Colin Charles Agenda

I find it interesting that Wordpress with the Akismet plugin (yes, I upgraded my blog to run the latest Wordpress a while back) is still allowing spam thru. To make it even funnier, my wordpress.com account has also received spam that Akismet didn’t catch. Maybe its not working as planned then.

It seems that the Akismet API is fairly open, which is interesting. Requests for integration with MediaWiki, can be fairly interesting. MediaWiki’s own methods of spam protection don’t seem to go very far, as edits still tend to need patrolling (I subscribe to the RSS feed of changes which seems to make a lot of sense).

Now to decide to go back to patrolling blog comments or just turning the feature off. How do other Wordpress users deal with spam?

I let the battery on the MacBook Pro run completely dry, and when I plugged the power back in, it resumed to my last saved state. I am highly impressed with this technology, as I never did get a chance to try this on my Powerbook itself. Software suspend is cool. When is Suspend2 going to be integrated into the mainline kernel?

OK, back to the MacBook Pro. The keyboard didn’t become usable until after a period of time (I’d say, about a minute). That seemed rather odd. If time permits, I’ll be sure to try and repeat this - has anyone else noticed this though?

The machine runs really, really hot. Really. I put it on my lap and I’m wearing a pair of jeans, and even then the bottom is really burning me. This is so, not good for a laptop. And Apple saying not to put laptops on a lap just seems rather silly. I haven’t updated the firmware yet, so maybe it’ll miraculously cool after that. I can’t imagine this doing good things to the life of a MacBook Pro, to be honest.

Also, there’s a distinct whine. Sure you can’t really hear it with a podcast playing in the background but man, oh man, its there. “Whirrr”. Its annoying. You can’t be expected to leave the MBP on 24/7 and expect to sleep next to it or anything.

I guess all this is handy now that winter is abound.

Its pretty amazing. Download, get the trial key, and use the Wizard to create a virtual machine. Defaults to 8GB for Windows, which does seem sensible. When booting it, there will be an error (doh, Windows isn’t installed); fix this by popping the Windows XP CD into the SuperDrive and it’ll pick it up. Very smart. It takes about 40 minutes to install Windows XP, which does seem rather long.

VM -> Clone VM is something I think is a winner! I just made a pristine Windows XP install and if it needs to get blown away, I’ll have the actual VM image sitting around. However, it seems to have hung when I ran it. Redoing it seems to have made the clone. I can’t reproduce why it hung, however :-(

Another interesting feature is using full-screen guest OSes - the switching is very “fast user switching” like. I’m impressed. However, moving around from full-screen to not, and accidentally hitting the Expose button on the Mighty Mouse, renders all windows to resize in a way it feels like. There’s no defined behavior and its kind of annoying.

Some quick notes:

• Ctrl+Click isn’t right click anymore - its Shift+Ctrl+Click. Seems it conflicts with other applications and is possibly valid in Windows.
• The image format is nice. It doesn’t take 8GB of space up-front, but instead grows space conservatively as and when you use it.
• The .pvs file is a text file, and has a lot of configuration options.
• My network (wireless) beyond having a WEP key also has a MAC address authentication module. It however, by default, conflicts with my MBP’s MAC address when the WinXP guest wants to get access.