Blue Sky On Mars

Over the past few days, I’ve gotten blasted by a bunch of trackback spam. Comment spam has been all but nonexistent since I installed James Seng’s SCode plugin. The new round of trackback spam enticed me to check out whether there had been updates to the popular MT-Blacklist plugin. There had been, so I installed the update.

Bam! I got a slew of new comment spam. I found it hard to believe that a human being would have entered all of that spam. So, I tested out my SCode plugin. I had forgotten that you have to add a small hack to the MT-Blacklist plugin to use it with SCode. Woops. I updated SCode, readding the hack in and should now be comment spam free again.

One plus, was that I discovered that James Seng has a clever solution for trackback spam. It double checks that the trackback is coming from the same server that the ping refers to. It’s not perfect, and will shut out some reasonable pings… but, there’s only so much time I want to devote to cleaning up trackbacks. (MT-Blacklist does a great job of that, but I’d rather not even deal with it.)

I’m pretty sure that Mac Mini: The Emperor’s New Computer, a review of Apple’s new machine, is a joke. Or, rather, I’m positive it’s a joke, but I think it is an intentional one. Check out these howlers:

While the hardware is about roughly equivalent to a Windows PC circa 1995, what got me interested were Apple’s claims about its size, weight and footprint.

I recently retired my 1995 machine which had been doing Linux fileserving duties most recently. It was a Pentium 133 with 32MB of RAM. At this point, I thought the guy was just exaggerating. With the next sentence, I thought the guy wasn’t paying attention.

If you believe Apple’s marketing department, the new Mini is “smaller than most packs of gum” and weighs “less than four quarters”.

Having watched the MacWorld keynote, I recognized this as the description of the iPod Shuffle, not the Mac mini. To be sure, there’s a big difference in size between those two. The complaints that followed about the lack of serial ports, parallel ports and floppy drives started me down the track of thinking this article was out for laughs. I knew it for sure, though, here:

This is where the first noticeable problem with Apple design arises. While there is a Mac-style “donnnnggggg” when the Mini is first turned on, during normal operation the unit makes no sound whatsoever. This could make it very difficult for a novice user to know whether or not the computer is on.

Now that I was finally in on the joke, the article just gets funnier.

For example, there is no Outlook Express for email, but Apple includes a program called Mail, which is like a stripped-down email client that can’t execute scripts or open attachments without user intervention.

Gotta love that conclusion:

So is the mini a maxi value? For me, clearly, no. When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware–none of which are available for the Mac platform–it doesn’t make sense for me to “switch” to a Mac at this time.

This review is actually a dig at Windows in the guise of a bad review of the Mac Mini! Good job! I wish I had thought of that.
I came to DivisionTwo by a direct link to the article above. Going in by the front page, you can see that they’re all about funny fake geek stories. I hadn’t been aware of that, which made the article that much more entertaining. But, now the surprise is ruined, alas…