A software blog

There is a newer version 2.0 over here.

The DieOnSpam plugin inspects the commited comment, and if the comment do not contain at least one non english character, it is assumed to be spam and is entirely ignored, and a message is returned to the user (in the rare case it is not a spam bot) which says that there has to be at least one non english character at the comment.

The 1.0 version introduce changes related to localization and personalization of the initial release. Now it is possible to specify the error message which is displayed, and the error can be formatted with HTML tags. The options window use to change this setting is fully localizable.

Installation instructions:

Under your plugins directory create a dieonspam directory and copy this file to it, then enter the options/dieonspam window in the blog administration and configure the error message to be displayed, and finally activate the plugin.

Creating a localization:

A pot file is available if you want to create a localized version for this plugin option window.

At my hebrew blog I use Akismet as my anti-spam utility. Akismet works very well in identifying spam, and has a low ratio of false positives. The problem with Akismet is that because of the false positives you have to check all the comments marked as spam by it. In bad spam days there can be many comments to inspect which is annoying by itself.

I have made some research into other anti-spam technologies, starting with renaming the php file which handles commenting and ending with the spamkarma2 plugin which is supposed to end all spam. Somewere in the research process I had realized a very basic fact of spam. All of the spam is in english. Since my blog is in hebrew and all the comments to the blog are in hebrew as well, it was only the logical thing to do to develope a plugin which blocks comments which are written entirely in english.

The plugin inspects the commited comment, and if the comment do not contain at least one non english character, it is assumed to be spam and is entirely ignored, and a message is returned to the user (in the rare case it is not a spam bot) which says that there has to be at least one non english character at the comment.

I have no idea if this logic can be applied to other Latin languages which have a common character set with english.

There is a newer version 2.0 right over here.

This is probably one of the most useless plugins ever written, but I had an itch I needed to scratch.

The aim of the plugin is to control the amount of text send in the rss feed, and the amount of text displayed on pages which display multiple posts.

RSS: By default if you do not specify an excerpt to be used, and you do not insert the “more” tag into your post, wordpress will send exactly 55 words in the feed, which usually cause a fragment of a paragraph to be send. Not a very user friendly feature.

The plugin sends in the rss full paragraph. You can configure the amount of words to be used as a guideline to the number of paragraphs to send. If the guidline breaks a paragraph before its middle point, the paragraph is not sent; otherwise the full paragraph is sent.
Multiple posts: Much like the RSS feed, there is no way to control the excerpt used by wordpress themes which show excerpt of posts on multi posts pages. And much like the in the RSS feed the plugin gives you control on the amount of text displayed as the excerpt.

Sounds interesting? give it a try. Save it from here, put it into your plugins directory, and activate it.

This plugin was strongly inspired by the following great code.

The aim of the extension is to provide a way to extend the windows snmp agent by a scripting language instead of using the winsnmp c/c++ api.

TCL was chosen because I worked for the last year for a company which developed  a TCL based product which gave me the opportunity to hack the language, write extensions for it, and generally appreciate that its really a nice, easy to learn language.

While tcl is not very popular at this time and age, its syntax is not too different from php and it should be easy to learn for any experienced programmer.

As any 1.0 software version this software is kind of a beta version, at least until there is a positive feedback from users.

Get the full information and download the extension from the tcl extension page.

This is the most downloaded piece of software out of the various softwares at this site. It is also the only software for which a potential costumer had run a test suite against, and the only problem he had found were related to some edge case in error reporting inherited from the underlying net-snmp stack.

The errors which were found were insignificant for any real world usage (I assume that taking into account the popularity of the net-snmp stack, if they were significant they would have been fixed long ago), but the breaking of the deal which forced me to return to a normal day job have depressed me and I have not bothered to analyze and report them to the net-snmp project.

In the year which had passed since then, there some shift in the server market and there are now more servers running windows 2003 64 bit version. Since the agent in its current state is a 32-bit application, it can not access the SNMP DLL’s which are supplied by microsoft which are 64 bit. I havn’t tried it, but I assume that you can’t run the agent on a 64 bit OS.

For now the software is in maintenance mode. If you find bugs, or has a suggestions for minor improvements, I will try to make the necessary code changes.

Assuming someone will be willing to sponser the work, or I will come up with a working buisness plan, this is the current list of features I would like to add in future:

1. 64 bit OS support
2. MSI installer
3. GUI candy for defining snmpv3 views by browsing the agent mibs and data
4. upgrade to the latest net-snmp stack

In February 2002 I have left my job as Project manager/Software architect/code monkey at XOR Technologies. In this position I have done most of things related to SNMP. I have designed MIBs, developed SNMP agents, developed proxies to SNMP agent, developed Element Management Systems, and integrated software with higher hierarchy management platform like HPOV NNM.

Back then, the SNMP world consisted of tools which were not friendly to developers and did not support the process by which SNMP software (agent and management) software is developed. I thought that I know better, that I have Ideas which may simplify and reduce the cost of SNMP software development. So instead of going hunting for a new job, I started to develop software, with a hope to sell it via the internet.

In 2005 I wasn’t shocked to discover that the time I was willing to leave on savings has run out, and the commercial result were very poor, and took a normal day job. Having a day job and not seeing any profit from the software I developed, caused me to neglect it, and it didn’t help that the spam in the PHPBB forums I had, killed their usefulness.

But now I am once again out of a day job, and until I will find a new one, I have decided to put some effort in reorganizing my software in hope that someone will find it useful (and maybe I will be able to make some money of it ;)).

Hopefully, the wordpress CMS/blogging platform used here, is much more suitable to the kind of low traffic discussions I hope to have here.