Newsmap is a super-cool news headline aggregator. Take a look.

So far I’ve nuked comment-spam, by using embedded graphic security codes in my comments. It sucks to have to do this, but we all know that this is war.

Next up is referer-spam, which is at an all-time high. It seems that the developers of my stats analyzer, Awstats, either don’t care or don’t know how to set up an easy method for referer blacklisting. If anyone knows of a good way to do this with Awstats, or a better stats analyzer, let me know.

I truly loathe comment-spammers, as they’re following what has to be the stupidest marketing idea ever.

Check out Trencaspammer, which forces commenters to enter in a security code before accepting comments. It should be a nice stopgap measure against comment spam, at least until WordPress 1.3 is released.

Oh yeah, the site is in Spanish, but the installation instructions are in English, and it’s not that hard to install. Edit your wp-comment-* files, and add the plugin, and you’re done.

Austrumi is a handly little Linux-based rescue disk that I’ve recently used to recover lost passwords on a Windows XP laptop.

My friend and mentor, Doug Visniski, passed away this weekend.

Doug got me my first job in Atlanta, and was my shift lead in Sprint’s IBO NOC. He had an insane amount of knowledge about networking tucked in his head, and even more knowledge about automobile mechanics. He was the only guy I knew who could remotely troubleshoot obscure physical-layer issues while putting together engine parts at his desk.

He taught me a great deal about deep physical-layer troubleshooting, and was instrumental in maintaining the outstanding quality of service provided by the Sprint backbone during his many years with the company.

Here’s another essay on the previously-linked Shirt Fu.

For those of you still suffering in the pits of WinXP-Hell, you can install Flyakite and make your PC look almost like it’s running OSX.

(This app is rather like looking at penises from a distance, but not actually touching them with your face. You’re not quite gay, but you’re very envious of homosexuals.)

I’ve installed it on my WinXP SP2 machine, and have had no problems so far, other than one of the default fonts being pretty ugly [Lucida Console? Wha?]. If you decide to use it, you must turn off System Restore first.

One nice feature that the Powerbook has over the iBook is support for screen spanning: you can connect an external monitor to the laptop and ‘extend’ the desktop to the new monitor. For some inexplicable reason (save maybe another ‘selling point’ of the Powerbook), iBooks don’t ship with this feature. Instead, they only support screen ‘mirroring’, which is pretty worthless since the laptop goes to sleep with the lid closed.

Macservers.org has a nice article on how to configure the built-in Apache webserver, and how to install and configure MySQL and phpMyAdmin on OSX.

Some of the information in the Macservers article is out of date. I recommend getting the updated Mac OSX PHP 5.0 installer package from here. The newest MySQL package includes an installer for the OSX startup item script, so you won’t need to install the Entropy.ch one.

While I was in line at Microcenter tonight, I witnessed just how bad at security most people are.

Microcenter cashiers pump you for information. It’s a given. They ask for as much info as you’ll give them. There was a pretty twenty-something girl in line in front of me (I was buying Half-Life 2, of course). The cashier asked her for her address, and the girl answered. The cashier then called her by her last name, and asked her for her phone number, which the girl glady gave. Finally, the girl gave out her email address.