I had to temporarily disable comments until I have time to upgrade Wordpress and improve my spam protection. I had barely gotten any comment spam over the last year or so, but since yesterday this has changed again. I am currently getting spammed at the rate of about 2 comments per minute…

I decided to take my recent comment / trackback spam issues as an opportunity to upgrade Wordpress from 1.5 to the latest version (2.02) and try the new Akismet anti-comment-spam plugin that is included in the release. Comments are re-enabled for now. Let’s see how this goes… Either way, the upgrade was worth it. The WordPress 2.02 admin interface looks a lot more modern and polished, and I look forward to exploring some of the new themes and plugins....

Geoffrey Grossenbach recently posted two excellent articles on using and implementing Rails plugins:

My wife just received a new Bank of America debit card and managed to persuade me to activate the card by calling the number on the sticker. In the past, this was usually a simple and painless procedure: enter the card number, the expiration date, and the last 4 digits of the SSN, and you were all set. But this time, I almost couldn’t believe my ears. While the activation was supposedly being processed, I had to endure 4 lengthy and annoying advertisements for credit reports and similar services, before I finally got the confirmation that the activation was successfully completed....

Yesterday the ESRB re-rated Oblivion M for Mature. Bethesda’s response to the re-rating followed shortly afterwards. Apparently the re-rating was mainly triggered by a user created modification that allows players to play with topless versions of female characters (Hot Coffee anyone?). In addition, the ESRB accused Bethesda of improperly disclosing the excessive amounts of blood and gore that go beyond a Teen rating. Personally, I don’t agree with the new rating....