SFTP, not FTP

The Windows GUI for secure FTP is WinSCP. When I’ve tested this, I’ll be a happier man.

TextDrive is requiring its users to use SFTP for file transfer. Break-ins are a bad thing, and avoiding shouting out your passwords on all logins is a good thing. SFTP is the solution to that.

OK, enough of my yapping. I just bought a domain name, and I host it at TextDrive: www.olleolleolle.dk.

Privacy, comments and blogs

I have had the first outside-my-circle reaction to this blog.

I had typed something disparaging and incorrect about a website. And published it here.

I named names. **Doh.**

Should not have done. (And I shouldn’t go on in any way about websites sucking.)

(Ms. Koi: From now on I shall refrain from snide and useless online discourse.)

Under the previous entry on ImageShack, Ms. Koi says it all.

Get a job: here you go

Hi, friends.

At the moment I am very busy doing some work, and I do not have the time to do nice, easy stuff like proctoring, at a school here in Copenhagen. Please, help my buddy Tim, who works there as the proctoring organizer, and sign up for a few work hours. Tim says:

> Also, I am in desperate need of more proctors, so if you know
> anyone who would like to earn some money, I have attached the
> schedule, so feel free to tell people about it.

I think I was paid around 90 DKK per hour. (Easy hours, though.)

So, whip out your email client and send me an email, or just give me a call, and I shall hook you up with the Timster.

(The dates with exams are May 12, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20.) If you are interested, just email me, and I shall forward the DOC file to you.

Upgrade and upgrading

Luisa just upgraded to the new WordPress version, 1.5 (Strayhorn), and it is so much better than this 1.2 thing. Tobias also runs the 1.5 and I suffer from deep version envy. The comment spam problem should be interesting to look at, as they have just begun using their new 1.5 WordPresses. Has the upgrade removed the possibility of botspamming a WP blog? We live in interesting times.

Am also looking for free software that does this: **Lets you post-it note a PDF**. If you know of some free software that does that, my day is made. If nobody knows about such a piece of software, there is your niche, unknown programmer. Whip out you PDF library of choice and start rebelling against the Adobe hegemony.

And, Sweden has a feminist political party, the feminist initiative. They get my next vote.

Comment spam: Trackbacks

Folks are whining about spam in comments.

I whine about spam sent by WordPress to me, containing links to the usual spam-bait.

So, today, I concentrated a bit, wandered in the (rather clean, for PHP) code, and found my line.

In the folder wp-includes/functions.php there is a function called 

wp _ notify _ postauthor

Open that file, and look at line 976. There is a conditional there that checks if the variable comment_type is set to “trackback”. For me, the trackback notifications are the only spam-problem left, so I edited that elseif-part of the conditional to be only this: 

       } elseif ('trackback' == $comment_type) {
            return false;
        } elseif ('pingback' == $comment_type) {

Now I might lessen the strain on my kind host’s server, and also get less spam. Was this helpful to you?

Learning J2EE

I was at the Knutepunkt larp conference in Norway, and there I met Verneri, a friend, and he whispered something more or less to the effect of:

> “Make yourself useful with J2EE.”

Hm, Enterprise computing. Where the jobs are. So, I asked what the first step was, and he answered the day after:

> “Install [the application server] jBoss. ”

And, I have. Now there are quite a few tutorials from Sun, on J2EE.

I have only met the J2EE thing in polemics, as yet, and my first impression of the thing is verboseness. Very much talk from an application like that. But there **are** things to read, unlike in other environments.