daniel.haxx.se

There’s no secret I’ve had my share of gripes with Wordpress and here comes two more:

I can’t upload images at the moment! I run the “plain” wordpress package in Debian testing and when I try to upload an image using the fancy new ajax way in 2.5, it just sits there for a while and it seems it receives the file but I don’t get the UI up that I believe I should get when the upload is completed… so I can’t confirm the upload etc so it instead it gets discarded!

I’m suffering a bit from trackback spam so I installed a plugin named Trackback Validator to help me reduce the manual work of denying them. It seems to work rather well so far in that I now no longer have to mark very many comments (trackbacks appear as comments within Wordpress) at all, but the annoying part is that even though the validator unvalidates the trackbacks I still get information mails sent out to me about them! I’ve now also enabled the Akismet plugin so let’s see what happens. Of course simply disabling trackbacks is an option that I’ll use if this doesn’t work good enough.

A funny side-effect with installing and enabling Akismet was that all of a suddent I could access comments previously marked as spam, and thus I could undo the damages from my accidental mark-as-spam-hiccup the other day!

While playing around with plugins, I also installed a gravatar plugin that shows gravatar-images for users on comments, and I installed a plugin that will automatically set my timezone correctly even when DST changes – which Wordpress can’t do by itself!

Then all of a sudden when I poked around (too much) I managed to somehow ruin the background image I use a the top of all pages on my blog. Somewhat I got a gradient there instead, which indeed is what the theme supports (the theme I use is of course a standard one but I have done some minor edits of it). Took me a while to manage to get rid of the gradient and get back image back… I had to resort to editing the PHP file for the theme!

Blah, so I get a large amount of spam comments and trackbacks to my blog and I go over them and mark them as spam regularly. They don’t appear on the site, they just end up in my attention queue and I need to deal with them and take care of the occasional “true” comment as well.

When I do this I press the Awaiting Moderation (15) link (assuming I have fifteen comments awaiting), select them all and then press Mark As Spam and I’m fine.

Right now I managed to error. I didn’t press the awaiting link and then I had the list of all comments shown and since there were many comments I got to see the last 20 comments or so. I selected them all (all comments on that page) and marked them as spam. Whaaaaaa. Pain! That was not very clever! Several legitimate comments now went down the drain and…

There’s no way to restore them, there’s no undo the deletion, there’s no “oh wait these aren’t spam really” way.

Grrrr. So guys, if I removed one of your comments you should know that I’m sorry. I really am. I’ll try to improve…

So the big fancy (and often ridiculously stupid) Swedish IT news site idg.se opened up a “blogging” portal, and in there we find an at least semi-interesting open source blog named Open Force. Contrary to linuxworld.idg.se, it doesn’t look exactly like they just suck out all the news from slashdot, linux.com and linux today and translate them to Swedish.

But of course the author (Niklas Andersson) is but a journalist and not an open source contributor, why I fear it may very well keep up with the rest of idg.se anyway.

I’ll try to keep an eye on it and give it the benefit of the doubt for a while.

Update: it should possibly be noted that “Open Force” – despite the name – is written entirely in Swedish.

I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry but out of no particular reason that I understand, my Wordpress installation has started to speak French to me! At least all controls/popup-texts in the text editor are no longer in English! I don’t know any french, but luckily I know most of these things already without actually having to read the labels. Like this “insert link” example:

(Update: I guess I could mention that this is a plain Debian Unstable installation, and most of the thing is still in English. It is just parts of the UI that went French.)

Nathan pointed out to me that these days you can make your old advogato account syndicate a blog from an RSS feed, so once I get a fresh password for my account there I should get this blog shown there as well for completeness – and after all I blogged on advogato long before I started here… (actually it goes back to May 2000)

Hey, I and Linus are blogging a bit about our week in China (in Swedish) on this separate blog.

Right now there’s darkness outside my window. It is in the middle of the night and this is my prime hacking time, when the rest of the family are all sound asleep.

The three first days of nursing Rex full time has been gentle, as he’s been his very happy himself and we’ve had some great weather allowing walks outdoors and visits to the nearby playgrounds etc. Also, Rex’s two naps per day (totaling at around 3-4 hours) does allow for some personal time as well, so I manage to read my mails and even do occasional commits during the days.

Things will get rougher when the days go darker, colder and wetter. Or when Rex is getting more cranky and similar. But I’m optimistic.

Keeping up with IRC like I can when I’m sitting in front of my computer all day at work isn’t really possible and the no commuting will prevent me from keeping up with the podcasts I used to listen to, but those are no biggies to overcome. I quite like not having to go anywhere particular in the morning and thus not have to “travel” home again in the later afternoon.

Instead, I’ve fixed bugs and worked in several patches to curl and c-ares and I’ve even been able to submit blog posts at a decent pace.

I’m going to China for a week in October. I have a few things I feel I better figure out while I’m there, including:

1. Exactly how evil is the internet censorship and filtering for ordinary tourists such as me. A laptop and some network tools should be enough to tell, as the hotel boasts free internet access…
2. Time zone stuff. China has a single time zone for the entire country, which by itself is fascinating for such a huge area. And when looking at a time zone map, you can see that the country picked a time zone that is the equivalent of western Australia, which seems to be a lot of sense for the east coast of China. So, the western parts of China are terribly off. The question is: do the people ignore the time and follow the light, or do they obey the time and spend parts of the lives in more darkness than what they otherwise would? If you go north/south at the eastern and western edges of China, you’ll end up in time zones that are five hours apart!
3. Chinese typing is with glyphs; some tens of thousands of different ones. In a Chinese dictionary, like a Chinese to English one, how do they sort the Chinese words? I mean, glyphs just have got to be very hard to sort in a logical manner?! Or how do they find the words?

Yeah, I only have five working days left until I take a bunch of months off to take care of Rex full-time. It may of course prevent be from being as active online as I sometimes have been. We’ll see.

During the summer 2001, me and my wife toured Vietnam and we had a great time. For that occasion I set up a little online diary that would allow us to post entries while on the road, to allow our families and friends back home to be able to keep up with what we were doing.

Fast forward to present day: the diary “submit new entry” form is still left on my site, and while it no longer works (it hasn’t worked for many years) – it is still one of the most visited pages on my site! It seems the automated spam bots find it and submit crap to it… the crap doesn’t end up anywhere to be seen nor is it even stored on the server, but it clearly identifies evil machines! Isn’t that a honeypot as good as any?!

So far during September 2007, no less than 309 unique IP addresses have issued a POST on that page..