BPI inside

Month: March 2005

  • Comment spam countermeasures results

    NULL

  • Holiday summary

    NULL

  • Vacation approaching

    NULL

  • Laser paintball

    NULL

  • Comment spamming countermeasures

    I’m having quite loads of comment spamming hitting my pages, which also seem to pass MT-Blacklist blocking.

    From some sources I’ve read that MT-Keystrokes can reduce automatic spamming by checking if a human being has typed something into the comment form using JavaScript and hidden HTML fields.

    Sounds cool, I’ll install that soon 🙂

  • Preparing vacations

    NULL

  • GDS and WLAN trouble

    Trying the Google Desktop Search works flawlessly on all machines except one. It’s the one, where the Wikipedia dump also resides on and the errors are those:

    • indexing in background stops after ~15 minutes and doesn’t continue until I restart the GDS
    • it completely left out the directory with the Wikipedia dump initially

    But now, after I had forced the initial index process to complete by always restarting the GDS, it seems to catch up all forgotten stuff. With Sysinternals Process Explorer I can see, that the GDS is walking through the Wikipedia directory…

    I somehow suspect that Scansoft Omnipage Search Indexer plugin to be the root of that evil, because GDS always ran flawlessly until Omnipage has processed several files.

    Moreover, Scansoft seems to have changed its registration policy: The first computer I installed its plugin on needed to register, which was done on a single HTML-Form and worked without further notifications. But on the second computer, where I installed the plugin two days later, the registration process spanned several pages and ended with a note, that the plugin is beta and would work until April 15th. Great.

    On the other hand I had some troubles bringing my personal laptop online with WLAN and VPN at the company. I had a working WLAN connection but the Cisco VPN client always refused to connect.

    After three days of trying now I succeeded by deinstalling local firewalls and virus scanners completely, updating the WLAN drivers and downloading an updated version of Ciscos VPN client somewhere on the net. Normally only customers of Cisco can download it, but someone at some university forgot to secure the internal VPN-download page 😉

    And after all of that hassle an email arrives, that VPN will be restructured next week to achieve SOX-compliance…

  • More on Stirling

    Some more stirling engine links to remember:

  • GDS now also searches Thunderbird

    Google Desktop Search now also is able to index my Thunderbird mails.

    Even better: It’s smaller than Copernic and supports plugins, which promises to bring out even more support for desktop searching through volunteering developers.

    Copernic had massive problems when trying to index my offline Wikipedia files, I’m curious how Google will handle that…

  • But it has already been that way

    Seems, that our company is going to include some passages into our work contracts, which in my opinion are already given by law in the collective contracts for IT professionals.

    But until now, if asked, the HR department everytime replied with something like "this doesn’t apply to us because this and that". Well, if I understand the collective contract correctly (and it isn’t that hard to read), everything applies to us OF COURSE! But in the past I wasn’t that unhappy with their denial, that I had to insist in my rights.

    If everything is now written down one more, I have no problem with it that our HR can’t say "no" anymore 🙂