Autarchy of the Private Cave

As an update to WordPress anti-spam plugins, I highly recommend Spam Karma 2. For a time, it seems to be the ultimate protection. I turned off all the other anti-spam plugins (including Aksimet), and everything’s just perfect! SK2 gathers up to a thousand spam comments/trackbacks during a single week on this blog, and I never had a complaint from blog visitors on their inability to add a comment (though some did have to fill in captcha to post a comment with links).

And SK2 still works under WP 2.5! (SK 2.3 was released to support WP 2.1)

Kudos to Dave!

It would be a pity if this excellent plugin is abandoned and stops functioning in one of the upcoming WP releases.

Update: SpamKarma is now GPL (at google code).

This post provides several links which would be useful for the beginning Drupal developers, or developers deciding which CMS to use as the base for their next project. Also, strengths of Drupal are highlighted.

Intensively working with Drupal during the past two weeks, I find it to be an excellent tool, and also much more than a YACMS.

Now I think that Drupal is also a framework – providing invisible to developer caching, session handling, access control, theming, localization, and more. The minimal effort required to extend already huge Drupal functionality is to write your own module – and, if done right, your module will immediately benefit from all the bonuses Drupal provides.

But Drupal also really shines as a CMS! You can start with a free design theme, and without any PHP knowledge have your custom portal built within a week – with your own hands, if you desire! (Note: “within a week” is true, but only if you already know what exactly you should be doing; learning time is short, but it’s not within that same week.)

What makes Drupal so powerful? I’d say that beautiful core and numerous modules.

What Drupal has to offer?
Read the rest of this entry »

4 seasons (23 episodes) of highly enjoyable British comedy. Excellent playing by Stephen Fry (Jeeves) and Hugh Laurie (Bertie Wooster). Good stories by P.G. Wodehouse. Highly recommended!

P.S. “Jeeves and Wooster” differs strongly from the IT Crowd I had written about before. IT crowd is an every-day-situational-comedy, while J&W is genius-serving-the-idiot, with most laughs at Wooster’s plans and deeds.

If taken out of [Ani]Matrix context, and filtered through internal “over-exaggeration removal”, then this exact 9-minute animation (episode 2 of 9) is quite coherent with soon-possible problem to face humans.

Yes, I do believe the creation of sentient machines is within perceivable future. And yes, I do think that the problems of “robot personality” will be acute.

In support of my view – cloning is an unresolved ethical problem, which also grows into legal and social problems in the case of human cloning. When even the possibility of having two genetically identical humans arises, this leads to debates and disagreements (to clone or not to clone?). What could be said about a machine claiming it’s right for life?

Claiming other human rights?

Racism and xenophobia are characteristic for some countries even nowadays, and it can be even said that there is no country where the number of xenophobic or racist citizens is equal to zero. And that’s human-human relations problem.

In other words, I did enjoy The Second Renaissance, Part I (except for the clearly contradictional last two minutes of it).

Overall The Animatrix is good.

And the message I was trying to express is that mankind better be prepared to live side-by-side with machines – develop some realistic co-existence model. SciFi writes will help here . Just let’s avoid the fake, insincere model tried in The Animatrix: Matriculated (episode 9, the last one).

I have just joined AN Hosting Affiliate Program – you can tell by the new link in Web Hosting section in the right sidebar, and by the real huge banner on the blog hosting page (so huge actually that it won’t fit completely with smaller resolutions like 1024×768 and less). I do not yet know if this affiliate program is worth the trouble, but I did find good feedback for their hosting on Drupal forums (here and here and search for more), so that really was the initial reason to put the links to them.

I would be interested in AN Hosting feedback, as I do plan to try their services one day.

P.S. A Small orange (direct link) also has lots of positive feedback.

Is that only me, or WordPress is really leaning towards the Drupal ideology?

Here’s what I mean:

• user levels were changed to user roles – just like in Drupal
• now, instead of categories and just recently introduced tags, the word ‘taxonomy’ is used – which is a Drupal slang
• ‘widgets’ work just like ‘blocks’ in Drupal – even style IDs are assigned the same way, e.g. id=”widget subscribe_to_comments_widget”
• (add here the similarity you found yourself)

I wonder, what will be next. PHPTemplate support, as default theming engine?
Or no-backwards-compatibility policy?
Or, best for WP users, advanced Drupal-like caching and throttling techniques?

drupaldojo.com – at the moment of writing, has 42 video-lessons (screencasts) of developing with Drupal.