Archive for December 2005
Who the Hell Is Trying to Poison the Well?
8 December 2005 in Root | Comments (0)
Ohh, yes, after a while, they’re back: the spammers. Random IP addresses with legit links but no legit text. And they are trying to poison my spam filter, as they’ve done before:
I really appreciate what you’re doing here. Very interesting site. Profound, Black, Superb nothing comparative to Good: http://www.imdb.com/search , Rape Circle is very good Cosmos Do Double Create - that is all that Mistery is capable of , to Con Chair you should be very Big when Stake is Chips it will Double Pair
Gotta love it. 
The best part is the random compliment which ranges from the above to “very nice. i hope you’ll update very soon.” , “Very interesting. keep the good work!“, “I enjoyed your site so much so i have to say it to you.“. <sarcasm> Yeah, right, like I believe them — my site stinks! 
</sarcasm>
Well, to look on the bright side, I now joined the Anti-Spam Jedi Council, which more commonly is known as Akismet (mmmm… Kismet *runs to the store to buy some*). It is a unified spam filter that analyzes the input from lots of other Wordpress installations (with the plug-in installed) and filters the incoming spam based on some custom-made algorithms and agents. (Did you get that? 
) In other words, if someone else has gotten spammed by a user at IP address 192.168.1.1, then Akismet will (probably) already be blacklisting that spammer when he/she tries to spam you. Although, that attempt will probably be foiled as Akismet is installed on your Wordpress installation and it sees that the IP address is a blacklisted one from the Akismet servers.
So, thanks once again spammers for making your own life harder than ever! 
(And, yeah, while I remember it. WTF does this mean: “grass can compute circle” ? 
)
Why Nordic Characters Appear to Work Only in Some Web Browsers
1 December 2005 in Root | Comments (0)
I’m now going to answer the question that I’ve been asking:
The reason why Opera and Internet Explorer do not seem to work properly with Nordic characters is that they have, by default, enabled the feature UTF-8 URL encoding. By turning this option off, you will be able to view the page åäö.html.
To turn UTF-8 URL encoding off in Internet Explorer, go to Tools > Internet Options > Advanced and uncheck:
“Always send URLs as UTF-8 (requires restart)”
To turn off UTF-8 encoding in Opera, go to Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Network and uncheck:
“Encode international addresses with UTF-8″
There, now after restarting IE, or just clicking OK in Opera’s options window, you should be able to view åäö.html. In Opera, you must manually enter the URL to that file: http://www.filips.net/åäö.html and then press [Enter] (since this page is UTF-8 encoded, Opera will send the URL encoded in the same encoding that this page is in).
Well, now most webmasters and webdevelopers are probably asking: do we have to ask our visitors to turn off UTF-8 URL encoding in their browsers manually? The answer is no, you shouldn’t have to. It should be possible to configure your webserver to accept UTF-8 URL requests, but it might be hard to get it working. If you are on Apache running on some open source operating system, then you might be interested in hearing that mod_fileiri can allow both UTF-8 as well as ISO-8859-1 encoded URLs when configured the correct way. But that is probably no use to you if you are with a web hotel.
However, note that you will have to test your web applications together with UTF-8 enabled to see if there are any cross site scipting vunerabilities in them. The UTF-8 characters are a much bigger bunch than the old ASCII space ever was, not to mention the ISO-8859-1 encoding space.
If there is a simpler way of getting UTF-8 encoded URLs to work on my server, please let me know. Until otherwise, I’ll let my server be alone for the moment: “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” 