As a Firefox Campus Rep, I get a box of Firefox goodies to use while promoting Firefox on the USC campus. A few days ago, I received a box for this year. It contains a book called Firefox for Dummies, by Blake Ross.
I have to be honest. I’ve always been a little hesitant to pick up “for Dummies” books because they’re a huge series, which reeks of mass media and brainless fluff. With a title including the word “Dummies”, who can take it seriously? As usual, I was wrong. These books are often full of good stuff.
Firefox for Dummies is no exception. It’s written by the main man himself, Blake Ross, co-creator of Firefox. There’s no better person to write a book on this topic, and he’s fully equipped and a heck of a lot more knowledgeable than me.
Despite his stunning credentials, he comes across as humble and down-to-earth, at least in my opinion. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction: Continue reading ‘Blake Ross is an inspiration’
Is there any way to mass-edit these three fields for all forums?
- Default View Age (Default date cut-off for thread display)
- Default Sort Field
- Default Sort Order
Continue reading ‘vBulletin Mass-Edit View Age, Sort Field, Sort Order?’
When you edit the first post of a topic in vBulletin, it doesn’t update the topic title, even if you update counters in the Maintenance section.
Continue reading ‘vBulletin Edit Titles’
I’ve been struck by the stupidity of the spam I’m seeing. I see tons and tons of spam everyday, from comments on my blog, to posts on Google Community, to your typical email spam. The spam that’s hitting forums today includes plenty of your typical trashy, obvious spam. But buried deeply I find lots of other tricks spammers are trying to pull, especially ones who try to pass off as real users. Yes, they’re not using an automated bot, but they are posting self-promotional topics where it’s not allowed. Here are a few examples for your amusement. I’ve seen better and worse. Continue reading ‘Spammers are crafty, but silly too’
I just upgraded Google Community vBulletin. I thought they had better ways to fight spam, but not so: they use image verification, no matter how complex it is. The more weird-looking the images get, the harder it is for real humans to read them. Sometimes, computers can even read images (using OCR) better than humans can. So that’s not the way to go. Computers can crack images better than humans can, so we really need to focus on what computers cannot do. I think the next logical step is to ask a question, like a test you might have taken at school.
It’s simple, easy to implement, and very effective at defeating bots. I think it should be at least as effective as image verification.
Continue reading ‘Defeating spam with a question’
This post has been moved to my linkblog as SitePoint Topics.
I’m finally going to follow up on my post from about 2 months ago, Too Many Websites. I sat down today and suddenly remembered a few sites that I love, but don’t have time for - and so the’ve been growing stale for about a year. All it takes is for someone to put some attention and planning into it, and I know they can grow into useful and interesting sites. Here’s the list so far:
Continue reading ‘Website for You’
The year was 1996. I was creating my first website. It was about Pokemon, games, and programming. Life was simpler back then. The Internet felt like a relatively small community. The number of webmasters was a fraction of what it is today. There was less information. Spam was not a problem, search engines were not ubiquitous. It was like a club. It felt like its own community.
Continue reading ‘The Web is Becoming Increasingly Overwhelming’
[MM] I woke this morning in time to finish my Calculus homework before going to EE 106 to work with Michael O. on our robot. We’re supposed to make it run through an obstacle course, but the IR detectors see too far. We need to somehow make it more nearsighted. Otherwise, we can’t detect small gaps in walls. Perhaps there’s a bug in our code: thinking back on it, the sensors seemed to be more sensitive before. Yet there was always a problem with close accuracy. I brought the robot back to the dorm to work on; let’s hope we do before the last class session (Thursday).
Continue reading ‘Robots, Math, phpBB Star, MP3 Shack, Pete, Ishwar, Essays’
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