Several weeks ago I mentioned that spammers had found a weakness in Mollom. Well, Mollom's learning algorithm has successfully learnt the new tricks that spammers were using, and the spam comments have stopped. The number of spam attempts has not decreased, but I have now had over a week without a single spam comment coming through.

Last night I had bit of a battle with my Linux server. The evening had already started out badly with a backup of this website failing due to some mysterious Sqlite error (note, that is was on a Windows machine). Next, backups from my laptop to the server failed, and I could suddenly no longer access network shares on the server by the server's name. So, I logged on to the server from my laptop, opened the Samba config file, and added an entry, specifying its netbios name, and then restarted Samba. At this point, the server was visible in the "network neighbourhood" again, and the backups could proceed. Little did I know that this was only the first problem that I was going to be dealing with that evening.

I've been trying out different advertisers on this website, WidgetBucks being one of them. The hope is that, one day, this website will cover its own hosting costs. As of yesterday, WidgetBucks is no longer active on this website. This was done because WidgetBucks popped up a message saying that they were going to disable the account in three days because it was failing to meet "minimum requirements," as outlined in the terms and conditions. I checked the terms and conditions, and there was nothing there that I had failed to meet; they didn't even have minimum revenue requirements. Rather than try to fight the decision, I decided to pull all of their advertisements off this site for the following reasons:

If you have a digital photo frame from AVLabs (or some other company) and it simply shows "initializing" when you insert an SD card, and switch it on, try a smaller card. I came across this problem recently when my sister bought a digital photo frame, and a 4 GB SD card. Unbeknownst to both of us, a 4 GB SD card, is in fact a 4 GB SDHC (High Capacity) card, and the SDHC standard is incompatible with the SD card that it is based upon.Yes, that's right, despite having SD written on the front (with HC in a different font), and having the same physical size as the original SD card standard, only SDHC card readers can access the data on 4 GB to 32 GB SDHC cards.

I have always had my reservations about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) due to issues such as reliability and control over my own data. To date, no SaaS vendor has addressed my concerns, indeed some people have been openly agressive, to the point of suggesting that I'm so paranoid that I need my head checked. Well, last night I had a problem that highlighted my reliability concerns: the power supply to my home router broke, leaving me without internet until I could buy a replacement today. Due to Dick Smith electronics becoming increasingly poor in its electronics selection (it is now hopeless for the electronics enthusiast), I had to drive all the way into the other side of downtown wellington to Jaycar, in order to buy a 5VDC 3A power supply. One small failure knocked out my internet connectivity for half a day.

Logging in to work on this website today, I was greeted by an ugly sight: comment spam! The number of comments on this website had increased by over 150. It appears that spammers have found a weakness in Mollom, and exploited it.

There have been several cases of external websites embedding images from this website directly into their pages. Known as hotlinking, this results in bandwidth being used up on this website, for the traffic belonging to another website. Hotlinking is essentially stealing of bandwidth from another website, which someone else (or me, in the case of this website) has to pay for. Up until now I have been fairly relaxed about this, after all, some of these external pages were discussing projects on this website and providing inbound links. However, I have also had totally non-related websites hotlinking websites. Most recently, a classified listing on another website was using a photo of my old Compaq Presario in order to sell their item. Not only is this non-related traffic, but the photo shown in the advertisement was most certainly not of the item being sold; something that could be misleading to prospective buyers (it's clearly not a company promotional shot, so the assumption would be that it is the second hand item being sold). With this latest incident I decided that I was fed up with others stealing my bandwidth for non-related websites, and any page that hotlinks to this website now shows the following image:

I have just spent a ridiculous amount of time setting up a satellite TV system for receiving Freeview, free satellite TV for New Zealand. A lot of this time was due to my own lack of experience, and the difficulty in knowing whether something is really working, or not aligned. Here are a few tips for anyone else wishing to set this up themselves. This is not a complete guide, just some ideas that should save time. It assumes that you are installing a Ku band dish for digital TV, but a lot of the advice applies to any satellite dish.

Roughly a year ago this website was opened. By opened, I mean first indexed by Google and Yahoo; the web-space and domain name were registered a year and a month ago (the start of June 2008). It took about a month to get this website to the point that it was ready to receive visitors. At that point, I registered a Google Webmasters account, added this website to the list, and started creating external links.

The statistics for June 2009 are: