Rob Ferrer’s Thoughts and Writings

I’ve recently noticed in my logs lots of visits to my posts from a Microsoft IP block (the last one was 65.55.109.226), supposedly with a referrer of http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=[random keyword]&form=QBHP .

My posts never appear on the search results page, in fact some keywords are completely irrelevant.

The visits even show up in my Woopra log, which means the bots must support JavaScript. Annoyingly due the the low volume of visits to my site, this is really throwing off my statistics. In particular, because the bot is reporting a screen resolution of 800×600, my total stats show 14% of visitors have that resolution (which clearly isn’t accurate).

I found this post on Blogboing (and this older one), and this fuller explanation (including instructions on how to block it), which partially explains them, but the Microsoft response is clearly rubbish. As far as I’m concerned, this is just referrer spam, and another reason not to use Live Search!

I don’t think I’ll block them for now, but may do if it continues.

Any regular readers (although I don’t think I actually have any!) of this blog will notice I recently changed the theme to the fantastic Freshy 2 theme from Jide.fr. Together with the customise plugin it’s a great theme with many great features, including support for the Gravatar plugin.

Unfortunately as of version 2.0.6 there’s a very small error in the way the Gravatar function is implemented, which means the Gravatars aren’t displayed properly (and in fact it means commenter’s email addresses are displayed in the source).

Luckily the fix is very simple. You need to edit the file comments.php (using the theme editor or your favourite method), and find the following section (around line 37)(sorry about the indentation - Wordpress insists on removing it!):

<?php // gravatars
if (function_exists('gravatar')) {
if ('' == $comment->comment_type) {
echo '<img class="avatar" src="';
gravatar($comment->comment_author_email);
echo ‘” alt=”‘.$comment->comment_author.’” width=”40″ height=”40″ />’;
} elseif ( (’trackback’ == $comment->comment_type) || (’pingback’ == $comment->comment_type) ) {
echo ‘<img class=”avatar” src=”‘;
gravatar($comment->comment_author_url);
echo ‘” alt=”‘.$comment->comment_author.’” width=”40″ height=”40″ />’;
}
} else {
//echo ‘<img class=”avatar” src=”‘.get_bloginfo(’stylesheet_directory’).’/images/default_avatar.png” alt=”‘.$comment->comment_author.’” width=”40″ height=”40″ />’;
}
?>

And you need to change the two gravatar() function calls to look like this (remove the paramters):

gravatar();

If you prefer you can download a fixed comments.php to replace you existing one here:

coments.php.zip

These changes actually make a lot of the code redundant, as it’s not possible to display a Gravatar for a trackback (there is no email address)

Make the above changes and you should be able to see Gravatars for all your visitors!

I also note, it looks that as of Wordpress v2.5, that gravatar support is built in. Note, if you use thisthe get_avatar() function does require the email address of the user as a parameter!

I wrote last Tuesday that My Search Funds (the site that pays you for your web searches) was to become Homepages Friends. This change took place yesterday.

The biggest change is that Yahoo is now used for the searches. I haven’t done enough searches to be able to judge the quality of the results, but I doubt they are as good as Google. I would guess the cashback per search is likely to be similar though.

The other change is to the “personal homepage”. As well as the main search box, there are tabs for “My Gadgets”, “My Shops”, “My Bookmarks” and “My Blog”. None of these are functional yet, but they seem to be aiming at an iGoogle sort of service.

Interestingly, despite them quoting the domain homepagesfriends.com in their logo, the domain they are using is myhpf.co.uk!

Sign up here and take a look, and start earning. I’ve accumulated over £30 so far, and am close to £20 “past 45 days” threshold I need for my first payment!

Why is it that delivery people find it so hard to use doorbells? You’d have thought they would be more experienced than most, but they seem incapable of pressing that little button. Maybe it’s something missing from their basic training.

I suppose they are too used to doorbells not working, but surely people wouldn’t bother installing doorbells if they didn’t have a use for one. Why not knock and ring?

The reason this is such an annoyance for me is that I work from home in a log cabin at the bottom of the garden. This means I can’t hear anyone knocking on the door, which is why I installed a wireless doorbell. I’ve missed a lot of deliveries because of their fear of bells. Citylink seem to be the worst offenders, but I missed one from Royal Mail today.

I think I need to get myself a “Please Ring” sign, but I am reluctant to have to put up instructions for such a simple device. Maybe something like these from Dave Gorman’s Flickr set:

(see also this Flickr Group)

My Search Funds announced today in an email to their users (or at least me) that they are to become Homepages Friends. It seems they are moving away from just paid searches, to add more cashback services (like their existing eBay cashback).

One downside is that they are moving away from Google to use Yahoo as their search provider. It looks like they are hoping to add more Yahoo services to Homepages Friends in the future. Maybe we will see a service that pays you to check your mail?

The Homepages Friends domain (homepagesfriends.com according to the logo in the email) isn’t active yet, although similar domains redirect to www.whitedotbox.com which seems to be the same organisation and offers search income to sports clubs etc.

They promise changes over the next few days, in the meantime we can get paid to use Google.

I hope this continues to be a good service - I have over £30 accumulated so far!

[Update 2008-06-09:] The changeover has taken place - see my new post.

I was enjoying my lie in on Saturday morning when I was rudely awaken at 07:30 by the sound of a lawn mower coming from the front of our house. The strange thing is we don’t have any neighbours with a front lawn.

I looked out of the window to see someone cutting our neighbours hedge with a Flymo lawnmower! Sorry about the photo quality - I only had my phone on me and just snapped a quick pic (click for larger).

Not exactly the right tool for the job, but to be fair to him, the finished result was ok!

Our main problem with it was we were woken up before 8 on a Saturday morning - Abby was not happy at all!

Disclaimer: I went to university with Natalie who owns Photolate.com, and had a sneak preview, but this is still an honest review.

Photolate.com (short for Photo Manipulation) is a new service that offers professional photo retouching for your own photos. The homepage is bright and cheerful and clearly shows what they offer with the simple claim “We retouch everyday photos”. The three packages “Natural”, “Rejuvenate”, and “Party Glam” start at just £4 per photo (£5 for Party Glam) and are described well with plenty of “Before and After” examples. They also offer addons for just £1.50

All packages offer basics like red-eye removal, colour and exposure correction, and blemish removal, as well as many more. Add ons offer to change eye colour, straighten teeth, blur the background or a bespoke add on which lets you ask them to do anything (although I’m sure there are limits?)!

I decided to try the service out with a photo and Abby and I at the Hofbräuhaus in Munich last year. As you can see, in the original we both have redeye, I have spots, and I’m very red (click for larger).

To place an order you must first sign up for an account. This is a pretty easy pain-free process (although you have to wait for a confirmation email), and once you have signed in to you new account you need to upload your photos. When I placed my order this was through a standard upload form, but now it’s been replaced with a fancy flash multi-file upload thingy - it seems to work very nicely. The size limit (when I ordered) was 10MB, which should be no problem for most resolutions.

Once uploaded, you’re shown thumbnails of your photos. These aren’t very good quality, but they’re good enough to chose your photo. Select your photo and you’re given the choice of which package to apply to your picture. If you can’t remember which is which, a handy help popup is provided to remind you - with more examples. You can also add any of the addons to your order.

I went for the Natural Package, with a bespoke treatment to get rid of the bandages on my fingers.

From here it’s very much like any other online shop: add to basket and checkout. At the checkout there’s a handy ’special instructions’ box to tell them what you would or wouldn’t like retouching (this is where I specified I wanted the bandages removing). Payment is made through Paypal (which I don’t personally like, but it is widely trusted, and ideal for a startup such as this).

They claim to retouch your photos (all by a real person) within 48 hours. I had to wait longer than this, but when I chased it up I got a prompt reply saying she wasn’t happy with the results so had to get it re-done. Quality control is certainly a good reason for a delay, and I am pretty confident this is just a teething problem.

A short while later I got an email telling me my photo was ready (”You`ve been photolated!”). I logged in to my account and downloaded the photo from the “My Orders” page. They only store the finished products for 2 weeks, so you have to make sure you are able to “collect” your order within this time. The finished result is below (click for larger):

My first reaction was “That’s not been retouched”, but that’s the whole point of the natural package - a natural look! The red-eye has been removed (on both of us and the random guy behind). My complexion is much improved, and the overall colour balance is better. The bandages on my fingers have been expertly removed. I still look slightly red, but I’d been in the sun, and I would probably look too strange pale or artificially brown.

Technically, the photo was the same resolution (2MP - this was taken on my old camera), and the EXIF data had been retained. The image was actually less compressed, although obviously this wouldn’t ‘bring back’ information lost in my camera’s original compression.

Here are some before and after closeups at full resolution (click for larger):

Overall a pretty good service at an amazing price. A few teething problems but they’re improving bits all the time. I would highly recommend this service.

Photolate are currently offering a limited offer of a free retouched photo for a limited time only (not sure how long for), so you’ve got no excuse not to try them out (enter free0805R at the checkout).

I wanted to be able to use the fantastic My Search Funds from my Google Homepage (iGoogle), so I decided to try my hands at creating my first Google Gadget.

It simply adds a My Search Funds search box to your iGoogle page. You can add the Google Gadget using the button below:

For those who don’t know, My Search Funds is a site that lets you earn a percentage of advertising revenue from your every day web searches. Currently the site uses Google, but they are developing their own aggregate search engine. You earn around 2 to 2.5p per search. Sign up here.

Disclaimer: We are resellers for Death2Spam, so I have a potential interest in recommending it, however, we became resellers because we like the service!

For years I had just accepted the ever increasing amount of spam delivered to my mailbox every day. My email address is at the top of every page on the company website and as such harvested by every spambot out there, but I’m not going to remove it - I’d rather ensure every (potential) customer finds it easy to contact me than reduce spam by removing or obfuscating my email address.

We use DNSBLs at the server to reject mail from known spamming servers, but it is hard to get the balance right between blocking spammers, and not blocking legitimate users. False-positives are not an option, especially considering our mail server hosts our customer’s email as well as our own in house.

DNSBLs block quite a few junk mails, but personally I was getting over 100 junk mails per day.

I used the standard Junk Mail Controls in Thunderbird, and that cut out quite a few more, but I was left with quite a lot I had to deal with manually.

I looked in to installing SpamAssassin onto the server, but decided against it for various reasons:

• It was important that junk emails were rejected during the SMTP conversation so that senders knew their mail was rejected, but we did not produce any backscatter. It looked like at the very least this was going to be difficult to implement, and cause the SMTP connection to be too long.
• I needed to offer users a way to customise the sensitivity level. Again, this wasn’t going to be trivial.
• The risk of false positives was too great - it wouldn’t be easy to let users recover email rejected as junk.

I decided to abandon SpamAssassin as it didn’t seem quite right for our needs.

After a bit of reading, I decided to try SpamBayes (with the ThunderBayes plugin which is no longer supported) - a great client side solution. With a bit of training this cut out a large proportion of junk - much better than the Thunderbird built in filter, and virtually no false positives. It did however take a while to process my mail each morning, and of course being a client side solution meant that if checking my mail using webmail or on my phone, I still had to wade through all the Spam.

A request from a customer prompted me to again look at server-side solutions. I discovered Death2Spam through the SpamBayes site (listed as a ’similar project’), and contacted them for details.

Death2Spam works in a similar way to SpamBayes - it scores each email based on content and headers, and categorises it as ‘good’ ’spam’ or ‘unsure’. Users can (and should) recategorise the emails to train the system
. Greylisting is also used, which can cause a delay on certain initial mails from obscure senders, but does a very good job.

The great thing about to Death2Spam is that is it works independently of your existing mail server, and client. It is essentially an smtp proxy, and rejects emails marked as spam during the SMTP conversation (as well as storing a copy), and only the ‘good’ (and ‘unsure’) emails are delivered to your mailbox. This means however you read your mail: webmail, desktop client or mobile, your mailbox will be spam free.

After a bit of training (using their easy web-based control panel), excellent statistics can be achieved. Mine is currently quoted at 98.8% accuracy. The number of spams being sent also seems to be going down (In the first full week of using it I had 2989 spam, total emails 3128, The most recent full week I had 128 spam, total 245). I am assuming spammers eventually remove addresses off their lists when mails are rejected.

The cost of D2S is £27 per user, per year. This may seem like a lot, but consider how much time is saved not having to go through hundreds of junk emails each day. They offer a one month free trial, which is well worth trying out. See more details on Death2Spam and the free trial here.

Our Wii Fit arrived yesterday! We found one in stock at Dixons, using the great Wii Fit Stock finder (you have to be quick off the mark, but can normally find one if you persist - actually as I write Tesco.com have them in stock and they’re £5 cheaper than most other places!). It arrived pretty quickly - much quicker than the promised 5 working days.

We have only had one evening using it, but here’s my experience so far.

The first thing it does is talk you though everything, which can be a bit annoying (an animated Wii Balance board starts talking to you!), but it’s only for the setup. You select a Mii to represent you, and enter your height, and Date of Birth.

Next, you stand on the Balance Board for a little while and it measures your weight and centre of gravity. Apparently a central COG means you are fitter! From your weight it also measures your Body Mass Index (BMI).

I discovered a) I am overweight, and b) My centre of gravity isn’t as good as it could be. It also told me my Wii Fitness Age, which was about 10 years older than my real age - not good. You can also set yourself a target weight, and a date to reach it. Nicely, it warns you if your target means you will need to loose weight too rapidly, and suggests you change it (I did). The idea is you re-do this test daily so it can chart your progress.

Next is the fun part - the training. This can be done at any time, and is the ‘game’ part of it. This is split into 4 sections:

Yoga Poses

Yoga poses are exactly that - yoga poses. I wondered what the point of using Wii Fit to do yoga would be, but it’s quite nice because when you are in the pose, it encourages you to keep your balance on the board by showing a dot you have to keep inside the circle. It then gives you a score based on how little the dot moves.

Some of the poses are simplified (for example the Sun Salutation) only has stages that keep your feet in the same place (who’d have thought I actually knew something about yoga eh!?).

Four poses are available to you to start with, and more appear as you train more (one more was unlocked for me). All are demonstrated pretty well by an animated trainer, and other sounds and animations encourage you to breath with a good rhythm.

Muscle Workouts

I didn’t do many of these, but they are things like press-ups and twists. They are also demonstrated by an animated trainer. The twists I did seemed easy, but the press-ups were much harder (although I got a good score!).

Aerobic

This is where it starts to get a bit more fun. It includes things like hula hoops, step aerobics and jogging.

The hula was quite fun, and tiring, although Abby struggled to keep the hoops going. Do it enough and you get a more advanced version (I was too tired by the time it appeared though).

Step aerobics was ok, but didn’t really get my heart racing - it’s a bit like a dance may game where you step on and off the board to the beat.

I didn’t really get on with jogging. This doesn’t use the balance board, but instead measures your speed from the Wii Remote which you are meant to put in your pocket. This didn’t seem very accurate and the speed kept changing even when jogging at a fairly constant speed.

Balance

These activities are all based on shifting your weight on the board to control the game. I was generally pretty bad at these - I struggled to move the weight anywhere but centred, or all the way in one direction or the other. I don’t think this is a fault of the games, as the idea is to train you to get better. They all seemed pretty good fun and will hopefully get better as I get more skilled!!

The time spent on all activities is stored in a graph so you can keep track of your progress. Another nice thing I liked is that you can add activities you’ve done outside the Wii Fit training on to the graph so it encourages you to train generally, not just spend all day playing on the Wii.

Overall first impressions are pretty good. One downside I haven’t mentioned is that if you have your location set as the UK then all measurements are in imperial, and there’s no way to change this. A minor point, but annoying as I work in metric most of the time.