Posts from 2007

A minor irritant with uninteresting email cluttering up my Inbox has resulted in some minor changes to my Web 2.0 first-team squad.

Akismet, the popular and widely used anti-spam solution, was letting an increasing trickle of irritating comment and trackback spam through. As I had configured email notification for all blog comments, this was generating pointless, tedious, worthless emails that simply had to be deleted. A complete waste of time and energy.

Initially, I toyed with the option to simply disable comments on articles older than 90 days which accounted for 95% of the spam but would block authors with valid contributions.

A little research revealed a possible alternative - Spam Karma. I was loosely aware of Spam Karma from the footer in Tim Hall's excellent blog

This blog is protected by dr Dave's Spam Karma 2: 23182 Spams eaten and counting...

as well as Andy Beard's positive review and useful tutorial on configuring Spam Karma. Initially, the Spam Karma interface was a little confusing. With Akismet, you literally set and forget whereas Spam Karma has a configuration page with a plethora of different options. Anyway, after deciding to start out with the default, out of the box settings, I just activated Spam Karma and waited.

Sure enough, the never ending barrage of spam trickled in and the vast majority were correctly marked as such, valid comments were allowed through and I couldn't detect any false positives.

The moderation mechanism wasn't quite as obvious as Akismet which emailed me whenever a comment was held for moderation. However, Spam Karma was actually better as moderated comments are held in the Spam list and can be quickly moderated from there. In addition, Spam Karma can email a daily/weekly digest summarising recent activity.

I have been running Spam Karma for almost a week now and not a single comment/trackback spam has got past the barriers yet. A truly impressive and valuable piece of software.

A few features in Spam Karma I really like:

• All comments are assigned a score depending on various criteria.
• Comments on older articles get penalised...
• ...but older articles with recent (valid) comment activity score higher.
• Instant comments within seconds of viewing get penalised.
• First-time commenters are presented with a captcha.
• Established commenters are recognised and scored accordingly.
• Trackbacks without a valid reference URL are penalised.
• My comments score higher than anyone elses :-)
• A detailed breakdown of the score assigned to any comment is available.

-12.5
0: Encrypted payload valid: IP matching.
-2: Browser doesn't support Javascript
0.5: Comment has no URL in content (but one author URL)
-2: Flash Gordon was here (comment posted 8 seconds after page load)
-9: Entry posted 7 months, 3 weeks ago. 0 comments in the past 15 days
Current Karma: -3

I was so impressed I donated $20 to the author and that doesn't happen very often. Another source of unnecessary email was valid blog comments (albeit much fewer). The solution for this was obvious. Subscribe to my own comments feed and read them in Google Reader.

Another source of Web 2.0 irritation was that the Firefox extension for coComment broke some of the drilldowns in the revamped Google Analytics reports so I reluctantly stopped using it. This was a real shame as coComment was one of these Web 2.0 applications, I actually used on a daily basis.

Again, I looked for an alternative and installed co.comments (yeah I know - it's a Web 2.0 domain with an embedded period) which works fine. There is a Firefox bookmarklet (not an extension) so the author has to remember to mark any comments posted whereas coComment automatically tracked these 'conversations'.

The other advantage of the coComment extension was automatic notification whenever a comment was added to a tracked conversation.

Again, the solution for this issue was obvious. I simply subscribed to the RSS feed for my tracked conversations and read them in Google Reader.

Dear Cathy and Claire

I wonder if you can help me. I recently was asked to host a deluxe barbecue for some Scottish friends who live in a town called 'Glasgow', near Scotland. I live in London and had stocked up on decent cuts of meat, firelighters, barbecue coals (impregnated), vegetable kebabs and fish because some veggie always turns up unannounced.

As my wife is so quick to prepare her lovely potato and pasta salads and often brings the baked potatoes out before my BBQ is actually hot enough to start cooking, I took the precaution of stocking up on a few gas canisters and hundreds of gallons of fuel accelerant. She won't mock me in front of my friends this time. Oh no.

Anyway, I just popped into a corner shop to buy 514 gas lighters, and guess what. My beautiful silver Mercedes got a ticket from a traffic warden and then got towed away. In the dead of night, in the heart of London, those blinking traffic wardens and damned wheel clampers are still working for their stupid commissions. Can you believe it ?

A friend, Ali Akbah, kindly lent me his black 4x4 Jeep for the jaunt to Glasgow and it was a long, tedious journey particularly as I wasn't allowed to stop at service stations or smoke for some odd reason. Why - I was pretty relieved when I finally got to ~~the safe house~~ Uncle Mustafa's house and could use his toilet. I cracked that old joke 'Mustafa Wee' but he didn't get it.

Some of the very important guests for the BBQ were flying in from all around the world so I drove to Glasgow airport to meet them. Unfortunately, as I was so tired from the long drive, I lost control as I approached the terminal building. Instead of braking, I mistakenly hit the accelerator and crashed into the front of the terminal building and Ali's lovely, brand new black Jeep caught fire.

Imagine my surprise, when I managed to leave the vehicle and tried, in vain (and excruciating pain for that matter) to save my 756 Birds-Eye (100% beef) Quarter Pounders. I felt pretty warm and sweaty and slowly became aware that was because my clothes and hair were on fire so tried to grab an ice-cold can of Grolsch from the boot to cool down.

Imagine my relief, when a friendly policeman came to my assistance and tried to drag me away from the vehicle into the terminal building to buy me a Coca Cola. I fought with him, pleading with him to help me retrieve my 128 portions of finest rump steak but no, he insisted on dragging me away to safety.

To add insult to injury, a Scottish BAA employee then waded in and started to attack me, raining in kicks and blows, talking in a language I couldn't quite understand. It sounded like 'Whityedaein? Yae dinna come to Glasgae and mess with the polis, you wee bawbag !'.

My questions are:

• Will I make a full recovery from my burns ?
• If I rearrange the BBQ for Monday 30 August 2018 (late August bank holiday), would you both be able to attend ?

Cathy & Claire reply:

'Sadly, I have some bad news for you. Very bad news. You have 90 degree burns over all of your body. Your medical prognosis is not good. Even if you survive, you will be condemned to a life of skin grafts, complicated operations, expensive plastic surgery and you will have to learn to tolerate extreme levels of pain. You will also be horrendously disfigured for life. In fact, you are more likely to die than survive, particularly if the British authorities refuse you any medical treatment.'

'In the unlikely event that you survive, Ali Akbah is not pleased with the state of his Jeep, the loss of his no-claims bonus and has issued a £20,000 contract on your life.'

'PS. Cathy & myself would be delighted to attend the event if an alternate host (and venue) can be found. Just so you know, Claire is a recently converted vegetarian but still eats fish.'

Newly appointed Manchester City manager, Sven Goran Eriksson stunned the football world today by opening the transfer kitty and swooping within hours of his appointment, to announce two high profile signings from two major Premiership rivals.

The new arrivals are a combative 24 year old midfielder and an experienced, classy central defender

• Joey Barton (Newcastle - £18.4 million)
• Silvain Distin (Portsmouth - £7.2 million)

Seven weeks ago on this blog, I predicted that Manchester City would appoint a foreign manager.

'However, I have a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that, in seven weeks, Manchester City Football Club are going to appoint a foreign manager.'

I also suggested the name of 'Sven Goran Eriksson' as the most likely candidate to be appointed.

Now, seven weeks ago, you could get decent odds from your local bookie on Eriksson being appointed: 100-1 in fact.

So, I put my money where my mouth was even though I don't follow Citeh and decided to risk £10 on a long shot.

However, if you, dear reader, shared my convictions and also followed my sage advice, please do not waver now. Please do not be weak.

Now is the time to seize the moment. Now is the time to significantly increase your original investment of £10. Now is the time to be rich beyond your wildest dreams.

Bet the £1,000 proceeds (all of it) on this accumulator

• Manchester City to win Premiership, Carling Cup and FA Cup in 2007-2008 (2,500-1)
• Manchester City to win Champions League in 2008-2009 (50,000-1)

In just two years, you will be 125,000,000,000 pounds richer.

Tell William Hill, I sent you.

When I moved this blog from hosted Wordpress , I submitted the site to Google and Yahoo! After that, I noted the respective crawlers indexing the blog and thought no more of it.

I subsequently registered the site in Google Webmaster and Yahoo! Site Explorer and added a sitemap to help the robots index my site more efficiently. After a while, it was clear that Google was responsible for the vast majority of traffic to my humble blog. Mainly 'one-hit wonders' but welcome nevertheless.

Today, while dabbling with various reports in Google Analytics, I compared the performance of the two major search engines over the past nine months.

The statistics are quite staggering, to me at least. So much so, I have been moved to include inline images (which took me 14 hours and they're still not right) to reinforce the point.

Over a period of nine months, Google (17,562) absolutely hammers Yahoo! (413) into the ground.

So then I started to get curious. Why does Google do such a better job of indexing my blog ?

The standard test I use is to search for a set of keywords from a recent blog entry and see whether it appears on page 1.

For this test, I used "under the covers at Wimbledon' from a post made last Sunday. On Google, this appeared as the first post in the first page. I already know that Google is very timely at indexing my blog. If I post an blog article with an internal link (pingback), my RSS feed of Google inbound links notifies me instantly.

Here are the Google results. The blog article is the first entry displayed on the front page.

OK. So now for Yahoo!

Here is the Yahoo! equivalent. Nothing for the actual blog article on page 1. However, the main blog page is listed which happens to contain a snapshot reference to the article title.

Which is more relevant ? Which looks a better match for the actual search terms ? Which one would you be tempted to click on ? Which site would you advertise on ?

Next, I went to Yahoo! Site Explorer to see whether the actual blog article was indexed yet.

No it wasn't. So, an interesting experiment and I am sure SEO magicians in white hats will arrive promptly to point out the error of my ways.

A footnote : The Yahoo! chart does appear to shows worrying signs of life from mid-May. The number of daily referrals jump from almost zero to almost a whole 10 visitors in a single day !

Come to think of it, Live.com (previously known as Dead.com) has also recently sparked into life, rising from the floor to reach the dizzy heights of a spike of 3 daily visitors.

Google beware !

LHR-NCL (BA1326) Dep: 09:40 Arr: 10:45

Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Newcastle airport where the local time is 12:50. Once again, we would like to apologise for the [2 hour] delay to this service. We hope this does not inconvenience you and wish you a safe and pleasant onward journey.' 'Passengers wishing to smoke should note that, following changes to UK legislation that came into effect over the weekend, smoking is not permitted anywhere in the terminal building.'

'Passengers wishing to smoke should only do so on the concourse in located front of the main terminal. For the safety of fellow passengers, please dispose of all cigarette butts carefully. In particular, be aware of fast moving vehicles packed with gas canisters, petrol and sharp objects, as these may cause damage if inadvertently ignited by a stray cigarette.'

'Thank you for your attention. Good afternoon.'

If you are the parent of a teenage girl, I have some fantastic news for you.

Good news - You will never have to purchase an air freshener for your car again. Ever.

I kindly gave my daughter and three girlfriends a lift yesterday. As each young passenger boarded, pleasant smells and odours of various perfumes and fragrances wafted and swirled around the car interior until it resembled a perfume counter at Boots.

By the end of the journey, as I jettisoned my precious cargo, the smell was overpowering and I started to feel positively nauseous and light headed. 15 minutes later, I found myself slumped unconscious over the steering wheel. Or rather, the police officer did. Thank goodness, I passed that breath test and the policeman also had a grown-up daughter, who has just graduated from Exeter University.

Despite opening all windows, the sun roof and leaving the boot open in a futile effort to de-fumigate the vehicle, this pleasant smell will persist for a period of six months, rendering the need for small, refillable air fresheners that attach to the air vent grille completely superfluous.

Bad news - the cost savings of the air freshener won't make up for the unspecified and intangible costs of owning a teenage daughter.

This year, like the previous three, we applied in the LTA ballot for Wimbledon tickets. This year, unlike the previous three, we were allocated two tickets for Court 1 for the middle Saturday in blazing June.

I checked the Order of Play on Friday night. My wife asked me who was playing. I casually replied 'Oh - just some ladies playing pit-a-pat tennis then Djokovic (Men's #4 seed) against Kiefer followed by another ladies singles match.'

'Are the ladies well known ?'

I manfully tried to control my rising excitement and the quiver in my voice: 'Oh I dunno - someone called Sharapova. I think she's the pretty, athletic one. Tall, blonde hair with long shapely legs who also does modelling.'

After a cold shower, I checked the weather forecast, looked outside at the torrential rain and, for the first time in 23 years, said a little prayer before turning in.

The day dawned grey and wet. We arrived at Wimbledon, prepared for the increased security checks. A gentleman in a blazer asked me and my son to open our coats. An unusual request but, in the interests of homeland security, we complied. He said 'I'm awfully sorry, Sir but you can not wear those T-shirts on Court 1.'

We looked down at our chests. My son's read 'Blog in Isolation' and mine was adorned with 'www.nbrightside.com'. 'Why not ?'

'Those shirts constitute "ambush marketing" which is strictly not allowed by the LTA. Come to think of it, didn't I see you two dancing on stage at Glastonbury last week behind Iggy Pop waving a "Bring back Wispa" flag ?'

Undeterred, we promptly removed one layer to reveal our contingency shirts

'Come on ~~Andy~~ !' 'Come on ~~Tim~~ !' 'We love you, Maria !'

'That's much better, Sir. Have a great day and enjoy the tennis.'

Pictures here.

During the week I am a boring IT consultant.

However, at weekends, I transform into a massive, dance, trance, garage, hop-hip, mixmaster DJ, spinning vinyl, entertaining the masses at Glastonbury.

No wonder I'm so tired every Monday morning.

This Bluehost powered blog is now FastCGI enabled. You may find the site faster but, then again, hyperlinks may return completely random articles. You will probably struggle to tell the difference.

Which reminds me of a funny story...

I am currently working in the North East on an 'escalation'. An 'escalation' is characterised by frequent, lengthy conference calls with bi-hourly status updates, the phrases 'high-profile', 'alternative technical solutions', 'severe degradation', 'impacting the bottom line', 'CIO visibility', 'options for the weekend' and the perennial favourite: 'any progress yet ?'

Thus far I have managed to resist the temptation to reply: 'No. Sorry. No progress yet because I have been in meetings and conference calls since I arrived onsite and I haven't even been offered a coffee yet, let alone actually touched a keyboard.'

Anyway, I digress. All of these factors combine for a relatively stressful working environment.

This lunchtime, during a scheduled outage of 15 minutes to stop and restart Oracle to change a static 9i parameter (optimizer_index_cost_adj from 1 to 10 for the technically minded), three highly skilled, overpaid technical people and a project manager were overseeing this vital, complicated and potentially life saving modification.

The application servers were shutdown so those pesky users could no longer use the system. We looked wistfully at a AIX 'topas' screen showing 'CPU: 0%, User: 0%, System: 0%, Disk 0%, Wait: 0%' and took a screenshot for posterity.

We paused to savour the moment. There was a brief moment of quiet contemplation and tranquility. Then the DBA piped up: 'Shall we wait for 1 minute ?'

The DBA then fired up Enterprise Manager. We all doubled checked the password credentials and the target database. We held an impromptu video conference call to get approval to press the 'Login' button.

We doubled checked that password for SYS was secure, non-intuitive and, err, different for the DEV, TEST, UAT, STAGE, QA, TRAIN and PRODUCTION environments. Of course, it was. What sort of organisation responsible for Oracle outsourcing would do anything different ?

The moment had finally arrived. Hours of detailed analysis. Hours of pouring over Statspack Level 7 reports and query plans. Hours of talking to the mysterious 'SAN Man'. Hours of scouring SupportWeb and Metalink.

Hours of investigating helpful (but ultimately unhelpful) suggestions from people who should not have been involved. Hours of going deep down into dark rat holes. Hours of early starts, late finishes, no coffee and plenty of red herrings.

The time had finally come to change the parameter. We stand, poised, on the verge of greatness.

I broke the tense silence: 'OK. The Oracle parameter we need to change governs the behaviour of the Oracle optimizer. We are seeing an expensive 'INDEX FULL SCAN' on the customer table which generates million of logical I/O's, physical disk reads and brings the database server to its knees. We are trying to encourage Oracle to use 'INDEX RANGE SCAN' on the driving, intersection table instead which is 300 times more efficient.'

'We are unable to add hints. We are unable to modify the SQL generated by the black box so we are going to change a key Oracle setting for CBO. I have the Change Control in my hands. We are actually going to change an Oracle parameter.'

A hush descends. The DBA observes another minute silence and expectantly clicks 'Instance - Configuration'. With a little prompting, he clicks 'SPFile' instead of 'Running'.

I continue: 'The parameter we are about to change is called 'Go' 'Underscore' 'Faster'.

The DBA then scrolls down to the 'G' section.

There is a period of a superlative 3 second silence followed by 'Sorry - what did you say: 'Go' 'Underscore' 'Fas...' followed by three people (poor project manager) laughing uncontrollably.

The door opens: 'Any progress yet ?'