I’ve got a red eye to FLL in four hours, and am going to go for a walk on the beach and dinner beforehand. No telling for sure when I’ll be back in California, pending a CEV announcement.

Does anyone know if there’s way to get Moveable Type to display comments on a certain date, or some other script that would do that, and allow their deletion? Somehow I was hit with many hundreds of comment spams back on May 5th of this year, and they apparently came in so fast that MT didn’t even send me email notifications of them. I’ve been looking at old posts, and they’re infested with them. Furthermore, they aren’t even blacklistable–the URLs are nonsense strings of characters (what was that all about, other than pure vandalism?).

I’ve been going through and deleting them as I find them, but it would take a long time to look at every one of thousands of posts. It would be nice to just see comments that were posted on that date. I’m sure that it would be possible to write such a script, but I’m wondering if one exists.

I’m flying back to Florida Friday night. It looks like the first business of the day will be putting up the shutters. I sure don’t like the track of this storm. If it holds up, it’s headed right for Palm Beach County.

[Update late morning EDT]

The latest track looks a little better for us, but not good for the Keys.

There’s an after-lunch session on arcane areas of space law. Because it’s after lunch, and an abstruse discussion under the best of blood-sugar levels, I’m not going to even attempt to blog it. It’s not that it’s not interesting, but it’s all over the map in topics, and it’s just too hard to blog, I know that the difference between “inherently risky activity” and “inherently dangerous activity” is important but I just can’t write down every jot and tittle of the discussion. At least right now. And it hardly seems worth reporting without doing it, other than saying that “three lawyers discussed space law.” Maybe Clark will do better.

[Update a few minutes after the session ends]

He did.

I just got in on an early morning flight.

I have to say that I really like Delta, at least that flight. Leaves Florida at 7 AM and gets me in to LA at 9 AM, non-stop (the American non-stop leaves at 9:15 and gets in at 11). Comfortable, not too packed (empty seat next to my window) with DirecTV on the seat back, which allowed me to follow the war on Fox and CNN.

Too bad I’m an elite flyer with American.

Probably not much blogging–I’ve got a lot of work to do over the next couple days, then I’m driving to Vegas tomorrow night or early Friday morning for the conference. Maybe some live blogging from there, though, wireless permitting.

Once in a while, the good guys win. I got pinged this morning (and the pings are still way, way down from what they were before I renamed scripts):

A new TrackBack ping has been sent to your weblog, on the entry 6459 (The
Big Lie Continues).

IP Address: 209.123.8.127
Title: airlines
Weblog: british

Excerpt:
british

It takes you to a page that just links to airlines.

I forwarded the notification email to the web host at prohosting.com with a hope that this was in violation of their terms of service. I just got the following email from them:

This account has been removed from our servers for violating our Acceptable Use Policy. Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention.

I’m sure that the cretin will quickly find another host, but at least any time spent spamming us with that URL is now wasted.

Since renaming my scripts, I have gotten zero, count ’em, zero spams on either comments or trackback. It won’t last forever, but it’s a nice breather. And I hope that they’re wasting a lot of time on the honeypots.

[Update on Saturday morning]

OK, got one ping spam overnight. But it’s still a huge improvement.

[Late afternoon update]

Still one and counting. I should have done this a long time ago. Even if I have to do it weekly, it would be a vast improvement over the time I spend dealing with these cretins now.

[Sunday morning update]

Oh, well. I knew it was too good to last. I got nine pr0n spams overnight. All from one domain, though. It’s still a lot better than it was. Hopefully, I can at least keep it down to a dull roar.

I’ll be getting back in late tonight. Home for four days, then back here, and off to Vegas for the conference.

See you later.

I know comments are fubar. I’m working on it and should have it fixed in a few minutes. Don’t take the message personally, unless you really are a scum-of-the-earth spammer. You know, if the shoe fits, yada yada yada…

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, seems to be fixed now. Let the calumny and trolling recommence! (errr…just kidding)

I know comments are fubar. I’m working on it and should have it fixed in a few minutes. Don’t take the message personally, unless you really are a scum-of-the-earth spammer. You know, if the shoe fits, yada yada yada…

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, seems to be fixed now. Let the calumny and trolling recommence! (errr…just kidding)