When I was doing my Computer Science degree our lectures used to make a big deal about making sure you spell Internet with a capital ‘I’, because it’s important and it’s the name of a thing. Apparently it’s now been decided that it should be spelt with a lowercase ‘i’, I wish bloody linguists would make their minds up!

# Pete Graham

I’ve starting getting lots of Spam comments on my blogs recently. This was becoming increasing annoying because each time someone comments on my blog I get sent an email. Not only were the comments sections, on some of my articles, full of viagra advertisements but my inbox was also full of notification about these comments.

I decided to install the Spam Karma plug-in in an effort to thwart the irritating bots that were making these comments. Since installing it (about 2 weeks ago) I think it has successfully caught each spam post to this site, and set it for moderation. It rarely seems to identify real comments as spam (let me know if one of your comments goes missing). As a Spam prevention plugin it works very well.

Spam Karma is incredibly configurable, the downside of this is its interface isn’t very intuitive. It does appear to have some options for moderating your existing comments, but after having very limited success with this I decided to delete the offending comments manually. This is just a small complaint thought and if you do start getting Spammed on your Wordpress blog then I would suggest installing this plug-in ASAP.

# Pete Graham

I’m a big fan of Gmail but they’re a few things about it I find annoying. My Friend Kenny Lee, of Hidden Messages fame, sent me the band’s album, which they had recently finished recording, earlier this week. He attached each track as an mp3 to an email (I believe Gmail has a total attachments limit of 10MBs per email).

So I had 14 emails from Kenny each with an mp3 attached. Gmail saw all these emails and grouped them into a ‘conversation’; this was actually very convenient since I could access them all together. My problems started when I went to download the first track, Gmail insists on running a virus check of files before you are offered a download link (again a nice feature). I noticed Gmail was running extremely slowly, this is because it was attempting to virus check every single attachment in the conversation.

Doubly annoying Gmail doesn’t remember which emails in my inbox it’s virus checked, so each time I reload it the whole process kicks of again. Now Kenny had originally sent me the emails from his Gmail account therefore they would have been virus checked when they were uploaded, this just all seems a bit inefficient.

At the end of the day these are minor grumbles and Gmail, in my opinion, is still pretty ace. I guess it’s probably because of things like this that Gmail is still stuck in Beta mode.

# Pete Graham