SteveX Compiled

For all the work that people do to try to prevent spam from showing up on websites, there's a class of sites that spammers are using to propagate spam basically unchecked. Abandoned Websites.

Here's how it typically goes:

• Bob gets an idea for a site.
• In a burst of optimism, Bob registers a domain name, and heads to a web host to do some basic setup.
• Bob configures a phpBB, WordPress or MediaWiki site for his new project and starts setting it up.
• Bob goes to bed, wakes up the next day, gets busy with other stuff, and doesn't get back to his new project for some time.
• Time passes...
• Spammers bots find the site. "Hey look, phpBB".
• Armed with algorithms for breaking that version of phpBB's CAPTCHA, the site starts filling up with spam.

That's it; your project has now become a tool for the dark side.

Names have been changed to protect the guilty; substitute Bob above for Steve and phpBB for MediaWiki.

A few days ago I started making a backup of the databases on my webhost. I asked MySQL to backup all of them using mysqldump --all-databases, and noticed it was taking a long time. I asked MySQL what it was doing (SHOW PROCESSLIST), and saw that it was dumping out a table called 'text' in a MediaWiki installation that I'd created for a project I wanted to work on about a year ago.

Turns out that table had 12 gig of data in it.

Most of the data was either new wiki pages or edits to the Talk pages of existing wiki pages, with links to websites that the spammers were trying to promote. MediaWiki adds a nofollow attribute to outgoing links, so I don't know why spammers would want to do this, but they were doing it hard.

12 gig is a lot of data, and on top of that, there's all the activity of posting it and the activity of all the search engines crawling it. This one abandoned MediaWiki installation was wasting significant resources for a number of companies.

Now it's gone.. but how many more are there out there?

So this is my public service announcement: Check your domains. Are there any domains you bought, set something up on and then abandoned? Now is a good time to clean them out.

Microsoft has come out with their first ad response to the Get a Mac ad campaign by Apple.

I don't get it.

It's fun and whimsical, but it seems like one of those videos you show at the start of a company meeting, not something you use with mass media to try to improve your image.

I like the fact that Google Chrome runs each tab in a separate process. What happens when one of those processes dies? Fire up Task Manager, pick a chrome.exe and try it out:

Google Chrome is available now, here.

If you haven't heard of it - Chrome is Google's new browser project. It's based on WebKit, giving it some similarity to Apple's Windows version of Safari.

I don't really understand why Apple wanted Safari for Windows, and I don't really understand where Google is going with Chrome. But hey, it feels fast, looks good, and it's free. Check it out.

This is some good soup.

I did a bit more tweaking of the Recipes site for the iPhone this evening. It basically came down to using the iPhone CSS on a few more pages, which makes the text big enough to read on the iPhone.

I ran into a problem with setting the background for the <pre> tag using CSS. In Safari on the Mac (and in other browsers), the background would be as wide as it needed to be based on the width of the content. On the iPhone, the background would be narrower than required, leaving the text floating on a strange grey box. To workaround this, I changed it so there is no background behind the recipe on the iPhone, though I think it looks better the other way.

One thing I can't figure out is what to do about the Google ads on the recipe pages. I'm forcing the text to 32 point, but I can't change the size of the ad, so you get this teeny ad at the bottom of the page:

Anyone come up with a way to ads that look good on the iPhone?

Yeah, that's what my PS3 says when I put a PS2 game in. I got it for Christmas and didn't realize I got the version that couldn't play PS2 games. So I bought a PS2 game. And I can't play it.

Bummer.

This is a bit of a strange move. I'm watching TomTom to see when they come out with a GPS that has a better screen, since that's my main complaint with their current hardware, and instead they come out with this.

These two "new" devices are the old devices with a new sleeve and some new policies surrounding warranty, support and updates. I hope there's more coming.

About a month and a half ago I mentioned that my old cheapie popcorn maker broke, and that I ordered a replacement. It arrived a few days ago.

I also ordered some Wisconsin White Birch popping corn, since I discovered while checking Amazon reviews of popcorn makers that the popcorn you use makes a difference.

This is good stuff.

The popcorn maker works well. No wasted popcorn, no mess. And the popcorn itself is very good - strangely white, but light with a good texture, and noticeably different from the usual popcorn that I get at the grocery store.

This makes me wonder how much variety there really is in different types of popcorn? I'm tempted to order this sampler.

It's also interesting that for $15 you can get a popcorn maker that looks like the one pictured above, but sucks, and for another $15 you can get one that works remarkably well. And guess which one tends to be in stores.

I just tweaked my Recipes page a bit, to add an iPhone CSS file. It basically just detects the iPhone and makes the font bigger. I also cleaned up the page a bit, removed the obsolete search methods and just left the Google search.

I plan to sprinkle some more iPhone awareness throughout the site - the recipes themselves are already pretty plain and generally look good on the iPhone (especially sideways) but there's still some room for improvement.

I wish the Google search results page would detect the iPhone and look better. I'll have to see if there's a way I can style that.