Lumpy's Corner

how do you set the time on this darn thing?

Well this took like two hours but I finally got the CSS working, FTP working, and even figured out how to set the time... Everyone is even leaving the lockergnome chat room. I am just like too excited to sleep. Three valid pages on my site. ALL valid XHTML and now a blog. Too kool!!!

I really should just go to bed. But I know that is not an option. I am obsessed right now...

Well, I did have a pretty good day all in all. I am finally starting to get the hang of this XHTML and actually generating pages as a pretty decent rate. Work is going much better, things are starting to get real organized and we have a good crew.

Considering it is 3:30 AM, I am going to bed short tonight. Hopefully, I will have more to say tomorrow.

So much for a short, sweet, goodnight blog, insomnia set in so I thought I might try to get the movable type thing going except it is now five AM and It's still waiting for it to finish it's FTP. Then all I get to do is debug it!!.

Ahh the pleasure of being a complete, moronic n00b! And MySQL takes forever to run on the server.

Well it is almost now noon. Still haven't figured it out. I can't find where to set the file authorization. Time to give up' I have to go to work.

Well 34 hours later and I think i got everything all debugged. I do have a valid CSS. After I post this I am praying for the valid page.

I got to meet Foofy finally. But i really didn't get to say much to the blog master because i was too busy trying to work all the kinks out of this. It was really a mixed bag because I also got to meet Randy....

I see what you mean dil... My n00b ass even had to kick him around.

Maybe i will extend this in a bit but i am more concerned with validating the code tonight than much else...

l8tr

Well I finally got the "look" right.

Thanks to Geek, Dil, and diligence all you Internet Explorer users can even read it now. Funny what comment lines can do to ie.....

I have spent a few hours tonight modifying the blog rollling list so that will be all until after Christmas weekend. I will be going home to my parents and doubt I will blog much then. But when I get back, I plan to write like the fiend I am.

I have been busting my butt of the late to make sure that this little corner is one hundred percent XHTML valid code. Some of you have asked why? Well, first off, I have this major anal streak in me which just makes me that way (and tend to get a bit ornery when people ask me "why?"). Second, you are SUPPOSED to write valid code. It is just a matter of good practice. I mean don't you want to do things right?

On that note let me get my soapbox out and talk about valid code. Valid code is a standard set by the World Wide Web Consortium . This organization, the W3C for short, is trying to set a uniform standard so that the whole world is on the same page. This guarantees that browsers for the blind, deaf and other special devices such as brail printers will know how to function with the given web page.

This is actually a major improvement in things for HTML which was rather forgiving in terms of code but could be ambiguous. XHTML is stricter but more specific and powerful. Using XHTML instead of HTML allows one to "extend" the language and allow it to do much more than HTML. (The "X" stands for "eXtensible".) It can properly display math equations with MathML, make full use of XMLwhich allows one to really change the static nature of HTML. In short, it is just better just think of it as HTML on steroids and crack.

I know I have heard a good bit about my web site lameness of the late. Well I am finally getting a chance to try and remedy that SIN on my part. (Honestly, I never recalled promising to write any minimum number of blogs but since I have heard about it so much it must mean that someone is reading what I write.. go figure...)

So what is new? First off, I have added a "personal" blog due to some repeated requests. Second, I am adding a new category to this already clustered mess I refer to as a web site. That is where this little mess of a blog falls to the category is "general Site News". (I also never promised to be overly creative.) And no, that is not all there is... If you know me, of course, more... Just keep your pants on OK?... (well most of you anyhow, those of you who I wish to see pantless already know who you are and are free to do as you wish. :)))

This blog has been put off long enough. I was hoping to solicit a few other people's opinion but it looks like it is not going to happen. The original intent was to solicit the opinion of several people in the know on bloggin software. Of course, most of my contacts are also college students and major geeks. This means most of us disappear during the school year. That is exactly what happened here.

As far as what I prefer, I prefer Movable Type. I, however, am no expert. I like my older version because it supports multiple blogs and authors. (My old free version supports up to 5 authors and 5 blogs. The free 3.1 version supports 1 author and 3 blogs.) It works simple enough and well enough to meet all my needs. It is widely supported and numerous templates are available for it. I am comfortable with it, like it and endorse it.

As far as an expert, I turned to Geek who got me hooked on bloging and held my hand via Internet relay chat while I configured and modified Movable Type. All of what is written below, minus my comments in italics, is his penmanship.

Recent changes in the two most popular blogging tools, the buyout of Blogger and the revised licensing of Movable Type, have led many to look elsewhere for blogging software, and programmers, be they professional or beginner hobbyists, have stepped up to the plate to try to make the next Movable Type. There has also been an explosion in non-traditional blog uses, and I will also cover these, from PhotoBlogs to aggregate blogs.

Well all I have finally upgraded to MT (whatever the newer version is). I have also imported all of my other blogs into this site so excuse the temporary clutter.

I will be housecleaning soon.

BTW you can comment but I must approve it first. So if you think my member is small.. heh

Actually folks, it is the assimilation of several of my old looks. I am finished with the switch upgrade to Movable Type 3.15 and have imported everything into just one blog. It shall remain a few more days in this state of disarray but I shall have it looking decent again soon.

Lump has a busy boy. (Okay Sin, maybe better put a busy dirty old man.) I guess some one's writing tempted me to get busy with my site's CSS and such.

The site is now up and valid.

I hope to have a few more post up in a day or so.

Well, it should be simple enough.

All I want to do is take the content from a textbox, preserve its formatting and output into a php page. (Now, if you do not understand any of this, read no further.)

First of all there was this security issue of having it query the sql db and not allow an injection attack. Mucho thanks to Helio and Usrbingeek for help on that little issue. (And no, I did not forget, Helio does not have a website.)

I am not really doing much of a blog here. I am playing with my site's CSS and wanted to test something right quick.

I know it is not much but in the future any links which go to photographs (warning this one is REAL ugly) should look different than the other links on the site.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work.

well that was annoying.

Seems that when i use an achor tag for a photo an old extra tag for blog body would over ride it.

I really thought that the in-line tag would have precedence. Never thought of getting rid of the redundant tag so it took forever to locate but now photo links are different than page links.

Well it can, at times, be annoying. That is getting a web page to look the way you desire it to. I think, for now, I am content with the current look of this site.

I simply love CSS! It certainly beats the days of inline coding and having to re-invent the wheel for each and every page you did.

Links are now the color of this text and in bold. After you visit them, they end up normal weight and strikethrough style. Links to photos are a shade of blue, which is just a tad bit darker than sky blue and underlined. After you visit them the underline goes "poof" and it is strikethrough style. The collections of links to your right and left are now delimited by black text to make it easier to sort out.

Editing one file did all of this. Thanks to CSS it impacts every page on this site that links to that file. Yeah! CSS rawks!

Well, I fixed the comment spam... kinda, sorta, maybe?

Lump's ongoing battle with the spammers is a saga which reads a bit like this:

• Lumpy's Corner starts to get barraged with spam. Not any type of spectacular spam or anything like that but just your garden variety typical spam.
• Lumpy deletes the posts
• The spammers return
• Lumpy deletes
• The spammers return
• Lumpy deletes
• Lumpy notices a pattern
• Lumpy takes advice from Geek and upgrades to MT3.15
• The spammers return
• Lumpy deletes but takes joy in the fact that none of their comments actually got to the server because of comment moderation and enjoys the ability to delete enmasse
• The spammers return and trackback spam begins
• Lumpy deletes but with less joy
• Lumpy renames his comment script and trackback script
• Lumpy enjoys 10 spam free days
• Some "paster" starts to spam
• Lumpy uses IP banning
• Lumpy notices he is not getting anymore trackbacks
• Lumpy wonders if he dorked something
• Exios tries to set a trackback to me
• The trackback is dorked

Lumpy is a bit lost here. I dunno if it because I renamed the script or if it is a bug in and of itself. I took care of the entries in the config file, hid the index and can run the script. Track back just doesn't seem to be working.

Sorry, be patient while I figure this one out.

Yours in SPAM CyberSP4c3,
Lumpy

Actually, WTG Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress. I wonder if WordPress users feel Used?

This bugs me. I think it is SPAM.

While I empathize with having to pay for hosting and such, I do not think that covering expenses in the manner he did is an acceptable solution.

The damage to his reputation is likely to cost him far more than any revenue generated by this stunt.

This is just a quick and dirty entry. I am putting it here just in case you haven't heard of "pingomatic". I somehow missed it until I heard Chris Pirillo mention it in an interview on his podcast show

It is a great service that pings as many as 14 different blog directories and indexes.

You can also enter their URL to ping them and they will ping the sources for you. The URL is http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

A long time web-friend of mine, Joe, wrote to me with "two questions". They are:

• What kind of "lappy" did I get?
• How do I block the RIAA from this website?

The first one is rather straightforward. I got the best kind of laptop anyone could buy on my budget. I got a good used one. My real world and cyberfreind exios gave me a great deal on a Compaq Presario 1500. It is a P4 2.2 GHz CPU with 512 MB of RAM, a 40 gig HD and a Cisco Wireless card. I know there are better machines out there but for this "old school" dude this is a great machine. It is, actually, the fastest one I own at present.

The second question is one, which shall be the subject of this blog. Although I would love to take the credit for how I do this, I cannot. It is not that difficult. It is as simple as a cut and paste

I know I mentioned in a previous blog that I thought it odd the timing of my site's spam baragge. I also mentioned that Geek had warned me of a rather serious flaw in my version of Movable Type. Seems like some freak likes to try and force us to play "Texas Hold em' Poker" by comment spamming my blog. Heck we have a poker night at my Fraternity house almost every month and i still don't attend it and I live there. (Okay, maybe i do live on the Internet but the whole point is poker is not for me.) It was getting a bit old though. I was spending almost an hour a day deleting comment spam.

So I upgraded to MT 3.15 which allowed me to moderate comment postings. This was one possible solution but there is an inherant flaw in it. I spend just as much time deleting them. (Well actually a little bit less cause MT lets you do it enmass now.) Unfortunately, things actually got worse. I started receiving trackback spam as well. I was recieving spams at a rate of about 60-90 comments and/or trackbacks per hour. I noticed the attack early one morning while I was at work. The script ate about 3% of my monthly bandwidth in, what appeared to be, about 6 hours.

What did I do? Well, I started off doing what I do best, I found the comment script and broke it. I know this may seem like a ridiculous place to start but I had to use the skills I had. I had a bit of an idea as to what else I could try but i wanted something rather expedient. I am, after all, the expert at making programs and scripts not work.

Seems like my adsense has shot me in the foot. After blogin' about "texas holdem spam", that is the theme of the ads.

My apologies

Jack Vinson who has a great blog posted a comment to my blog on comment spam. Dr. Vinson wrote;

Lumpy- The name change thing is a good start. I wouldn't mind more details on what you did to rearrange the order in the templates.

I assume with the plug-ins you will look into MT-Blacklist and the new SpamLookup. I've been using MTB for a while, and it seems to catch the majority of the garbage that is thrown my way by the robots. It's statistics on my site say that 9700 things have been blocked, and 300 have been moderated since earlier this year. Of those 300, most have been spam as well. So it isn't perfect.

SpamLookup is newer, and people have been saying good things about it.

(Lumpy converted his URLs to hyperlinks)

I sent him a hasty reply and informed him that I would write more on it soon. Thus today's blog. First more detail on what I initially did to my comment template and index template to deal with this issue.

I am Reading my feeds and I am reading about pictures making blogs better. I got to wondering how easy or difficult it would be to put an image directly into a Movable Type blog.

So I figured I would give it a try. Now all that is left to see is if it is lilly true.

Well I finally got the upgrade to 3.2 working. It is amazing what a misplaced pound sign can do to you configuration file and cgi script.

I know it does not really look too different but I have changed things around here at the corner again. Some of the changes are:

• First of all, I have upgraded to Movable Type 3.2. I know it took me a while but I have just been busy and have had less than optimal connectivity. It is a good upgrade. So far, I like it very much. Other than being a total n00b dork with a pound sign, install was easy.
• I tried to install a captcha and dorked the server. No biggie.
• I found this neato RSS to JavaScript converter. Kudos to Amy Gahran at Contentious for bloging about it. I am now using this service along with Delicious to add some things to this site.
  • Off to the left there is now a list of my more recent comments.
  • Just below that is a list of my more recent additions to my delicious account.
• I put some of the old stuff back up on this site. I did so because of popular request. I added a table below the blog body for this stuff. I think it looks cluttered but, if it bothers you, do what I do. Just grab the RSS feed.

I have changed things around a bit more here at the corner. I have added another color code for news related links. They will appear black form now on.

I have also added the tags plugin for Movable Type. This will allow you to better search my 200+ posts. I have also removed all the category links at the bottom of the page for they are simply too redundant with the tag generator.

Speaking of Tags, I am also working on cleaning up my delicious tags. There is a great deal of standardizing that area of the web.

I have also added the JAVA based chat applet again.

I am trying Xenu to check for broken links on this site. So far, I am very impressed. It only took about 20 minutes to crawl this entire site via my 115.2 kbps modem.

Now I have to fix them all. :(

A bloggers battle with SPAM is on-going. Recently, I had a baragge of comment spam slipping through my filters. I decide it was time to try a few more plugins. I tried TCode and CCode. So far the result is perfect.

They say this is the ugliest dog in the world. I think it looks like a pet hell boy would have. Here are a few more "dog gone" links:

• Here is a bad dogie story
• If every vote does count, does this mean the world, like this blog post, has gone to the dogs?

Is this for real? Microsoft was distributing Ubuntu? And if that is the case, how should we take this?

I found this over at digg. Look at this photo for a few seconds and see if you can see what the problem is.

I can't resist this one. Don't we all wish we could have seen this?

I found this one via Digg. It is a great little piece of writing. If an Architects had To Work Like Webb Designers. Frank Lloyd Wright would have been challenged.

I know I say this often here but you gotta see this! There is another clip that I think is even funnier.

This one reminds me of the Cheech and Chong Movie, Up in Smoke - 1 ton of Pot Burn in warehouse Fire

Another one from Digg, Pentagon Admits E-mail has been Hacked!

One more link, check out this NASA Image of the Day.

Still playing with it and making suttle and not so suttle changes. I like this theme. I doan't like some of the issues with widgets. NTL I shall make it submit

I have often, likely too often, gone off about how great a resource all of the Gnomoies are at Wyldryde.org in the various channels they host. One of them being the person behind this stunt. Before I saw that video this AM, I had already begun this draft. I decided to add this little intro because Chris Pirillo has been mentioned here before and, after viewing it, I just had to... too funny.---

Nonetheless, before Chris' production served as a drafting intermission, it had dawned on me that I have yet to mention one geek of lore here at Lumpy's Corner. Possibly, the worse "how could I ..." in Cyber-history. Actually, I have mentioned this individual here before but only in passing.

I have mentioned many a blogger, author, podcaster and tech gurus here. I mention a podcast almost every show over at Radiostatic.am.

So, a podcaster, an author, a blogger, a tech guru... hmm. He is all of that. Am I leaving anything out?

I tried Co.mments a while back. I ended up dropping it because the Firefox Extension stopped working when I upgraded. Seems like I was not the only one having issues with the old version.

Recently, I heard that Robert Scoble was going to give it a try. That was enough to prompt me to try it again. (My Public Page) Mr. Scoble says "It'll be interesting to see how the new version works"... My thoughts, ditto that. I really want it to work well.

I suppose the first issue is how you feel about comments in general. Some well known web authors think they may well be dead. I was surprised when Chris Pirillo wrote A Comment About Comments. Other authors would disagree though, Amy Gahran started a new blog in which the very title implies otherwise; The Right Conversation.

Sometime life is so ironic. I was planning to visit my folks this weekend but my cat kookie decided it would be best for me to stay home and deal with his infected eye. Instead of getting better after visiting the vet on Wednesday, the poor feline's eye was only getting cloudier on Saturday. The vet gave me additional instructions. Meaning more frequent applications of eye irrigation and eye ointment.

Now both of my feline roommates are very well behaved and docile animals. This however matters little when the animal does not understand that the "treatment" going to benefit him. His only though it "God gave me claws, you are not putting that stuff on my eye!"..

I have found that the only method I can deal with the furry spastic fearful ball of fur is to toss the poor little bugger into a military laundry bag. The draw string allows just enough cloth to bunch up around his neck so that he can't get those claws into me and ruin another set of pants but not tight tnough to choke him or bind his neck. He is actually adapting well to this new 5 time per day ritual. He hasn't hissed and growled since Saturday now.

Good Morning Readers,
I hope everyone is well today. Lumpy is still somehow surviving this allergy season despite his chronically infected sinuses. I stopped to mention a few quick things.

Just in case you have not heard, Firefox 3 will be released today. Mozilla is asking everyone to set a world record for the most software downloads in a single day. Today is also my kid sister's birthday so they picked a good day to release it.

You have likely noticed that over the past two years, my posting frequency has been about as consistent as the Cleveland weather. The combination of poor health and having too many pots on the stove so to speak have taken a toll. I had hoped that my chronic sinus condition would just go away. It is not.

I had hoped that once I had my sinuses under control I could begin posting more material again. The reality is that my sinuses are going nowhere and the best I am going to quoting my doctor "manageble". Reality is not just so simple though.

My inner child has been trying to ignore the fact that, at 44, I should slow down. At present I publish at up to 9 different locations. That is too much. I am going to cut back. How much and where is yet to be determined. The only thing I have deffinitely decided on is that I will be doing more live streaming and podcasting since that is what everyone seems to enjoy the most. Check out and bookmark my LumpCast Site.

Just curious, does any one know what happened to SuprGlu? I have been checking my page since Friday evening. (I hope it being a Friday the 13th had nothing to do with it.)