JDPFu.com 2025

Today the roofers are here putting up a new roof. I had a leak, but only when it rained REALLY hard – perhaps once a year. The old roof was 16+ yrs old, so it was about time. About half the neighborhood homes already have new roofs.

The guys were all here before 7:30a and ready to go. The weather today is going to be a perfect day for this – clear, sunny, highs in the lower 80s. No rain expected until after midnight. Perfect.

I’ll try to take a few photos during the day to capture some of the progress. As the day goes on, I’m learning about more leaks and bad design than I already knew. The leader is explaining how and why they happened. I trust him. I’ll explain below.

Blog Spam

I’ve noticed the number of blog spammers have increased significantly in the last 2 months. They use general “good job” or “nice work” comments, then leave their email and commercial weblink. I assume these are spam-bots – automatically doing it.

Moderated Comments

Since all comments are moderated here, I’ll do my best to weed them out if they aren’t related to the posted article. Only on-topic links will remain and generic posts will not be allowed. It isn’t like there are hundreds of spam posts daily. I know this will reduce the number of comments, but that is the price for non-spam comments today. Sorry. If you’re comment is on topic, it will be posted. Basically, any comment that is remotely on topic will be posted. Just those that are commercial or links to unrelated content will not be posted. For example, if the post is about virtualization and you provide a comment with links to an online vitamin store, that will not be posted. OTOH, if links in comments are to other articles on virtualization or even commercial virtualization products, then it will be allowed. The decision of moderators leans towards posting comments when in doubt.

Test Messages

I guess some people don’t want to bother writing a longer message if it won’t be posted. I get that, but a test message is not on topic either and won’t be posted. How does that comment add to the conversation?

Further, I’ve disabled comments for older articles. I don’t recall the actual cutoff day. It is probably 90 or 120 days, so it won’t impact the few, loyal, readers. Those articles do not have any way to enter any comments. If there is a comment field displayed, then your comment will be seen by the moderators.

Hello, Nice Article and other non-related comments were allowed previously, but are not going forward. Sorry. Those do not add to the conversation.

English Only Please

This is an English language blog. While we like worldwide viewers and understand that not everyone reads English, that is simply a limitation of our skills. I have translated some non-English comments previously. None were on-topic to the post. We may attempt to translate comments again, but you can visit translate.google.com just as easily as we can.

No Sign-up Required

We do not require any sign up to post comments. Heck, we don’t really want your email address either. An alias is preferred. If you leave an email address or web address, it will probably be included in the comment and publicly seen. That seems to be the way this software works. Our systems do log IP addresses, just like every other system out there does.

Example Blocks

A few of these spammers have been blocked at the router. Sure they can come from a different subnet, but I bet they won’t.

The financial planning and foreign internet diamond sellers are the funniest. Blocked.

Automatic Moderation

I’ve looked into viable solutions to allow non-moderated comments here and didn’t find one that I was willing to implement.
Here’s a site from 2005 with specific ideas to reduce, if not eliminate internet marketing on blogs. About a year ago, I came across another site where the blogger had placed a static Captcha with an simple arithmetic problem inside the image. The answer was always “42.” He never changed it, Never, yet it prevented 100% of the blog spam. I may introduce that here.

If I were running MT or blogger or some other highly popular blog tool, then I’d have a bigger issue. Since I’m running a little used Ruby blog with few internet users, I’m fairly safe just like Linux and Apple are safe compared to Microsoft.

Today, we are manually moderating comments about once a day.

Comment Edits

Occasionally, comments may be edited by a moderator to remove offensive content. We will say in the post that it was edited. Cuss words will probably be removed or exchanged for #$#%. Keep it clean, please.

Exceptions

We are people and regardless of the statements above, there will be exceptions for posting and not posting. Friends who post can say almost anything.

Last week I discovered that one the RSS/Atom feed methods on this site had been broke the last few months. I’ve taken steps to get both of them working again for the few subscribers (including myself). Most of you are using RSS, not Atom. RSS is my preference too.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen anything new in the feed recently, please update the feeds.

Sorry it took so long to notice. I’ve been migrating lots of hardware around and still working with insurance to get the laptop fixed.

Nothing really to report this week. Doing RMA stuff on an old Antec 550W PSU and getting an estimate to fix the Dell laptop.

I’m curious about my blog readers.

1. How often do you read an article here? Daily? Weekly? Monthly?
2. Do you use an RSS reader to read this blog? I do, BTW.
3. I’m planning a migration to a new blog system. Any feature or content requests? More virtualbox or more cooking?

Please either leave a comment or drop me an email.