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Fight back SPAM

If you have read my blog for a while you will notice some comment spam since last week. That was not good at all and I've never happy to see them. Now, it's time to fight back! Fortunately, Drupal has a good module for this special task namely spam. And now, it is spam v2. Briefly, spam v2 is very easy to install on Drupal 4.7.2 by just downloading, extracting, enabling and configuring. How good is it? Shortly, you may think that spam v2 is a kind of SpamAssassin for Drupal because it has Bayesian and supports auto-learning. If you are not familiar with SA, the good news is that you don't need to know anything just let spam v2 do the rest. The detected spams may be reviewed later by you.

How to fix silent flash in Firefox on Dapper

I'm trying to teach myself to sing . Unfortunately, it was so quiet. I could not hear any sound at all. Only I know is that my sound card works well with ALSA so the problem could be firefox don't know how to deal with ALSA properly. By the way, every questions have their answers including this one. Eventually, I found a good blog since last January. I just need to install alsa-oss (already done) by sudo apt-get install alsa-oss. And then modify /etc/firefox/firefoxrc to use ALSA as below.

New ipdb.mysql

It seems I forgot about ipdb.mysql during last upgrade so I got a comment about my mistake. To fix this problem, I will upload as an attach file with this post so you can get it anytime you want. I don't commit it to the CVS because of its size. It might take your updating into big trouble for diffing 5MB text file.

Linux Kernel 2.6.x Local Root Exploit

As of today, Linux Kernel 2.6.x has been hacked for lots of local root exploits. Anyway, it doesn't matter how many they are but it does matter that most of that exploits valid on most Linux stations. One serious case is that they also valid on even cluster distribution like NPACI Rocks. In other words, the whole servers in a cluster maybe exploited for cracking bigger goal, e.g., password decryption. Ones may argue that it is not that dangerous because they are local root exploits, not remote root exploits. Yes, they are. But you have to imagine the power of grid computing where you can run a job seemlessly on remote clusters with automatic executable staging. That's enough. One may exploit the whole grid instantly.

Resource Consumption of Firefox, IE and Opera

In browser war, there are big three player in this game. The first one and my favorite is Firefox. Anyway, it seems like Firefox is beating by IE 7 and Opera 9. While other competiters trying to promote its usability and resource usage, Firefox is still focusing on extensibility and performance. One big problem here is not performance but resource consumption. In other words, Firefox is growing up and it is not for machine with main memory lower than 512 anymore. Well, to make it more fair, we are engineer and we talk by exact value. I found a comparison. Let's skip to the resource usage. The article measured memory usage in MB with no pages load on MS Windows XP Professional SP2. The result turned out that Opera 9.0 consumed 53 MB followed by Firefox 2 Beta 1 at 42 MB and IE 7 Beta 3 at 24 MB. After loading 6 tabs, Firefox 2 Beta 1 ate 73 MB, IE 7 Beta 3 at 70 MB, and Opera 9.0 at 52 MB. The last performance test is startup time in seconds. Opera 9.0 was the winner in this criteria while Firefox 2 Beta 1 is the slowest one.

Is this possible?

You know sugree, Over the last few months I've learned some very interesting stuff from your reading the postings on your site, not just about Drupal. I thank you for that. Yesterday, I read this post http://drupal.org/node/73389 over at Drupal and thought it's an interesting idea. Since nobody at Drupal seems to know the answer to this one, I'd thought I'd ask here since you always have the answers! Is it actually possible to take blocks from one Drupal site and post them on another non-drupal site.