...well, maybe not.

I discovered a whole bunch of nasty porno links inserted into one of my recent posts, all hidden from the typical viewer. This meant that search engines spidering the site would pick those up, and either add me as endorsing those links (unlikely) or start discarding this site as a spam-shell, one set up for the sole purpose of submitting these kinds of nasty links to search engines.

And as a side effect, those sites with this one in it (ie the Planets) might get caught by it too, since the nasty stuff was also embedded in the RSS feed.

This is entirely my own fault. I’ve been running an ancient version of Wordpress. I didn’t make the leap from 1.x to 2.x at the time for two reasons: firstly, because I had spent a lot of time tweaking this theme so it looked like I wanted it to, and secondly because a test upgrade I did using data from this site didn’t go well at all. Migrating was going to be a lot of work, and frankly I didn’t have the time or the interest to make it work properly.

I have been aware of vulnerabilities in this version of Wordpress, so from a security standpoint it’s my own fault this happened. This has been the first incident I am aware of, although I suspect that when I go through the data manually I’m going to find a bunch more posts similarly defaced.

But the bottom line is that I have to make a decision about this site. Do I do the upgrade, then spend the hours fiddling with the theme until I get something I like? Do I pick a different software package, and then either import my history or just abandon it? Do I go with an outsourced blogging service, like Google, and can/should I import my history there?

Or do I just give up on the whole thing?

I’m not exactly swimming in free time these days, so I need something that is as much of a turn-key solution as possible.

The bottom line is that you should bookmark the planet as any solution/decision will either be included or announced there should this set of pages disappear.

I see Mr. Obama definitely wants to be a different kind of President: one who’s obsessed with his permanent place in history from the get-go rather than worrying about it at the end of his term:

Obama would address Mideast conflict ‘the minute’ he became president

Time to play catchup on some photos of the boys.

Nathan in the park.

Alex has a new smile. About two months ago now, Alex and I were rough-housing in the basement, and he went for a bit of a tumble, resulting in a dislocated and bloody tooth. We got referred to the dental clinic at CHEO, and because Alex is so sensitive about his mouth, they had to schedule him for a surgery to get in and have a look. The surgical team discovered that the dislocated tooth was dead and probably had been for some time, and so therefore had to come out. Its now been a month since the surgery, and everything is healing well. This will be his smile for the next few years until his adult teeth come in and at that point we'll probably be looking at orthodontics of some kind, assuming Alex will tolerate them.

As a side effect, we learned that Alex had five teeth between his canines instead of the usual four.

Finally:

...here's a picture of the two boys playing in their wading pool on Canada Day.

So this is the 13th, which means I’m slipping again. It only occurred to me that I’d missed What’s On Your Desk Day while I was cleaning up.

So here it is:

The Sun Ray is currently gone, due to my getting anoyed about the bad media handling—if I can’t play music, it isn’t worth using. My life is currently in the Dell Lattitude D830 who’s dock sits in front of the keyboard. Most of said life is in VMs in said Dell, so it isn’t quite as ugly as it looks. (See also an updated, pathetic justification for continuing to run Windows.)

See also the first celebrations in 1998, the original slashdot poll that started all this, plus the subsequent celebrations on 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007.

I’ll take “Duh” for $600, Alex.

Answer: Stop making mistakes.

Question: What do team bosses think that the teams should do if they are making mistakes?

Ferrari boss calls for no more errors

Ferrari president Luca de Montezemolo has urged his team and drivers to stop making “stupid” mistakes if they are to stay in contention for the world championship this season.

Personally I think this could have been a brave gamble. At the moment when the cars came in, rain was forcasted, yes, but Raikonnen was faster than Hamilton. If the rain had not showed up as predicted, they would have potentially had a huge advantage while everyone else was fiddling around trying to decide if they should go with slicks or not.

McLaren got lucky; Ferrari did not. It could have gone the other way.

It is a similar case for Barrichello; the full-wets were the right tire at the right time; they also got lucky in that their fuel problem forced them to come back in for intermediates at the right time, instead of trying to hang on to the drying track with disintegrating full-wets.

Greater Ottawa reports on the results of that popularity contest I pointed out earlier.

With over 700 Ottawa residents rating Ottawa City Council, most council members, including the Mayor don’t measure up.

The Mayor received a 68.7% disapproval rating while council as a whole feared worse; 80.7% disapproval rating.

The survey itself has significant problems from a statistical point of view—for example only having 499 valid responses since May is a pretty poor sample size given the city’s population.

I’ll see if I can find the link to the survey results on the Eye On Ottawa site if/when they ever get posted.

So Twitter is having scaling problems, which results in the service being degraded. While some people have had snarky things to say about the issue, it might be more productive to offer solutions rather than just complaining.

Here’s how I think they might going about fixing it.

1. Set a maximum number of people an account can follow.

I saw one account that had something like 60K people they were following. That’s insane. It’s also obviously a spammer account of some kind. Accounts grab me all the time which hover in the 20K to 30K range. NONE of those account care one whit about my tweets, they are merely hoping that A) I’m dumb enough to follow them back, and B) I’ll hit the web page of whatever they are shilling.

What’s the upper limit on the number of people you can reasonably follow? Set it to something generously insane like 500.

The next step would be to disable accounts which follow more than that number of people. As in: no tweets go out, and they don’t receive tweets that come in. (They are not reading them anyways.) Notify the account holder that this is the case.

You might make an argument that some excessive following is acceptable; but even if you can make the case for it, I’d suggest requiring a case-by-case approval by Twitter, probably IM disabled and with some kind of throttling in place to make sure that the big users don’t bring Twitter to its knees. The theory behind the throttling would be that since a computer is obviously reading and mining the tweets, it can wait and do them four times an hour in batches rather than every two minutes.

You might even consider charging large users for the privilege of any or all of (existing|IM|less throttling).

2. Promote RSS more.

This particular problem is that Twitter is at conflict with itself: at times the “microblogging” aspect (the “I think this is interesting” kind of post) is destroyed by the intrusive nature (“ALERT! User foo is finding something interesting!”).

There is interesting content on Twitter that I want to read, but I don’t want to be interrupted with as it happens.

Like I’ve said before, RSS is the answer to this aspect of Twitter’s problems. Do I care right now what Wil Wheton is doing? No, but I’m still interested; RSS lets me read what Wil is up to at my convenience, and without adding too much to Twitter’s load.

3. Encourage people to use Twitter sanely.

I would suspect that part of Twitter’s woes happened when there was a burst of twitter-enabled applications being released. A couple of my targets suddenly started twittering stupid information (“I’m listening to Abba!”) at a stupid frequency (“I’m listening to the track after Abba!”).

Memo to everyone: nobody else cares.

While these are possibly technically interesting uses of the service, they don’t add value. They turn Twitter into a constant monologue of boring, useless information which does nothing more than push out a steady stream of “Look! I might be doing something interesting! I’m important! Love me! LOVE ME!” messages.

(One of my twitter targets got dropped; the second one got the message and stopped it.)

So in conclusion, there are a couple of things that Twitter can do which I think will help, one policy change, and two in a user-education way. I think that all three of these ideas can help reduce the load on Twitter, which will buy them time to solve their technical problems.