My Afternoon at the Command Line

Phew what an afternoon I have had. I spent most of it in Terminal removing comment spam and disabling comments and trackbacks for school blog accounts on our x-serve.

The x-serve running Tiger Server is an easy platform to set up to host weblogs. It could not be easier to set up. Go into Server Admin and then web services and click the box that says "enable weblog server".

Here is the rub. Turned ON by default is the ability for anyone to comment (you can limit this in each account but that is a pain) at least you can turn it off or limit it. For trackbacks its a little bit different. Unless you go into the file /library/tomcat/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/username/blog.properties
and change to blog-comments-enabled=false and blog-trackbacks-enabled=false then you cannot stop the p*orn spam.

So 3 hours later I have cleaned up over 40 blog accounts and removed the offensive spam and disabled comments and trackbacks.

Currently looking for some alternative for students to use to blog. My current recommendation BLOGGER !!! partly why I have switched myself to blogger.

Macworld Expo Keynote

I went to the Black Swamp Mac Users Group meeting at Beaners in Perrysburg last night and to my surprise there were 21 people there.

We tried to watch the keynote which had only just been released as a video stream at 6.30pm. Alas we could not get the stream due to high demand. So Chris Hamady went through the announcements at MacWorld.

I think that the iPhone was cool looking .... but due to the cost ($500 +) and the fact that Cingular coverage sucks in NW Ohio. I doubt I will ever own one of these babies...

The AppleTV looks interesting, I do want to put all my DVDs into digital format and play them using Front Row on my TV. I am not sure if this device will do all that I want to do.

I will be waiting to see what comes in the way of Video ipods. I would buy a Full screen video ipod with the same form factor as the iPhone if it was reasonably priced.

I wonder why Apple chose to do only non-macintosh announcements at a MacWorld. I feel a little slighted... Oh well I guess that they had a captive audience and with CES going on they needed to use up some of the Oxgen..

Maybe they should change the name of MacWorld Expo to Apple World Expo.