Schonhose

Sometimes things just don’t work out the way you’ve planned them. Like most of you, these little things will frustrate me from time to time. When this happens I get all agitated and tend to look at the dark side of these things.

At these times I sometimes need a friendly reminder not to worry so much. Lately I’ve rediscovered a song that embodies the feeling I would like to have. Listening to this song is a subtle reminder not to “worry ’bout a thing, ‘Cause every little thing gonna be all right.”

Today was a day I played this song several times, just to remind me things have a tendency to work out just fine. Hopefully the little annoyances which I take way to heavy and have bothered me ever so slightly will go away soon.

Hopefully Obama can keep his promises and undo some of the stupid things Bush has done. Hopefully the Netherlands will follow Obama like they did with Bush and in the process we can turn this world around. Let’s hope we can actually turn away from the current path of a government controlled society where everything has to be stored, tracked and monitored all for the sake of the dreadful “war on terror”.

I always found the following quote from Benjamin Franklin very descriptive on what has been happening in the world:

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Lets just hope “change” started yesterday.

Every once in a while I need new shoes, being for either basketball or every day use. Buying shoes is a real adventure, since I have special soles to prevent pain issues from Plantar fasciitis. On most shoes the inner sole isn’t removed easily making it hard to use my own soles. Luckily I still manage to find shoes which I like and can be easily modified to be used with my own inner soles.

Everyone who has bought a new pair of shoes has experienced another discomfort: blisters. To prevent these blisters it is recommended to ‘break in’ the shoes by walking in them for a couple of hours a day. And most of the times this works, for instance the latest daily shoes I bought were put immediately to the test by walking 4 days in Rome, Italy. No feet were harmed during these days, which was really nice. If only I was that lucky when I visited Dubrovnic. I got some really nice blisters from the shoes that week.

The fact is sometimes I get lucky and I forget what I’m suppose to do. However, my feet will always give me this little reminder if the combination with the new shoes don’t work. This was the case on monday when I went out playing basketball using my newly bought basketball shoes. The normally white socks turned to some pinkish color around the toes which was the first indication I forgot something. The pain in the shower and after applying disinfectant would be the second and third indication. So this is a friendly reminder to myself: save some agony and spend some time breaking in new shoes.

Back in the days when this site used my own custom written CMS I implemented a nice feature to speed up the loading times and to save bandwidth. I compressed the output using GZIP, getting on average about 60-70% compression rate. That means sending less data which boosted the loading times enormously.

Today I remembered that hack as I found out you can actually set that behavior inside a .htaccess file. So I implemented it for my Photoblog, got a nice 70% compression rate on the current page and it does load faster.

To enable GZIP compression add the following line to your .htaccess file:
php_value output_handler ob_gzhandler

You can test your page over at the gzip test tool.

Over the last few months several threads have been posted on the Pixelpost forum regarding SPAM comments. In some of these threads the author boldly claims that Pixelpost isn’t stopping any SPAM. Well, since December 28th, 2006 I have installed a SPAMlog addon on my blog. Basically, what this addon does is keeping track if and why a comment is blocked.

First I think I have to elaborate on my settings, so here they are. I use the <TOKEN> setting from Pixelpost, along with a 30 seconds SPAMflood protection setting and a maximum of three URLS in a comment. Besides that I use the http://BL addon (more info about this addon) and I have installed Defensio addon for Pixelpost.

So now we know the configuration let’s show some stats from the last 743 days shall we?

It seems my photoblog received a total of 31897 comments (43 comments per day). A total of 2457 comments actually made it through the defensive lines of both Pixelpost and the http://BL addon. Defensio managed to catch 2256 comments as SPAM, so this leaves out 201 comments. It turns out that 70 of these comments were SPAM, but these slipped through before the Defensio addon was installed (The Defensio addon was installed a few months after the initialization of the SPAMlog).

These are the numbers, but what happened to the initial 31897 – 2457 = 29440 comments which were blocked by both Pixelpost and the http://BL addon?

Let me break that number down: Pixelpost internal measures took care of 17194 of these comments while the http://BL addon took care of the other 12246 comments. Basically this says that the measures in Pixelpost are capable of catching at least 50% of all SPAM comments.

So what is the internal Pixelpost method that stops most of the SPAM?

• 887 comments contained words listed in ban or moderation list
• 10379 comments used an incorrect token
• 2 commenters waited too long before posting (30 minutes)
• 156 comments were posted to rapidly in succession (SPAM flood)
• 5403 comments contained too many URLs (3)
• 114 comments contained an URL on the blacklist
• 210 comments were not allowed (commenting disabled)
• 41 commenters used an invalid e-mail address

As can be seen the token protection is responsible for 60% of the SPAM stopped by Pixelpost own defensive measures. Feel free to comment on my analysis.