Monthly Archive: September 2015

Referrer and Comment Spam

September 21, 2015

In reviewing traffic to this set of blogs, I got tired of seeing referrer spam. I looked up what to do about it and found you can use the .htaccess file. So I started the project of gathering up referrers from across all the hosting and domains I deal with, then filtering that down to a list that included one each and did not include real referrers. Tedious! Need to get back to it.

Meanwhile, some older sites on which I have not yet updated WordPress have started getting pounded with comment spam. Since it needs to be approved, that just means a ton of e-mail, but that’s annoying enough. Now those updates are on my agenda, as I am pretty sure they helped in the past. If only because it makes upgrading Akismet possible. On the other hand, maybe Akismet is being overwhelmed. Which makes me want to see what else can be done.

I actually tested Ghost as an alternative to WordPress. There were two issues. One was the learning curve. The other was that I couldn’t blog remotely with BlogDesk, as is my habit.

Sigh…

Blogging, Security

Lavarand

September 10, 2015

I’d never heard of Lavarand until someone mentioned it this morning, in the context of having dreamed about it, of all things. I laughed when I read the entry on it, but true randomization is certainly a worthy goal.

Humor, Programming

Exascale Computing

September 6, 2015

The first time I’ve heard that term is in The First Exascale Computer. Cool goal, though I question whether the government has any reason to spearhead such a thing, as opposed to it coming along organically. The analogy of car speeds really brings home the distinction in speeds versus what is current. While they mention trying to match human neural processing, I was picturing simulations on almost Matrix-like scales.

Computers