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tlambert | July 5, 2005If you are using WordPress you urgently need to upgrade to version 1.5.1.3 (released last week). This is why. Update: OK, apparently that hole had already been fixed, but there was another vulnerability. You should still upgrade.
tlambert | July 1, 2005Actually that's an undercount since some people read my blog via the RSS feed. My thanks to everyone who has dropped by.
tlambert | July 1, 2005Blogwise have used the Google Maps API and GeoURL to get a map showing locations of blogs (If you follow the link you'll have to click on the satellite button to see anything).
Those shadows don't look quite right. How could the sun be shining from the south?
tlambert | June 21, 2005From the gentleman (and this time I'm not being sarcastic) who wrote to me earlier:
I'm sorry I acted the way I did in the email. It was wrong of me and only hope
you accept my apologies. Behaving the way I did shows me in a pretty bad
light.
Some of us have built some pretty strong pre-conceived ideas about issues and
when the opposite argument turns up which in your case seems well-thought out
I have to offer my grudging admiration. In my job, rigidity means an early
grave career wise at least.
Case in point- Climate change.
I spent some time reading your stuff fairly extensively and I have…
tlambert | June 19, 2005I broke my RSS feed -- it started reporting the message
XML Parsing Error: xml processing instruction not at start of external entity
I thought I should post the fix in case any other WordPress users have the same problem. The plugin I had just added (disemvowel.php) had an extra blank line at the end. Removing the blank line fixed the problem. Simple really.
tlambert | June 18, 2005The gentleman who I disemvowelled emailed me complaining about the lack of vowels in his comment. I wrote back:
[Name deleted], you are not banned from commenting on my blog. If you can work
out how to post something other than flamebait, I'll leave the vowels
in next time.
His reply is below the fold because it contains bad language.
Hi Tim (Lambert):
Thanks for coming back but go fuck yourself.
If your posters are an indication of the company you keep, any normal, self respecting individual wouldn't come anywhere near your bog.
You know what is really nauseatingly disgusting about you. It…
tlambert | June 16, 2005One of the drawbacks of switching to a more popular blogging platform is more spam. Spambots just did not know how to comment on the old blog -- I got two just spams this year. In the last 24 hours spambots have tried to post about 100 comments. The spam filters stopped all of them, which is good, but they also sometimes catchlegitimate comments. I fish those out, but it's still a pain for everyone concerned. If your comment gets caught please be patient and blame the vile parasites that run spambots.
I've also changed the technique I'll be using against trolls. Posts by trolls will be…
tlambert | June 11, 2005Links to the old blog should now get redirected to the appropriate entry here, so you don't have to adjust any bookmarks. Though it will load faster if you do adjust them.
After experimenting with several themes, I'm leaning towards adopting the current one. What do you think of it?
I've added a page on how to comment on this blog to the sidebar.
tlambert | June 11, 2005I welcome comments here, especially from people who disagree with me. There is one rule that I ask commenters to follow -- please do not make personal attacks on other commenters. Such comments tend to cause discussion to degenerate into a slanging match so I will usually delete or disemvowel them. If you think some other commenter is dishonest or stupid, you should show us, by presenting evidence and letting the rest of us make up our own minds rather than telling us.
Trolls are posters who try to disrupt the discussion by posting specious arguments, inflammatory comments or off-topic…
tlambert | June 9, 2005 I've switched my blog to Wordpress. I've imported all posts and comments from the old blog using this handy script.
It turned out I had 10 megabytes of posts and comments to transfer and I had to break it up into smaller pieces to avoid choking the script.
The old blog will be replaced with a redirect to this blog once I work out how to rewrite the URLs correctly.
tlambert | May 31, 2005 Today's Sydney Morning Herald has several articles on blogs and blogging. I get a mention in this one, as "one of a handful of prominent bloggers covering news, politics and economics". It's nice to be mentioned like that, but I really think they should have included Ken Parish or Mark Bahnisch instead of me.
John Quiggin gets quoted:"I have had occasional sharp interchanges with Tim Blair and some others but nothing that could really rate compared to Tim's other feuds"
I wonder what he is referring to?
tlambert | May 14, 2005 People who suffer from Asperger's Syndrome have grave difficulties with social interactions because they have trouble in reading other people's emotions. I recently read an interesting interview with Bram Cohen (the inventor of BitTorrent) who suffers from Asperger's. Which brings us to Tim Blair. After his latest attack on Lancet study blew up in his face, Blair's response was to claim that I suffered from Asperger's syndrome. (No link, find it yourself if you care.)
Unfortunately, this sort of behaviour from Blair is all too common. After Darp Hau commented on the way Blair made fun…
tlambert | April 8, 2005I've added gravatars to the comments. You can have a little icon (your gravatar) that represents you next to each comment you post. All you have to do is upload your icon at the Gravatar site and enter your email when you leave your comment. I don't display your email---it is just used to look up which gravatar to use. There is now a separate entry for email and url when you leave a comment so that you can have a gravatar as well as a link to your web page when you leave a comment.
Look at the comments to this post for an example of what it looks like.
tlambert | March 18, 2005Tim Blair has posted emails from Ted Lapkin and Andrew Bolt who object to a couple of my posts. Blair fails to provide links to the posts so that readers can determine whether Lapkin and Bolt have accurately described what happened.
Lapkin begins: In November 2003, I argued in the pages of Quadrant magazine that the environmental movement is moral culpable for the deaths of 2 million Africans killed each year by malaria. In mid-February 2005, a left-wing blogger named Tim Lambert (Deltoid) accused me, and others, of participation in what he described as "The Great DDT Hoax". Without…
tlambert | March 18, 2005 In my previous post I noted that Tim Blair had posted: Can I ask all timblair.net regulars to stop commenting here. This is exactly what he wants and you're only encouraging him.
In my comments someone also claiming to be Tim Blair posted: You complete idiot. That comment wasn't posted by me. I suggest you ban the impersonator responsible.
Oh no! It's like one of those movies where there is a real person and a fake person and you have a gun and you hafta shoot the fake one. How can you tell which one is the real Tim Blair? What to do, who to ban. Is there some characteristic that…
tlambert | March 17, 2005 So I was reading this thread on John Quiggin's blog when the discussion turned to Tim Blair's policy of banning any dissenters from commenting on his blog. (See here for an example of the sort of comment that will get you banned.) Now Blair doesn't have to support comments from people that disagree with him, but there are free commenting systems available, so I set up Haloscan so that people could comment without being banned. I also wrote a little CGI proxy script that people could use to add links to the Haloscan comments under each of Blair's posts.
Tim Blair got rather upset,…
tlambert | February 15, 2005 There has been a flurry of bloggers pretending to be females. Via Jason Soon we have the exposure of Libertarian Girl, who was actually a guy. Another faker recently exposed was Hot Abercrombie Chick. And the winner of the NetGuide award for Best Personal Blog for 2004 was "Natalie Biz", who was really "James Guthrie, a Wellington man, happily married with children".
Libertarian Girl says that when he had a blog as himself, he got no links or comments, but by pretending to be a pretty girl he instantly got to have a popular blog. Now I don't think that means that…
tlambert | February 4, 2005 Embarrassing Correction: I screwed up. Somehow I pasted the wrong IP into a query. I thought I was checking Brignell's IP, but it was actually Per's. Per and "James Brown" are the same person, but his real name is David Bell, not John Brignell. I apologize to John Brignell and to Per/David Bell.
After I criticized John Brignell for an innumerate criticism of the Lancet study in this post, a commenter named Per showed up to defend Brignell and attack me. Those of you familiar with the Mary Rosh story can guess the rest---it seems that "Per" is a sock puppet…
tlambert | February 1, 2005 Via David Tiley we have an interview with one the scumbags who comment spam blogs. One of them just finally left my blog alone after trying to leave about a hundred trackback spams. I deleted the first few that arrived, and found that it was posting new ones as fast as I deleted them. I renamed my trackback flavour so that it wasn't called "trackback" anymore and that stopped the spams from getting through.