soledad penadés

repeat 4[fd 100 rt 90]

Found this comment in a weblog:

i was minding my own business one day then suddenly this thing popped up asking me to debug using microsoft script editor. what is debug? why is it happening? when i press ok, it stopped and said that something is null and not an object. leaving me no choice but to press break. what is break? but it is just hanging there and i can't use my program. and i don' t understand what the whole thing is about. please help….

(from MSE at Erik's weblog)

Unfortunately I couldn't feel more identified with it. It might be surprising but when you're working with computers during 8+ hours a day the last thing you want to get is an error like that one. Even if you know what's going on, what's debug and what's break. It isn't your business, and it shouldn't be, but it prevents you from doing yours.

It's like a plumber being greeted with an stack overflow when he comes back home after a long plumbing and unblocking day.

Ahhh computers! Diabolic weapons!

Akismet has caught 52.000+ spam comments since I installed wordpress. That was a year and a half ago, which is pretty impressive for a non popular blog.

Most of the comments come from pingbacks, so it's a good idea to install some kind of plug-in which disables pingbacks on posts after a certain time (~3 months), or just run a query to disable all comments from time to time, etc.

But I just got an e-mail with the definitive solution, and you don't need to install anything. See by yourself how easy is it:

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 45452xxxx or write me texxxxxxxx(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

I feel very relieved now that I found the solution… I think I'm going to answer him immediately, so he can speak to the spammers and tell them not to spam my site. He's such a nice guy!

So that's what happens when a site decides to join the tagging fever:

Tags: php, dd, tutorial, shiflet, shiflett, zend, framework, web, site, anirudha, fdffffffffffffff, hello world, httpwwwgooglecom, kjkljlkj, asasas, vinod, chilli, shiflettasshat, mama, papa, chuckoo, sathishan, nithyan, ashokan, unni, divya, pradeep, abcphp, zde, jayesh jose, harro, ronnie, sample, oui, lebicheur, controller, error, d, kontrola, omg lol, 5, 46457, dfsdfdsf, sdfsdf, asd, crazy, booga, should tags be allowed to be added like this, no i dont think so the tags should be extracted from content, dont allow users to add tags or youll see the results, tags are the root of all evil, thi is, cvcxv, ioncube, zend framework, you already see the results, has not printable version, user created tags how lame, pet the monkey, shoutmouthcom, maybe only registered users should be able to add tags, adding another worthless tag to hammer in the points made earlier, this is only way to add new tag, didip is a complete bonehead, rapdwordpresscom, trke olmayan dkman, turkce olmayan dokumanlar, prova

I have mixed feelings about tags, but in this case, tags seem pretty much useless.

Two years ago I was an absolute tagging enthusiast, but I have slowly moved towards a more cautious opinion. It's like wikis: if there's not someone exercising some quality control, the content gets easily polluted when the number of users grows.

Even though, I still believe that their flexibility is also their advantage over other ways of organising information. But unless you use these methodologies in a closed, controlled environment, things will screw up pretty soon, I guess.

You just need to take a look at del.icio.us or flickr, two of the most famous tagging-enabled sites. There can be several tags in different languages for tagging the same thing. Or maybe somebody will prefer to separate multi-word tags with underscores, whereas other prefer points. Or hyphens.

The syntactic problem is slightly irrelevant, but the semantic one is not. And I'm not even going to enter the issue about mechanical tags, vandalized content tagged with really wrong tags and all that crazy stuff!

Oh and if you feel curious, this is where I found those absurd tags.

… because this has been happening for a couple of years now and you don't even reply to my support tickets.

Check my triplicated search results by yourself!

I heard Google's blog search was a better search engine for blog stuff. What do you think?

Note: I very very rarely use Technorati, since its search results tend to be quite polluted with things like this one. But it is used by Wordpress to show you the latest links to your site and that's why I'm seeing those threesomes each time I log into my admin panel. And it's ridiculous!

The web team, composed exclusively of interns, made a request to their project manager:

– We'll need a php editor, the trial license for Ultraedit in this machine has expired and we can't be disconnecting the network cables each time someone starts Dreamweaver so that it doesn't detect we are all running the same license.

– Ok, just download something in emule and try to crack it. Don't know, Zend Studio or something. It's ok, as long as you have space in your computer for installing it… Just make sure you download it in your home computer, since we have a very limited network connectivity and we can't afford to use the office's network for downloading large files. We don't have budget for development tools either.

Some years later, different country:

– I'm afraid I'll need Flash CS3 for doing this…

– Ok, no worries. Just let me know which package you need and I'll buy it.

(10 minutes later)

– You can find the software in this folder. License key is there as well.

* sole is trying to pick her jaw, which got stuck in the floor, with no luck.