After the major upgrade by my webhost, there was a sudden surge in spam on the blogs on spherebox, with a lot bypassing Akismet‘s filtering. Apparently he did not configure the ModSecurity Apache module (which did an excellent job previously) and was too lazy to do so as the new version he had installed had supposedly different configuration settings. :(

Since I got sick of getting the incessant email notifications of spam held in moderation queue, I decided to go looking around for fixes and came across this at WordPress’s Codex which helped cut down the crazy amount of spam that kept going through by heaps. Basically it adds rules to the .htaccess file which will check that any comments being submitted to wp-comments-post.php come from the comments page of the WordPress installation and not directly injected by spam bots.

Note that this did not stop the spam completely, but managed to reduce the volume enough so that Akismet could block it off appropriately.

If you’re encountering the same issue as I did, try it out. The instructions are fairly simple and requires few modifications. :)

Just got some height/width/depth specifications of a new mobile phone and are unable to compare it visually yourself? sizeasy does an excellent job at this and only requires you to enter the dimensions.

3D view comparison between an iPod nano and a pack of playing cards:

Didn’t grab the screenshots for the other views, so if you want to check out the other views, just try it out yourself. ;)

Microsoft very recently released Windows Vista to the general public with heaps of fanfare, with even Bill Gates appearing on the Daily Show to promote it. It would seem to me that this is probably one of the few releases of Windows of all time with a very lukewarm response from the public and this comic pretty much sums it up nicely. :P Or maybe M$ might’ve to resort to something like this to get people to upgrade.

Jokes aside, ck has a review up at spherebox if you’re interested to read more about it. :)

It’s been a while since my last post, unfortunately have been extremely busy with all kinds of things lately. :( Had some time this weekend, so WordPress 2.1 has been deployed to all hosted sites. Unfortunately, there are some plugins which still have not been fixed to work with 2.1 (e.g. video embedding).

Have just upgraded all WordPress installs across spherebox sites with the latest version. :)

Get the latest zip or tar.gz from here, or if you want just the changes files and/or diff, have a look here.