Akismet works great to catch spam from comment forms etc but still needs manual interventin and has a chance of missing some, due to some (easily fixed) issues in the forum implimentation spam still showed up in places till it was deleted.

Bad Behaviour works by checking the information sent to your website by the visitor, if it breaks certain rules it’s rejected and they don’t even see the webiste nevermind get a chance to post.

Combined the two systems have almost totally eliminated spam, and both are really easy to integrate into your own site, and addon ports have been made for a lot of systems too to make things even easier.

I’m also running Spam Karma on my blog which adds even more checks for spammers to fail, just for extra defence.

I reccomend adding these if you can as they do seem to work and I’ve practically eliminate spam from my website and forum.

Basically running the algorithms through a standard dual core PC woudl tak 2 months, plug in a GeForce 8 graphics card, use the right code and you can run it in 5 days!

why aren’t all Nvidia making CPU’s rather than GPU’s if they have that much power? ok yes its dedicated number crunching power but still that kind of speed ups pretty nice

wonder what kind of a performance upgrade a computer would get if it was ran using a combination of CPU + GPU for everything rather than cpu for work, gu for display

I manage to use a computer practically all day everyday without becoming infected, no virus alerts, pop-ups,infact nothing not a single thing, even with no resident protection on my home pc I don’t get infected, so why are so many people infected ?

Granted if you connect to the internet directly with no firewall you have about 30s before an attack gets you but you’re just plain stupid for not getting someone to set you up properly

Virus writers and crackers give hackers a bad name.

After 4 separate anti-malware apps and about 10 hours I’ve come to the conclusing that re-installing windows would actually have been faster.

First we had the malware detected by Avast, then what was detected by AVG, then spyware doctor then superantispyware

why don’t the anti-malware companies get together and form an uber-definition set that they all use so we can just use 1 app, and instead of we kill x thousand infections, they can sell their own product saying they have faster scanning better detection resident protection etc. that way it wont matter who’s product you use they’ll all clean the same problems

to misquote Lord of the Rings

One list to rule them all, One list to find them, One list to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them

with the 1 definition list available it would simplify my job I dont want to run 4 maybe 5 separate programs to clean a system (funny that the one that fixed the problem was the copy command) I want to run 1 scanner that will find all known problems and correct them.

Anyway here’s a useful site for getting your feet wet in the sea of AJAX

AJAX:Getting Started – MDC:

and the top level page

AJAX – MDC:

I found it very useful, and its so easy to use, only difficult bit is finding somewhere to use it, and getting the server side stuff right, but you’d have that anyway without using AJAX

Being able to create virtual servers to test things is just so useful, I don’t know how I got by without it.

At home I’ve tested VMware with my dual boot system, 1 drive is set aside for linux, so I can now boot into Windows and from there launch my linux system, I’m sure most people will say I should go the other way and launch windows from linux, but linux is there for playing and windows is for games, I suspect that my games wouldn’t run so well in a virtual server but I’ve not tested that yet.

From work I’m playing around withvarious Raid configurations which would involve me having multiple drives available so I can change their set-ups, using a VM I can just delete the drives and start again if anything goes wrong. This way I don’t lose anything off my computer and can reconfigure and reinstall as many times as I need to.

To put it simply something like VMware (Microsoft have a virtualPC, there’s Xen too, I’m sure theres more I don’t know of) is essential if you want to play with/test another operating system or computer setup without having to repartition drives and mess about setting up dual boot systems. And whats best is it just works

Have no fear you can recover the key using a handy utility that reads it from the registry.

This is a life saver for reinstalls on systems where the stickers just not there or the installation disks are missing (along with the key) .

What you do is before wiping the system run this little program, it’ll tell you the licence key, you write it down, then wipe the system reinstall windows using the key you got from the original install. No problems reactivating windows as the key was previously used on that computer.

Brilliant!

Anyway Keyfinder is the program you want and it can be found at Magical Jelly Bean Software

Phil stumbled across this one when looking for a shared clipboard, as we both tend to do our browsing on one machine and our work on another if we uncover some code we need it’d be great to be able to just copy between the 2 machines.

This is where Synergy comes in, it allows you to connect multiple machines to one keyboard and mouse input (like a KVM switch thing, only with multiple monitors). You can set up the appearance of a multi monitor system, with the mouse seamlessly going between screens and sharing the clipboard.

Available for Windows Linux and Mac, it really does simplify life and tidy up your desk a little

Check it out

And best of all its free

open your pMachine/pm/lib/comments.fns.php
find the function weblog_comments()

insert this line

$gravatarlink=GetGravatar($email);

at about line 612

it should look something like

$if_email				= '';
$if_email_as_link		= '';
$if_email_or_url_as_link	= '';
$if_email_as_name		= $name;
$if_email_or_url_as_name	= $name;
$if_url_or_email_as_name	= $name;
$if_url_as_name		= $name;

$gravitarlink=GetGravatar($email);

further down in the function find the bit that defines the tags to go in the comment template around line 780 and add

'%%gravatar%%'				=> $gravatarlink

so it will look like

'0'					=> date("Z",$t_stamp),
''			=> $avatar,
'Member'		=> $moderation_level,
'%%gravatar%%'			=> $gravatarlink
);

once thats done you can now include the %%gravatar%% tag into your comment display template to display the commentors gravatar

Add these functions to the bottom of the file

function wp_gravatar_info($md5 = '') {
//taken from gravatar plugin for wordpress
if ('' == $md5) { return false; }
$r = array();
$foo = @file("http://www.gravatar.com/info/md5/$md5");
if (! $foo) return false;
array_shift($foo); // strip leading  declaration
array_shift($foo); // strip opening
array_pop($foo);   // strip closing
foreach ($foo as $bar) {
$matched = array();
preg_match_all("/([^])+/", $bar, $matched);
$r[$matched[0][1]] = $matched[0][2];
}
return $r;
}

function Download_Gravatar($id, $local, $remote)
{
// we don't know about this gravatar yet, let's look for it
$response = wp_gravatar_info($id);
if ('200' == $response

)

{

// it's not an error, so let's make a local copy

if ( (is_writeable($local)) && (ini_get('allow_url_fopen')) )

{

$cached = copy ($remote.$id, $local.$id.".TMP");

if (! $cached)

{

// looks like the copy failed, delete the TMP

unlink($local.$id.".TMP");

return 0;

} else

{

// we copied successfully

rename($local.$id.".TMP", $local.$id);

return 1;

}

}

} else {

return 0;

}

}

function Gravitar_Cached($id, $local, $remote)

{

$cachetime="34200";

if(file_exists($local.$id))

//if the file exists on the server

{

//check its date

$now=time();

$ftime=filemtime($local.$id);

//echo "boo".filectime($remote.$id);

if($now-$ftime>$cachetime)

//if the time difference is more then the cache time then get a newer copy

{

//download it

Download_Gravatar($id, $local, $remote);

}

return 1;

}else

{

//download it its new

return Download_Gravatar($id, $local, $remote);

}

}

function GetGravatar($email)

//function to return the gravitar requiered

{

$gravatar_url="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=";

$gravatar_id=md5($email);

$gravatar_local=$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . "/pMachine/gravatarcache/";

$gravatar_local_url=$_SERVER['SERVER_ROOT'] . "/pMachine/gravatarcache/";

$gravatar_none=$_SERVER['SERVER_ROOT'] . "/pMachine/gravatarcache/none.gif";

if(Gravitar_Cached($gravatar_id, $gravatar_local, $gravatar_url))

{

$gravatar_path=$gravatar_local_url.$gravatar_id;

$gravatar = "";

}else

{

$gravatar_path=$gravatar_none;

$gravatar = "<a xhref='http://www.gravatar.com' target='_blank' title='Get your own gravatar from www.gravatar.com'><img  class='gravatar' alt='Get your own gravatar from www.gravatar.com' width=80 height=80 xsrc='$gravatar_path'>";

}

return $gravatar;

}

you will need to create a /pMachine/gravatarcache directory on your server and add a none.gif to represents an unknown gravatar in the even one isn’t returned by the server (I suspect theres a flaw here but I havnt been able to test it)

You might want to modify the image using css and modify the template code to get things to show how you want

http://www.metku.net/index.html?sect=view&n=1&path=mods/whiskypc/index_eng