blog.dataforce.org.uk

So as you may or may not know from time to time I have the joy of fixing computers for various people. A lot of these fixes result in a reinstall of windows and away.

This is a rather easy enough job, I have a KVM switch that I attach to the machine, pop a windows CD in (I used to have an unattended CD but don’t any more), answer a few questions and then occasionally switch the KVM over to see if the install died or so.

Now this is all well and good except for 2 problems:

1. It means I need to keep (or remember to bring) windows CDs at home (where I do most of my jobs)
2. I recently had a machine to fix that had a non-working CD Drive

Now, the first one isn’t so much of a problem, but the second one was.

Recently I finally finished adding support for AuthGate to be an OpenID Provider.

This prompted Chris to develop Poidsy, which I have also implemented into AuthGate. This allows people to login to AuthGate (and thus also here, and other AuthGate powered sites) using OpenID instead of having to register with AuthGate itself.

On a daily basis, I get around 800 emails to my email accounts, of which most of it is spam.

Now as good as thunderbird is at detecting spam, even it fails at a lot of the spam I receive, leaving me with around 100-200 spam per day that gets into my inbox.

I’ve dealt with and accepted this for over a year now, before a discussion on IRC made me decide to do something about it. (When I say discussion, I mean Chris pasted one line showing how good the UTD-Hosting mail server was at preventing junk getting to him)

So, I recently (Today and yesterday) started prodding my postfix config to help with the problem.

DMDirc 0.4 has now been released :)

I (Along with Chris ‘MD87’ Smith and Greg ‘Greboid’ Holmes have recently started working on DMDirc (again, only this time its in Java to help towards the original aim of the project to be a decent, truly cross platform IRC Client)

Its coming along quite well :)

You can track the progress, (and download the current release which is 0.1) at the Google Code Project or the Project Website

Lemme know what you think.

With the release of windows vista, comes the start-of-the-end for Windows XP. with its EOL (End-Of-Life) date now set at January 30th 2008 (that’s less than a year away), people (by people I mean windows users) who are unable to upgrade to vista (due to Lack of computing power or so) or don’t want it (its crap, proprietary, riddled with DRM and probably bugs - Microsoft are already producing SP1!) need to start looking for alternatives, unless they want to stay using an unsupported (this means no more bug/security fixes) Operating System.

Imo, The best alternative is some derivative of Linux. (Although there is others such as MacOS x86 although its not supported on non-mac hardware, FreeBSD but I don’t think its desktop oriented, and others such as beOS or so)

As of Saturday 27/1/07 I have started using KUbuntu Linux as the main OS on my desktop, as a trial to see how well I can get by without my “trusty” windows installation.

Due to a recent need in a project of mine for mySQL access from delphi/freepascal I have adapted the version of mysql.pas from http://www.fichtner.net/delphi/mysql.delphi.phtml to load both libmysql.dll (on svn) and libmysqlclient.so (Usually located in /usr/lib/mysql/).

I also created a wrapper class for it (TSQL in SQL.pas)

Downloads can be found here: [http://blog.dataforce.org.uk/viewcvs/misc/MySQL/]

Any queries/questions should be left in the comments.

(This has been tested, and compiled on Freepascal on Linux (1.9.8) and windows (2.0.0) and in Delphi (6/7/Turbo) on windows.)

Even the most complex captchas can be bypassed, if not tested thoroughly enough.

Some time ago, I implemented a captcha on my comments form for news posts, to stop spam bots. My captcha is quite complicated, and sometimes generates images that even humans strugle on, yet for some reason I managed to get 10788 spam comments!

I immediately tested my captcha - tried with no value, a wrong value, a right value, only the right one worked.

Then I tried in a different window, open 2 tabs to the same comment, submit the 2nd one with no data and get told the correct captcha, then try using that on the first window, this also didn’t work - however, it told me the correct captcha was “”, upon hitting back and trying with no captcha, it worked.

Turns out I had forgot to make "" an invalid captcha when testing if the values were correct, seeing as when you submit the captcha, it clears the captcha session, a blank value WAS indeed the same value that was stored in the session! The spam bots were just not accepting the session, and thus had a blank captcha - and by them not filling in the captcha, and not accepting the session, they were able to submit comments. This has now been fixed, and a blank captcha will now give an error of “Captcha Timeout”.

Fortunately, 3 Simple SQL Queries pruned the lot :) 1 of which pruned 7900+. Silly bots being so similar!