OK, filial duties are all taken care of, so I’m back, with a brutal pile of work to get cracking on.

Oh, and sometime this week we’ll have a new arrival here:

He’s a rescued English Springer Spaniel, 13 weeks old. Currently, his name is Webster, but we’ll probably rename him Macchiato (Mac for short – who says I don’t have a sense of irony?).

… More details about English Springer Rescue America.

Mom’s in town for a visit, so I’ll be playing tour guide and dutiful son for the next few days.

Talk amongst yourselves.

Based on feedback from you, my dear readers, I tweaked the fonts to make more of a separation between headings and text. I’m not going to add a logo anytime soon, but I did change the banner at the top to “logoize” it a bit. Thanks for the many comments. I’m very happy with the way this has turned out!

In the midst of a post about Microsoft’s new viral marketing campaign for Windows Vista (which I wrote about last night), Dwight Silverman tosses off this aside: 

Whether [the Demetri Martin campaign] will be enough to get consumers to pony up the bucks for a Vista upgrade, and once they have it, make them forget such irritants as the User Account Control and the Software Protection Program, remains to be seen.

I just want to go on the record here with my thoughts that these two features should not be mentioned in the same breath. UAC is without a doubt a feature that was designed to provide a benefit to Windows users. We can quibble about the way it works, but not about the goals behind it.

SPP, on the other hand, is the successor to Windows Genuine Advantage. Both initiatives have in common a reliance on Orwellian language that appears to be in the customer’s benefit but is actually a horrible inconvenience and potentially a nightmare. Despite Microsoft’s attempts to spin the new program, there’s no advantage for the Windows customer, and the only thing being protected is Microsoft’s revenue stream.

By definition, security measures like UAC are inconvenient. But SPP goes beyond being an irritant.

OK, rant over. Sorry to pick on a single offhand remark, Dwight.

If anyone’s looking for a Tablet PC at a bargain price, ping me. I have a 2003-vintage Toshiba Portege 3500 that’s looking for a new home. It’s been upgraded to a full 1GB of RAM and has a 100GB hard drive. It’s running on a 1.3GHz Pentium 3.

It’s running Windows XP Tablet PC edition. Although you could probably install Vista on it with a lot of work, I don’t recommend it.

Anyone who knows this machine knows it’s a small and very light workhorse. I’ll negotiate a very fair price for the right person.

E-mail me (ed-blog AT bott DOT com) if you’re interested.

It’s gone.

The last time I mentioned Spam Karma 2 was on April 4, 2006. In the previous six months, it had successfully deflected 19,003 attempts to post comment spam to this site.

Today, almost exactly six months later, I checked the SK2 stats again. This time, the numbers were more sobering.

That’s not a typo. If the pace of the last six months continue, this site will have been subjected to more than 1 million attempts to post comment spam before the year is over. On average, I get a few hundred comment spam attempts every day, compared to a handful of legitimate comments. (For an explanation of why people do this, see this Wikipedia article.)

Ugh. I’ve decided, in the interest of sanity, to close comments on all posts more than 60 days old. I may consider re-opening some older posts if they seem to be alive, but this should make a big dent in the problem and make my web hosting company much happier.

… OK, comments for most older posts are open again, thanks to a new plugin that should stop most stupid spambots. Let me know if you try to comment and are unable to do so (send a message to ed-blog AT bott DOT com).

… And after just a few days with the new regimen, the difference is profound. Spambots are now being blocked before they have a chance to post, thanks to an awesome plugin called Comments Post Rewriter, which uses a clever little bit of JavaScript to redirect the Submit button to a special URL and block any post that tries to access the comment submit script directly. Spam Karma now deals with the small number that sneak past, which is about two orders of magnitude smaller than before.

Oh, and sorry for you folks with live.com in your URL. For a day or two the filters were blacklisting that domain incorrectly. Should be fixed now.

I decided to update the template for this site while I was at it. I think it’s more readable than before. Comments?

I’m upgrading to WordPress 2.0 this afternoon. It may cause some brief problems with site navigation. Hopefully all should be cleared up quickly. Let me know (e-mail to ed-blog AT bott DOT com) if you see anything out of the ordinary.

Just testing image insert capabilities. You can subscribe to this site’s RSS feed here:

Update: All done.

Katy is 10 years old today.

Wish her a happy birthday, won’t you?

Ziff Davis Media publishes a bunch of print magazine (including PC Magazine). Its sister company, Ziff Davis Internet, runs sites like Microsoft Watch and ExtremeTech. I work for a site called ZDNet. Both companies have ZD in their name, so they must be related, right?

Wrong.

Stephen Howard-Sarin, a VP at ZDNet and an 18-year veteran of this wacky industry, explains how it all started, many years ago:

Ziff Davis started an online division called ZDNet. Ziff Davis started a cable TV operation called ZDTV.

Ziff Davis split up. The magazine group kept the name. ZDNet was sold to CNET. ZDTV was rebranded TechTV (and later sold to G4).

Confusingly, many people through the years have worked for both companies. I was an editor at Ziff Davis’ PC Computing for nearly 10 years. I worked for TechRepublic before it was owned by CNET. Folks like Dan Farber and David Berlind and now Mary Jo Foley all worked at Ziff Davis back in the day and are now affiliated with ZDNet, part of CNET Networks, Inc.

It’s a tribute to the late Bill Ziff that the equity in his name is worth so much that none of these companies have given it up.