Something I do regularly on my site but neglected to run on the other sites is running a SQL to delete the comments marked as spam in the comments table.

Instructions:

Open up PHPMyAdmin. After selecting your DB on the left click “SQL”,

The SQL to enter should be,

DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_approved` = ’spam’

If you’re like me I and changed the default table prefix (highlighted above) from wp_  just change the SQL with the correct prefix for your table.

Then click “GO”.

After you’ll be greeted with this informational dialog. 43K comments is ridiculous and will slow down your db.

You’re not done yet, click structure and optimize your tables to get rid of the overhead.

After reading all of Duncan’s and Matt’s comments I had to throw my two-cents in,

Duncan: I don’t see your point. You mention that Matt can’t have it both ways but by writing this article and placing *your* issues into a “gray area” you’re rewarding your terms with two-ways to lean; neither for or against, making you’re actually opinion irrelevant. And isn’t this just an opinion piece? I don’t see any facts–that are correct–, it’s all lambasting for self-promotion, similar to your friends at Vallywag.

No matter how many times you’ll be told that your statements are false and irrational you’ll always be clinging to that “gray area” message.

In your response to the question you pose to Matt, “WTF did someone do to you BTW? Where did this hatred come from?”. What exactly made you criticize Matt–and by association the entire wordpress community of developers and supporters–? All without one ounce of research of how to properly run a business through OSS, the business model of automattic and how Matt runs it, the history of wordpress or even get to know how spam works? Instead of reporting you glued your self-important thoughts together and lambasted the very person AND the community that built the infrastructure for you to get paid from.

I find this post so disturbing as D’s trying to associate taking advantage users by placing paid text ads on released code is the same as Matt providing a service through Wordpress.com and Akismet. He really needs to step back and learn a few things, specifically:

The Blogroll: it’s there as an example for users, is easily managable and provides a credit to the hard working developer community. Since Matt works very hard at wordpress.org he deserves it like the others. Lastly how does he make money off of those links again?

Akismet: Is entirely a service. Yes the free Akismet users contribute to the whole but they also benefit is the entire community. Matt is not holding back the perfect solution to stop all spam for every wordpress user, he’s just providing an added value to the paid users of Akismet because it includes a service level that the free addition could not support.

Wordpress.com: Charging for an extra service level through Wordpress.com doesn’t leverage the community nor the code-base. It’s a service level agreement that you’re paying for, similar to Akismet.

Update: Another comment.

“Actual Friends”

• I want to add more personal posts through Pownce but I need to decide how to segment out those few of you that are my “actual friends”. It’s a shame you all don’t use Pownce. Maybe a new blog is in order.

Pownce

• Post all my asides in Pownce and continue to pull them into this site for my RSS readers and non-pownce users to comment.
• Post more asides through pownce. I’ve wanted to post so much stuff lately and was just distracted by not wanting to open the dashboard and making it an official post.

General

• Keep all larger and more tech related posts within the main/”general” area of the site
• Post more larger articles and/or reviews
• Start actually reviewing products I’ve purchased with the income of my site (i.e. the unfinished Tivo HD post I have sitting as a draft)
• Post a major post daily, or at least schedule a daily post (this wasn’t written today)
• Draft every article and edit it.

I guess my overall goal is to post more and figure out something for my VTA family and friends because I know dancameron.org is boring my wife.

Anyways for the people who do not prefer my mini posts (now from Pownce) I do have other feeds for you to use, depending on the category:

http://dancameron.org/category/general/feed/
http://dancameron.org/category/asides/feed/

In my next theme I’m going to make these more clear for readers because this morning I received a concerned e-mail,

I’m interested in what you write from a web design point of view and would certainly resubscribe if you create a feed for entries only

Since I’m talking about Pownce as my mini-blog tool; I really don’t know how I’m going to manage it in the future. I do want the posts in my feed and I do want everyone to be able to comment, not just Pownce users. So for now I’m going to keep them the way they are. Currently they’re being pulled in by feedwordpress and then a post is created. This is actually the same way I used twitter tools with the only caveat that my site’s sidebar will now link directly to Pownce. My reasoning is my “fans” will read my RSS and will be able to get to the post on my site to comment, my guests on the other hand will just go to Pownce directly if they click a link in the sidebar and hopefully they’ll just followup at Pownce.

In the future I do want to seperate the two becuase I really want the ability to segmant out my actual friends so I can post whatever I want and send whatever I want without any questioning about it being appropriate. And Pownce does that for me. An easier transition would be for them to fix their damn commenting if you’re not logged-in/registered.

I mentioned a new theme and I want to say that I’ve been inspired by simplicity of some major blogger sites, namely Dave Winer’s site. The plan is to either get going on a new theme for the sandbox competition or wait until the entries are released so I can fork one of the entries. The later seems more reasonible at the moment however I don’t know what I’ll be doing on some Friday night at midnight in the coming weeks.

On to my early impressions of Pownce:

It’s been compared to Twitter but it’s completely missing the mobility of Twitter and the accessibility of Twitter. Without an API it’s going to be very hard to get updates of what’s going on over there and actually updating your friends requires you to login to the site or use the AIR application they’ve released.

That AIR application is rather bulky. Not in application size or overhead, I’m actually sure it’s very light using the Adobe framework but the design of the app is too simple. You can’t change the style, transparency or size and I do not need anything else on my desktop. That’s what I love about Twitter because I already have IM open and getting updates through IMs and sending messages through IM fits perfectly into my mobility. Pownce is lacking in this area to the tune of null.

The feature set is everything that I’d ever want in a mini/social-blog. You can send files, separate links out, post files or events and it’s not just posting it’s all about sending. You can easily segment out your friends and send only to them or just individually. I actually love this because it’s completely personal and it makes sense and very similar to facebook.

facebook allows you to be completely private and pownce walks the line. I really enjoy how there are fans and friends but I wish I could ask to be a fan or make a freind a fan instead. A few of my “friends” aren’t actual friends but I don’t want to remove them. I love the personalization of pownce. Not for interface personalization because there isn’t any but the personalization and segmentation you give to your friends and fans is perfect.

I do see pownce replacing Twitter (for me) on shear feature set, unless Twitter kicks it up a notch but it’s going to take me a long time without being free’d up a little. Since I really don’t want to loose my twitter blog on this site I don’t know what to do, especially since it pownce does replace Twitter here it could handle all the comments. So unless I think of another way to merge the two services (maybe RSS splicing and an RSS module in the sidebar replacing the tweets to the right) it will take a while.

As you can tell I really like pownce and I’ll wait for it to replace anything but I will still use the service and hopefully you’ll join me.

• tumblr – It’s a great “blog” service that compiles a lot of your online feeds into one online log. I liked the idea but it’s not something I see people using (for me) since if their my friend they can see my feed at facebook.
• last.fm – I never used this as much as I wanted. I think it still get’s my iPod updates but that will stop very soon.
• myspace – Not only did I rarely use myspace I never liked it, I actually hated it. The navigation is obnoxious to say the least and facebook is now my  “social network” of choice.
  
• virb – I was pushed into using it.
  
• CoComment – An awesome idea especially since I originally had the idea a long time ago. But I find that it doesn’t work very well unless the blog integrate it (which is a very few).
• digg.com – Ever since the DVD hex code debacle I’ve come to the conclusion that community is a bunch of childish kids; and the founders aren’t making it any better.

On the chopping block

• Newsvine – Wonderful news site that should have replaced digg but where digg strives in minimalism (for those kids) newsvine is too cluttered with content.
• aim – If I could I’d shut it off now but some people still use it.
• del.icio.us – This is one of those services that I love but I’m just not using it. Namely becuase I can’t stand having it clogged up with bookmarks I know I’ll never comeback to. I’m also curious to find out if Google bookmarks is going to incorporate into Google Reader since I do star a lot of feeds already.

The ones I’ll keep:

• This site (of course) – It’s my ultimate online presence.
• Twitter – Something that’s already a major extension of this site for mobile/short posts and is integrated into my next service…
• Facebook – I’m a new user but I’m definitely enjoying myself. And with the apps I can play and develop at the same time. Better yet I can include my other online presences into one, just like my blog.
• Flickr – I wont be leaving flickr anytime soon.
  
• Google Reader Shared – Something that I’m sure no one is subscribed to but I love putting it out there for the one who might.
  
• Google Talk – I’m one GTalk 24/7 through my BB and I love the features and client. Chat history rocks.

There are more but as you can tell there are way to many listed already.

As a BlackBerry user Spinvox provides my voicemail to my phone immediately as text, allowing me to actually respond to any message much faster in a medium I prefer. Even though I love mobile phones  I don’t love them to talk or call my voicemail I love them for the the other connections they provide, ie e-mail, text and internet.

Personally I hate voicemail, it’s awfully time consuming. It’s slow, you have to find the time to call in, listen to the voicemail and then you have to call the person for a reply. The message that I receive now is a very good conversion of the audio left in the queue sent through email that I can read whenever I want, in a setting that I want and I could forward it to the caller with a reply.

No matter who it is I just may not be in the setting where it’s appropriate to pick the phone up; I’d say 95% all my voicemails are the result of me not being able to pick the phone up or I simply don’t want to. Now I wait 2-3 minutes for the email to be sent, I read it either on my computer or the phone and I can call them back when I can without calling my voicemail first. The majority of the time it’s just to get an answer to a question so I just text or email them back with a response. It’s extremely productive for me and it helps me not do something I don’t like, being on the phone.

If anyone want’s a Spinvox account contact me. I’m going to e-mail the contact I know over at Spinvox later this week to sign-up a few friends and he’s told me that I can pass along a full list of people to get free 1-year accounts.

If there are any drawbacks to Spinvox it would be:

• That I have no idea how much it’s going to be after my trial is up, hopefully by that time we’ll see some other providers with the same service so it should be cheap.
• Every phone should have access to e-mail but without constant e-mail delivery to your mobile phone you would have to rely on checking your email shortly after every call to check for a message or just calling your VM number. Since there is no other notification that you have a voice mail other than the e-mail.
• So that little message icon on your phone, you’d never going to see that again with Spinvox. While some may see that as a drawback I see it as a plus.

Well, you forced me to defend myself.

My solution doesn’t have any single points of failure except maybe someone retrieving my password db from one of my local machines and then cracking it somewhere else, which you know is highly unlikely. More unlikely then someone getting to your “password page”.

I refer to the “password page” from your previous post but I’m still unclear as how that page works. And I’m assuming that is the only way for you to get passwords from a new previously unused computers. Hmmm…hope you reset the browser cache.

So in defense I don’t have a “single point” of failure. Like everyone should I have all of my computers locked down with a system password and never stays unlocked while I’m away. I believe this is the single point of failure, if you’re worried about someone using an account of yours (locally) then you should be more worried about them getting into your apps, documents or stealing the damn computer and cracking somewhere else.

As for the trust Google thing. I have to; I use Gmail. They already know more about me then my mom or wife.

To detail what I do:
Multi-Tier
Modifiers
System password which is extremely hard to guess and locks down the computer on a 5 min. screensaver
Sync by GBS and a “Master password”

And when I’m away from any of my systems I can easily remember my passwords. Something you can never do with a hash. And I’m more worried of someone getting my master list through keylogging, screenshots or other malicious ways then them using the same method to get into one of my tiers.

I’m ranting a little and if you don’t mind I’ll continue.

We live in a world that we need to be paranoid and aware. If you limit yourself to just making your passwords long and impossible to crack then you’re allowing someone to locally break into your machine or someone tampering with your or anyother machine with something that logs your keys and/or hashes.

There are a lot of points of failure in the processes we use but you cannot deny the more common singe point of failure is trusting an untrusted machine. Which reminds me of a friends insight.

I’d also like to say Nintendo better fix this whole code thing and make up usernames for people. Because a 1216 digit code is horrible to have to remember and share with friends. Making it worse the Wii doesn’t even do friend confirmations. Both users have to add one another to the address book in order for it to work. What a hassle. On XBox live I had a gamertag and if I wanted to add a friend I’d just type their name in and they would get a message confirming the request and vise versa. It shouldn’t be that hard.

At least the wii does e-mailing, if you wanted to spend 10 minutes writing a short message to someone that could only reply to your wii address. Making e-mail worse if you actually had a real e-mail address like I’d expect from every wii owner.

One thing I will miss on Wii that I loved on the 360 is the online profile and how it handled friends. I wish Nintendo is planning something because I’m online now with the Wii and I just don’t see the Mii community being easy to manage. But even if it’s hard to setup it’s going to be a blast messaging with the Strykers, the Bangs and the Uribes; who else is getting a Wii? Or have one and you want to be friends with Mii.

Google opened up a new search sevice called Google Code Search today. The new search allows you to search through a huge index of code that the Google search engine has crawled over the years.

Being the curious beings we are, a friend of mine and I immediately started searching for passwords to see just how much Google was indexing. It didn’t turn up much in the way of anything “secretâ€? until we refined our search to just wp-config files (the file that contains the database connection information for Wordpress installs).

That worked. Since Google Code Search actually indexes the contents of compressed files like ZIP and TARBALL files, we were able to find copies of people’s wp-config files and several contained usernames and passwords.

Here’s an example search.

Now, this only pulls up 50 results (after filtering out the sample config files), but we only looked for Wordpress config files. Who knows what other similar files out there are being indexed and made public. So, a lesson to webmasters– don’t put anything you don’t want seen in a zip file on your server. Perhaps obvious to most, but worth repeating.

[source]

Wow, never even thought about using it for these kind of purposes.

Thanks to all that congratulated me and whom gave me a great day, especially Avery and Sara. work was great and I’m really glad I spent the night with great friends at common meal at the Bangs, that was awesome. Thank you Martha for getting that delicious cake.

2 more weeks until Sara’s, better get crackin.

What I would encourage people to do is just not use gas at all. Ride a bike to work (I can’t but in a month if things change I will). Ride a bike to the store or walk with the family to dinner. Ventura is so dense and most of us don’t need to drive anywhere except a job or a far off friends house anyways. I would also encourage carpooling everywhere, why is it that we have to meet someone or some people instead of having one come pick the other up? Being constricted to car size is one thing but a couple friends meeting at the mall should warrant a car pool.

With my rant aside I’d like to say that I’m not a person that will ride or walk anywhere differently because of the gas price but I’m also not the person to boycott a station for one day only to go back the next. I’d also like to point out that this is another one of the great idiotic moments in our current presidents term and might prove our president is more greedy then idiotic or incoherent.

Media Center

This feature alone makes up for the purchase because the not only does it work beautiful with the 360 but I can get rid of hardware and use unused hardware. The “out with the old” falls on the AverLink player, now listed on eBay. The hardware that just was newly dusted was “Yellow”, my big yellow PC that I made a while back that cost me a pretty penny when the AMD64 first came out. Now it’s a mid-high end PC that I just loaded Media Center addition on and it’s feeling fresh.

One thing Media Center lacks which I hate is XVid and DivX support. I installed this though and it works pretty good, I just wish it was supported like the Averlink especially since I can’t get HD now. But it’s still early and we might see a better workaround.

A couple other things the media center does which I love is Podcasting through newsgator. It limits you to three feeds but an awesome workaround is to create an Odeo account to splice all the feeds together. Then the other two feeds can be used for video feeds. Which reminds me Media Center hates codecs other then windows media, I wish if the computer played a codec thn MC would play the damn thing and stream it.

Everyone saying I should just get frontrow running downstairs or MythTV: I rather not. I don’t want a box downstairs that wouldn’t integrate nice (MythTV) and I want to stream the content without having to buy anything more (Mac).

Games

I have G.R.A.W, which is a masterpiece of graphics and game play and I’ve only played it for an hour.

Burnout is the same but better because I can just pick it up and play for 10-15 minutes if I want and it’s been a long time since I’ve laughed or smiled ALONE playing a game, the crashes are great.

PGR, I haven’t even played (it came in the kit from Costco).

And the best for last, Geometry Wars. The first game i bought from XBox Live marketplace (below), it was about $4-5 and it’s so fun. I can only describe it as a 80s space shooter in high-def. The visuals are illuminating and distracting with how cool it looks. Avery likes watching it and it reminds me of fireworks.

Live

Playing games online is the best. And how the dashboard makes it easy to see and connect with friends it only makes it better.

Dashboard

It’s true the MS guys that made the dashboard for the 360 seriously need to go get their hands on Vista before it’s released. Or is that why it was pushed back AGAIN.

Marketplace

Buy old Sega games (I think it’s coming since I haven’t seen any yet), smaller games like Geometry wars, download movie trailers, and the best ever download demos of released and future games.

My habits of a gamer are short and sweat. Demos work out for my benefit perfectly. I just want to play a little anyways and their free, perfect. Boxing was cool, full auto was cool, Online Battle field felt like I was stealing since it was so good and free.

Conclusion

It consolidates my old hardware, brings to life unused computers, gives me free games, dazzles my eyes with high-def goodness, streams music, video, and pics. What else? Nothing other then make Windows MC work like it should.

I would love to have a website of the top myspace designs and the worst myspace pages. There are a lot of, sorry I have to say it, SHITTY pages. Most make my eyes hurt. What would be cool is a 9rules for myspace. And the badge could be a special footer like I have on my page and Jason just added to his. Anyone up for creating such a network?

So my Gadget week went by the wayside, I’ll start it back up and run it Monday through Thursday again. The problem was my new theme that I released and my new addiction to myspace.

Leander at the Cult of Mac blog has been feeling like Steve’s keynote from this past Tuesday just didn’t have the polish or energy that Macworld keynotes typically do. He was discussing this with a friend recently who, he says, is very much “in” at Apple, when his friend had something quite interesting to say. Namely, that “key products” had to be omitted from the keynote due to “supply issues.” Now, this is rumor, of course, so do with it what you will. Leander writes:

“‘They can’t get enough Core Duo (chips),’ said my source. He also said that if he were me, he probably wouldn’t order one of the new MacBook Pros. I asked if there would be MacBook replacements for the 17-inch and 12-inch PowerBooks, but he said, ‘Oh, it’s much cooler than that. Much cooler.’”

Here we go again. So, what didn’t we get to see and when wiill it be released? Let the baseless conjectures begin!

So my test. Last night I figured to keep my Gamecube and DS and just play them until I have to get a new system. And the definition of “having” to get a new system is when I notice I play more or just something more compelling and useful then what the 360 has to offer for me at this time.

Even with that said I still might buy a 360 but I’m never going to wait in line for it, definitely a costco purchase. Because I can always take it back whenever I want.

In the meantime I purchased Super Mario Strikers. A game that I know I’ll love, even more then Mario Tennis. Multiplayer looks awesome on this and also a game I can get good at, take over to the Bangs and crush their entire family with.

Also, I know I only brought up videogames in this post but I plan to uphold this in all my other purchases. Including computer purchases, DVDs, and anything else I “have-to” have.

I don’t endorse blatant insertion into the line at some random point and trying to get away with it, but people saving places in line for their friends is completely different, and as long as there aren’t any rules posted to not allow it

Jared:
Your saying that if the guy at the front of the line just let people in the line ahead, or behind, would be okay. Even if those people were not there at any point in time? That is bullshit, what is the point of a line then? I might as well have just got there a day early and sold spots behind me and claimed they were friends or better yet sell the spots to friends then they could sell spots to their friends. According to Jared’s rules it wouldn’t be a problem, as long as it wasn’t posted anywhere.

You cover your horrible “logic” by saying it would get out of hand if 50 people were let in by one person, what is the difference between 50 people and 1? The situation that occurred was 3 or 4 groups let 2-3 people in. Leaving a lot of people out, people like me that actually waited in line for something did not get the product that was originally designated in the common understand of a line.

I previously brought up the Star War lines, that you guys waited in, because of the aspect of waiting in a line for a release of something NOT because of line etiquette. I agree that people may “cut” with friends in situations like that because no matter where you are in line you still get what you deserved, which was a seat. And in that situation no seat is valued the same and having your group of friends is the point of waiting in line; so you can sit all together. And most importantly no one will miss a seat.

This was a product, not a seat. A better example, for you to understand: someone in the front of the line buys all the tickets for a certain show for the full days release, even though there is a hundred people behind him wanting just one. And in the case that it is “posted” one ticket per customer, the person gets a hundred friends to arrive 5 minuted before the box office opens and they buy up all the tickets. I guess you would be okay with this? I see NO difference.

A line is a line. You are supposed to wait in LINE at the point of arrival. Adding friends only makes another line detached, almost like a branch. A branch is not a branch, if you didn’t know.

It’s common etiquette not to cut and I don’t understand why you think it’s alright.

Also, for you to say that you wouldn’t let people cut is absurd. We all know you are a very soft spoken person in public and I couldn’t imagine you walking up to someone and tell them to get out of line, no matter who it is. And for you to say I should have said something would have only created a confrontation or worse fight. 2 on 8 other guys who wouldn’t give a f- if they started a fight isn’t worth it to me, especially since it wouldn’t have resolved anything since the Bestbuy guess didn’t care one bit.

Since I had the horrible experience with BestBuy yesterday I thought, they owe me one.

How to actually get the DS for $99; easily

First you must print the screens on the Target site, more the better. And make sure to get the one that says $99 “in store only”.
Go to Bestbuy, I wouldn’t mind Walmart either. As long as they price match.
Get the DS and go to checkout. Here is the tricky part, get someone new. Don’t tell me you can’t tell.
Just say you have a price match for the DS and hand here the print outs.
In my experiences she just changed the price and that was it. If they say no because of it being online then make sure to show the sheets about how it is a catalog. You can always try again.

And, after it works the first time you should be able to just show the receipt of the first one that works and you can keep getting Christmas presents for all your friends. Or a backup for one that might have a dead pixel like mine had, baah.