… and then I pulled myself together and released phpCF 0.2 into the wild. You may be wondering why you never saw a 0.1 release, but that’s because it was never released. But tonight I gave it the final work-over, wrote some documentation for it and - thanks to Steffie - decided NOT to write a DB configuration backend for it anyway, so now it runs with a single, very simple configuration file. Way better than a big, clumsy and useless configuration in a database. (There are more reasons, but I won’t get into them now.)

In case you’re wondering what phpCF is, then you’ve chosen the right paragraph to read. phpCF is a PHP class designed for scanning of e.g. blog-comments to determine whether they’re spam or not. phpCF only does the checking, assigns a score and compares it to the configured threshold. What to do if it’s spam is up to the one implementing it. Apart from doing a simple job in a simple way it’s also simple to implement. Simple, simple, simple… SIMPLE! Look at this example…

Also, I created a Freshmeat entry for phpCF and I hope that the server can stand the extra traffic, when phpCF hits the Freshmeat front page. If not, let me know.

This post is in response to http://www.aeris.dk/kommentar.php?id=754 [da], written by Anja [da], who’s wondering if the internet will exist in 10 years, how it will work and if it’s worth bothering to buy a couple of domain names for her children. An interesting question, so I thought I’d drop my 2 cents here…

I say, buy the domain names - the internet will definitely be around in 2015 and I’m pretty sure we’ll still be using domain names. I mean, if you look at the last 10 years of evolution of the internet a few things come to mind. Email hasn’t really changed much over the years - the protocols are still pretty much the same, only the clients have really been updated. IM has come around and has become very popular - still I prefer good old IRC over Jabber and MSN any day. I don’t really think that’s evolution - that’s just making a well-known concept more user friendly and taking credit for it. Then there’s P2P action - that’s a relatively new concept with the decentralized network and all - but file-sharing isn’t, people have been doing it via FTP for ages and are still doing it. VoIP is definitely a new thing, though it’s quite interesting that back then we used internet over the phone, now we phone over the internet. :-p MMORPG - the Massive Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games, they’re kind of new, but still, from 8-5 years ago I was (actively) playing a MUD (Multi-User Dimension/Dungeon) named The Two Towers and that’s definitely Multi-player, it’s Online and it’s RPG. Now they’ve just added graphics and made it more bacndwidth intensive. (I’m sticking to T2T, thank you.) ;-) Blogging is a relatively new phenomenon; at least, it’s a sort of new buzzword. People have been posting (un-)important stuff on their personal websites for ages, but now it’s become popular and everyone has to have one. Personally, I think it’s great - it’s making the web more personal.

In general I’ll say that the internet is evolving - but slowly. Compared to the innovations done in the hardware business, the internet seems to almost stand still. Of course, there has been upgrades in connection speed - I mean, seriously - 10 years ago, who had ever dreamed of a 2mbit pipe? (Yeah, I still dream about it…) And along with the speed new stuff is coming up - like the “rent and watch a movie over the net” services and other bandwidth intensive stuff. Personally I think it’s great … if you have the bandwidth. (There are 3rd world countries where you have to pay a fortune for a 28.8kbps connection.)

Last but not least, honorable mention goes to Google. They’ve really been making the way for some pretty cool and interesting “next generation” web-apps. Talk about making good use of HTML/JavaScript.

Did I forget anything? (I got out of bed like 30 minutes ago, so I’m still not really awake.) What do you think we’ll happen to the internet in the next 10 years?

Creativity both on the coding front and the artistic front.

First of all, I’ve been receiving a lot of comment spam lately - so I thought I’d revamp my spam checking system (I just counted the number of links before; if it was > 5, then the comment was blocked and the IP logged for potential blacklisting). The new system I’ve been hacking a little on is way more flexible and extensible - so it’ll be a lot easier to fight off spam later, if they find yet another way to spam me. If this turns out to be a success I might release it under the GPL, but I want to test it a little before deciding on it.

Secondly, I’ve been playing more with my tablet and now it works perfectly with Linux. Turned out that kernels 2.6.4 through 2.6.8 had some issues, so after upgrading to kernel 2.6.11 and recompiling mousedev.ko, evdev.ko and wacom.ko I finally got it working. (Thanks to the docs at the Linux Wacom Project and furrywolf from #debian.) So if you’re considering buying a tablet I can recommend the Wacom Volito (if you’re a beginner) - it’s cheap and it’s relatively easy to get working with Linux - just like the other Wacom tablets. Look them up on eBay - you can probably get a used one very cheap.

Oh yeah, bumped into this sign here in Århus - I can’t remember whether it was a hair dresser or some kind of shop. Also, take a look at this cake we made for a friends birthday.

Todays blog entry is handwritten (by me) - click on the thumbnail to read it! And yes, my handwriting actually does look that bad - and in that context - look at my drawing (and that’s traced!). *sigh*

If you want to learn Japanese I strongly recommend Takasugi Shinji’s Site and a couple of Japanese fonts of course.