I haven’t posted here in a while… I’ve been watching too much HD! no not really… personal life is keeping me busy, but I HAVE actually made some interesting revelations in regards to HD. A lot of talk over on the AVS forum for my area is in regards to the Super Bowl, which everybody and their brother (if their brother has HD) wants to watch in HD. And in our area, CBS, this year’s lucky recipient of the Super Bowl broadcast, does not broadcast in HD. Well, not until a few days ago when they swapped on their HD feed for over-the-air (OTA) reception. This, however, doesn’t help those of us stuck in apartments that face far far away from any signals. We use cable, and in doing so we are lucky enough to be at the mercy of Comcast.

Now, WTAJ, the CBS affiliate, has been broadcasting HD for a few days, but Comcast has still yet to pick it up. Why? Who knows. But the folks over at the AVS forum have poked around a bit and discovered that Comcast is carrying WYOU, a CBS affiliate from Scranton, on a digital signal that is hidden from their cable boxes. I ran a piece of coax to my TV directly last night, scanned through the channels and lo-and-behold, WYOU, broadcasting in perfect HD.

The guesses I’ve been hearing are that Comcast probably made a deal with WYOU to have them as a backup plan in case WTAJ didn’t have their act together in time for Super Bowl Sunday. According to the folks who have been watching the OTA broadcast, they still seem to be working out some of their audio-video sync kinks.. so it remains to be seen what sort of service to expect by this weekend

In other news, I’ve been doing a lot of work at work (imagine that) on Wordpress, trying to build a new subsystem of it using VMware as opposed to being locked onto a specific piece of hardware. I tell you what though, VMware is an amazing tool. With it, you can basically run your server on whatever piece of hardware you want, as long as it has the disk space for your virtual machine, and can run VMware. If you’re married to Windows, you can still run it on top of a linux host, and save that virtual machine image for the easiest disaster recovery imaginable. Your whole server catches on fire and melts down? Run that backup virtual machine on your desktop PC running XP, or on that spare Linux workstation, or any other computer until you can rebuild the server, and then *ploink* copy it over to the server and you’re back in business. I can’t stress enough how much stress and drama this is capable of preventing for people in my industry.

So wordpress has updated to 2.1. Crap, i’ve fallen behind, time to update this bad boy! If I don’t return, it’s been fun.

UPDATE: Everything went just fine, 2.1 is up and running

For as long as I’ve had a blog I’ve fought against the dreaded enemy: Comment Spam.

Luckily Wordpress has come along and now ships standard with a plugin called Akismet (auto kismet), which claims it will eliminate comment spam. The setup process was easy enough; you just need an API key from wordpress.com, enable the plugin and give them the key. From then on, spam comments should be autoflagged, and hopefully eliminated from your posts.

This post will be a testbed for it. If spam DOES get through, the system allows you to flag it, so it can learn what should be considered spam. Hopefully it makes for a more competant and useful blog system… without the hassle of manually going through each and every comment.

If this turns out to be less effective than I’d like, I have looked into implementing further captcha methods.  One such method, a simple plugin for wordpress, forces all comment posters to solve a simple math equation prior to posting their comment.  While this is easily identified and solved by a human, it is far less simple for an automated script to identify the problem and form a solution that is compatible with the comment interface.

An alternate, more prohibitive method is to require all posters to register.  For one thing, as a blog reader, I know that most people will not go through the hassle of registering for everybody’s blog.   And sometimes the most insightful comments will come from those ‘anonymous cowards’ who for whatever reason wish to hide their identity.  So a system that rules out anonymous comments entirely simply is not ideal.

So we shall see how this works.

i’m not really one for these first posts and all, i have no idea what to put at the moment, i just know i don’t want the default wordpress crap in here so i’ve gotta edit it.