Category: Tech

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Judging by a quartet of comments posted this evening, 3 of which slipped past Spam Karma, someone’s started outsourcing comment spam to India. (I’m serious, the IP addresses were assigned to Bharti Airtel and BSNL Internet, both ISPs based in New Delhi.)

They were posted quickly, as if they’d been composed in another editor and pasted into the form. More importantly, they were actually posted through the form, not just sending data directly to the handler. And most tellingly, the posters had gone to the effort to fill out the CAPTCHA that Spam Karma provides to allow human commenters to recover from a false positive.

The one I liked best, from a technical perspective, was posted on Tall Ships of San Diego. The spammer had followed my link to the San Diego Maritime Museum, then followed that to a page describing one of the ships, the Californian, and generated a post by stringing together sentences from that page. The whole thing linked to a student loan site.

At first glance, it looked like a garbled, on-topic comment from someone who maybe didn’t speak English as their first language. That happens, and if it’s a legit comment, I leave it. In fact, I considered leaving the comment but deleting the author URL, until I looked up the ship. (It wasn’t one of the ships we toured on our visit, and I didn’t recognize the name.) As I looked at the ship’s profile, I started recognizing text from the comment. At that point it became clear what was going on, and I started looking at the other comments posted over the last few hours.

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Wow! Songs Not to Play at a Wedding has been one of our more popular posts for a long time, and I’d seen hits start coming in from StumbleUpon, a social bookmarking site, about a week ago. But that was a trickle. I wasn’t prepared to check my stats at lunch today and see 1,112 visits from StumbleUpon (here’s the review page) since 5pm yesterday (WordPress’ daily stats rotate at midnight GMT), with another 632 the day before. Continue reading →

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I decided to go for it, and set my alarm for 2:30 AM (ick) to see the eclipse. The moon was nearing totality at that point, with a too-shallow crescent near the bottom and the rest in slightly reddish shadow. My original plan was to lie down on the balcony and watch, but it turned out there was a tree in the way, but if I went over to the other end, by the patio table, I was able to see it.

I watched as the crescent shrank to a sliver, and finally the moon was shaded dark red to dull red to light red to a much dimmer white than usual. The deeper reds slowly spread across its face, edging out the brighter colors near the edge of the Earth’s shadow.

I brought my cheesy little digital camera, and took some photos. It promptly started warning me the battery was low, and I had to dig around in the dark to find the spare. I think this is the best of the pictures, as far as showing the eclipsed moon itself goes:

Moon in eclipse
Eclipsed Moon, 3:13 AM

Earlier in the evening I was testing different shutter settings. I thought this photo from the floor of the balcony turned out interesting:

Balcony lit by full moon

Yes, that’s lit by moonlight (in a long exposure).

OK, I’m going out to take one last look at the moon (I think I heard the downstairs neighbors’ door open a few minutes ago, so at least I’m not the only one up for this) and then go back to bed. I’ll look through my photos again tomorrow and post anything else that looks good.

Update: Here’s a shot from deeper in totality, just after the mid-point of the eclipse:

Lunar Eclipse - orange moon
Eclipsed Moon, 3:40 AM

PleiadesAnd here’s the Pleiades, which I spotted when I turned around and looked up. A far cry from this, but hey, I figured I was doing pretty well to be getting photos of stars with this type of camera in the first place.

I think the last time I saw the Pleiades, Hyades, Taurus and Orion in August, I was something like 14 and on a trip with my scout troop to do whitewater rafting. We slept out under the stars and I just happened to wake up at 3 in the morning.

OK, sleep is calling to me. Signing off…

Update 2: After I went to bed, I realized that I shouldn’t have dismissed my idea of scrounging up some film and pulling my manual SLR camera out of the closet. Between the better optics, more shutter control, and an actual telephoto lens, I probably would have gotten considerably better pictures. I just don’t think we have any rolls of film lying around that haven’t expired, and I didn’t want to run out at 11:00 to get some. Ah, well. Something to think about for next time.

Also, I realized that these blurry pictures look kind of like a Moon-sized version of Mars. Hmm, that might confuse some people. 😉

Update 3: You have to check out Thursday’s APOD: an incredible telescopic image of the moon taken during totality.

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I’m still trying to decide whether I should set an alarm to wake myself up at ski-o’clock in the morning to see tonight’s/tomorrow’s lunar eclipse. I mean, I skipped the Perseid meteor shower a few weeks ago, but that would have required not only getting up in the wee hours of the night, but driving somewhere with less light pollution.

I mean, I should be able to walk outside and look out at a blood-red moon… at 3:00 in the morning.

*grrr*

(links via Bad Astronomy)

Update: Ah, the wonders of text search and delayed indexing. It seems that lots of people are searching for the phrase, “eclipse tomorrow,” leading to a spike in hits to this entry from last March… even though today’s post would be a more appropriate destination.

Update 2: I went for it. Here’s my write-up.

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This background (which only seems to show up on the solo post page) is a clip from a photo posted as the August 12 Astronomy Picture of the Day. It’s my current desktop wallpaper on my Windows box at work. And it’s got about a zillion times as many stars as I usually get to see at night.

Back when I was a teen, I was in Boy Scouts, and we went camping almost once a month. At home, in a suburban housing tract, I could see the major constellations, and I remember once just managing to pick out the fainter stars of Orion’s head, arms and club from my bedroom window. But out in the desert, you could see thousands of stars. In summer, you could see the Milky Way. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it from a city of any size. One summer camp at Lost Valley I went out into one of the meadows with a tripod and my SLR camera to try my hand at amateur astral photography. I got some pictures of Scorpio and Sagittarius, and I really should try to figure out where they ended up.

A few nights ago I stood out on our apartment balcony, looking up at the sky. I could see only a handful of stars, and one of them was Jupiter. Even knowing it was in Scorpio, I could spot maybe one or two stars. Tonight was a bit better, even with the waxing moon. I set out a blanket so I could lie down and let the sides of the balcony block out the lighting from walkways and other apartments, though it couldn’t do much for the moon or the slowly developing cloud layer.

The best view of the stars I’ve had recently was two years ago, on our trip to the Big Island of Hawaii. On the day we visited Kilauea, we drove back across the desolate lava fields of Ka‘u at night, and stopped the car by the side of the road for a few minutes just to look at the sky.

I think it’s time to go camping again. Somewhere out in the desert or mountains. Somewhere without all the haze and light we have here.

Notes on style: I used Trevor Creech’s Per-Post CSS Plugin to assign the background and appropriate foreground colors on this post. I originally tried it with inline styles on a div, which worked, but left the links illegible. Also, I’ve enhanced it using the CSS3 border-radius and box-shadow for browsers that support it. Unfortunately Gecko doesn’t trim the curved corners off the background image, so right now that’s just the Safari 3 beta and Webkit nightlies.

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I’m surprised it took so long, but trackback spammers seem to have finally figured out that they can sail past the simplest check against trackback spam—does the calling page actually link to the page being trackbacked?–by temporarily adding that link.

Or maybe they have for a while, and they’ve only just started getting past my other layers of defense (namely Bad Behavior and other checks by Spam Karma).

*sigh*

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I’ve held off on posting funny spam subject lines lately, but I just had to comment on this pair. First up:

Mazrim Taim was one of those, raising an army and ravaging Saldaea before he was taken.

It’s a quote from Lord of Chaos, the 6th book in Robert Jordan’s fantasy series, The Wheel of Time. The next one is a bit less obvious:

If Lan was attempting jokes, however feeble and wrongheaded, he was changing.

I wasn’t sure about this one, since there must be other stories with characters named Lan, but Google Book Search found it in book 5, The Fires of Heaven.

I’ve seen lots of spam that used filler from The Wizard of Oz and other novels old enough to be in the public domain. Project Gutenberg and the like have been transcribing them, making free plain-text ebooks for years, making it easy to snag a couple of lines of actual English text.

In theory this should be harder to identify as filler than randomly-generated text. Continue reading →

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