Archive for April, 2005

Guild Wars rocks

Friday, April 29th, 2005

I know it had been hyped a lot, but what a game! The graphics are mind-blowing, and the gameplay is like Diablo 2 with brains. I’m not going to write a lot, because every second I spend writing this is a second I don’t spend playing the game. Although, at the moment, all the servers (including the support website) seem to have crashed. Damn.

It lives!

Friday, April 29th, 2005

That Tiger post was my other post-to-future. As you can see, it actually worked. Having the server set to the right time did make a difference after all :P

ICRA re-labelling

Friday, April 29th, 2005

After contacting them by e-mail, I have been advised by the ICRA that the comments feature of Wordpress (and any other blog software that supports comments) constitutes ‘unmoderated chat’. The reason for this is that, although all comments are eventually moderated, there is no moderator present at the time the ‘chat’ (commenting) is taking place, who can be contacted in case of inappropriate behaviour. I’ve updated the label META to reflect this, as I believe that accurate PICS labelling (the W3C site labelling standard used by ICRA, Safesurf and most others, and recognised by decent filtering software) is the best way to enable parents to restrict their child’s access to material they feel is inappropriate.

Tiger launched today

Friday, April 29th, 2005

Today, Friday April 29th, sees the launch of the long-awaited Mac OS X 10.4 ‘Tiger’, a very capable looking operating system with a lot more features even than the promised ‘Longhorn’ version of Windows. For those of you who are thinking of buying a Powerbook (laptop) or Power Mac (desktop), bear in mind that it will be a month or two before computers actually start being shipped with Tiger pre-loaded. Until the middle of June at the earliest, even if a computer system says it includes Tiger, it will probably have the previous version (10.3 ‘Panther’) of OS X installed, and a disc for you to install Tiger yourself (a royal pain in the backside). So hold your horses!

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Anti-spam plugins

Thursday, April 28th, 2005

I’ve just installed a new anti-spam plugin- Bad Behaviour- which aims to block comment and referrer spambots as soon as they try to access the site. If any of you get a weird error page (a 412 calling you a spammer) then please e-mail me via the address on that page. Of course if you are reading this post then it probably hasn’t misidentified you, but just in case!

I’ve also installed TrencaSpammers, which is a Wordpress example of the near-ubiquitous ‘captcha’ test to prevent robots filling out forms. Yes, the line over the top of the number is supposed to be there, it makes life more difficult for the more advanced spambots that may have image-analysis built into them. Again, if you have any problems with this drop me a line.