Matthew Walton’s Blog

Over at Baboon Palace, which I just discovered by way of Positive Liberty, is a very interesting entry about possibly fictional, potentially-interactive weblogs: Blog Fiction. While the article doesn’t mention any blogs specifically known to be fictional, there are a couple which might well be, and at least one where user comments have been known to influence the activities of the narrator, be she real or otherwise.

It’s an interesting idea. The trick is, if I shamelessly stole the idea, would anybody read it? What setting should be used for such an endeavour? I suppose that depends on how much you want to fool people into thinking it’s real (not at all, in my case), so you could potentially use anything at all, although a setting where an online diary is a plausible part of the scene would help make it come across more smoothly.

Ultimately it would probably be awful, as you’d need to be a writer of considerable talent to pull off something that unusual — and I am no such writer. I suspect it would also have to be something set in the Real World. Or at least, something very, very close to the real world. And why not? Just invent a fictional person, drop them somewhere you know well, and let them live a nonexistant life. I’m sure thousands of weblogs out there are entirely fake in that regard.

I don’t think I’ll try it right now. If this weblog starts sprouting fiction in the near future it will be my NaNoWriMo novel for this year. With any luck, that one will actually be vaguely readable.

Got this from UFies.org — it’s titled about web designers, but I think it’s true of commercial software development in general. Oh, how it’s true.

Come to think of it, it also applies to Free Software development, and it’s mostly down to people not knowing what they want. In the commercial world, that’s because the sales people don’t know what the customers want, because the customers haven’t thought it through properly, so the sales people figure out what they think the customers are going to buy, and pass that on to the developers with the air of ‘do this and the company will be rich’.

If I sound cynical right now, it’s because I am. Don’t you like nice, simple reasons?

So I’ve not been blogging much recently. What have I been doing? Well, nothing much of note to be honest. I could launch into a long description of what I have been occupying my time with, but it’s largely dull, centering on going to work, attempting to design a new positioning system for Growl plugins, playing City of Heroes, watching DVDs (Lord of the Rings extended editions), playing The Sims 2, cooking elaborate weekend meals, attempting to track down an Arctic Blue Game Boy Advance SP (end result: got my sister a black one), and attempting to return a pair of trousers sent to me by Lands End, which have the right label on the bag (navy, men’s, 34 waist, unfinished length) but are in fact ladies’, size 14 in light maple. Lovely.

WordPress doesn’t seem to have the same kind of hooks for plugins to stop comment spam that Movable Type has. It seems that the Blacklist plugin only holds spam for moderation instead of rejecting it outright, and also that it’s impossible to have email when someone posts a comment but not email when someone posts a comment which is held for moderation. Maybe this will be added soon… anyway, it’s been fairly time-consuming to deal with, although easier than MT without MT-Blacklist.

Thus I’ve added a fairly rudimentary little plugin that should deny comments on all entries over 21 days old. So you won’t be able to comment on the old stuff anymore, but since nobody legitimate ever did that anyway, I’m sure nobody will mind, and it might just reduce the volume of comment spam I’m getting.

One thing that is good though is that WordPress does come with the ability to filter comments based on spam words and how many links they’ve got, so even though I’ve had a huge moderation queue every morning for the last week or so, none of the spam has ever appeared on the site itself. Go away spammers, your spam will gain you nothing here. In order to get a spam up here you have to:

• get past the WordPress Blacklist plugin
• get past the WordPress spam words list
• get past the one-URL-per-comment restriction

And then I’ll notice it and delete it. Goodbye!

Money was burning a hole in my bank account – specifically, the money which I won’t be spending on LASIK. So I succumbed to the itch and got some computer upgrades… after a Saturday of intense installation effort, I now have:

• MSI Neo Platinum K8T motherboard (SATA, RAID, socket 754)
• AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (socket 754 – would have got socket 939, but the price premium is way too high. Also didn’t want to pay £60 extra for the 3400+, didn’t seem worth it to me)
• 1GB PC3200 (yes I know, that’s actually a downgrade from the 1.5GB on my old mobo, but easy enough to add another 1GB stick when I feel like it)
• 200GB Seagate Barracuda SATA drive
• LG dual layer DVD writer (supports just about every writeable DVD format out there, plus CDs and it reads them too!)

This replaces the obvious bits of my old hardware, except for the hard drives, I still have my two IDE drives. Gradually I’ll migrate my entire Linux setup onto the SATA disk and then reinstall Windows so that I can ditch the 40GB IDE drive. If the SATA seems to go well, I may ditch the 120GB IDE drive as well, and get another 200GB SATA. It’s certainly very quiet…

Had some stress installing Gentoo Linux, I eventually got my old Linux system to boot happily (after some SATA misconfiguration problems, largely centred around an argument of Linux vs the RAID controller), added in the driver for the onboard Ethernet so Linux is now up and running and happy, but I wanted an AMD64 compiled system as well, so that’s what’s been installed on the SATA drive. Being Gentoo it’ll take me a while to compile everything, but there’s no hurry as I have a fully-working system available for when I need it.

Excuse me, it’s now time to play games. I wouldn’t really have thought it, but they’re much improved over the XP2100 even with the same graphics card. I guess there was more bottleneck in the CPU and memory bandwidth than I had previously thought.