated another night that would erode Obama’s frontrunner status. But my recently won cynicism was just as quickly dashed, and I am calm and confident that the first stage of my dream will come true in the next 4 weeks.

I bought a Flickr Pro account. Keep an eye on my photostream for impending madness. For mass uploading, I’ve switched from using Desktop Flickr Uploader to using jUploadr, which is not as good, but far more stable.

I’ve finally started using a feed reader, called Liferea. I had used iGoogle for a while, but haven’t touched it for months now. iGoogle doesn’t scale, I kept paring down what I was subscribed to to eliminate noise, but a good feed reader minimizes every feed’s impact and I can really get on with the consuming.

Time magazine has a good article on how Obama learned to win, called “How Obama Learned To Win”.

What a kickass game.

If you’re a Wii owner, look for the Wii Ware addition to the Shop Channel that will sell third party games, coming May 12.

What why the lucky stiff can do in 4 hours would put most coders to shame.

Me, John, and MaryBeth went to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden on Saturday, for their annual cherry blossom festival. Apparently the cherry blossoms there bloom like, for a week out of the whole year, so this year we caught it. It was John’s idea, and an awesome one. The Brooklyn Botanical Garden in general is gorgeous, and with the streams of cherry blossoms, and surprisingly unannoyingly high volume of people, it was breathtaking.

I put all of my photos, taken unambitiously by camera phone, on my Flickr page: here’s the set. I think they came out great. These are my favorites.

Also, in general I’m really getting into Flickr. The whole ecosystem it provides is glutted with fascinating metadata, whose power is revealed in aggregate. I could easily license my photos under Creative Commons, mark them on a map, and do simple things like rotate in place and add tags (so cliche now). I have wanted to start really taking advantage of Flickr for a while now, but never felt like sitting down and doing the manual mental labor of it all.

I lowered that barrier using the Desktop Flickr Organizer (for Linux only), which is just a sweetass app for getting your photos organized and up to Flickr. It’s got a couple of bugs, notably in creating a set and syncing to new sets, but at its most useful function, rapidly naming/tagging/describing/uploading files from my computer to Flickr, it is simply brilliant. If you use Linux I recommend you check it out, with the understanding you’ll still be doing the advanced photo management inside Flickr’s Organizr.

Make a point to visit the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.

The comment spammers here have already made some remarkable strides. I don’t know what kind of Pagerank they think I have. I used to have some, maybe they assume I still got it, I don’t know. I’ve tried a bunch of non-intrusive methods of blocking spam in the past. I really don’t want to mess with the ‘user experience’. On my old blog, I tried for IPs and certain phrases/links, but that was too easily tricked. More recently, a few days ago I added some code to prevent comments coming from users with blank “user agent” strings (that would say you’re posting from Firefox on Windows, or Safari on OS X, for example) from posting, thinking that the spam was coming from scripts that would have no user agent. But, they’re either coming from people in browsers, or with a faked user agent string. One purportedly came from a computer running Windows 95, through Internet Explorer 4.

So now, I’ve installed Akismet as a spam filter, and we’ll see how that goes. I’m not deleting comments detected as spam, just marking them as ‘invisible’, so I can keep a close eye out for false positives and false negatives. This is as far as I can go without changing the comment form, but if I have a single false positive then that’s just what I’ll do. My friend John uses the CHOCHANG approach to spam filtering and that’s probably where I’d go. Oh look at me announcing my attentions to the spammers! But maybe I won’t use the name CHOCHANG spammers, maybe I’d use FAXOFLIFE. Damn it I did it again!

Does anybody have other ideas for spam filtering that don’t involve changing my comment form at all? Anyway, just, er, don’t sign your name Viagra, or I’m pretty sure your comment will be instantly blocked.

Update: It’s already working, blocked 5 spam comments in the last 9 hours.