Defiantone.com

Due to my ever present boredom and need to share anything I find interesting to anyone who will listen I added my Google Reader RSS feed to my page. Check it out on the bottom right - you’ll find a listing of the latest and greatest stories that I felt were worth sharing but didn’t feel were worth blogging about. I have no idea why someone would come to me for information but if you’re here you might as well see what I’ve found interesting the past day or two.

Gone is the angry red and back is the calm and serene blue color scheme. I’m almost out of here and I was growing tired of the red scheme - so, I edited one of my photos for a new header and BAM! there it is.

Hope you like it.

(if you can’t see it hit refresh)

One little plug-in was all that it took - one plug-in to rule them all, one plug-in to find them, one plug-in to bring them all and in the darkness bind them!

YAWASP, a plug-in for fully hosted versions of Wordpress like mine has effectively stopped the torrents of comment spam that I was receiving daily. Now, instead of removing 50-100 bogus comments a day I find myself removing as little as one bogus comment a week. If you have your own blog I STRONGLY recommend you grab this little beast. Its going to save you tons of time.

We all fight spam in one form or another be it snail mail, email, or comment spam. I’ve done a fairly good job at blocking out the email spam but and I can readily ignore the snail mail by throwing it in the trash. I haven’t had good luck blocking out the comment spam.

Spammers will leave me random comments full of links to websites full of porn and prescription medication advertisements in an effort to increase their Google page rank. The spam filter catches 99% of them and leaves them for me to moderate. I have to dig through the comments in hope that there is something that isn’t spam - there seldom is.

I noticed a new plug-in for my blog YAWASP (Yet Another WordPress Anti Spam Plug-in) that alters the comment field so that bots cannot easily access it and leave comments. Hopefully it works - only time will tell. It should be absolutely invisible to you but its going to help me out immensely. I’ll be able to see that I have no new comments from one day to the next. Oh well

BlueCoat, the web filter ran by the USAF, has caused me much aggravation since my arrival at Balad. I am not the only one that is feeling pain - everyone else is affected by this poorly written web filter. Recently, I discovered a way to circumvent the filter - RSS feeds. Techically, I’m accessing the site information without breaking the terms of service because I am not accessing the site or any restricted content - including all images hosted on that server that could potentially corrupt me (I think the only reason the filter exists is to 1. save bandwidth, 2. block porn, 3. prevent idiots from downloading viruses). RSS stands for really simple syndication - really, I’m not kidding at all. Its the summarized content of a website that is delivered without all of the extra advertising, images, and themes of the full website. You get the good part of the website without all of the crap that slows down your browsing experience. RSS feeds are read and displayed by readers that can be web or desktop based.

Google - the company that does almost everything - well, they haven’t figured out how to build an electric car that runs for a 1000 miles on a single charge… yet - has a free reader that is quite simple to use. Simply register, subscribe to the websites of your choosing, and read away. The reader allows you to view all feeds or just those that have been recently updated. I’ve added a RSS link that you can see to your right - right below the Askimet spam count. Click on the link and you can easily add my feed to the reader of your choice. You’ll never miss another gripping update - ever - you can rest easily now.

So - Screw you BlueCoat - I’m going to get my news one way or another.

I’ve been reviewing some of my old posts and I noticed that I spend most of my time writing about things that cause me grief. So, I’m going to break off some of those onto a new blog called How I loathe thee

I do need some other bloggers so if you’ve got something that grinds your gears let me know and I’d be happy to share the space with you. Topic choice is up to the author and you are free to write pretty much whatever you wish. Feel free to check it out - I’ll be writing some stuff there on occasion.

I upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress, my blogging software. If you find anything that doesn’t work as it should please leave me a comment and I’ll try to figure out what is wrong.

Thanks!

For quite some time I’ve thought that we didn’t have information to conclusively determine that humans are causing global warming and the contention that it is irreversible unless we change our carbon consuming habits.

Some interesting research has come out and it points to the idea that we may not be as involved as some would like to think. This winter has been cold

According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”

Check out this interesting article - it doesn’t draw the conclusion that we aren’t on a pattern of global warming or that we aren’t polluting the heck out of our planet but rather alludes to the fact that we may have less to do with it than some scientists believe. Read on at the National Post

Sorry about the unreadable page - I made a mistake. Hopefully it should work as designed - if it doesn’t, please let me know.

I’m currently modifying some code and images for a new theme for the website. Gone should be the dark background and light text and it should be replaced with something slightly more readable. I thought I had it correct but apparently I missed some code so its not going to go live yet - if you’ve been surfing in the last 20 minutes I’m sure you’ve seen some strange things.

When its available, let me know if you like it. I should have it live within the next 24 hours.

- I’ve had a little spare time on my hands.

You won’t see much of a content change, its just going to be the same crap in a shiny new wrapper.