Extension 437

Going 80%

Starting in December, I'll only be working four days a week at CompuMentor, instead of five. This is to free up time for me to focus on personal projects, the interminable to-do list, and possibly some independent consulting.

In general, my schedule will be Tuesday through Friday.

Message Board Spam

I know there are probably only about three people who will see this post, but if anyone has links to concrete solutions to prevent message board spam, I'd love to hear it. So would Matthew Schaeffer. I'm pretty sure I spelled his name right.

I have heard tell of a technique that is similar to the realtime blacklists (RBL) used to combat email spam. When a poster submits a message, their IP is checked against a public list of known spammer IPs. If it's on the list, they don't get to post. If it's not on the list, the post is displayed.

I searched a little on Google, but haven't found much yet.

Update: Moderating the first x number of posts from each user is one way to combat message board spam. Usually a spammer won't post a couple of useful messages before sending up the spam.

Adam Kalsey's post "Cutting comment spammers off at the knees" is good reading.

We don't use Moveable Type, but if we did we could use this plugin: MT-Blacklist, aimed at preventing comment and trackback spam.

Searching on the words "comment spam" returns additional interesting references.

Here's another idea: a community-based anti-spam feature. It could work something like this:

1. Spammer posts on TechSoup message board
2. Before the post is displayed, the IP of the poster is compared against a community-contributed list of IP addresses for known message board spammers.
3. If the poster's IP is on the list, no postie. Otherwise the post is displayed.

Another idea, courtesy of my pal Phil. It has actually been implemented for Movable Type, it seems.

1. Let the message board community decide whether a post is spam or not by offering a "spam" button on every post.
2. When a post is marked as spam, it is removed for review, and the content of the message is fed into a Bayesian filter.
3. Over time, the system proactively prevents the display of messages that match the spam signature in the filter.

Technical Editor: Free Downloads

I am acting as the new technical editor for the TechSoup Free Downloads section. Today I met with Michael and Susan to discuss what needs to be done. Right now we have a set of products for which content needs to be written and produced on the Web. We'll be highlighting the more complex products as being "Geek Picks" or something like that.

I asked Susan if I could have a TechSoup Free Downloads press pass, and she replied that she would get right on that.

Local User Groups

In Consulting Services we're talking about integrating community participation into our work. One example might be to assign a staff person to attend local technology user groups. The user group liaison becomes known to the group and trusted as a partner in that community. When it comes time to ask for volunteers or technical assistance, the group will be more likely to respond. The liaison also learns about technology of interest to nonprofits and brings that knowledge back to CompuMentor.

Here is a list of interesting user groups in the SF Bay Area:

PC-Related

EBIG - East Bay Information Technology Group. The East Bay I.T. Group is the East Bay's leading technology forum. Connected to the best and brightest developers, entrepreneurs, and start-ups in the San Francisco East Bay, with strong ties to industry experts, major technology corporations, and local municipalities, eBig is the East Bay's premier resource for information, education, and personal networking for people seeking connections and technology resources.

NTEA - NT Engineering Association of Silicon Valley.

SFNTUG - San Francisco Networking Technologies Users Group. For Computer professionals interested in Active Directory, NT / Win 2K / and Win 2003 Server design, implementation, administration, networking or maintenance.

Linux Related

BALUG - Bay Area Linux Users Group.

CABAL - Consortium of All Bay Area Linux.

Mac Related

BANG - Bay Area NeXT Group - The Bay Area NeXT Group is a longstanding support forum now focused on issues relating to Rhapsody/PPC, Rhapsody/Intel, YellowBox/PPC, YellowBox/Intel, BlueBox, WebObjects, EOF, the rumored Apple NC, as-yet-to-be-announced OS permutations, OPENSTEP, NEXTSTEP and the Macintosh computing environment.

ebMUG - East Bay Macintosh Users Group.

MILMUG - Milpitas Macintosh Users Group.

MUCHO - Macintosh Users Computers Hands On. MUCHO is a Macintosh User Group of senior citizens based at Little House Senior Center in Menlo Park, California.

PlanetMUG - Online Mac user group.

SLMUG - San Leandro Macintosh Users Group.

SMUG - Stanford/Palo Alto Macintosh Users Group.

SVMUG - Silicon Valley Macintosh User Group.

TMUG - Tri-Valley Macintosh User Group. The Tri-Valley Macintosh User Group, serving Livermore, Pleasanton, Dublin, San Ramon, Tracy, Stockton and the Tri Valley Area.

UCSF Mac OS X Interest Group - Open to students, faculty and staff, but their website says they're interested in community outreach.

Other User Groups

BAWUG - Bay Area Wireless Users Group.

Mobile Computing SIG of San Francisco.

I also ran across this interesting online users group.

The Macintosh Guild - The Ultimate Apple User Group for Corporate America.

How not to update Xandros Desktop

I chose Xandros Desktop 2.0, Open Circulation Edition as my Linux distribution to replace Windows XP because it is aimed at the non-technical user. That means that it is one of the distributions that I would recommend to a small nonprofit organization.

I like Xandros Desktop a lot. It is extremely easy to access Windows file and print shares. It supports dual monitors (I use a second monitor with my laptop), which is nice. It supports almost all the hardware on my laptop.

But it doesn't include all the software I wanted. I was after two packages in particular: KGPG and Kifi. KGPG is a graphic user interface to GPG, the Gnu Privacy Guard, which I use to interpret PGP signatures. Kifi is a graphic user interface to control wireless cards.

Xandros is a commercial distribution based on the free open source Debian. The way to install and upgrade software in Debian is with the package manager named apt. For example, if I want to install KGPG, I would enter at a command prompt: apt-get install kgpg. Because this package wasn't in the Xandros collection, I decided to add the general Debian package repositories to the source list for apt. That's where things got a little funny.

Upgrading my Xandrox installation (apt-get upgrade) from the new package list resulted in the custom Xandros implementation of KDE being overwritten by a new version of KDE (3.3). Lots of things changed and now my laptop is running the bastard child of Xandros and Debian. Kind of funny.

It's working OK for me, but I wouldn't recommend this experiment to anyone else.

When your mail disappears

If the prefs.js file in Mozilla becomes corrupted, all the program's settings may be lost. Including where all that nice email is located. One possible cause of corruption of this file: unexpected power loss. The solution is to restore from a backup prefs.js file. A backup is made each time Mozilla starts up...or shuts down, something like that. So the prefs.bak file may be of some use.

KDE Menu Edit no-no

This is the first post in a new category: "Linux switch". About a week ago I started using Linux instead of Windows. More on that later. This category is to drop things that I learn into. Maybe they'll end up in a TechSoup story later. Maybe not.

One learning for today: KDE comes with a menu editor that lets one rearrage items on the KDE menu (equivalent to the Windows Start button). Very nice. But be warned. If you delete a folder in the menu, it will disappear...along with any program shortcuts it contained. :-(

Update: Kappfinder is a utility that can look for applications that do not have a shortcut in the KDE menu, and allows one to add them back. Nice.