My blog has been receiving a lot of spam lately, at a rate of about 50 dummy comments per day. As my current web hosting doesn’t allow me to open socket connections, a part of WordPress functionality (including Akismet, the spam checker plug-in shipped with WordPress) won’t work. I knew about the limitations and am currently looking for a hosting replacement (in fact, I guess I already found one). In the meantime, manual triaging so much spam was just becoming painful.

In order to try finding a quick fix to the problem, I made a quick analysis to the spam comments, which revealed a pattern in about 95% of the comments: the commenter always had the URL set to something like [few random letters].com/map.html. I then added the following to my Comment Blacklist (found in Settings, Discussion):

.com/map.html
buyaccutane@gmail.com
195.88.33.85

There, this should keep me less annoyed for a while (at least, until I find the time to switch hosting).

As a final note, be careful when automatically filtering using a less significant string (for example just .com): you may end up marking desired comments as spam. Always seek for a pattern which is different enough from generally expected content.

(Post image shamelessly copied from here.)

Update 2009-11-22: Updated anti-spam rules; added post image reference.

BIOS screenshot of USB controller speed configuration

Today, while browsing through my system’s BIOS for some tweaks, I noticed a strange sentence in my peripheral configurations:

Configures the USB 2.0 controller in HiSpeed (480Mbps) or FullSpeed (12Mbps).

Full-speed at 12 Mbps and Hi-speed at 480 Mbps? Damn, is this a typo in the BIOS textual description or am I missing something? I crawled the Web and found out that it was I who was confused: in fact, Hi-speed USB is the fastest one.

I was aware about the speed differences, I just didn’t had noticed such a counter-intuitive marketing terminology for the two different versions. And yes, I’m convinced that I was the one who had “tweaked” the setting to Full-speed (option which was active when I noticed the weird sentence).

So that’s why my USB drives were so slow… And me blaming the drivers and hardware for the lame performance… Better double check yours too to see if no one did the same mistake as I did!

Finally, while investigating the difference between Full-Speed and Hi-Speed, just noticed the upcoming Super-speed which will take data transfer into light-speed (!). Not that my current data transfer requirements are as high, but I always like to watch things moving!…

Notice 2009-09-27: This post wasn’t actually published when written: the post contents were mostly ready but, unfortunately, got lost in my “to do” stack (see the first blog entry for more on this).