Monica

I've been seeing more spam on my LJ entries than usual in recent weeks, but most of it is posted anonymously and gets auto-screened, so nobody else sees it. Two days ago I started getting the following message from LJ accounts that were presumably created just to post these comments (on, I assume, as many journals as possible as quickly as possible):

"Hey This is hard for me because I have never done anything like this.. but I have a huge crush on you. I have never been able to tell you for reasons which you would quickly identify as obvious if you knew who this was. I'm really attracted to you and I think you would be wanting to get with *Read FULL Card Here* [URL removed]"

These ones, coming from logged-in accounts, do show up (about 15 so far). I really don't want to have to start screening comments from people not on my subscription list; I prefer to be more open. (I didn't like having to screen the anonymous ones, but the spammers left me no choice.) I've been marking these as spam when I delete them, which blocks that particular LJ account from commenting on my journal again, but it would appear that creating bogus accounts is easy enough that the spammers don't care. This probably means that more-challenging captchas are in our future. (I struggle with them already.)

The pattern of attack is different, by the way. The anonymous spammers tend to latch onto the same three or four old posts to hit; this current wave is hitting random posts with, so far, no duplicates.

In semi-related news, I've seen no update on the journal-import problem over at Dreamwidth (entries come across fine, but comments don't). I've started to read regularly there in addition to here, so if you're there too and I haven't found you yet, please get in touch.

Update: I discovered that I can do something less severe than screening comments from non-friends: I can make them answer a captcha. Sorry, legitimate non-friends, but I'm going to see if this deters the bots.

Update #2: The captcha doesn't seem to be slowing them down, so either the spammers are humans, the spam-bots are good at captchas, or... the setting isn't working. Could somebody do me a favor? I'd like somebody who is not on my friends list to post a comment (while signed in, not anonymous) here and tell me if you got a captcha. Thanks!

I'm typing this from my new Android tablet -- an ASUS Transformer with keyboard dock. It's quite spiffy! (And a well-timed gift, as I was still cogitating over my dead iBook.)

It works well as a tablet -- nice display, the apps work the way I expect, and it didn't take too long to figure out some of the interface quirks (which may be real or may be signs that I've used an iPad). The on-screen keyboard is "fat"; I don't know how else to describe it, but it works (and, not surprisingly, with better accuracy than my phone). The hardware keyboard is of course smaller than a conventional one, so currently I'm making lots of typos but I'm touch-typing. The keys are closer together than I'm used to and it feels like I'm hitting them harder than I'm used to, particularly the keys toward the edges (that are less likely to be struck "straight on"). I'm still faster with the hardware keyboard than the on-screen one, though, and it doesn't take up half the screen. So, bottom line, when I want to do extensive typing I can slip it into the dock, and otherwise its a nice 10" tablet.

Please feel free to tell me about all your favorite Android apps. I have an Android phone so I know a few, but tablets and phones are different.

Good news: somebody has ported emacs to Android and it's in the store (free). Bad news: it seg-faults for me on start. It's a known problem but the suggested work-around didn't for me. I've contacted the author.

The dock provides a USB port and there's a file-browser app. This is very promising.

How in the world do I get the Google+ web site to let me use the regular, not mobile, site? I know there's an app but I don't like it; the web site is just fine with the real-estate available on a tablet. But when I try to use it it forces me into the mobile version, which isn't as good. (Not as bad as the app, but not as good as it could be.)

The previous paragraph might describe a specific symptom of a more-general problem. General solutions also welcome. :-) (Stack Exchange, by way of contrast, uses the mobile site on my phone but the regular one on the tablet, so it's not as simple as checking for mobile devices.)

There are two browsers pre-installed, "browser" and Chrome. I wonder why. I wonder what "browser" is.

LJ oddity: I'm typing this using the (regular) web site, not an app, and when typing this text is a smaller variable-width font. When focus is elsewhere (like when I typed the tags), it changes to a larger fixed-width font (Courier, I assume). I want that all the time! (This is the HTML editor, not the rich-text one.)

I'm not very good at finger-based cursor placement yet. I wonder what typos Ive introduced while editing. :-)

More to come as I use it more, I'm sure.

Just curious: where was my recent SCA post linked? And if any of my recent flurry of new visitors are reading this, hello and welcome y'all. :-)

(I'm aware of one link in a locked post. That doesn't account for all the traffic.)

They changed the style for the individual-entry pages. The big thing everyone is complaining about is the new comment interface; that's butt-ugly too, but my real problem is that they shrank the font for everything. Browser zoom zooms the whole page (hello horizontal scrolling) and just isn't practical -- if I set a higher zoom for LJ it'll affect all my pages and things like profiles and help requests will be affected too. Ditto for Stylish; I don't know how to have it affect all and only individual entries.

Assuming that they're going to punt on my request to put it back (they usually punt on accessibility requests in my experience), could anyone reading this possibly, pretty please, write me a Greasemonkey script (or Stylish script, if you can figure out how) to put it back the way it was, or suggest some other browser customization that'll do it? Or an LJ style? (They claim they'll offer one in the future, but who knows how long?) I still have some old-style LJ pages in browser tabs so I'll harvest the source for one of them.

Big accessibility fail, LJ! Stop with the assumption that everybody in the world has 20/20 vision please.

This was a really productive Yom Kippur, from the robo-call on the answering machine Friday afternoon about lashon hara (yeah, really) through Kol Nidrei last night and the whole day today. Parts of the liturgy newly resonated with me, I heard two excellent sermons (maybe more on that later), and the new morning service was a rousing success.

On that last: I was expecting 30-40 people, basically the minyan regulars minus some who'd said they wanted to be in the sanctuary, plus some curious others. We had 80 and had to send out for more prayerbooks twice. The room seats about 100; we may be in trouble next year. Lots of people complimented me on it and my rabbi said many kind things about me for organizing it. We had my rabbi for the first hour and had lots of spirited singing, just like in the minyan. We had only expected to have him for half an hour, so plans about timing went out the window, but it was obvious that he really wanted to be there and of course everybody wanted him to be there, so I think we need to see if we can make that easier next year -- maybe start half an hour earlier? Because of the extra time we spent in the opening section we had to rush to try to catch up with the sanctuary service -- which was complicated by the fact that they were making up for a late start by adjusting and ended up running early. So while we had intended to enter the sanctuary at the beginning of the torah service, we actually missed the first few aliyot. Oops. We'll do better next year.

Even with the responsibility of running things -- it can be challenging to really pray when you're also responsible for watching the clock and tracking the people who might need extra page cues and signaling to your assistant leaders about changes to make and so on -- I was able to really engage with this service, and it was a great way to start a day spent in the synagogue. This ended up being even better than just switching the two morning sanctuary services (my original request) would have been; the new service had a much higher lowest common denominator, in terms of fluency, and that's huge. I carried the high from this service through most of the rest of the day. (My mind always wanders during Yizkor, which is more about the dreary English readings in our machzor than it is about Yizkor itself, but the rest was good.)

I read torah at the afternoon service. I didn't manage to learn the special high-holy-day trope this year either, either for Rosh Hashana or for Yom Kippur (I read on both). Someday... (Nobody else uses it, but I want to try -- and maybe start a trend.)

( fast notes )

OT: LiveJournal could go back to the fixed-width, larger font in the main part of the "post" page any time now, ahem. Yes, I filed a bug report. (I compose in emacs and paste in, but it's still a pain to do edits like the addition of this paragraph.)

We have joined the ranks of the smartphone-enabled. We had been Verizon customers and the Droid Bionic looked tempting on specs, but we ended up going across the street to T-Mobile (it seems safe now that AT&T is unlikely to buy them), where they're selling an all-you-can-eat plan for less than Verizon's metered plans and the staff were very helpful besides. (By comparison, I was only able to use a dummy Bionic at Verizon and the sales guy didn't seem to understand my need to use the phone before deciding.)

We were both having trouble with the touch keyboard; I assume that's something you just have to learn to do. So we both chose the MyTouch Slide (4G), which also has a physical keyboard that we were both able to use easily. I'll try to transition more to the touch keyboard, but meanwhile I can still complete a Google search or type a text message or the like on the first try when I need to.

(In case you're wondering, Dani decided that if he really really wants the iPhone 5 when it eventually comes out, he can buy an unlocked one and switch over to it.)

So what apps are must-haves? (Android 2.3.)

Edit: How do y'all post to LJ from your phones? I downloaded both "Livejournal" and "LJ Beetle"; in both cases I could figure out how to compose a post just fine, but could not find anything like a "post" or "send" button. Once I've got a buffer to send, what then?

Pennsic was good this year; more about that later. Meanwhile, I haven't seen LJ since a week ago Wednesday and catching up will be sporadic, so if there's something you want me to see, please let me know.

I noticed that while I was gone somebody in the Netherlands fetched the last several hundred entries of my journal (possibly more) in the span of a few minutes. Was there another DDoS attack? Do I have a new fan who wants his very own copy of everything I've written here? (If so, hi. :-) )

I submitted the d'var torah I wrote last year on this week's portion to the Reform Judaism blog and they published it today. I enjoy reading the RJ blog, which is syndicated to LJ here: reform_judaism.

In the last month or so I've seen a large increase in the number of spam comments I get. (That's why I had to set anonymous comments to be screened, though it delays some legitimate comments.) I understand that this has been happening all over LJ. What puzzles me is why a majority of my spam comments have targeted this short, older entry on an obscure topic -- but an entry that is not so complete or keyword-laden to be clearly the definitive web page on the topic or anything like that. I mean, what search produces that page as a top candidate, and why would spammers selling dating services and shoes and Viagra care about those search terms? I just don't get it; what's so special about that one among my 3000+ journal entries?

Neat visualization #1: the scale of the universe, showing how big (and small) things are. Link from filkerdave.

Ooh, pretty: when Planet Earth looks like art. Link from browngirl.

Overheard at work: "Every time a developer cries, a tester gets his horns".

Neat visualization #2, from a coworker: 200 counteries, 200 years, 4 minutes.

I had sometimes wondered what the point of bots was -- what does somebody get out of creating bogus LJ accounts just to add and remove friends? (At least when they post nonsense comments they might be testing security for when the spam comes later.) Bots on Livejournal explored helps answer that question. Link from alienor.

Graph paper on demand (other types too). Thanks, loosecanon; I can never find the right size graph paper lying around when I need it.

A handy tool: bandwidth meter, because the router reports theoretical, not actual, connection speed.

And a request for links (or other input): does anybody have midrash or torah commentary on the light of creation (meaning the light of that first day)? I have the couple passasges from B'reishit Rabbah quoted in Sefer Ha-Aggadah and I have the Rashi; any other biggies? I was asked to teach a segment of a class in a few days.

Since about 30 seconds after LJ announced the tagging feature I have been wanting boolean search for tags, so that I could find entries tagged A and (B or C) or the like. This has never been possible.

Today in news they announced that you can search for entries with two tags (specifically two) using the following syntax:

http://username.livejournal.com/tag/tag1,tag2?mode=and

(Substitute for username, tag1, and tag2, of course.)

That's great. This will help. But I can't help wondering... why this implementation? I tried it with three tags; it took the first two and ignored the third. I tried mode=or; didn't work. I assume from this interface that they'll be extending this to support the latter; it makes sense to introduce a "mode" argument now and support other options later. But what kind of implementation limits the parameters to two? I'm trying to imagine the design that produced this result and seemed like a good idea to the dev team, and I'm coming up blank. (Yes, I know LJ is open-source so theoretically I could go look. I don't care that much.) Isn't it just as easy to process arg1,arg2,...argn as to parse arg1,arg2?

So yay for the beginnings of expressive tagging, but I do hope more is coming.

15 most strange buildings in the world is bizarre. While it's not the strangest, I am fond of the library that looks like a shelf full of books.

Dani's comfort foods include shepherd's pie, which was not part of my upbringing. I've made the version from Cooking for Engineers a couple times, substituting margarine for the butter because of kashrut and beef for the lamb because of availability, but he says it's not quite right. I asked him to do some searching and he reports that everything that looks right involves milk or cheese, which is of course a problem. Do any of my kosher or lactose-intolerant readers have a favorite recipe?

A friend recently burned DVDs from some treasured old videotapes, but our DVD player won't play them. (The computers will.) Google tells me that this is a common problem, especially with older players. There are the competing standards of DVD+R and DVD-R; the documentation for our player mentions neither by name. (These discs are DVD+R.) This happened once before and I assumed a bad disc; now I suspect the problem is the player. We bought our DVD player, a region-free Sampo, when the first season of The West Wing was released in the UK, which was apparently 2002.

I could get this video adapter for my iBook for $19. There might be other benefits to that too, though streaming Hulu might not be one of them (video seems jumpy). Or it appears that region-free DVDs have come way down in price, so maybe we should replace our player. Maybe with this ($58 and I've heard of the manufacturer) or this ($40, no reviews, and never heard of the maker). These are the results of half an hour of surfing; if anyone reading this has opinions, I'd love to hear 'em.

Recently I've seen a few "bot" LJ accounts go by -- users that seem to subscribe to people at random but don't do anything else (so they're not, say, making harrassing comments), and then the accounts get nuked. The last one I got was Russian, as I gather many are. I don't really care if such accounts show up as subscribers, but I find myself wondering two things: what do they get out of it, and why do some folks get upset enough to get the accounts suspended? What am I missing?