Category — rants

I have installed some code from Project Honeypot to the website, not that much is necessarily happening but the amount of cleverer or manual comment spam is starting to get on my nerves, so I am hoping that a couple of changes will help keep the site cleaner.

Using Bad Behaviour and Comments Cleaner I hope will stop nearly all comment spam since either it cannot get there, or once it has, the links are removed anyways. So all the stupid ‘I love your site’ or ‘please explain how to add me to your RSS feed’ type of stuff will go away..

If you are really human and want to add a link – please just add the site name (mysitename.com/gohere) as plain text and I will then change the link manually. Sorry for the hassle but given a ratio of spam of something like 1000/1 real comments it is better to proceed like this.

PS for those of you in ZH – you will need to use a proxy to find the code to install the honeypot code – it is blocked. Maikefailapolis?

Ceci est le contenu d’un message envoyé aujourd’hui au service de outien A-V de Archos après que bon, avoir décidé que vraiment ça foire un peu trop au niveau de leur browser.

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Bonjour, le browser est d’une lenteur epouvantable dans la derniere version du firmware, notamment sur news.bb.co.uk chaque fois que la page contient un lien vers une sequence video elle reste bloquee pendant deux minutes pendant le “chargement” de l’image, ceci ne se produit pas sur un browser sur PC.
Facebook se plante tout le temps, le browser vire au noir et la machine redemarre d’elle-meme. Meme lorsque la machine ne se plante pas, Facebook est d’une lenteur epouvantable et le browser se bloque et refuse de repondre pendant deux/trois minutes a chaque chargement de page ou de deplacement de la page via l’ecran tactile.
Il est impossible de rentrer dans la page d’administration d’un site qui utilise WordPress (www.wordpress.com) le browser reste bloque sur la page de login.
De maniere generale l’ecran tactile est tres peu fiable en surfant, tantot il repond au click, tantot pas, alors qu’il est toujours possible de deplacer la page ou de la faire defiler via le meme ecran.
Je ne me sers quasi que de cinq sites lorsque je surfe sur le Net, quatre de ces sites sont actuallement pour ainsi dire inutilisables (www.facebook.com, news.bbc.co.uk, www.guardian.co.uk, www.dean.be). Le seul qui fonctionne +/- ok est Google Mail. Il va de soi que je ne suis pas trop satisfait de l’Archos 5 en tant que plateforme de surf portable.
Je ne pense pas que ces sites soient particulierement inhabituels, exotiques ou inadaptes a l’emploi de Opera.
Merci pour votre aide!

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on va voir la réponse.

En tout cas, il est clair que autant que le Archos 5 détruit le Ipod Touch (actuel, la nouvelle version du Iphone/Itouch changera-t’elle la donne?) dans sa capcité de lecteur audio/vidéo, autant que dans tous les autres domaines elle est en retard.

Pour moi, tant que Archos garde un OS verrouillé et est sans une plateforme de développement ouverte à tous, Archos est voué à une mort certaine. Le manque de sex-appeal de l’Archos 5 et son manque de fun en font un produit génial mais simplement utilitaire. C’est dommage. Sa SEULE solution pour Archos est de totalement deverouiller l’Archos pour que enfin on puisse avoir des produits et des utilitaires a y intégrer, car attendre que Archos règle les problèmes avec son logiciel et son offre audio/vidéo est une peine perdue, à mon avis!

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Hello friend,

My name is Catherine Williams.

Let this HEALTHY CHOCOLATE be a perfect Christmas Gift
for yourself, your family, your loveones (sic) and your friends!.
Just like you, I was shock (sic), at first, but YES it’s true,
NOT ALL chocolates are created equal.
Please visit this very important link below:

[three ws][dot]cathwilliams.co.cc/

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I know there are zillions of places out there about eating in Beijing and how great it all is. So I keep on asking myself why is it that when asked ‘where do you want to go and eat tonight?’ I have *no answer*, I just don’t feel like there is anywhere that I can say – ‘yes let’s go there’. Nothing where you can eat reasonably good food, that is not more than 75 kuai/person (and let me tell you that this is a *lot* of money for most Beijingren who will eat for about 10 kuai or preferably less, usually max 20 kuai, including beer), that is not (ab)using oil that has been thrice recycled or taken from a sump, and where MSG and salt are used sparingly.

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Quick rant about our Xmas dinner at Feichang Thai (Very Siam) here in Beijing as it justs sucks to have to eat such fake thai when the place *was* so good in the past. Nothing is permanent here, and here is further proof of Beijing’s rapid descent *down* the culinary scales as people forgo authenticity in lieu of crass and in your face ‘trendyness’. It seems it is easier to make money selling crap wrapped up in gold leaf rather than making the effort of doing the real thing.

My wife asked me soon after we ordered ‘why are there so many dongbeiren serving us here?’ and it all clicked into place. I was the only paleface in the joint, last year it was full of them. It has changed its target clientele and is now aiming for the clueless hip ‘nouveau riche’ chinese and serves up Thai dishes that taste as if designed by a Dongbei chef. From the deep fried mandarin fish in sweet and sour sauce that looks and tastes exactly like a poor man’s song shu gui yu (but it ain’t cheap) to the Tom Yum soup that is tasteless and totally lacking in anything except maybe the name of the packet that it came out of to the masaman curry that is just totally weird and bears no relationship to the real thing. Oh and the ‘vietnamese spring rolls’ even had a layer of sugar to crunch on and no mint at all. Looked and tasted just like pillows. For 360 kuai per couple (and with only 1 beer! imagine how much if you buy drinks for two!) it is just a total waste of your money. Cool for dating clueless Dongbeiren though Looks nice, but it is all so shallow.

If you want real thai in Beijing, try somewhere else! (Purple Haze?)

This site is getting very slow. This is nothing to do with the provider, but all to do with me. So far MT has proven pretty good for my current modest usage of it, in particular it allows much better customisation of the PHP/Apache interface, so you can actually use a php.ini or .htaccess file with most of the options. SSH access is great and works very well, only pity is I could not find a way to bulk FTP my old site across using the default MT tools.

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Until I can somehow find a WSP (Web Service Provider) that allows me to host large files (ie 20GB of space or more) has secure SMTP, IMAP and POP3 access, the usual LAMP type setup and can run Gallery 2.0 along with WP and everything else I want to throw at it (Ruby on Rails for example) then I am stuck with kludging on this site.

This is a pity, I have a large number of pictures that could well go out there. Flickr is useful, but is a huge dustbin as well, with just a search on Beijing coming up with thousands upon thousands of pictures, nearly all of them just holiday snaps of no use or interest.

At least Porta is really beautifully designed, although it needs some tweaking to get it to be really 100% useful. It is very fast in generating pix, but totally non-interactive, in other words, once out there, the pix are static, just paintings on the wall. Why infomaniak cannot get its act together and ramp up PHP memory and have decent libraries beyond a basic GDLib drives me crazy, as they are otherwise really good.

So, enjoy the MOB pictures from Bai He  from KHM, they are really good. And there is another one here of the ride to Machang on the 1th of May

After my friendly bike shop did something strange with one of the bolts on the XTR middle chainring of my bike, and spending the best part of the Huangshan race having my chain fall between middle and outer ring and me lose two more bolts. Return to Beijing and then on to another shop where the only competent bike mechanic in town lurks. Ask for bike cleaning. Forget to mention the missing bits but do mention problem with wheel. ‘no problem’ it is fine. We will see. [Read more →]

Its’ when you read stuff like this here http://travel.yahoo.com/p-travelguide-2760792-ristorante_italiano_gisa_beijing-i that you wonder how much these people got paid to write this non review.

We went to Gisa’s today. Having not been before and having an Italian recommend it I thought, cool, must be good.

This place sucks. I am actually quite angry at having been given this pretense of Italian food, this lame excuse for food and with service that was really creepy. My wife felt that they waiters were trying to ‘take our clothes off’ they were so prompt to remove dishes and so cold about it. What also got my goat is that they have a white face as part of the ‘service’ who must be feeling pretty slimy given the quality of food served. Even the pizzaioli seemed to be having a laugh at the customers’ expense when making the pizzas, as if they know they were utter crap.

Salad. Rucola. At least the rucola was fresh. I can do a better salad myself.

Pizza. Tuna pizza. DO NOT PRETEND THIS IS A GOOD PIZZA! It sucks. thin crust pizza. one thin layer of tomato sauce *with a minuscule amount of tuna blended in*. this is a joke, right? Oh sorry, a bit of oregano on top of that. You want 60 kuai for that? Sorry what is that you just went and shoved up my arse?, it did not feel nice.

Fish. Forgotten what fish it was, at least I don’t think I will get food poisoning, but the description sounded nice. at 95 kuai it should taste nice and look ok. Sorry you get a 3 out of 10 for your efforts.

Three dishes + one qingdao. 220 RMB. What did that feel worth? 40 RMB.

Will we be going back? NEVER! Should you go? NEVER!!!!

Why do people accept such crap food under some guise of western food? Are we all f-ing mad?

We did not complain at the restaurant. We ate all the food. We were hungry and it was expensive. But we feel cheated and unhappy at levels of everything.

There are lots of other good restaurants out there. Need I mention ASSAGGI? If you want good food, at a reasonable (although not cheap) price level, with a varied menu, *very* good lunch menu that often changes, really pleasant atmosphere and service (I must recommend their service, very very professional and pleasant). http://www.thatsbj.com/directory/venue/Assaggi/67 for details. Will reopen soonish, looks a bit of a mess for the mo

Go to Gisa? Ma vaffanculo!

Current mood? pissed. in a way that only bad restaurants get me.

Just finished installing the Spamato extension on my Thunderbird email client. Very good. I recommend anyone who is trying to manage their incoming spam to check it out. Quite quick it went through the 1255 emails in my inbox in about half an hour, very good considering how bad my current Internet connection is.

One day later, it seems that the Keyscrambler addon may be screwing up the WP editor ? This is where they are. I currently cannot add any links in the graphical editor or else Firefox craps out when saving the doc. This has already been typed six times . Typed in the linx by hand in the HTLM source editor.

Back to Thunderbird. Today it wiped the smile off the faces of all my incoming spam and stuffed them into a Spamato folder. Magic. It added some false +itives I will chase them up in the web console. Very impressed. Not a single real spam got through this time. check them out if you hate spam!