No other word to describe this…

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A lot of WordPress-powered blogs recently got a load of comment spam. Nasty. In fact, I had to do a bit of a clean up job (and so did many people using WordPress), all because the Akismet spam database appeared to be down.

Akismet is an awesome service for WordPress-powered blogs which checks your comments against the spam database and either puts the comment in the spam bin, the moderation queue or straight onto the post depending on how similar it is to the spam.

Unfortunately, when the spam database goes down, as happened recently, all comments get let through … with disastrous results. So I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the Akismet guys for their great service; the fact that I don’t notice the spam when it’s working means Akismet is great.

According to their site:

One of the reasons we’re doing Akismet is we’ve built up a highly fault-tolerant infrastructure that can handle huge amounts of traffic and processing. However if something ever does go wrong your comments will simply go into the moderation queue.

Not this time, apparently.

But we love Akismet! (especially when it’s online!). No, seriously, we do. We love WordPress too.

UPDATE: The Akismet blog has an update on this – it seems to be back online and working for me. Apparently some new code broke the API, but it’s working again now. Thanks guys for the great service. Thanks also to Antony Pranata for (indirectly) leading me to this update (and linking to me in the first place!).

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was the first version of Windows that I used, and I thought I might have another look at it, just for the fun and nostalgia value.

But I wasn’t going to install it on a real machine – I have setups I don’t want to lose! So VMware was launched and I had a try getting it to work on a virtual machine.
Just a word – the original machine which ran WfW 3.11 no longer has it installed; not that Microsoft would be too worried about multiple machine uses of an essentially dead product. The machine originally came with IBM PC DOS and OS/2 (neither of which now live on it either).

Initially, I was going to put PC DOS on the VM first, because Windows at this stage wasn’t really an OS in its own right, it needed DOS to run the setup. However the IBM PC DOS floppies weren’t looking too good, and the PC DOS install had a hiccup. It completed, but important stuff like himem.sys (deals with extended memory, so you can have over 640k RAM) weren’t installed, so it wasn’t much use.

So instead I downloaded FreeDOS, the free and open source DOS system, that claims pretty damn good compatibility with MS-DOS. I had to find a mirror that worked, and a version that worked, but when I did, I successfully installed FreeDOS on my 200 MB virtual hard drive.

Now, to the Windows install – with screenshots (click any one to make it bigger, thanks Zooomr)!
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Just a quick post – I’m going away for a few days sans internet access and will be back posting by Wednesday with a bit of luck.

In the meantime, be sure to check out my Writely and Mono+GWS conspiracy theory. Well, not quite, but read it anyway. It’s interesting.

I think the video speaks for itself here.

Happy birthday world wide web! Apparently, today in 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee first released files for the first ever web browser, WorldWideWeb and the first web server, httpd, to the world. They were, incidentally, written on the now defunct NeXTStep operating system. When I say defunct, I mean, Steve Jobs went back to Apple and turned it into Mac OS X.

Tim’s also the founder of the W3C – the de facto web standards and web authority.
From the Wikipedia article:

“Berners-Lee’s made his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The World Wide Web Consortium decided that their standards must be based on royalty-free technology, so they can be easily adopted by anyone.”

Now that’s what I like to hear.

I think the picture explains all. Apparently this Dell laptop blew up at a conference in Japan. And you thought Dell made good laptops, didn’t you? Read more at The Inquirer and UNEASYsilence.
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Just seen a pretty amazing thing at the LXF Team Blog. It seems you can watch the World Cup on your PC. No, no, in pure text mode. It only seems to work when there’s a match on, so I haven’t had a chance to look yet, but I’m sure I will before the tournament is up.

If you’ve got a Unix-based system (Linux, Mac OS X etc), run telnet ascii-wm.net 2006 from a terminal, but do it when there’s a match on. Quality’s not quite as good as HDTV, no doubt.

In fact, Windows users should be able to watch as well, run a telnet program (HyperTerminal on XP??, or try PuTTY) and connect to ascii-wm.net, port 2006.

And here’s to my first real post on my blog in WordPress!

This video just made me laugh. I don’t know how you could let a MacBook Pro be subjected to this sort of damage. It would also make a very expensive cat toy. The cat’s having fun anyway.

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The newly announced name for the Nintendo Revolution – Wii seems to be making some waves within the Nintendo community.

Personally, I don’t like it. I can just see kids asking their parents “Can I have a Wii?” and the unsuspecting parents agreeing, not having realised that they meant the Nintendo console.