More on the current blogspam situation

As several commenters have reported, I’m not the only one who’s having problems. It looks as if Akismet is broken right now.
Meanwhile I’ve installed a new plugin, Bad Behavior, “a set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots”. It’ll be interesting to see how well it works. If you find it blocking your comments, please let me know via email.

Thrilling

I don’t want to spoil the Turkish Grand Prix for anyone who’s time-shifting it. Let me just say that you won’t want to miss a second* of the last fifteen laps. Glorious racing, and a thoroughly satisfying result.
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* Except, of course, the seemingly interminable and tediously repetitive commercials on Speed.

I'm temporarily moderating all comments

A couple of blogspam got past Akismet, and they looked like the kind of thing it should have caught. I’m going to turn on full comment moderation until I’m sure Akismet hasn’t been hacked. (For the record, the normal policy here is that I moderate comments from people I haven’t seen before; once I approve a comment, the author is exempt from moderation.)

Consequences of moving west

The qualifying session for this weekend’s Turkish Grand Prix will take place in a mere 6 hours, at 4am Pacific Daylight Time. (That’s so early that it shows up at the end of Friday’s televison schedule rather than the start of Saturday’s!) Coverage of the race itself begins at 4:30am PST on Sunday.
Of course, if I decide to watch the GP2 event, I’ll have to be up by 3am.
The sacrifices we make….. 😉

Packing heat

Those who know me well will confirm that I loath guns. I cannot imagine any situation in which I would allow a gun in the house, much less own one. My personal creed is Be part of the solution, not part of the problem, which definitely applies here.
However, I now find myself making the extraordinary admission that I might make an exception….
WETA ray gun
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In case you’ve forgotten, WETA is the amazing outfit that did the special effects for “Lord of the Rings” and “Kong”, among other films.

Interviewing

As I come to the end of my second week at Amazon, I realize that I haven’t blogged much about the experience. In part, this is because of the sheer volume of material I’ve been absorbing (“open mouth, insert fire-hose, drink”). It’s been taking place at all levels, from short-term planning meetings for one small engineering team to VP-level breakfast discussions, and everything in between. Architecture, operations, monitoring, infrastructure, computer science, engineering practices… the list goes on. And (of course) the details are all confidential.

Amazon.com DSE
But I can talk about one thing I’m doing: interviewing! The Distributed Systems Engineering group is hiring; we have some really interesting opportunities, and we’re getting some very promising candidates. The bar is set really high (in fact there’s an official, HR-blessed role called “Bar Raiser”), and the interviewing process is pretty rigorous. I’m finding it time-consuming, but a lot of fun.

And of course, [shameless advertising] if you’re interested, drop me an email or contact DSE!

Just keep taking the lithium… (but the right kind, please)

It turns out that both of the batteries (primary and spare) for my PowerBook are covered by Apple’s Battery Exchange Program. Let’s see how quickly they can get me replacements. The only question is… until they do, should I run the machine with or without a battery installed?
[UPDATE] According to the email I just received from Apple confirming my order, the answer to the first question is “four to six weeks…” maybe. Which settles the second question: I can’t go without instant-on-from-sleep for a month.
[UPDATE] There are reports on various mailing lists and websites of people having problems with the Battery Exchange Program web site. My own experience was certainly confusing. I entered the serial numbers of my PowerBook and both batteries, and clicked Continue. All three serial numbers were rejected. I clicked Back in my browser, double-checked that I’d correctly (a) written the numbers down and (b) typed them in. Then, without changing anything, I clicked Continue again. This time all three numbers were accepted.
If at first you don’t succeed…..

Lack of imagination

I hesitate to post this question, because I’m not sure it’s in my interest for things to change, but anyway….

Why is it that 99% of the blogspam comments that hit this blog begin with the words “Nice site”? Surely the spammers realize that such predictability just plays into the hands of the spam detection engines like Akismet. OK, I realize that the most likely explanation is that everyone is using the same spambot, and the “Nice site” is boilerplate which they can’t change. But it’s still pretty dumb….

(We’re talking a lot of spam here – Akismet has caught 7,130 spam coments since I upgraded to WordPress 2.0.2 in March.)