Looking a little on the internet I found out what a "Trackback" is exactly and I also found the WP file that allows the trackback mechanism to show up as a posted comment. This means that with "Trackbacks" turned on in WordPress, cretins can leave spam comments to their heart's content by formatting a special HTTP POST request to wp-trackback.php (thus by-passing my captcha).

I have disabled pingbacks and trackbacks on my blog for now, let's see if I get any more spam in the next month or two...

The newest version of WordPress is out, Version 1.5. They seem to have improved the commenting and moderation system, so I'm tempted to upgrade, because despite implementing my own captcha, I got bombed without about 30 spam comments last night. Thank god for "Mass Edit" mode...

I might try playing around with my captcha a little more, but I'm having a hard time believing someone actually figured out a way around my little captcha just to post comment spam on my little blog with an audience of about 2. Thus, I think they're exploiting a vulnerability within WordPress there and I may investigate that a little.

What bottom-feeders...:(

A friend of mine once showed me this popular article in which the author recommends putting "your life" into version control. Read the rest of this entry ...

An update on my Subversion installation: I woke in the morning to find that most of the Subversion tests had failed during the "make check". I looked at the log file and it seems that all the tests that had anything to do with the repository failed (checkout, commit, etc).

First, a little history: Subversion 1.0 had a backend based on a Berkeley DB, while Subversion 1.1 introduced a backend based on the filesystem itself (not dependent upon the Berkeley DB). After weighing the repository pros and cons I decided on the new FSFS filesystem for my Subversion 1.1 installation.

Thus, I had a doubt: Could the make file only be supporting checks for the Berkeley DB filesystem? A google for it turned up this nugget which shows that a special argument is required during "make check" if you're using the new FSFS filesystem. Grrrreat....