Tweed Coast Treadly

The locals have had a breakthrough! The Tweed Shire Council has voted to create/implement a Development Control Plan (DCP), see the Echo Story, the developers and their council sympathisers were out voted by a slim 4-3 margin.

This may not be the end of the war on every natural and cultural environment destructive development in the area but at least it is a small battle victory.  The general idea that more of anything is better than less is something that I disagree with.

I feel a rant coming on….

The idea of sustainability was summed up in the late 70’s when I was undertaking a Business Degree at Ku-ring-gai CAE and the theory of the Steady Sate Economy was presented to me! Ah the light was blinding… but the greed is good promoted to the community during the next 30+ years has lead to the economic crisis we find ourselves as a community fast required to deal with. Many of the precepts of a Growth Economy can easily switch to become that of a Shrinking Economy. The magical multipliers work geometrically just as well in both directions!

Both the Federal and State Parliaments are proving themselves incapable of consensual action, even though the economy ship is on the verge of sinking the powers to be are deciding what colour to paint the frigging lifeboats, even though there is no rescue ship close by to save those that can fit in the limited capacity lifeboats.

Remind you of a story you may have heard? Does the Sinking of the White Star Line’s Titanic come to mind, not enough lifeboats, a ship said to be unsinkable, musicians playing to placate the passengers while the ship goes down, water to cold to survive in for long, passengers deciding when is the right time to jump ship, passengers thinking the crew will save them they can sit back and be told what to do, not enough life jackets for those that can’t fit into the lifeboats, no practice drills in case of emergency, etc… the list of similarities between the economy and the Titanic sinking goes on, definitely neither are or were a boy scout

… ah that’s better

Last 2 days I have been trying to get the plumbing done on the old 1000 gallon water tank. But as an amature the swearing has been the most successful part of the impression! What a bitch to get the bung out until i realised I needed to get at the nut on the inside of the tank! and that also meant having another arm about 15 feet long with a strong hand on the end!

So the solution was? Maneuver the tank, after emptying it, to a location I could ti it on it’s side rotate it until the large Inlet hole was close enough to the ground wiggle inside after propping a pair of Stiltons to the outside nut/bolt securely so that they wouldn’t fall off! 

After squeezing myself inside ( with the sides chocked to stop me becoming part of a mixing machine) I stood over the outlet nut and gave a gentle push on the second pair of Stiltsons I had with me, torch secured into my mouth. No worries the nut rotated smooth as though it was brand new, better even! 

Next task is to try to quickly find a 1¼ inch inlet bung supplier! Hopefully before it rains again!

Also been mucking around with a couple of scripts at night ie the Ride Stats Plugin and the Google Feed Reader Linking Widgit…. both were ok after a bit of tweaking of code to work better in Wordpress 2.6.x

WP-Spamkit - a Wordpress Anti-Spam Plugin

Idea - To Use Response tokens to Reject Comment Spam

A filter available to webmasters is to add a hidden session token or hash function to their comment form. When the comments are submitted, data stored within the posting such as IP address and time of posting can be compared to the data stored with the session token or hash generated when the user loaded the comment form.

Postings that use different IP addresses for loading the comment form and posting the comment form, or postings that took unusually short or long periods of time to compose can be filtered out.

This method is particularly effective against spammers who spoof their IP Address in an attempt to conceal their identities. It works very well against automated bots that send $_POST data to the wp-comments-post.php script. It needs no communication to external servers like Akismet or Bad-Behaviour does!. It would be great if the Wordpress Maintainers implimented a rejection of POSTING DIRECTLY to this file in the core code. 

** This Plugin Requires $_SESSION use to be enabled**

** Works better with Javascript Enabled by Clients **

All instructions are within the readme file and there is detailed inline commenting of the WP-Spamkit scripts

Installation

1. Copy folder files into your plugins directory
2. Ensure the tmp logging folder is writable
3. Note: Not needed for WP version>2.2.3  On Windows-Apache Servers you need to make sure you are running the below wordpress patch
   • To Work the Activation/Deactivation requires Patch for plugins.php
   • Revision 5928 for windows activation of plugins in subfolders is already patched in Wordpress-2.2.3
   • In plugins.php
     /*replace the function*/
function plugin_basename($file) {
$file = preg_replace('|\\\\+|', '\\\\', $file);
$file = preg_replace('/^.*wp-content[\\\\\/]plugins[\\\\\/]/’, ”, $file);
return $file;
}
/*With Revision 5928 function*/
function plugin_basename($file) {
$file = str_replace(’\\’,’/’,$file);
$file = preg_replace(’|/+|’,’/’, $file);
$file = preg_replace(’|^.*/wp-content/plugins/|’,”,$file);
return $file;
}
      
4. Activate the plugin and then go to the Options page and check your WP-Spamkit settings
5. **NOTE: a file-hack to Reject direct $_POST to wp-comments-post.php**
   Note: this is not a requirement for the plugin to function but it is a final block to spammers which will stop direct posting to the wp-comments-post.php file and thus bypassing all the WP-Spamkit checks In your wp-comments-post.php replace..
   require( dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-config.php' );
   with
     @session_start();
  require( dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-config.php' );
  // Protect against bypassing the WP-Spamkit Plugin
  // with spambot's direct POST to this file
  if ($_POST[$_SESSION["rand_name"]] == ”){
    // will be no false rejections as a SESSION had to be
    // SET during form display we are not worried about
    // checking time range or validity of the token
    // we Could Enable Logging here but it would be cosmetic
    wp_die( __(’Sorry, Spam Comments are rejected at this site.’) );
  }

Uninstall

1. Deactivate the WP-Spamkit plugin
2. Delete the WP-Spamkit plugin folder and files in your plugins directory
3. Remove any edits made to the wp-comments-post.php file during installation

Background

The plugin creates a randomly named session variable which is filled with a string of the $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] and time() encrypted with a seed string set by the admin.

This is then placed into the comment form as a human-hidden field.

The hidden field is checked against the $_SESSION var on posting the comment to see if…

1. it is a valid token
2. that the form was submitted after the Plugin Adminitrator set minimum time delay
3. that the form was submitted before the Plugin Administrator set maximum time expired

Any comments that fail any of these three tests are rejected!.
No moderation is required and there will be no false positives!
BUT NOTE: Javascript is required in the newest version 0.0.8!

To assist real people posting comments after the minimum time delay
a javascript function is used to disable the submit button until the time expires.

Note: WP-Spamkit does not monitor Trackbacks or Pingbacks!!!

Based on the Old SpamKit Plugin
Old SpamKit Plugin URI: Wordpress SpamKitPlugin v1.4
[by Michael Cutler]
Old SpamKit Description: Prototype, uses Time-Based-Tokens in the comment form
[by Gerard Calderhead].

These links do not seem to be alive anymore (they both used to be hosted at the same server IP-address)

Download

Wordpress Plugin: WP-Spamkit 0.0.1

Version: 0.0.8 is available and working VERY, VERY WELL! Not one automated comment-spam has made it through in over 12mths.

If you (are a human and) are interested in Getting the latest Implimented Production version (0.0.8), aside: so far No-One but spammers seem to visit this page, leave a comment and I will Update the Download but there is no need to give the spammers a leg up by providing the download if no-one else wants it.

Just spent the last couple of hours planning and implimenting an upgrade of this blogging software scripts. Most things went OK but I have lost all my previous categories and gained something called tags… I will need to research the modifications….

Otherwise all seems to have gone ok! (x-fingers)

Well the only error I found was the htaccess file was not transfered/created so i needed to manually re-create one to allow the permalinks option of removing the

index.php/

from the URL string