The vast majority of the people who have commented on things I’ve written in my blog over the years have been polite.  They have refrained from ad hominem attacks and tossing around words like "bigot" and "racist", and for this I thank them.  I haven’t felt the need to tell people they need to play nice in my sandbox.  Until today.

I wrote a blog entry about the Kasper Holmberg incident before the identity of the hacker was revealed.  In that entry, I basically said that people who do things like that are not heroes and such behaviour should be discouraged.  I wrote a follow-up entry when the hacker’s identity was revealed which talked about what they were being charged with.

A couple of people have commented on the original entry, both of whom felt I was being harsh and unreasonable and that the hacker was essentially a modern day Robin Hood. One of the commenters clearly knows the hacker personally.  There was a back and forth, but when confronted with facts that clearly contradicted their assertion, the commenter responded by calling me a "stupid hateful bigot" and suggesting that I said what I said about the hacker "because of his name".  Both of those quotes are taken from the comment I moderated.

These accusations are unfounded and untrue. I didn’t know that the hacker’s name was Mansour Moufid when I wrote the entry, nor would it have had any bearing on what I wrote.  I stand by my assertion that he is not a hero for what he did and should be prepared to accept the consequences of his actions.

This is my blog and disrespectful behaviour towards me or other commenters will not be tolerated.  You are welcome to post comments disagreeing with what I write, but do so respectfully.  Toss around epithets or make ad hominem attacks and you can expect to be moderated.

For the vast majority of you who do play nice: Thank you!

WordPress 2.6.2 has been released.  It addresses a couple of issues related to SQL Column Truncation and the mt_rand() function, along with some bug fixes.  Using subversion, the upgrade consisted of switching to the root directory of my WordPress installation and entering the following command:

svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6.2/

As always, I hit the upgrade URL after this, but it said the magic button didn’t need to be poked.

WordPress 2.6.1 is out.  It fixes the inevitable .0 bugs that new releases have.

As always, upgrading via Subversion was painless:

svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6.1/

Followed by hitting the upgrade URL and poking the magic button.

I just happened to be looking through my blog’s logs and noticed that a ‘bot had crawled through numerous pages on my blog in a very short period of time:

72.3.137.83 - - [13/Aug/2008:06:01:45 +0100] "GET /2008/02/01/ HTTP/1.0" 200 35253 "-" "ISC Systems iRc Search 2.1"

72.3.137.83 - - [13/Aug/2008:06:01:49 +0100] "GET /2008/02/05 HTTP/1.0" 301 84 "-" "ISC Systems iRc Search 2.1"

72.3.137.83 - - [13/Aug/2008:06:01:52 +0100] "GET /2008/02/05/ HTTP/1.0" 200 35375 "-" "ISC Systems iRc Search 2.1"

72.3.137.83 - - [13/Aug/2008:06:01:56 +0100] "GET /2008/02/06 HTTP/1.0" 301 84 "-" "ISC Systems iRc Search 2.1"

72.3.137.83 - - [13/Aug/2008:06:01:59 +0100] "GET /2008/02/06/ HTTP/1.0" 200 33373 "-" "ISC Systems iRc Search 2.1"

The “ISC Systems iRc Search 2.1” user agent caught my interest, so I did a little research with Google.  As I suspected, it seems that this user agent is associated with a web crawler used by an address harvester used by spammers.  I use the AntiLeech plugin to battle content thieves and the like, so I added the user agent to its blacklist.

But how to tell if AntiLeech is actually working?

(more…)

WordPress 2.6 was released a few minutes ago, so of course I’ve upgraded already.  Since I use subversion to maintain my blog, the upgrade process basically consisted of making a backup (it’s always a good idea to make a backup) and then running the following command from the root of my WordPress installation:

svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6/

I also upgraded a couple of plugins, including Akismet.

In the roughly 90 seconds it took to do all of this, some comment spammer tried to post some spam to my blog.  Fortunately, I had comments set to require me to approve the first comment, so it went into the queue to be reviewed.  When I re-enabled Akismet and poked the “check for spam” button it flagged it automatically.

There are a lot of features in it that make it worth upgrading, including some security updates, including better SSL support.  There’s also the addition of a post revisioning feature that will make it easier to track changes to blog entries, something that will be of particular interest to blogs with more than one author.

There’s even a video tour of WordPress 2.6 showing off the new features:

Congratulations to the WordPress 2.6 team!

The new header picture is a section of a larger picture I took my first evening in Athens from the Aeropagus, a small rocky hill part way up the Acropolis.

I see by the Green Website widget that there have been enough visits to my blog since I installed the widget a few months ago to offset 1 pound of carbon dioxide incurred by the operation of my blog.  Cool!