centre{source}

A friend of mine pointed me at this site: http://www.mapable.com/. A neat, but forgettable site. It uses the Google Maps API to display a map with real-time chatting between people on .. the map. It uses the client IP address to extrapolate geolocation and display it on the map, so they can talk in tiny width-restricted fields. Example:

Person in Algeria: So, you’re in Canada, eh?
Person in Canada: Yep
Person in Algeria: Soo..
Person in Canada: Can you see anything I write longer than 50 charact
Person in Alergia: Nope.

We try to stay away from politics here on the centresource blog, but this is one area where they have affected security and technology, so I’ll keep this neat and quick: One of the more amusing gifts we’ve been blessed with as a result of the PATRIOT Act is the set of “security” questions that Dell has to ask now, when you order goods from them.

Congratulations to us! CentreSource was recently nominated for two categories (Emerging Business and Businesses with 1-25 employees) in the Nashville Business Journal’s Best in Business awards! I (Nicholas Holland) was also honored as a nominee for Entrepreneur of the Year! While being nominated is quite an honor, we are pleased to announce that CentreSource is now one of the finalists for the NBJ: Best in Business – Emerging Business category!

We are truly honored and want to send a special congratulations to all the finalists – good luck!

CentreSource is proud to announce the completion and successful launch of Martin Methodist’s newly redesigned website. By combining beautiful design, functional layout, and a powerful content management system (SiteMason) – CentreSource provided Martin Methodist with a turn-key solution for their University website. Here is an excerpt from their testimonial:

..Martin Methodist College website was outdated, disorganized, and uninviting: a challenge that Centre Source was eager to tackle. CentreSource was hired to help accurately reflect the vibrant nature of the college through a colorful, easy to use website that could change and grow with the vision of the college.

Apple has released another Macintel machine: a sexy new powerbook that they are dubbing “the finest laptop in the world”. Combining Intel’s new CORE Duo Chip (two chips on one), a profile of 1″ and 5.6lbs, and all the pizazz of Mac OS X – this laptop is poised to be a real winner. Perhaps most surprising is how affordable it is… starting around $2000. I found an honest overview of the machine at Law Crossing (surprising) – here are some brief excerpts:

On the day of Percival Lowell’s birthday, Google has announced the launch of Google Mars (think Google Maps but for Mars, get it?). Noel Gorelick (a friend of mine) and Michael Weiss-Malik from Arizona State University worked with Google to combine google maps technology with the data from THEMIS, the most detailed imagery of Mars to date.

Full press release below the jump:

A concise history of Opera’s ACID2 results. Pretty funny. (And impressive!)

Well, yesterday’s foolproof method of defeating trackback spam is today’s old news. Seriously no less than 24 hours after I proclaimed victory, I have started getting trackback spam that defeats the validation method by maintaining a list of the links, rotating out the URLs as it spams them — on the same page as their ads, or whatever content they are pimping in their spam.

For now I can just blacklist this IP, but a botnet will soon be employed to do its dirtywork. Because trackbacks are a process that by definition is automated, it’s particularly difficult to stop, since any turing-test type validation is out of the question.

Last month, I posted about the methods we use to block comment and trackback spam. As I noted then, we hadn’t had one single successful comment/trackback spam then, or since. However there was still one tremendous annoyance. Dan Sandler’s trackback validator plugin effectively eliminates the trackback spam, however Wordpress was still stubbornly e-mailing me about every single one.

My personal blog is currently getting slammed by a botnet of around 270+ computers so far, continually spamming it all day long, so you can imagine how this was quite an annoyance.

Finally, I’ve figured out why: in wp-trackback.php, there’s this bit of code:

I am going through the Agile Web Development with Rails book, and in their tutorial, there’s a slight stumbling block I ran into. I figure if anyone else has this problem and is anything like me, they’ll google for it, so maybe this will help someone out there. A description of the issue and solution follows: