Nirlog.com

The comment and trackback spams had been a headache for me. Every blogger understands how annoying they are and how unproductive they can make you. Besides from being a blogger, I maintain systems that hosts many wordpress blogs. The good news for a normal blogger who uses wordpress is that the built-in Akismet anti-spam in wordpress 2 is already very mature and can catch most of the spams. The spam comments are caught by the mighty Akismet but from system’s perspective, it’ll still have to process and classify it as spam or good comments. When there’re robots and scripts commenting in thousands, it makes MySql consume a lot of system resources (Memory, CPU and connections), making the whole system unavailable at times.
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The Great Firewall of China monitors, filters and blocks all the websites and email contents. If you’re in China you won’t be able to browse CNN, BBC and other international news smoothly, and you’ll have a terrible experience of sending and receiving emails. There will be a lot of unexplained bounce back emails and sometime emails lost in black holes. To further extend their control over the net, now China is moving towards ‘real name’ system for blogs.

The Internet Society of China has recommended to the government that bloggers be required to use their real names when they register blogs, state media said on Monday, in the latest attempt to regulate free-wheeling Web content.
The society, which is affiliated with the Ministry of Information Industry, said no decision had been made but that a ‘real name system’ was inevitable.

Implementation of this will mean an end to anonymity, threat to privacy and a further curb on free speech. I quite doubt how effective they’ll be in implementing this system, looking at the number of blogs and bloggers in China.

China now boasts over 17.5 million bloggers, producing nearly 34 million blogs. An estimated 75 million Chinese netizens—more than half the country’s estimated 130 million Internet users—are blog readers.

But China has a reputation for being ruthless in implementing their policies and they do have technical, human and financial resources at their disposal. I think they’ll try very hard and ultimately fail. What do you think?

Amazon’s new Astore allows you to create your own Online Store. It’s new Associates product, very easy to setup, allows you to create your store in few minutes by choosing any products that Amazon has to offer. You can link the store to your blog (it stays in amazon’s domain). It would be great if you could create the store in your own domain. Here’s Nirlog Book Store, I created using Astore in 5 minutes.

CEO of Technorati, Sifry has published State of the Blogosphere, August 2006. Technorati is currently tracking 50 million blogs and have some very interesting figures with graphs about the state of the blogosphere. This is the summary:

• Technorati is now tracking over 50 Million Blogs.
• The Blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.
• Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months.
• From January 2004 until July 2006, the number of blogs that Technorati tracks has continued to double every 5-7 months.
• About 175,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day.
• About 8% of new blogs get past Technorati’s filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.
• About 70% of the pings Technorati receives are from known spam sources, but we drop them before we have to send out a spider to go and index the splog.
• Total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second.
• This is about double the volume of about a year ago.
• The most prevalent times for English-language posting is between the hours of 10AM and 2PM Pacific time, with an additional spike at around 5PM Pacific time

BackupMyBlog is a remote blog backup service. It’s first of it’s kind. With explosive growth of blogs I think we’ll see more similar services in the future. It’s free during beta testing period. Looks like they’ll start to charge once on production. The service can be used by any MySql and PHP based blogs. Currently they’re providing 10MB of storage per account which I think is not enough.

Users who’ve signed with spam fighting company Blue Security have been recently targeted by spammers and attackers. And on Tuesday a massive denial-of-service attack was launched on Blue Security’s web site which then knocked millions of TypePad and LiveJournal blogs offline. This is how it happened:

When Blue Security’s web site was hit by a distributed denial of service attack attack (DDoS), the company temporarily repointed www.bluesecurity.com to a blog on Six Apart’s TypePad service. The DDoS traffic appears to have followed www.bluesecurity.com to its new home, overwhelming Six Apart’s network and knocking its TypePad and LiveJournal services offline for nearly eight hours.

Distributed denial of service attacks the target (servers and services) by overwhelming requests for information. The requests typically comes from compromised computers. As a result, legitimate users cannot access the site and service. You can see a graphic example of DDoS Attack here.

If you’re a regular visitor, you can see that I’ve changed the theme. For my rss readers you might or might not see the changes depending on your news reader. Anyway if you care to see it you can directly browse the site.

I’m using WP-Andreas09 theme. It’s a port of an open source template by Andreas Viklund called andreas09. The wordpress them was ported by Ainslie Johnson. This is one of the best themes I came across and it’s packed with following features:

14 colour options selectable from your WordPress admin.
Horizontal menu with unlimited sub-page support.
Built in Widgets support.
Fully prepared for localisation - only one file to translate to any language.
Comments enabled on pages.

The most useful feature for me is the Widgets support. From now I don’t need to edit the template files every time I want to add/delete some items in the sidebar.

Other cool feature is 14 different colour support. I hope you’ll like the new theme.

Mahesh Poudyal, a Nepalese blogger has written a post with very detail analysis on whether Monarchy is worth keeping in Nepal. He analyzes economic, political, and cultural aspect looking at the pros and cons of keeping monarchy in Nepal. The post is very long but it definitely is a worthwhile read.
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Democratic Protests in Nepal is getting unprecedented coverage in International media. Of course it is well deserved and thanks to all the media coverage, world now sees how Nepalese are fighting for their freedom. I just noticed that Boing Boing has a story about A Nepali photoblog site Phalano.com which is publishing the photos of the ongoing protest everyday. I’d mentioned about this blog in my previous entry News from Nepal .

Talking about this photo BoingBoing says:

This demonstrator has shaved a message into his head. I can’t read it. But would welcome a translation from a BoingBoing reader.

There is an excellent translation in the comment with which I totally agree:

You asked for a translation of "Loktantra". The Nepali language used "Prajatantra" to mean "democracy". "Praja" means "subjects" (of a King or monarch), so "Prajatantra" actually means "the rule of subjects", which obviously is unsatisfactory. So the new term "Loktantra" was coined. "Lok" means "folk" - so "Loktantra" would be full democracy, as opposed to a half-hearted version.

I think Apple keeps things simple, yet powerful and effective. I was pleasantly surprised with iDVD. The Magic iDVD is very easy to use and yet lets you create a very professional DVDs with few clicks. The most amazing experience I had was with the OneStep DVD. All you’ve to do is; connect the camcorder via firewire, insert a blank dvd disk and press OneStep DVD. That’s all. Also good thing about the MacBook Pro is that you can do other things with it as the iDVD is running. There is no noticeable delay in performance.

I’m enjoying the Mac life as a newbie. After yesterdays post Mac Applications for daily use I’m receiving a lot of comments. Thanks to everyone who’ve read, commented and sent emails with a lot of suggestions. OS X and Mac Applications are great, MacBook Pro is a very fast and sexy machine but it does have some serious problems, so we’ve finally sent it to Apple for repair. I think they’re going to repair instead of replacing it. I’ll let you know how the repaired or replaced MacBook Pro behaves.