Author: Daniel Mettler

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blog spa-a-a-a-a-m

gee.. now even my change/b/log is getting spammed (as seen with online guestbooks before)! i’ve just noticed a – now deleted – comment entry looking like a spam message. it obviously wasn’t posted by a person but a bot running on a box at 66.111.50.170. among others, it reads: “If you find this entry inappropriate please remove it from your database!”. as if spam could ever be appropriate.. darn dingo.

it’s time for spamassassin for blogs. eventhough – unlike andreas’ experiences – i’ve noticed more false negatives recently. this might have to do with several rbl shutting down service after suffering dos attacks – allegedly by spammers. furthermore, spammers become more sophisticated, now often sending image-only spam messages, preventing many text-based filtering approaches (as only the headers are left for analyzing).

another (most effective) solution would be to disable anonymous comments (which scuks). if the spamming problem persists, there’s no other choice left atm.

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“security is always political” (w. diffie)

i thought whitfield diffie would give a presentation packed with cryptography theory. surprisingly (and slightly disappointing) there wasn’t any at all. instead he gave an overview of the emergence of cryptography, finishing with an outlook. the three key challenges in tomorrow’s cryptography research according to diffie (don’t cite this – it’s based on my memory, not speech recordings):

1. configuration control [dm: clear definition of a device’s configuration/state]
2. automated computer-to-computer economy [dm: think of web services, distributed systems, automated negotiation and (sub-)contracting]
3. trusted computing [dm: think of “tcpa” etc.]

and it’s all about “who will control information society” in the future (am i the only one who heard a gentle criticism here?).. not very exciting insights actually (most people probably knew this before already). seeing whitfield diffie (i’d call him a “living crypto legend”) in person (wearing long white hair and a beard – a bit like mage gandalf ;) was an impressing experience however.

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the perfect digital cam? ;)

talking about latest gadgets. that’s the one i’ve ordered on the same day (thanks to stephan for hints):

sanyo xacti vpc-j1 ex (original page), ordered at byteline.ch with quite an amazing discount. further i’ve ordered the fastest sd-memory card currently available at panashop.ch. using this 256 mb 10 mbyte/s chip the cam will even be able to shoot short movies at 30 fps (vga resolution 640×480, including sound)

the other features are impressing as well:

– fastest camera of its category (wake-up 1.2 s, shutter-interval 1.6 s, playback 0.6 s, shutter delay 0.05 s)
– 2.8x optical zoom using a prism (= internal zoom)
– super-macro mode (2 cm)
– usb direct printing
– cross-platform image transfer (simply recognized as a usb storage device)
– 3.2 mpixel
– li-ion battery (accu) with very long runtime
– durable magnesia case
– last but not least: the first digital cam that actually *talks* to you ;) (-> talking navigation menu system)

the thing i’m rather sceptic about is the quality of the lenses and mechanics. sanyo clearly lacks the reputation of zeiss or leica just to name two. nevertheless i’m confident as i got told that sanyo is actually the world market leader with digital cameras if one also counts the rebranded (oem) cams. i’ll post my experiences regarding image quality. tbc..

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mt modules/plugins?

need to get some useful moveabletype plugins. for blogrolling and such. any recommendations by chance?

further i should review my mt setup. some valuable features apparently still don’t work (e.g. e-mail notification upon posting, pinging sites(?)).

i need at least:
– blogrolling (or similar functionality)
– plugin to integrate some feeds such as those by /. or the lkml