Bad Behavior 2 Released

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The latest incarnation of the great WordPress plugin, Bad Behavior, has been released. It’s greatly improved over the previous generation of the plugin and is a highly recommended upgrade. I’ve been using the alphas and betas for quite some time and it’s been working great. 🙂

And for those not familiar with Bad Behavior, it’s a first line of defense anti-spam plugin. It doesn’t check comments or anything like that to see if they are spam, rather it attempts to block spam bots from ever accessing your site in the first place. It does this by examining the request headers and such and is very accurate. It’s not replacement for Spam Karma 2 or Akismet (which should be used in conjunction with Bad Behavior), but it spots the recent spam screens for those plugins from filling up with tons and tons of spam as well as stopping bots from harvesting e-mail addresses, etc. and using up your bandwidth.

Damn It’s Been Hot!

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Yeah, so on Sunday it hit 100F (38C) here and then on Monday (yesterday), it hit 102F (39C). That’s the hottest day in June that we’ve EVER had. Ugh!

And yeah, yeah, I know, in Arizona, Texas, etc., temperatures like that are pretty common. But around here, that’s damn hot! I mean, during July and August, the average high is around 80F (27C) according to Wikipedia.

Thank goodness it’s “only” going to be 88F (31C) tomorrow, but that’s not much to look forward to as here at 2:30AM, it’s still 75F (24C). 🙁

Avatar.Viper007Bond.com Killed

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Sorry, but I’ve had to kill my public image rotating script. So far this month, it had gotten over 180,000 hits (in the whole last month, only 140,000 hits were made) which resulted in WAY too many open connections to the site at once. While that was very little bandwidth, it was still way too many people trying to access the script at once and my host had to kill it as it was starting to affect other people on my shared server.

It’s a real shame too as I had already completed about 1/2 of the complete recode of it. Perhaps one day I’ll bring it back up as an invitation only service for use on non-high traffic sites, but not for now (busy with other things).

And for those who have no clue what I’m talking about, I had a script located at http://avatar.viper007bond.com/ where after signing up, you could enter the URLs to some images hosted elsewhere. Then you’d use a URL given to you by the script as your avatar or sig on forums and my script, when called, would redirect people to one of your URLs. Basically, it was an image rotator.

Sorry guys.

So I Got To See That Pixar “Cars” Movie

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Cars Move Poster

Yesterday (Saturday) morning, I got to go see a pre-release of Pixar’s latest movie, “Cars” (official site). My mom got some free tickets from a local radio station and had a spare ticket, so she invited me along.

After seeing the previews and commercials for it, I figured it’d be funny (like most Pixar movies are), but I also figured that it’d be a movie for like 7-12 year old boys, i.e. a kid’s movie. While it is in some respects, it definetly isn’t goofy or retarded. It’s not my favorite Pixar movie, but there’s a definite plot to it and I didn’t get bored at all during the movie.

The visuals were quite stunning, the best to date of Pixar’s films from what I can tell. Makes sense too as it’s the newest. They also pulled off the racing scenes and such really well. I’m guessing it’s pretty hard to show speed and such with CGI, but it turned out good.

Anyway, I give it 9 outta 10 stars. 🙂

Oh, and on a final note, if you go to see it, make sure you stay for the ENTIRE credits. Like all Pixar movies, there’s always fun stuff mixed in with the credits as well as something after the credits. 😉

WordPress v2.0.3 Released

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A bugfix and security release of WordPress was released yesterday. It’s recommended that you upgrade. 🙂

For those running v2.0.2 and looking for just the changed files (or even a patch), Mark Jaquith has been kind enough to make some downloads. There’s also this plugin which fixes some very minor admin area bugs / removed features.

Spam Spam Spam

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Wow, my blog is getting spammed hardcore right now at a rate of around 3 per minute for the past 24 hours (it was doing a lot, but not quite as many over the past couple days). I can literally watch the count just go right up before my eyes.

I mean, it’s not like I really care. Not one of the spams has gotten through thanks to the anti-comment spam plugin I’m using, Spam Karma 2 (see this previous post of mine), but still, it’s kinda a pain in the ass. I wish the spammers would just figure out that if the first 2000 comments they made never showed up that perhaps the next ones wouldn’t either. Oh well…

EDIT: And yes, I’m already running Bad Behavior, the latest beta even, but it’s not helping much. 🙁