Comments for Ardamis

Comment on World of Warcraft Hunter Pet Common Questions by shawnaconda

shawnaconda — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 01:49:46 +0000

OK, I was readint this, and somebody asked what would be a good pet for talking. You may laugh, but I am using a tamed Zarakh (spider). I know people think spiders stink, but hear me out. My first character was a Lock, and I used voidwalker all the time. My tamed Zarakh holds aggro much better than my voidwalker. It practically screetches like an owl. A lot of players get annoyed because it screetches (growls) so much. And a lot of people say that spiders don’t learn a lot of skills. yeah, that’s true, but how many skills does a tank need. Spiders get tons of armor. not bad health, and they actually get decent dps. One last thing about spiders: they don’t get a lot of skills, and that is actually kind of a good thing. The reason i say this is, you can spend all your skill points on them abd pretty much get all their skills maxed. Like i said, they get really good tanking skills, and you can practiacally max them out. One more last tidbit of info, I think spiders are some of the coolest looking pets in the game, so you can get one that tickles your fance. Oh yeah, if anybody wants to send me a comment, my email is shawn_aconda@yahoo.com. let me know if this helps you, or if you have a spider as a pet and really like it.

Comment on Protecting a download using a unique URL by Rajiv Totlani

Rajiv Totlani — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 05:41:36 +0000

Clear and concise. Good snippet. Thx!

Comment on Xbox 360 Gamercard WordPress Plugin by Myke

Myke — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:21:00 +0000

yey! this is awesome! thanks!

Comment on MG2 0.5.1 Modification for XHTML 1.0 Strict Validation by ardamis

ardamis — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:53:08 +0000

Hey there, Colin.

Thanks for the interest. Actually, I haven’t used MG2 in well over a year, for the very reason you mentioned. After losing the folder structure of a site, I decided to get away from the flat file database and to start looking for a MySQL alternative. I’m not sure MG2 could be ‘fixed’ to make it able to handle ALOT of images, due to its use of a text file as a database.

So, to answer your questions, no, my changes don’t make MG2 any more stable, they just make the output valid HTML, and I can’t code a fix for the instability issues.

The search for a replacement to MG2 led me to Plogger ( http://plogger.org/ ), which I’ve found to be more stable than MG2. Plogger has its shortcomings, but on the whole I find it much more dependable.

I’ve developed a few themes for Plogger, too:
http://www.ardamis.com/2007/09/10/plogger-3-theme-broadway/
http://www.ardamis.com/2007/07/05/plogger-beta-3-theme-air/

Good luck.

Comment on MG2 0.5.1 Modification for XHTML 1.0 Strict Validation by Colin

Colin — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:10:41 +0000

Hi Ardamis, this is nicely done just wondering if I could enlist your assistance on something. I know MG2 is intended for small galleries, but what happens when you feed it ALOT of photos. I have been having problems, sometimes when a photo is uploaded it drops the index and all the photos then appear in the root folder. its quite a bug, if I can manage to fix that, then I could potentially use it for a number of sites. Does your version address this issue please? or can I please ask your assistance to help program a fix? please drop me a line. Many thanks, Cheers, Colin

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Comment on World of Warcraft Hunter Pet Common Questions by Aaron

Aaron — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 21:29:12 +0000

@kayla

The level 1 pets are just for show. They won’t actaully attack anything.

Comment on Defeating WordPress comment spam by ardamis

ardamis — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 19:02:28 +0000

Well, I’m not sure I fully agree with that, Mike.

For one thing, it’s just not economical to write a spambot to defeat every countermeasure that is developed. This is a game of maximum effect for minimum effort; if .01% of the WordPress blogs implement this method, who’s going to bother spending the time programming a spambot to outsmart it?

For another, I explicitly state: don’t implement this on your blog exactly as I’ve written it. I point out a number of places where you can customize this method in order to delay the spambot programmers identifying a pattern. And even if you don’t post the inner workings of your anti-spam system, that doesn’t make it inherently more effective. Akismet is pretty secretive about how it identifies spam. But each time someone figures out how to fool Akismet, that spammer has a window in which he/she can post spam to thousands of blogs until Akismet is updated.

If this system doesn’t satisfy you, you could try developing a method like the one I alluded to in the post:

One in which a visitor who wishes to leave a comment is required to complete a challenge-response question, the correct answer to which is used as part of the name of the script, so that the path to the script doesn’t exist anywhere until the visitor creates it.

Or modify the timestamp method for reducing spam.

Lastly, all I really intend to do here is to block some of the spam before it reaches Akismet in order to reduce the number of database entries. I’m not trying to solve the spam dilemma, just hoping to lighten the load on my server.

Thanks for your comment.
-Oliver

Comment on Defeating WordPress comment spam by Michael J

Michael J — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 18:27:47 +0000

Well now that you’ve outlined exactly how to go about blocking spam, it also reveals to spammers how to get through the problem.

Brilliant stupidity.

Comment on Resolving transaction concurrency issues in a PHP+MySQL multi-user environment by ardamis

ardamis — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 03:40:51 +0000

That’s a very interesting PowerPoint presentation, thanks for linking it. And I’m happy to see that we both arrived at the same solution. I hope it serves you well.