Another Opinion Among Many

Balance

I’ve been trying to figure out the best balance between Spam filtering and freedom to comment on this site. The day before yesterday, in the evening, I decided to conduct an experiment and see what the results were.

What was here

Before conducting the experiment, I’d been using the same solution that I had before. Akismet and Tan Tan Noodles Simple Spam Filter had been my trusty resistance fighters who tirelessly kept my site pretty much free from comments made by that scourge of the earth known as blog spammers. I’ve been reasonably happy with this dynamic duo as the amount of work required by me was pretty low and people who wanted to could comment freely on this site and see their comment appear right away. I didn’t have to manually approve the comments and the person who commented didn’t have to do anything elaborate to have their comment appear here.

The Experiment

I had decided to see what would happen if I disabled Joe Tan’s Simple Spam Filter.I wanted to know two things – how many comments actually do get moderated because of their spammy nature, and, how many of those comments are legitimate. I’ve been quite lucky so far. About once or twice a week, there’d be a comment added to the list of spam comments in my moderation queue – and, it was put there because it should have been.

As I alluded to with my previous post, I enabled first comment moderation, in case Akismet wasn’t up to the task. Over night, I had received 14 comments that had been sent to the queue and they were all sent there with good reason. They were illegitimate crapola and should have been set on fire and fed to their owners. That part of the experiment seemed to have gone well.

Then, for the bigger risk. I disabled first comment moderation to see if Akismet would handle everything and do it correctly. I didn’t really want to have to go through a pile of comments and delete them from the published site. Over the next 16 or 17 hours, I received 64 comments that were marked as spam. They were waiting for me in the spam queue. I read through them all and determined that they had been legitimately flagged as spam comments.

So, Akismet had saved me from the spammers. This is great! On the face of things, there was no real difference to those who read the content here.

The Conclusion and My Action

I’ve concluded that Akismet can be the only spam moderation solution that you really need on your site. It seems to filter the illegitimate comments properly and doesn’t flag any false positives. The things that get filtered are queued for me to review, if necessary, in case they were put there in error. It does a great job.

I’ve enabled Simple Spam Filter again, though, as the way it works is a great compliment to Akismet. It was not decided as a single solution, but rather a prefilter for Akismet. This task is handled well. With SSF enabled, I don’t have to search through the spam queue to see if any comments there are legitimate. And, don’t kid yourself, if you have a list if quarantined comments, you’ll go through them, just to be sure.

With SSF, comments with more than 5 links get stopped and any comments with Regex code in them gets stopped. As well, comments with words commonly used by spammers are stopped. The good new is that, if someone gets stopped by the filter, they have a chance to moderate their own comment as approved by clicking the button on the page showing them why their comment was blocked. Then, the comment goes through. I don’t have to worry about reading through the Akismet queue often, as the really obvious robot-generated spam is deleted automatically, as the robot doesn’t click the button to allow their comment to be read. Once a spam commenter gets past the SSF by clicking through the first block, they get caught by Akismet. The positive thing for me is that I don’t have to actively pore through several comments just to find out they’re spam and need deleting. The robots’ inaction at the gateway is enough.

The potential is there for every comment to pass SSF, as the moderation is handled by the commenter. I think that this is pretty good evidence that there is a problem. My little site gets more illegitimate comments in one day than the number of articles I publish in a whole year.

This experiment has solidified my feeling that I’ve chosen the best solution for my needs. So, SSF and Akismet remain as my dynamic freedom fighting duo. I did remove a few words from the potential list (ones that I find that I use a lot). I figure that if they’re used by a spammer, Akismet will stop them or SSF will due to them using another tactic that is blocked before publication.

RT Cunningham recently wrote about his woes with Windows and his desire to kick Microsoft and its encumbered software to the curb. He is going to try and replace Windows with Ubuntu Linux.

I think that this is great, sort of.

You see, I’ve been using some form of GNU and Linux (or *Bsd) on my desktop compute since I first tried that Storm Linux 2000 disk that a neighbor gave me to play with. I had a hard time with it, as I couldn’t get my Wintel modem to connect to the internet.

Lately, although I am still a true distro-hopper, I have been using Ubuntu as my desktop of choice. The computer I currently have has not had Windows installed on it since I put the parts together. My hard drive was not new when I acquired it and has developed a few bad sectors, so I replaced it. I was running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, the long term support stable release, on my computer, which had bee upgraded from 6.10 or 7.04, as the releases arrived.

On the new hard drive, I put on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), which was sometime around September or October. This was just before the release of 9.10 in November. All of the bugs that had presented themselves in the early months seemed to have been ironed out, except for a sound/video issue in which the sound would totally crap out on me for no apparent reason, freezing up .avi videos. I resolved that by changing a configuration file to not choose the frequency (44,100 or 48,000) and set it at one. Taking the auto off seemed to fix the problem.

9.04 had Firefox 3.0, though, and I really prefer Firefox 3.5, so for that reason alone, I “upgraded” to 9.10 (Karmic Koala). I don’t know why I did this, as I had already tried to install Karmic on its own partition to test it, along about beta 1 or so. It began with sound, but now it has no sound. The desktop is stunning and the themes are improving. Everything seems to work with a nice, fluid flow, but it has no sound. This time I can’t fix it.

The “upgrade” had preserved the sound, but I’ve found a few little glitches that I don’t like at all and, even with diligent googling for the cure, I cannot solve these issues.

• sound and video skip, hiccup, and race or freeze at random times
• flash is unplayable on it
• logging out so another user can log in can cause X to produce a black screen that requires a REISUB or reset to get out of.

This is unacceptable, so my 9.10 spare test distro is now being upgraded to the alpha of 10.4 Lucid Lynx so that I can see if it can be repaired by “progress”. Its happening underneath this browser, as I type. I hope nothing breaks too badly before I submit the article. So far, its down to “about 4 minutes remaining”. I began this about 1/2 hour ago. That is amazing. The time that I upgraded to 8.04, it took all night (as in many hours). Of course, the new policy on upgrades is to disable 3rd party repositories during the upgrade, which likely makes it a lot tidier.

We’ll see. Hopefully, this experiment bears the fruit that I am looking for. Then I might be able to watch a video from beginning to end again.

Update: This didn’t work at all. Lucid Lynx totally broke and now kernel panics when booting into multi user mode. I’ve been updating, hoping that there will be some fix that will miraculously fix it, but I don’t have much hope.

What I did to work around it

After coming up against a stumbling block, such as it was, I looked elsewhere as a temporary fix. I must say that the newest Mepis is well-appointed, sporting a KDE4 desktop that is beginning to show the shine that we once saw in the older versions. I can view and hear video well and outputting the video to my TV set is resolve in a slightly nicer way, with a “widened” desktop, like Twinview did, but without fullscreen windows stretching across both screens.

Ubuntu did do a kernel update with 9.10 and it didn’t seem to have made any difference.  Video seemed to play a bit longer before the sound got lost, but that is all.  What did make a difference, though, was removing pulse audio from my system. Now, without that buggy piece of crap on my machine, video plays from beginning to end without problem.  There’s still an issue with Flash freezing up the browser, but Flash is buggy and a resource hog anyways.

I have not changed the look of this website for quite some time. I worked fairly diligently on the current theme, adapting from the most excellent Evanescence theme, using as a palate, a pile of maple leaves that Abby and I collected while walking back from Caleb’s school, which was before she was of school age.

There have been some exciting changes in the WordPress engine since, incorporating gallery functionality and threaded comments. These things aren’t worked into my current theme and I’d like to update it a bit.

Should I keep the same look? Or, should I go with something totally different?

BTW, for anyone who wants to dual, triple, etc boot from GRUB, and you want it easy, check this out. For as many distros as I’ve been able to, I’ve installed the bootloader on the root partition of the distro (my latest Ubuntu install is on /dev/sda5, for example). Then, I chainload it from the bootloader that I’ve already had installed. The advantage of this is that you don’t have to continually have to have your main bootloader reinstalled each time one of the distros has a kernel update.

Here’s how:

-add a new line in your /etc/menu.list or grub.conf file (and if you’re using LILO, 1.Why? and 2.You’re on your own. Read the man page). You will only need three lines for this to work.
-the first line is the title, so : “title Ubuntu 9.10″ (without the quotes)
-the second line is the “root (hdx,x)” line. I’ll use my Ubuntu install for an example. Use this command on this line (without the quotes, of course): “root (hd,0,5)”
-Then, put a third line: “chainloader +1″
-That’s it.

title Ubuntu 9.10
root (hd0,5)
chainloader +1

is how it would look.

What will happen, then, is that your grub will boot and then, if you select your new distro entry, it will load the grub install from the first partition of your new distro.

Now, its easy to add and remove distros in your bootloader without the risk of it being changed to a mangled state on a multi boot system.

So, I’ve been trying to settle in after my PATA drive decided that its job was finished. I thought that a new drive would be a great place to put a new version of Ubuntu. So, instead of going with Version 8.04 LTS, I loaded up version 9.04. As an aside, the numbering scheme coincides with the date of release (8th year, 4th month=April 2008).

I decided to install with the newer, and to some, buggier, EXT4 filesystem. That proved to be an interesting, and frustrating, mistake. I figured that I’d load up Warzone 2100 for Caleb to play at, which, so far, has locked up the screen on every version that we’ve installed. I figured,that with a new version of everything, perhaps this was the time.

It was not. Caleb could only reset the PC with the button, as he didn’t know the “reisub” trick. I’ve been teaching him a few of the more advanced tricks to using a PC so that he can gracefully shut down his PC, even if locked, though, so he will get this, if need be.

The filesystem pooched. I was able to get back into action with a quick fsck from the recovery prompt, but this is an action that only the root user can do, so Caleb and Abby would be SOL to fix a problem like this.  This went on for a few too many hard resets and some of the data on the hard drive became corrupted. One of them is my podcast downloader, PenguinTv. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling it and that didn’t work because the filesystem had decided to drop to “read only”, which screwed everything else.

What resulted was a screwed up system in which I couldn’t upgrade any of my packages and programs, as apt decided that it couldn’t get past the failed/screwed up PenguinTv reinstall.

So, I made the decision to reinstall Ubuntu 9.04 on the drive again, but with the EXT3 filesystem for the root partition. I left the /home partition as it was, with EXT4 (by the way, EXT4 is BLAZINGLY FAST – noticibly to the nth), as I became addicted instantly to the speed. Due to some bad package decisions (Warzone 2100) and a few other screwups that I shouldn’t be doing after all the Linux experience that I have, I ended up trying this again.

Here’s where the fun really began. Although I explicitly told the installer NOT to format the /home partition, /home got reformatted anyways. So, all of the data that I had collected over the last 2 weeks had been erased. My bad.  Thankfully, I had restored most of the data from my failing drive by pluging it in long enough to transfer what I could to the new one. This is the advantage of having your data files on their own partition. The bad blocks on the old drive were on the partition holding the operating system, but not on the /home partition where the user data was, so I could mount just that partition and grab what I needed.

So, I had to restore the old data once again. Before I did that, though, I decided that enough was enough with Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope version 9.04 and I upgraded the whole thing to the Alpha 5 of Ubuntu Karmic Koala, version 9.10, due out in October 2009. There were some really cool things that I noticed with Karmic, like the S.M.A.R.T. tool that popped up a nice graphical interface that informed me that the PATA drive had failed an integrity check and needed to be replaced. No other OS that I know of has done that by default. There were some refinements over Jaunty that I liked, as well (the themes are getting richer and more chocolaty, as well (yes, I am one of the few that will publically claim that I LIKE the brown themes).

The problem is, though, that sound doesn’t seem to want to wok as it should. When watching a video file on YouTube is choppy as all get out. Watching a movie file of any kind, such as Big Buck Bunny, would result in choppy, horrible sound that skipped.  Then, this morning, I tried to boot and the GUI did not show. The X-server took over, as usual, but did not go beyond a black screen.

I’ve installed Jaunty over it and am considering my options. I’m becoming quite disgusted with the state of distributions that use Apt as a package manager. When it works, it works great, but when it screws up, it can screw up royally.  Perhaps, if I can wresle the computer away from the kids long enough to fix it, I may ditch Ubuntu for Arch or Slackware.  They seemed to be easier to work with than others. But, Fedora 12 will be out in a few months. Perhaps RPM and Presto will woo me. I’m liking the delta merging idea a lot. Who likes to download 100s of MB of files to do a small update?

Wow. So much for the short rant.

In case you wonder why there is no “style” to this website today (actually for 48 hours), you must have forgotten that it’s CSS Naked Day.  This blog will be stripped of CSS styling for April 9th all over the world (hence the 48 hour ‘nakedness’).

“The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off your <body>.”

Why not participate yourself?

Check out this blog post, especially the comments. It reports that the Canadian government is actively seeking information about the use of  “No-Charge Licensed Software (typically referred to as Free and Open Source Software or FOSS and also applicable to freeware).”

It was not too long ago that I had to write to the webmaster of the Canada Revenue Agency to see if they’d consider including Firefox as one of their approved web browsers.  I didn’t receive a response, but others must have also written in, as it is now one of the choices.

One can hope.