Random Synapses

WordPress 2.3 is out for a few days. As any responsible site administrator, I upgraded my older version right away, making sure plugins work with the new database structure.

But now I’m at a crossroad. In addition to the traditional predefined category structure for posts, the new version introduced support for tagging. This is an unstructured, flexible organization of the posts, so one can assign any number of keywords related to a post.

I never felt that my posts clearly fall in one category or another, and cross-referencing them is weird. So I’m thinking about switching to tags, even for older posts. But should I keep the categories too?

Hmm. What’s your take?

Giveaway Of The Day (GAOTD) is an initiative I highly appreciate. It allows people to use commercial software, free of charge. There’s a new application available every day, and I’m among the first to see what they’re offering next. The catch? You must download, activate and install the application within 24 hours after it was published. You can’t install it later, even if you had it activated before.

Everybody wins. Customers get fully-featured, commercial software, completely free of charge (of course, without updates or upgrades or other services) — this is like an unlimited trial. Software publishers get a new base of curious potential customers encouraged to try the applications without time or feature constraints. Many of these trial customers do buy the license later on.

Applications vary greatly, from screensavers to DVD burners, personal information managers and system maintenance tools. It’s a free, competitive market out there, and inevitably you will spot some commercial application that does something you could easily do manually or with the help of other free tools. For example, changing the icon of a folder is a feature built into Windows XP, yet some company thought they could sell an application to do the same thing. It’s the foundation principle of modern economy: let the market decide what’s worth paying for and what isn’t.

People visiting GAOTD can leave comments and rate the applications they download. Power users, like me, do know freely available tools that do the same thing or even outperform the commercially applications distributed free of charge on GAOTD. And these people communicate their opinions on GAOTD for others’ benefit. Why limit yourself to one solution, when you have the luxury of choosing from several alternatives, also free of charge, to find what’s best for you?

And now we’re getting to what’s bothering me. There are a bunch of people on GAOTD that cannot accept any negative comment or a proposed alternative. Somehow their freedom of choice and expression dissolve in the presence of the word “free.” If GAOTD offers something for free, they feel compelled to get it and be thankful for it. Goodbye personal preferences and judgment. These people become extremely aggressive, rude and intolerant, calling others “whiners,” “rich,” “spoiled” and such.

Someone told me once that the most powerful word on the Internet is “FREE.” It’s an attention grabber, something to attract the crowd’s interest and bring some potential customers. But I never imagined that some people are blinded by this word and become unable to think for themselves and decline something they don’t like, want or need.

The extreme case is now the usual screensaver offered on weekends by GAOTD. It’s been many years since the technical reason of having a screen saver ceased to exist. Personally, when I use the computer, it doesn’t have time for the screensaver to start. Moreover, I fail to understand the people who get a computer just to stare at it waiting for an animated screensaver to run. But hey, it’s a free world and if they want to waste their lives staring at screensavers, so be it. Even more, if they want to pay for one. But so should they accept my opinion that most screensavers are utter crap. Commercial or not, free of charge or not, crap is still crap.

In conclusion, I’m now going to have my own giveaway. I’m confident it will be extremely appealing to some of GAOTD’s people who love anything free, just because it’s free. Here goes. Normally, I charge everyone $79.95 for kissing my butt. However, anyone who comments back and mentions the word “whiner” can kiss my butt for free. And don’t you dare telling me that other people’s butts can be kissed for free, you whiners!!!

Disclaimer: Not available in all regions. Limited to one kiss per household. Must be 18 or older. While supplies last. The provider of this offer reserves the right to decline any request. Further terms and conditions may apply, and these may change without prior notice. By kissing my butt, you agree to assume full responsibility over legal or sanitary consequences, and to exonerate me of any liability. This offer is not a subscription.

Why do things have to break? Particularily, why is water so revengeful with me so that it leaks where it’s not supposed to, and does not flow where it’s supposed to? Why do faucets play tricks on me?

It’s the third time in a few weeks when I’m having serious problems with the plumbing. And, every time this happens, it’s right before I’ve made plans for something, which I must cancel to attend to these emergencies.

Considering the hours I work, I can’t get a plumber to do the work for me. I’d have to stay half a day at home to watch him work. And then, I’d be pissed to no end looking at the careless job he’s done.

So, I’m Mr. Fix-It-All. Nothing is too difficult to repair, and to do it right. But it’s aggravating to have to do these things at the least desirable moment.

The toilet’s flushing mechanism broke, right before having guests for the New Year’s party. In the next two months I ended up buying 4 different mechanisms until I found one that a) works, and b) doesn’t break again after the third use.

Some two weeks ago, the toilet’s faucet started dripping, hidden away, until I noticed the big, wet spot on the wall of the staircase, created by infiltrated water. I didn’t have a wrench big enough, so there I go to the store to buy tools, rubber washers, new faucet, then fix the problem late at night when I got back from work.

Last weekend, the kitchen sink’s faucet decided to go on a permanent strike. It was such a nice day and I made plans to go out and play with my camera. Instead, I replaced the faucet, washers, cleaned the mess under the sink, and the day was already gone.

Today, as I open the front door, I hear a hiss inside that gives me cold chills. Hoping that it’s not a gas pipe, I step in and… splat into a puddle of water stretching all the way from the entrance to the bathroom. Water is spraying out of the wall, right where the sink’s faucet comes out. I have no idea if it’s a cracked pipe, an old rubber seal or what else, because… I don’t have a wrench big enough for THIS one. I had plans to attend the opening of a car tuning show tomorrow; looks like I’ll attend the line at the do-it-yourself shop again.

Keep fingers crossed for me, I hope I don’t have to chisel my way through the wall to replace a water pipe.

[edit] Whew, no chiseling required, but a pipe screwed into another broke off and left a piece of metal tightly screwed inside. It took a while to get it out, but it’s done. Everything is fixed now, I have running water again!

Checking my blog’s visitor statistics, I noticed one particular IP address standing out from the crowd. It accumulated more hits than second, third and fourth top visitors together, and ate up an impressive amount of traffic. A brief check revealed that the IP address resolves to rss.allresearch.com.

Who is AllResearch? It is a company that provides statistics for the web to its paying customers. One of its specialties is to find out how many people are talking about certain brands or products online and report these to their customers. Mention Coca-Cola in your blog and you’ll be a part of AllResearch’s statistics sent to the company. Another activity is to provide “clippings” from various blog touching a certain keyword. Your post on Coca-Cola will be fed to customers who want to read what’s new on the web about this keyword. This is achieved through a subscription-based site, webclipping.com — another product of AllResearch. Basically, your blog is the source of revenue for AllResearch.

In order to pull this information, AllResearch sends “spiders” (automatic programs) to index the millions of blogs out there and find new information they could use. Google, Yahoo and MSN do this as well, with one difference: AllResearch’s spiders flood your blog with requests, as often as once per hour. Search engines’ spiders are more considerate and more intelligent, they only check your site for changes and index it when there’s new information. AllResearch disregards this and re-reads on each visit everything you’ve posted. This makes your site’s traffic skyrocket, and you’re most likely paying for the extra traffic.

In short, AllResearch piggybacks the blogosphere to make a nice buck, with a complete indifference to limiting the unnecessary load they put on others’ sites. This, in my opinion, is abusive, and I’m not the only one noticing it. Daniel Bowen at GeekRant went through the same experience in February 2005. Larry Snider had a conversation with AllResearch in December 2004. Google AllResearch and find out more.

So today I blocked their spider’s IP from being able to access my blog. This is simply done with a “deny” rule added to the .htaccess file of my site. My web host’s Apache server checks this file for each visit and, from now on, will not respond to any requests from the IP I’ve blacklisted.

This is the second time I’ve encountered abusive behaviour towards my blog. The first time was some time ago, when someone installed Google Desktop Search on their computer, and that application was indexing my blog even more often than once an hour. My site’s traffic exceeded in a few days the total traffic in several months. I’m not the kind of guy who will tolerate such an abuse, even of an automated computer system.

Farewell, AllResearch, you’re not going to extend your business through my blog’s content any longer. May you and the disgusting likes of you miserably disappear in oblivion.

It was about time I spent some time updating WordPress here. Versions came and passed, all urging users to update to fix some known flaws, but I just couldn’t get around to do it. Fortunately, it seems that nobody reads this blog anymore, and no “hackers” tried to exploit those vulnerabilities. Whew.

I sort of picked up a few things about the world around me. Did y’all know Hillary is running for presidency? In the past few months, I have been completely oblivious to TV news, newspapers, magazines, radio… I loathe politics, scandal-focused media disgusts me to no end, social abnormalities went past boring a long time ago, news on the economy are incomplete and out of context, and positive news are more scarce than misprints. Why bother?

I’m catching up with my hobby as well: two lens for my digital SLR camera are on their way. They pretty much emptied my pockets, and all I can hope is that they will live up to my expectations. They couldn’t arrive at a better time for going out to take photos: it’s spring — flowers are blooming, the sun tickles the skin with warmth, parks are full of people and kids having a good time, ladies’ skirts grew shorter…