Software

I run Drupal for this site, as well as some others hosted here. My #1 complaint about it is that the spam solutions in Drupal are ineffective and poorly-designed. The situation seems to have actually gotten a bit worse in the most recent versions of Drupal. Here are my complaints:

• No working support for captchas. (I had lots of problems with captcha.module)


• Spam filter is not very effective, despite being properly trained on huge volumes of spam. I get dozens, if not hundreds, of uncaught spam comments per day.


• The "mark as spam" button has no effect on some very large spams.


• There is no feedback to users whose comments have been marked as spam, indicating to them that the comment will be manually approved.


• There is no auto-expiry of spam comments; they sit in the database forever unless manual action is taken.


• Deleting spam comments -- which seems to be the way that people are encouraged to use the spam module -- requires: checking one checkbox per message, then selecting "delete", and repeating this for each page of the spam comment listings (it only puts a few dozen per page; I get about 15 pages worth in a slow day.) Even with some Mozilla toolbar help, this is a slow and cumbersome process.


• No "auto-delete" feature for spams referencing certain URLs.


• Poor recognition of &-sequences in HTML


• Nobody really maintains the spam filter


• Does nothing at all to stop trackback spam

So, my question is: what blogging software has good anti-spam capabilities?

Back when I used WordPress, I used the Captcha module for it, which worked well. (Its normal anti-spam capabilities didn't.) Drupal doesn't have a working Captcha module, and everything else is hugely labor-intensive.

Is there something better out there for Drupal anywhere?

I often get the impression that the authors of the spam module in Drupal get less than a dozen spams per day on their blogs. It simply doesn't scale to places that get hundreds of spams per day.

(Update: Drupal also isn't very responsive at addressing bugs...)

I got my first Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone this week, a Motorola v551. I've been playing with the Linux utilities for working with mobile phones and have assembled some links. Most of the pages out there seem focused on SMS features of a mobile, or using a mobile phone for Internet access for a Linux box. I'm interested in neither, and care more about phone book syncing and transferring files back and forth between the phone itself and a PC.

• Gentoo's Mobile phone and Bluetooth HOWTO


• Linux + Phone + Bluetooth, the best guide so far on getting the basics set up on the Linux side


• Gnokii, a very nice mobile phone tool


• KDE Bluetooth Framework looks great from the screenshots. I need to give it a try.


• moto4lin -- this looks like exactly what I need for my phone. I think I'll package it for Debian.

There seems to be quite a community built around hacking Motorola phones as well. The Hofo Guide is the authoritative resource.

HowardForums.Com is also a great site.

As seen on #haskell recently:

<Speck> "That's like cheating. It isn't even programming. You just tell it what to do and it does it." -- My friend upon seeing some Haskell code

<autrijus> Perl: "Easy things are easy, hard things are possible"
<autrijus> Haskell: "Hard things are easy, the impossible just happened"

I found a wonderful essay by Peter Norvig entitled Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years.

Peter Norvig has a wealth of insightful essays I'll probably be mentioning over the coming weeks.