Daley Ponderings

Spammer Statistics

jondaley — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 08:09:01 -0400

I was poking around the logs today, and saw that of the 500 comments that were attempted on the blog yesterday 0 of them were actual people, and the blog successfully marked all of them as spam, and didn't bother asking me to verify that. I wonder how long that will last.

I regularly see spammers hiring programmers on some job websites that I use, and some of the code that the spammer's use is quite good, so I always need to stay on top of what they are doing.

There have been 112,572 attempted comments on this blog in the last 30 days. And I suppose that doesn't even count the one that were blocked by the firewall that repeatedly made comments. I don't have separated logs for those blocks, but just on a server basis. 42,837 IP addresses were blocked in the last month for making frequent comments on the blogs.

Those numbers are pretty incredible, if you think about it - they are just for one blog and server out of the millions of blogs and servers on the internet.

Don't Like How America Votes? Just Click To Change It

jondaley — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 22:42:23 -0400

The Google Maps Blog shared this fun use of the maps API - see what the votes look like if different states vote different ways. Also, see historical data.

Homemade Roller Coaster

jondaley — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 17:12:45 -0400

Here's a cool thing: a homemade roller coaster. Though it seems like it was probably a lot of work and not quite as exciting as it could have been...

Tim Hawkins: Chick-fil-A song

jondaley — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 17:05:36 -0400

Make Sure to Update Your Software

jondaley — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 10:24:35 -0400

I like knowing when my software updates, but I do like the software to automatically check, and I generally update as soon as possible. For this specific example, my answer would be to disable javascript, and avoid the entire exploit altogether.

ZScalar: PDF Exploits

A Beatless Heart

jondaley — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:56:36 -0500

This is pretty neat.

(Thanks Stephen for finding it)

A Couple More Links

jondaley — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 08:59:22 -0500

Here are the last ones to share, I'll try to be more careful in the future to link to posts properly when I "share" things, so you can actually see the content regardless of whether facebook or google or the original poster make it difficult...

Statistics in science: I don't quite understand the difference between statistically significant and practical importance, or rather, how does one make a study that accounts for this problem.

Statistics was one of my two worst courses in college. In both cases, I went to the professor during office hours when I didn't have a shot of completing the homework and said, "I'm really not getting it," and the professor, assuming I couldn't really mean that asked what parts I wasn't getting. I pulled out lecture number 1 and said, let's start here...) I did manage to pull off a B in both courses, which convinced me that grading on a curve is horrible, particularly when I could have pulled off an A in the statistics class had a worked a little harder on the final, but I hadn't realized how far the course was going to be curved, so didn't think it mattered, and I wouldn't have remembered anything after the final anyway, so I wasn't studying for learning, but just a grade. If anyone got lower than a B in my statistics course, you must now know less about statistics than when you entered the course.

And lastly, an interesting disparity between what members of churches want (or at least say they want in a poll) and what pastors think is a good idea to preach about.

Young Adult Fiction

jondaley — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 08:55:16 -0500

I was going to have Jonathan read this article about the status and progression of fiction, as he sometimes questions why we don't let him read or watch certain things, but then I decided the article itself was more than he needs to know right now.

Distributed Social Networks?

jondaley — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:00:25 -0500

I came across yet another version of a distributed social network, this one with hardware. FreedomBox Foundation is working on figuring out how to make tons of tiny little web servers that take out the centralized model. The New York Times has a decent article on explaining why Mark Zuckerburg having all of your information is a bad thing.

The introduction video on FreedomBox's site was a good non-technical description, and with graphics, for all of you who don't like to read that much... :)

It mentions diaspora, friendica and buddycloud. I'd heard of diaspora, and I have an account, but it doesn't interact with me very well. I glanced through buddycloud this morning, and didn't see anything particularly interesting. friendica emphasizes being able to interact with other current social networks, which is a good thing, since it is a hard thing to get people to switch.

I guess I should spend some time in figuring out how to install one of them and see if it is worth using. I've not been clear on how much you can customize the installations, and how hard it is to add features, etc. And how open the development really is, in terms of them wanting features from outside people, etc.

Mostly, I think the problem is that I want it just to work, and so I don't want to spend lots of my own time developing a system. Maybe I could work on figuring out if I could add plugins into LifeType to make it do some interesting things with the new social networks. LifeType 2.0 (if it ever comes out) started a couple years ago adding some social networking features, and so it might fit in well; I don' t know.

But, as facebook and google are increasingly unfriendly (Facebook announced they would no longer import notes, such as this one, starting in a couple weeks) I suppose their theory is that people will manually double post, or move to facebook only, or something like that. But, that is a pain, so I'll probably just stop posting to facebook.

Occupy Sesame Street?

jondaley — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:53:33 -0500

And in case you think I'm getting too serious with all my political posts, here's another one for Wall Street.

And be careful in apple orchards...

(thanks Dawn for keeping me up-to-date with the important news)