Tinotopia

I think that new year’s resolutions are a good thing. January 1 is just an arbitrary day, but then the determination to change a habit is itself pretty arbitrary.

You could pick any day — your birthday is a good choice, probably better than January 1 when you think about it — but in practice January 1 always seems to be less arbitrary than it might initially appear, logically. In January, the days are lengthening, snow on the ground makes everything brighter, and the disassembly and packing-away of Christmas decorations gives a general boost to the whole out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new-ism.

I am still working on Having Fewer Crap Experiences and Dressing Better, resolutions from previous years, but have made some progress in each case.

This year’s resolution is simply to make more of the Tinotopia blog, specifically to the point of having something up here every day. I say this with the full knowledge that I’m not going to do it; there will undoubtedly be some days when I’m too busy, or disinterested, to post even a picture. With things like this, though, it’s good to have a clear definition of success, and in this case I’m saying that success will be 365 entries between now and December 31. If I actually achieve 80% of that, I’ll be happy.

I plan to do this, in part, by resurrecting some of the 91 drafts that WordPress tells me I already have on the hook; by posting short things about meals I’ve eaten and places I’ve visited without getting in to 5000 words about what’s minutely wrong with the customer service; by posting links to news articles with a single bitchy sentence about what’s obviously idiotic there; and so on. 5000-word screeds are better, but they get bogged down and abandoned at least as often as they get posted.

1. You can now rate Tinotopia posts by assigning a number of stars to each post. Help those who come after you easily find the choicest pearls of wisdom from Tino!

2. Most posts now carry a short list of possibly related posts at the bottom, based on the text of each one. This seems to only be working on posts made within the last year or so, for reasons which are not clear.

That is all.

Starting this morning, I have consciously been attempting to take a lot of cameraphone pictures, uploading them to Flickr as soon as possible.

Most of these pictures come from my Treo 650, even though the PPC-6700 has a superior camera. The problem is that the PPC-6700′s e-mail client and other software is so horrid, user-hostile, and bug-ridden that it’s on balance better to use the Treo’s inferior camera and superior everything else.

Note that the Treo is also horribly buggy: it’s just that the PPC-6700 is even worse.

You can see the pictures at http://flickr.com/photos/tinotopia — I will keep this up for as long as I can stand it.

So it’s getting on six months since I’ve had anything to say here. Actually, that’s not true. It’s been almost six months since I’ve had the gumption to say anything here. There are two reasons for this:

1. Busy (30%)
2. Movable Type — the system formerly used to run most of this site — sucks (70%)

Amazingly, there are only 103 Google matches for the phrase “Movable Type sucks”; this must be because everyone who has come to believe that Movable Type sucks isn’t able to let anyone else know abotu this, because their websites are all dead because, well, see #2 above.

The particular way in which Movable Type sucked for me was that comment spammers — of whom there are a lot — would regularly DOS the whole server when they started trying to post ten comments a second. I had to turn off comments for the whole site, and even though I only got about two non-spam comments a week, I found that without this feedback mechanism most of my motivation to write anything here disappeared.

So I’m busy. Not necessarily too busy to hold forth on the important issues of the day like Why Those Bastards At Burger King Should Be Flogged, but too busy to smoothly switch everything to some other system and also hold forth etc.: so to hell with smoothness. All the old stuff is still at http://tinotopia.com/log/, as well as in WordPress. As time permits, I’ll come up with some kind of original look instead of this canned theme, and set up redirects so that everyone comes directly to the posts as presented by the new system, In the meantime, I have complaining to do.

It took an unbelievable amount of toil and expenditure, but in a week we have managed to convert this house from a wreck full of horrible junk into something suitable for Christmas, if only barely.

Note the Domo in the tree.

The Christmas haul: entirely books for Tino, in part because some presents are probably waiting for us on the porch back at Tino Manor East. I expect that that’s mainly books, too, for two reasons:

1. Amazon has made buying books easier than buying anything else, and
2. There’s a shortage of new and amazing gadgets on the market. I could really use a new computer, but there are compelling reasons not to buy one right now — particularly if, as I do, one uses a Macintosh.

Where’s my flying car?!

Comments and Trackbacks are still turned off as they present opportunities for what are effectively DOS attacks by would-be comment spammers. Movable Type’s comment-spam-rejection tools have got much better — they appear to be doing the right thing very nearly 100% of the time — but they are so resource-intensive that the computer will get wedged for hours at a time after a particularly intensive spam attack.

That’s it; despite upgrading to the latest version of the anti-comment-spam software, and despite explicitly putting the word ‘poker’ in the blacklist, and despite having deleted and blacklisted hundreds of comments about online poker in the last 24 hours, I’m still getting comment spams about online poker.

I am shutting down comments until I have time to upgrade Tinotopia to some weblog software that has decent, functional anti-comment-spam hooha built in, rather than bolted on the side and non-functional as is the case with Movable Type.

Six Apart has had a good run, and they appear to be doing well with their TypePad service; but I must say that they appear to have largely given up on their Movable Type users. You can always spot weblogs that are powered by MT; the people who run them are always going on about comment and trackback spam the way Windows people go on about inexplicable driver failures.

Most serious Windows failures are the result of users who really don’t know what they’re doing; and I don’t doubt that at the heart of the failure of my installation of MT to detect and kill comment spams is some misconfiguration of my own.

Nevertheless, I don’t have time to screw with it — all the configuration options I can find look fine, and I have been using this software for years now, so it’s not like I’m a complete neophyte — and I don’t see why I should have to.

So I turn the comments back on for about two minutes, and already there are a bunch of spam comments from the pig enthusiasts mentioned below. Like all websites with comments facilities, I’ve been the victim of comment spam before: but never with this kind of volume.

I suppose I was hoping that their comment spammer would time out on my URLs after enough failures: but apparently I misunderestimated the dedication of these people who would advertise poker hyphen critic dot com.

The policies of this website, which are linked from the bottom of every page, clearly specify that unauthorized advertising via the comments or trackback facilities of this website cost not less than $1,000 per insertion, and I believe that this is actually enforceable. The trouble is, to enforce this you need to find the people responsible, and then drag them into a U.S. court.

And then you have to establish that the people whose product is being advertised are actually responsible for the advertisements. It would be pretty easy to claim that these spams were the work of your enemies, out to destroy your reputation. Since these comments are coming from all over the place (presumably a network of zombie PCs), it’s difficult or impossible to trace them back to anyone directly.

Anyway, I’ve updated the anti-comment-spam software, and we’ll see whether that helps. Mentioning ‘poker’ in any context at all will now also cause a comment to be rejected. If you must talk about poker, please use a term like ‘five-card stud’ (though terms like that may soon also be banned here if things go on like this) or ‘thingie you use to move logs around in the fireplace’.

Now I’ve got to get back to working my ass off on things that actually bring in money.