Journal entries in 'Miscellaneous' for December, 2005

Bah, the comment spammers seem to have discovered my site. I've gotten about 20 spam comments in the last 24 hours. In frustration I wrote up a quick captcha feature for my comment submission form (Captchas are those images with the distorted text that you type in to prove you're a human), but now I'm not sure if I should use it. That puts the burden and inconvenience of preventing spam on the users, rather than on me, and that's not fair. Maybe I should just keep deleting them manually. Of course, 702 of the 891 comments on the site were left by users with BinRock accounts, so I guess I could just require captchas from anonymous users. That might be a good compromise.

Version 1.0 of the Ruby-based web development framework, Ruby On Rails, was released last week, which prompted me to revisit it. I'm very happy — they seem to have eliminated most of the complaints I had with it (mostly things like instability and inefficiency), and it now appears to be a perfectly usable development platform. Last time I tried it, back around version 0.12.1, it had some issues like deadlocking with 100% CPU usage when it encountered a syntax error in your code, and doing redundant things like saving all your objects in the database with every page load even if they weren't changed. Both of those are fixed now, along with pretty much all the other more minor gripes I had with it, so I think I'm ready to embrace it on BinRock.

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I've gotten really into the abominably-named Frou Frou, which I discovered on the Garden State soundtrack. I was interested in hearing more of their music, and it was suggested to me that I check out the solo albums put out by the singer, Imogen Heap. Now that's a name I can feel good about telling people I listen to.

So I found the album on Amazon and got ready to order, only to realize that the CD is copy protected.

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