Alden Bates' Weblog

Is it just me, or is everyone else getting a lot more of those Nigeria-style scams recently. It seems the rate they've been appearing in my Yahoo inbox has been stepping up as of late.

I'm tempted to start sending out replies stating that my country's government has a strict policy of hanging scammers, and they have an extradition treaty with the country of origin.

I downloaded the first Community Bonus Pack for Unreal Tournament last night... I grabbed the ut4mod version, which automates installation. Unfortunately when I went to install it tonight, I discovered that the file associations for the ut4mod file type were still missing due to the last Windows reinstall.

Fortunately there's a utility called UT2Kx Regcheck which can fix up your file associations for you, and also reinsert your CD Key into the registry - useful for the very situation I've described above. Kudos to the author!

If you search on Google for Doctor Who fan club, the top result is currently the NZDWFC page. I'm not entirely sure how that happened, but I'm not complaining either. :)

After all, these days Google is everything.

If you've got a wireless network set up, and your microwave oven causes interferance with it, is that normal? Or should we be worrying about radiation leaks and suchlike? Enquiring minds wish to know.

Edit: Sorted.

I've dumped TabBrowser Extensions, as it was just too buggy for my liking. On the last update it appeared to have killed something to do with Javascript, so that bits of sites (the link to empty the spam folder in Yahoo mail, for instance) no longer worked.

Instead I'm using TabMix, which duplicates a lot of the same functionality but with less code bloat. It's not perfect either, of course - I've found at least one bug to do with closing tabs - but hopefully it won't provide any unplesant surprises like TBE did...

Now, if only the makers of GoogleBar could fix its tendancy to duplicate all the controls when you upgrade Firefox.

I got bored, and looked up the domain information for some of the domains with which the one spammer keeps trying to bombard my site. It said the domains were registered to:

Phill, Jane (NIC-8754) contact61@support-4u.net
Jane Phill
142 W 44 Street
NYC
NY, US
10012
Phone: 2128523####

There's a number of problems with that information of course. For one thing, the phone number has too many digits (I've blanked the last 4 there). For another, the street address is for Osteria al Doge, a resteraunt who I'm sure would be appalled that their address is being used to register domains.

Fortunately by googling "Jane Phill" I found Spam Huntresses blog, which has more info: the spammers in question are the Bulgarian twins Iavor and Emil Zahariev . It's nice to put a name to the people who want to pollute my site. :)

Colin Baker seems quite impressed with new Doctor Who, though he tells Eccleston to shut up regarding the whole accent thing. I find it hard to imagine Colin with an accent like Eccleston's...

According to the Daily Record, he was also taken with Billie Piper. Down, boy!

Edit: It says "Ex Dr Who and local celebrity" on the main page of his column. International celebrity would be more like it!

Not content with using mt-blacklist to block spam comments, I decided to be proactive. This involved whipping up some .htaccess rules and scripts to catch and block spammers before they even got to the spamming stage. It works quote nicely - the script catches them when they enter, delivers a 403 error to them and bans their IP address from the weblog.

And then the traffic to my weblog decreased by 50%. Yes, 50% of the traffic to my weblog was spammers. That's just sad.

I can't say enough good things about Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist. Using Brad Choate's MTSQL plugin and some code from the forums on Jay's site posted by TweezerMan, I've added the current count of blocked spams in the right-hand bar on my weblog's index page. It only updates when I post an entry, but at the moment I can see it's reading 3583 spams blocked. The number will rise once I post this entry, of course, because at the moment some plonker is attempting to trackback spam me and MT-Blacklist is blocking them all. Thanks to Jay's plugin, I'm spending less and less time cleaning up after spammers.

Someday I'm going to invent a plugin which interfaces with MT-Blacklist and, when it receives a spam, causes the spammer's computer to explode, then gives them 15,000 volts to the gonads. Then I shall become very rich with donations from grateful bloggers. Huzzah!

Any resemblance between persons living or dead purely accidental, etc, etc. My apologies if this doesn't make sense to you. I was bored.