Then, my old PC (the music server), died again. It had a hard drive failure on its system drive a few months ago, and Berg kindly gave me a brand new drive to replace it. Unfortunately, that new drive has now failed. Curses! The drive is still under warranty, but I have to pack it up, ship it in, and wait for a replacement, all pains in my ass.

Fortunately my other Mac and my media PC are both functioning. For the moment.

In the world of improved computer stuff, I have a small announcement. I bit the bullet and upgraded this blog to MovableType 3.12. This is the version with more restrictive licensing, which is frustrating. However, it also has some major enhancements, particularly in the realm of spam-blocking. In the last week, I’ve been hit with over 3000 spam comments. The existing system for blacklisting and removing spam was functioning, but the overwhelming deluge of spam was beginning to expose the software’s weaknesses. It was time for an upgrade.

Now, comments to posts older than three weeks will be moderated, meaning I must approve them before they appear. If this happens to you, don’t worry, I’ll approve your comment as long as you aren’t selling penis pills. Also, comments with more than two URLs in them will be moderated. If you have to post a lot of links, go ahead and do so, but know that your comment won’t appear on the website right away, I’ll have to approve it (which, again, I’ll do as long as you aren’t selling penis pills). The amount of spam actually appearing on the website should decrease drastically from this point on, though one may occasionally slip through my ever-tightening nets.

If you feel like you have been blocked or needlessly moderated, or I seem to have forgotten to approve your legit comment, please “contact me”:/contact.shtml.

On the “About”:/about.shtml page, there is now a tiny bit of additional info, namely, the total number of posts, total number of comments, and overall comments per entry (currently 1.9), in addition to the month-to-month data. You don’t care, but I do! It is like a running log of how interesting I am.

Second, there is a little “Towers of Hanoi solver”:/hanoi.php running. Thanks to “Amit Singh’s Hanoimania”:http://www.kernelthread.com/hanoi/ I have been tweaking some PHP code to solve the classic puzzle. His code is great, and deserves all the credit, however, I’ve made a few tweaks to improve the interface, and add additional information such as the number of moves required to solve the puzzle.

For anyone who isn’t familiar, the Towers of Hanoi is a classic puzzle consisting of three posts with a tower of disks placed on one of the posts. The disks are stacked according to size, with the smallest disk on top, descending to the largest disk on the bottom. To solve the puzzle you must move the entire tower from the starting post to a different post. You can only move one disk at a time, and no disk may be placed upon a disk smaller than itself, IE, disks can only move to empty posts, or on top of larger disks. It turns out that the puzzle has a very simple algorithmic solution, which Amit implements in 108 different programming languages, a truly heroic effort. I’m playing with the PHP one for the heck of it.

There is a little legend associated with the puzzle, whereupon a monastery deep under the mountains contains a version of this puzzle with diamond posts and golden disks. There are monks there who are solving the puzzle. The puzzle began with 64 disks, and they started solving the puzzle, one movement per second, at the beginning of the universe. When they finish the puzzle, the universe will end. Solving a 5 disk puzzle is fairly easy, and once you figure out the system, the movements come quickly. However, with a little calculation you can see that the number of moves needed to solve the puzzle goes up very quickly. It turns out that it will take the monks somewhere around 580 billion years to finish the puzzle with only 64 disks.

Bonus points to anyone who can figure out the equation to calculate the optimal number of moves required to solve the puzzle with a given number of disks (N). Hint, check out the solution for “1 disk”:/hanoi.php?1, “2 disks”:/hanoi.php?2, “3 disks”:/hanoi.php?3, and “4 disks”:/hanoi.php?4. Seeing a pattern yet? Try to predict the number of moves required for “5 disks”:/hanoi.php?5, and see if you can formulate an equation based on that pattern.

There are a lot of interesting things that happened over the week, but I’m afraid that you won’t be hearing about them, because I’m no longer in the mood to write about them. Maybe I’ll get in the mood, but maybe not. I suppose we’ll just count this as a week lost to the void. Bye bye, week.

Anyway, I’ve got some correspondence to catch up with, now that I have email again. More interesting posts will follow, I promise.

WikkiTikkiTavi is in early stages of development, but has a simple templating system, and seems to be fairly powerful, without being overly complex. In fact, it is quite simple.

If you don’t know much about Wiki, let me just tell you that it is a website that anyone can edit. Yes, even you. Each page has a link at the bottom that says “Edit this page”. You can click there, and edit the page, using simple markup instead of full HTML. New pages are produced anytime you put two words together and capitalize them, LikeSo. As soon as you do that, the page is produced, and you can begin editing the new page. Wiki’s live on soft security, and evolve as a function of their user base.

One thing a wiki does as part of ‘soft security’ is remember all changes made to itself. Say someone comes along and trashes something (which is actually very rare in the wiki world), some other kind soul can just come along and restore from the change log. Its a very unique thing.

Anyway, please give what may become the “new CowboyWiki”:/wiki/ a try, and let me know how you like it. If you aren’t used to wiki, I suggest reading a bit more about it, and them come play around. If you ARE used to wiki (“Andrew”:http://www.andrewsw.com, Will, “Dustin”:http://radioactiveantimatter.com/blog/ I’m looking in your direction), please let me know how you think of things. There are some nice features, for instance, just click Preferences to identify yourself, and your name now becomes a WikiWord. The sidebar is actually its own wiki page as well, so is editable. You can double click on the page to instantly open the Edit window, if you don’t want to click the link at the bottom. Many interesting features, but still deliciously simple. I want to hear your feedback!

The other change utilizes the nice “MT”:http://www.movabletype.org plugin “MTRelativeDate”:http://www.rayners.org/archives/000107.php. Its a very simple plugin that works exactly like the normal date template tags, but gives the option of using “Today” and “Yesterday” to describe the date on entries where it is appropriate. Look for its use! Clever huh? It also affects the comment date/time information. Very nice. At least, I think so.

More little tweaks coming soon. Why? Because I enjoy it! Huzzah!

Oh, and some real entries containing stuff you actually give a crap about are coming soon too!

Update: MTRelativeDate, while an elegant solution, isn’t working properly for me. It only updates the date when I post a new entry, so things get out of date (pun unintentional) pretty fast. So, I reverted to a more verbose, but ultimately more effective solution, which is a snippet of PHP code. The code gets today’s date, yesterday’s date, and the date the post was made. Then it compares them and decides whether it should print “Today”, “Yesterday” or the day of the week, such as “Wednesday”.

";

if ($entrydate==$today) {
echo "Today,";
}
elseif ($entrydate==$yesterday) {
echo "Yesterday,";
}
else {
echo(",");
}
?>

One interesting method, and something I’ve been thinking about recently, and has was “implemented by James Seng”:http://james.seng.cc/archives/000145.html (who also wrote the Bayesian plugin noted above) is a ‘captcha’ that provides a very basic turing test. In order to make a comment, you have to look at an image, and then type the numbers seen in the image into a form field. You may have seen these in some places where you are making online orders and they wish to verify that a human is reading, not a machine.

One problem with this, that is noted heavily in his comments for the entry, is accessibility. If you can’t see, you can’t complete the test. Now, I admit that there aren’t many blind people reading the web, but they are out there, and they use browsers that are basically a text-only browser with the addition of special navigation tools, and a text-to-speech engine. Accessibility is a big deal now, and tools like this that hamper accessibility should be avoided in my opinion. Some may argue that sometimes you have to make a sacrifice in order to block the scourge of automated comment spam, but I’m inclined to believe that there is a better way. Until other solutions have been exhausted, I’m going to avoid this route.

Some people have suggested text based turing tests. For instance, you might have to answer a question like, “What is the third letter of the word ‘Banana’?” However, the basic problem is that even if this question is randomly generated, pulling from a set of predefined questions and answers, or even pulling random words and random numbers (third, fifth, seventh, etc.), it will ineveitably be parsable by a computer. If a script can create it, a script can parse it and get the answer. The benefit of images is that it is largely one-way. You can create an image with a script, but it is very hard to get text back out of that image. If only there was a way to do it without an image, but still retaining a level of unparsability.

If you have any great ideas, let me know! Until then, I’ll be using some basic tools, bayesian filtration primarily, to control comment spam. If it gets out of hand, I’ll put more thought into these other interesting possibilities. It may turn out that basic methods are sufficient, but the concept of developing a proper turing test is very interesting to me, and is worth considering, if only as a mental exercise. Its obvious the human brain is different from our computers, but it is difficult to pinpoint exactly how, and to produce tests that a computer can use, but that can only be answered correctly by a human.

Also, as a side note, this post sends more trackback pings than any other post I’ve made. Link-tastic!

If you’ve linked to entries before, using the old style, please change the links to the new style. However, if you don’t change it, its not the end of the world, because there is a redirect set up to move you to the correct entry.

For information on how to do this sort of thing, check out the following links:

* “Mamamusings.net’s solutions.”:http://mamamusings.net/archives/2003/07/24/redirection_solution.php
* “Future-proof URLs in Movable Type”:http://mar.anomy.net/entry/2003/06/22/17.15.00/

* “Muthafuckas better realize! NOW is the time to self actualize!” This quote is from Saul Williams and DJ Krust’s bizarre diatribe “Coded Language”, found on the album of the same name by DJ Krust. Saul Williams is a unique and powerful urban beat poet who’s passionate voice and penetrating words stand out amongst the rampaging beats of DJ Krust. The whole song is quite a trip to absorb, and this line stands out as one of the more odd.
* “High velocity verbal atrocities.” This quote is from Deltron 3030′s song “Things You Can Do” from the self titled album “Deltron 3030″. The MC is Del, who manages to mix his special brand of humor with political commentary in a science fiction setting. The line is attractive to me because it describes what I think many blogs consist of. You can post a lot of stuff, some of it very bad, as fast as you can type it. High velocity, verbal atrocities.
* “I’m seein’ robots!” Kool Keith is always seeing robots, and I’m afraid that sometimes, just sometimes, I see a few also.
* “Rat-atat-tata and all the cops scatta’ed!” This quote is from Slick Rick’s song “Children’s Story” about a man who makes some bad decisions. Slick Rick has a great story telling voice, and the song is quite interesting. I like this line because of how it just flows out of his mouth, and because I find it sort of humorous for some reason.
* “I don’t mind if you use this, but when you abuse this, you’ll feel the rough side of my smoothness.” This is from Black Rob’s song “Smoothness”. It would be a rather typical rap song if it weren’t for Black Rob’s precision, and Dan the Automator’s unmatched beatsmithing. I think this line is hilarious. The whole song is pretty funny actually.
* “Fuck the First Amendment, my speech was Free the day that my Soul decended.” From the Jurassic 5 song “Jayou”. Jurassic 5 produces some of the most pure hip hop out there. Top quality DJs, simple but precise beats, and old fashioned, no bullshit, rhyme till you drop MCs. I like this line, because it expresses a sentiment that I’ve always held. Freedom is something you are, not something you are given. The First Amendment is something to be protected, but my freedom is something inherent to myself. The body can be held, but your voice is your own.
* “Tested and scarred, pressed through the storm, found who we are, with true desire.” From “Aural Pleasure” by Blackalicious. The song is pretty good, but when it ends, attached to the end of the same track is a little freestyle by two rappers whom I can’t identify (bonus points to whoever can identify these guys). The part at the end is my favorite part of the track, since the flows are perfect, and the subject matter is quite enlightening.
* “As if the heartbeat wasn’t enough… They got us using drum machines now.” Another Saul Williams, this is from the track “Twice the First Time”. The song isn’t like most hip hop, but has a powerful but sad message. This song helped turn me on to hip hop in the first place.
* “Apathetic, therapeutic and extremely addictive. The methadone metronome.” What is the methadone metronome? Why, its television! This line is from the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy song “Television, the Drug of a Nation”. The song is quite funny and poignant.

Finally, the title of this post is also a quote from a hip hop song. Bonus points to whoever can name the song and artist! Also, any suggestions for quote additions would be welcome, or even just songs that you think have a great message are welcome.

As usual, “contact me”:/contact.shtml if you want to know more about how I did that.

Of course, if you think the comments are nothing more than mindless blabbery, and you don’t want to have entries you’ve already read show up as new just so you can read the comment, then stick with the regular RSS feeds.

If you don’t know what RSS is, then read this handy article titled “All About RSS”:http://www.faganfinder.com/search/rss.shtml. In short, RSS is a method by which the content of this website is sent out in a generic news format that programs called aggregators can read. The aggregator downloads the RSS file on a set interval (once an hour, once a day, etc.), and checks to see if there is a new entry. If so, it highlights the entry, and makes it easy for you to browse. I have about 30 websites in my aggregator, and whenever any of them make an update, I am informed within the hour. It makes keeping up with a lot of blogs and news sites very easy.