Interesting.
I installed WP-Hashcash as a helper to Akismet. So far, no more comment spam. I usually get 3,000+ a day, as Akismet shows…
Akismet has caught 268,126 spam for you since you first installed it.
I finished up a bunch of miscellaneous tweaks to the blog to tide me over until I can finally get a new theme up, with Nic’s help. Poke me if commenting suddenly broke horrendously, but I did try to test it. I also finally got around to backing up all my websites. Since that includes all of ZetaBoards’ skin files and graphics, as well as a few thousand dollars worth of projects I host for various companies around town… yeah. I should have done that a long time ago. Hopefully they aren’t reading this 
I now own INTC, MO, PMI, and SPY, and have updated the sidebar to track them. I’m looking to spread out into 2-3 more companies before I’m done with the money I’ve set aside for investing. While I was messing with the sidebar, I finally got around to fixing the “Latest Comments” and “Link Blog” sections. I’m going to try using ma.gnolia for the linkblog, because WordPress’ built-in one just doesn’t cut it. Icky.
The first link in the new linkblog happens to be YouMail, which replaces your cellphone’s normal voicemail service and adds some spiffy features. You can record greetings for each different phone number that calls you (but of course record a default greeting for everyone else to hear), and you can listen to and delete / save your voicemail messages from your computer. Very cool, and free (it does use cellphone minutes to check your voicemail, but I have plenty of those). Check it out.
I went shopping for a refrigerator today for my dorm room, but came back empty-handed. Too bad. However, I am keeping up my inexorable pace of one blog post per day rather nicely, if I do say so.
We all get tired of creating accounts for every website that we run across. A LiveJournal account to comment on friends’ entries. 11 different WordPress accounts for each blog regularly read, since there’s no way to link one account to all of them. Half a dozen accounts at different forums. Digg, Flickr, Delicious. Shouldn’t there be a better way to control access to sites, rather than having to duplicate effort and data across all of them?
Well, as with all leadingly rhetorical questions, the answer is of course yes. OpenID allows you to set up a single account with a single PIP, and then use authentication tokens to allow that site to distribute your information (partially or fully) to requesting sites. The coolest part is that you can set up your own site as an OpenID server or delegate, which means your login name can be yourdomain.com. If the PIP you are using changes its TOS or even goes under, you can switch PIPs with just a few lines of HTML and keep your same ID (assuming you hold on to your domain name).
OpenIDs are so ridiculously easy to set up that everyone should really get ahold of one so that adoption becomes more widespread. As more and more sites start to accept it as a form of login (and my site will do so soon), it will become easier and easier to use your existing credentials rather than create more. Here’s one of the easiest ways to create your very own OpenID.
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So after a long really long hiatus, I’m kinda back. Sort of. There are so many interesting things going on that it’s hard sometimes to sit down and write about them. But write I must, or else the blog grows old and stale (which it already has, so I need to reverse the trend). With the break finally over, I’m free from:
- 23 hours of class a week
- Hundreds of hours of RA responsibility
- 4 hours of tutoring a week
- Miscellaneous computer work (such as Pre-Med Club)
- And all the other normal college student responsibilities
It was a tough semester, to be sure. But with 5 out of 6 classes reporting, I was still able to keep all A’s… although one of them was very close (and it’s a good story too). Here’s how it came about.
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So after the fiasco earlier this month, I resolved that I'm keeping my own backups of everything. And since e-mail is what started the problems, e-mail is where I'm going to start too.
There are several good ways I could backup my e-mail. It'd be trivial to write scripts to tar up my mbox files every once in awhile and download them. Or I could rsync them to another account. However, I decided to go with a truly off-site backup, that was stored in a more usable format that I could search through immediately and restore piecewise if necessary. Aka GMail!
All I needed to do was setup a forwarder from my primary e-mail to my new backup GMail account. (I have a real GMail account for things that might spam me; this is a separate account.) Now I'm receiving mirrored copies of everything to that account. I don't need to do any spam prevention or anything, since I can search for whatever mail I need quickly and easily. And GMail has a much more lenient account dormancy policy— 9 months— than do most free mail providers.
All in all, I think it's going to be a fine solution… but let me know if I'm missing something ;)