Dale's Weblog

Just some stuff.

We’re now into the new year and it is about this time that I need to start thinking about my plans for the year.

Currently I am focusing on work, but more importantly going to uni. I spent another day yesterday having a last look at the two main uni I want to go to, UTS and UNSW. My first preference is Computer Science at UTS, then Computer Science at UNSW and then Computer Engineering back at UTS. Although I’m really hoping I get into my first choice.

UTS seems to have a better wireless network anyway! :p

They run their wireless unencrypted but use a IPsec tunnel into the network. When I sat down with my laptop I picked up 3 UTS access points, cool! :)

Anyway. On to another topic, my blog site.

As you can see there hasn’t been any changes and we’re now in to the new year. I wasn’t really expecting to have anything done by then. There has been some work on it and a basic site is running but there is still lots to do (no admin panel yet). I am going on holidays mid jan and will be taking my laptop to do some development work on it.

One section that needs work is trackback. Trackback is a really easy target for spammers has there is no protection on it what so ever. And because of the way it works you cannot add spam filtering to it until the data is in the database.

Photomatt has a post about it here: http://photomatt.net/2005/01/05/trackback-spam/
it also seems that stuart’s and josh’s site have been badly hit (add to that, so has matthews). Damnit!

This doesn’t look good. From what I can tell my site hasn’t been hit, although it wouldn’t be hard. It has the same protection (or lack of) as wordpress.

Trackback may have to be disabled altogether. Pingback is meant to be somewhat better but I haven’t looked much into it. None of my stuff supports it…

There are a few more things I want to talk about although I’ll but that into another post later.