I’ve been thinking on this for days and days, and days and days, maybe for a total of two full hours. Are you familiar with the concept of free software? Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. Anyway, anyhow, please let me explain, at least to fulfil today’s article.

I am an engineer. Yeah, I know it’s not what you may say, “Wow. Now that’s a revelation.” I’m merely remarking the fact that I am a graduate of Computing by the University of Guadalajara. I am an engineer, I was saying. Now, what can I do all day long by being an engineer of Computing that does NOT have a strong effect in my daily life? I mean, I have a job. I need the extra income but I can’t switch jobs right now, not because I don’t want to, but because I’m obtaining a credit to build my own house (eat that, you renters!) and one of the requisites is to have a secured job for at least two years. After you got the credit, you can switch jobs or even stop working and it won’t be a problem until you cease to pay your monthly bill. So I can’t switch jobs right now. How can I obtain an extra income, then? What can I do, and do reasonably good, in order to make more money?

Well, I know how to set up websites. And I can do that fast and easy and cheap, and probably even good. How about starting yet another hosting business? “Oh, great,” I swear I can hear it from the other side of the screen, “not again.” Actually, yes, I think I can do it. You know, it may be a good idea: I could aim for those people that want a website for your business and doesn’t have the “know-how” to set it up. I could charge a reasonable amount, say 1000 mexican pesos per year (that is barely 100 dollars per year) and spend, what, 15 bucks in the domain name and 10 minutes setting up an account in my web server? I could even charge a little more if I set up the actual website, something simple yet powerful, say, Joomla or Wordpress or even Nucleous, fill the appropriate forms, press the correct buttons, pull the right levers, stuff like that. I could be a webmaster-for-hire, to use an expression from the primitive web times, when if we needed bells and whistles we had to program them, and not simply reuse a simple piece of code from another site. So the clients will get hosting in my state-of-the-art web server, and I’ll get money to allow me to keep my server running. I think I have enough capacity and bandwidth for up to 200 websites working at the same time, and I hope, think and believe (not in that order) if I can get 100 bucks for each site, I’ll get 20000 bucks a year, more than enough to pay for the bandwidth of my server.

And it won’t be that much of a problem to obtain the clients. It’s actually a cheap price, and if I could get as low as four clients a month I can get the money I need to build my house without getting red numbers in my bank account.  Yeah. I can do that. Now all I need is a good slogan and a good name. I can use the ones I used with my old company, and I can use the ones of my current company. And I need a new domain name. Any suggestions?

Cheerio, partners.

V.

If the plural of man is always called men,
Then shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn’t the plural of booth be called beeth?

Then one may be that, and three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim!

Let’s face it - English is a crazy language.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren’t invented in .
We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes,
we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square,
and a guinea pig is neither from nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write but fingers don’t fing,
grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham?
Doesn’t it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend.
If you have a bunch of odds and ends
and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English
should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.

In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital?
We ship by truck but send cargo by ship.
We have noses that run and feet that smell.
We park in a driveway and drive in a parkway.
And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same,
while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language
in which your house can burn up as it burns
down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out,
and in which an alarm goes off by going on.

And, in closing, if Father is Pop, how come Mother’s not Mop?

Spammers are a bunch of guys and gals (mostly guys) that inspires in me feelings like love and hate. I admire them and at the same time I hope and want to drive them out of business. Yeah, they just want to make their bread and butter, just like any bloke, it’s just that they don’t want to do it in the same way one will expect another one would do it. Spammers use dubious methods to achieve their goals, most of them almost, but not quite, entirely unlike legal ways.

What I find interesting is the fact that an increasing number of spammers seems to think that my blogs are ideal platforms for the products or services they advertise, and just when they try to post something for free, my systems stop them.

Spammers do what in the Queen’s language we refer as “Intrusive Advertising by Electronic Mail.” You know the real life equivalent of spam: flyers. Just as your home mailbox is full of flyers trying to sell jou everything, from furniture to house stuff, your e-mail inbox is full of viagra pills or worse. As a matter of fact, my spammers know something about target advertising, because they insist in sending me ads for penis-enlargement pills. The difference is that while the pamphlets are real and someone paid several people in order to design it, print it and deliver it, allowing you to clean your windows with it, spammers cut all the costs. They don’t do marketing research, they just send the same mail to millions of e-mail addresses. They don’t spent their money to deliver their e-mails, they employ a lot of compromised computers from unsuspecting people. They don’t even need to collect a list of prospects, they just harvest lists of e-mails of your chain e-mails. If you send or even received a sad letter telling you that Sandy needs a new brain (her sickness and name evolves) someone has your address in a list and made a profit just by selling it. That’s the reason you receive so much spam in your inbox. My inbox, an extreme example, receives 95% of spam, 4% of chain letters, and, in a good day, 1% of valid mail. Modern e-mail software has integrated spam filters, blocking sometimes even 99% of spam, and what’s better, they learn and improve their work. Web-based e-mail, like Google Mail, does an excellent job filtering spam.

Thus, spammers had to find new ways and strategies to remain in business. And, well, blogs were right there. Spammers wrote bots, that is, little computer programs, that reads a blog, find the comment form, fills the appropriate fields, fill ‘em and submits ‘em. And if you don’t have appropriate ways to stop ‘em, they’ll overwhelm you and your readers. Let’s watch some real examples:

vEM87V hcjrmhjlsoec, [url=http://yqdfggwzmpco.com.xy/]yqdfggwzmpco[/url], [link=http://gvomnewfblqb.com.xy/]gvomnewfblqb[/link], http://violpjslvoyz.com.xy/,

buy viagra! purchase viagra! get viagra!

I’ve read your blog and, although it’s not a perfect match (I was looking for cheap travel agencies, like cheap-travel-agencies-dot-spam-link-full-of-ads-dot-com) I’ll return and read more of it.

Because people tend to dislike the owners of blogs aimed to children whose comments are full of ads of websites full of pornographic pictures, blog owners had to stop spammers before they do harm to their blogs. The spammers depends on numbers to make a profit, and if they fail to reach that number, their money fail to reach them.

Let’s do an example, just for fun and with surely wrong figures. Let’s say a webmaster known as V for Vancouver maintains an porn website, offering mostly erotic pictures back from 1820. Those pictures looks like Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother showing her ankles. There are 20 free photos to show the, well, customers, let’s say, what the site is all about. But because no body knows it, the site is brand-new and the server spends its time yawning. How is it possible for a server to yawn doesn’t matter right now. To spice things up V calls a spacker, that is, a hacker that works for a spammer, to do some work for him: V will pay the spacker a penny for each click driven to V’s site, and a full dollar for each subscriber. The spacker prepares a list of 100 million e-mail addresses, sends 200 million mails, and sits in his easy chair with a glass of wine (or was it in his couch with a beer? whatever…) waiting for the clicks and money to arrive. Sadly, barely one hundred thousand people actually clicked in the ad, that’s 0.001%. And of those hundred thousand barely 0.1% became subscribers, and that’s 100 persons. In real life an advertiser would have to deliver one flyer to each inhabitant in Mexico to reach those figures, and if only one hundred people actually purchased something, I’d say that the campaign was not successful and that advertiser sucks (and would have to declare bankruptcy). But not our spacker. He won a thousand dollars for the clicks and a hundred for the subscribers. V, on the contrary, made barely 1600 dollars for the new subscribers, each paying 16 bucks a month, and had to pay 1100. Our spacker feels pity for V; after all, V will pay more if he makes more, and most of the mails went straight to the spam hole. The spacker sends the message to all the blogs he knows and all the blogs he doesn’t know. He harvested the addresses and uses a bot to spread his work. And this is when we can stop him and force him out of business.

There are several methods you can use to stop spammers in your blog.

You can close the comments. Well, it works but also kills the main idea behind blogging: the users feedback. But you can’t simply left the comments open in the wild.

You can moderate the comments. That means comment received, comment verified and, if found legitimate, comment published. It is not practical if the author has a life out of the series of tubes, or if there is a lot of traffic in the blog. You can moderate just the first message, but if the spammer passes the first one, either by mistake or careful social engineering, it’s open season. And, of course, there is the possibility of someone yelling at you because his comment does not appear immediately.

To prevent that from happening, you can use a man in the middle. Enters the captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). In it’s easiest implementation, a captcha is just a word distorted in such a way that a computer can’t read it, but a human can, and therefore the comment was wrote by a human being and not by a spambot. Just look at the phoney word smwm as presented by a simple captcha implementation:

A good and useful implementation of a captcha is reCaptcha, of Carnegie Mellon University. It uses real words of real books that their OCR couldn’t recognize, and uses them as the basis for the captcha. You need tontype two words, one recognized, one unrecognized. If what you type matches the recognized word, then the unrecognized must be valid too, and you just helped to digitize an old book from lots of time ago. And your comment will be published, of course.

If you actually don’t want to help, or simply want more control, you can try other systems. Peter’s Custom Antispam is a good one. You can control fonts, colors, sizes, words and more. However, a badly configured system may allow the blog vulnerable by retrieving the list of words or trying a dictionary attack. Peter’s Math Antispamis an alternative, and you are challenged to solving an equation, say 2+2, and if you can figure out the answer, say, 4, then you can post your comment. The disadvantage of this system is that it needs to be relatively easy so it won’t bug your commenters, and thus vulnerable to dictionary attacks. You can solve that by using Peter’s Random Antispam, that displays a random set of letters and numbers, making it not vulnerable but also slightly annoying. But what happens to people with sight problems? It will be impossible for a blind person to see a captcha.

There are other ways to tell humans and spambots apart. You can put a question whose answer only a man would know it, such as “Whose the son of my mother that ain’t my sibling?” the answer being “me.” This kind of captchas are usually limited to a single language, or few questions, and again, vulnerable to dictionary attacks. You can put a check box next to the phrase “Mark if human,” for example. It may be overridden by a good spambot, however. You can also introduce honeypot fields, asking the user to fill or not to fill a variable, such as “type  the second to last letter of gazorninplat in the third box” and moving that variable, or duplicating the fields, one visible to robots and the other to humans.

Another variant you could use may be check the data of the spammer-to-be against a list of known spammers. The messages of any commenters will be considered doubtful and will be scanned to find if it fits into a pattern: maybe the same IP address, the same website, or the same e-mail address of a previous spam comment. New commenters will be sent to a moderation queue. If the message is a match, it will be removed. If it is not, it will be approved. As more and more messages are found to be spam, the system will learn and improve its abilities. The backdraw is that a spammer may send a preemptive message, and once approved, it will launch a blitzkrieg attack. If the database is shared, the blitzkrieg attack will be reduced to a simple firecracker: maybe one or two comments before the system detects it as a spam message. One of the best resources of this type is Akismet, available for free to all wordpress users and a sistem you can adapt to use in other platforms. For commercial sites you can get a cheap license: if your blog makes more than 500 dollars a month, you probably can spend 5 bucks a month to remain spam-free. There is a backdraw, if you have users that usually sent comments full of links (a spammers’ signature) such as users of science blogs. This kind of comments, if from a trusted party, go straight ahead to the moderation queue. Some users sends two messages, the original, full of links, and another one to the admin, saying that their comment is in the queue. There is another alternative: Bad Behavior, a fine piece of software that analyses the posting method: if the spammer hasn’t read the page first, or if any address appears to be forged, or if it takes too little time since you access the page, or if the page seems to be too old, anything that looks weird will be stopped. This method has its advantages: it can stop an attack before it can even start. However it seems to be a problem for those poor souls that need to post a comment from an anonymous network or  proxies. But I think that if you need to be behind proxies or conserve your anonimity at any cost, the least of your problems will be commenting in a blog.

I have a forum. It is an anonymous forum, and I named it “A Perfect Match” (El Fósforo Perfecto) in honour to a funny yet bad-translated spam comment. To keep it open, I have a complete spam protection system: it has a captcha, and the message then is compared against a list of known offenders, and also it has three different honeypots, that makes difficult the use of spambots to post. It has remained spam-free for a lot of time and I hope it will remain that way for a long time to come, even if the traffic is still too low to be a target for spackers.

There you go. Now you have ideas and tools, you know how these people think, and you are ready to implement your own protection to your blog, or at least you know where to start. All of this in a little bit less than two thousand and one hundred words.

Cheerio, partners.

V.

Weekdays are usually a mess. Repairing computers and stuff 11 to 7, plus a lot of other activities not related to my nominal job: proof-reading, spell-checking, translations and sometimes even transcribing articles, speeches or books. That’s mainly because I am a fast reader, I have good spelling, I can speak, read and write fluently in two languages and understand another two, and I am a fast typist. All of these compared to the other members of my office, of course.

A friend of mine asked me how it was possible that I’ve been doing all this for the same wage, MX$4000.00 a month, and I answered that’s because I don’t need a lot of money to live and I don’t pretend to be the richest man in the world. But as time goes by I’m starting to regret that answer. I believe now it’s because I’m single and I own my house. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to live with so little money.

Oh, yes, another thing I like to do Sundays is to lay in bed, think and write in a philosophical fashion, and publish it in a weblog nobody reads (yet) just for fun.

Cheerio, partners.

V.

One example of what is a sensitive topic in Canada and not in Mexico is the price of your house. Ask anybody in Mexico how much they paid for their house or apartment and everybody will tell you a number. This may provoke envy or surprise to the one who asked. However, in Canada, if I asked to any bloke how much did his house costs, he would punch me in the face or at least tell me “Mind your own business.” The most educated person would tell me “Why o you want to know?”
The same things will happen if you ask about cars, clothes, salaries or shoes.

Why this happens must be related to some odd stuff in English-related cultures. Spanish-related cultures, on the other side, like to show off their wealth to their neighbors. It’s odd.

Religion has a big bunch of taboos too. Muslim cultures tend to consider dogs as impure and don’t tolerate their touch. I had a neighbor in Vancouver that was muslim, and another that was a Presbytherian dog lover. They fought over that issue for years until an atheist neighbor (me) proposed a simple solution: the dog lover got an Afghan, because the muslim neighbor didn’t consider a Tazi a dog.

So, do you know another taboo in your comunity? Mind to share?

Cheerio, partners.

V.

As many native English-speakers will tell you, I’m not exactly the best writer. My grammar sucks, I have serious deficiencies using tenses, and my formal education can be summarized as “Total school time: four months.”

In fact, it’s not that I hadn’t had formal education. It’s just that the one I had was very deficient to begin with: three years in Secondary school (before high school) that were horrible, and what I learnt back then was enough to put me in English 2A. I learnt the language with the help of an old dictionary computer manuals and videogames. Fast forward fifteen years later, when I took a test that  placed me in Advanced English, two more months in school where I didn’t learnt anything I didn’t already knew, and that’s it. For example, it wasn’t until I started to study in Vancouver that I learnt what a tense was. And to make things worse, my vocabulary isn’t even consistent. I mix and use Canadian American and British expressions and words without a defined pattern (although I try to use Canadian English as my dialect).

I really started to learn English when I was living in Canada. In fact, that was the first place when I learnt what a phrasal verb was and what was the difference between in, on and over. Also, I learnt that phrasal verbs ain’t exactly understood unless somebody has already told you what the fuck they are supposed to mean. Hell, I didn’t even know how to write a simple formal letter because nobody taught me that before.

Therefore, as I was living in Vancouver I was actually learning a lot of new stuff, and I knew I wasn’t able to write fluently in English. As a matter of fact, I started this blog to force me (me!) to learn how to properly write and express my ideas in English. I’ve learnt to read, now it’s time for me to write. And I started this conversation club to allow more and more people to learn how to communicate effectively in another language. If you know how to correct my mistakes, feel free to let me know. I’ll learn, and other people too.

Now, my friends, you know the truth. Kind of. See you this weekend.

Cheerio, partners.

V.

The second oldest alcoholic beer is wine, made from the juice of the fruit of grapes (not grapefruits). It is only a wine if its made from grape juice, everything else is either a spirit or a beer. There are three varieties of wine: white, pink and red. But there are classifications for wines. I tend to prefer beujolais, but I’ll never say no to a nice cup of sherry, brandy or cognac. I have a favourite dessert wine, icewine to be more precise. It is a late harvest wine, that is, a wine made from the very last grapes of the season in cold enviroments, those grapes that were there when the first cold came and became frozen grapes. It is sweet, very sweet, and delicious, very delicious, and expensive, very expensive. It’s easy to make your own wine, but you have to be careful if you don’t want to end having vinegar instead of alcohol.

But spirits are another different thing. In fact, different things.  Technically, spirit means a distilled beverage containing at least a 35% of ethanol by volume and no sugar added, such as absinthe, gin, grappa, rum, tequila, whisky and vodka. There are also liqueurs, distilled beverages with sugar and flavourings added, such as Grand Marnier, Frangelico and schnapps (at least american schnapps). You can also make  fortified wines, just by adding a distilled beverage to a wine. Spirits are made of almost everything that can be fermented, even grape juice (brandy, cognac, and pisco, for example). And you can mix spirits to prepare coktails (you can do sangria with wine, but that’s not exactly a cocktail).

However, there is a beverage that can be named the best of all the Galaxy, the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. Drinking it is a special experience, comparable only to been hit in the head by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick. It is quite an easy recipee too.

• Take the juice from one bottle of that Ol’ Janx Spirit.
• Pour into it one measure of water from the seas of Santraginus V
• Allow three cubes of Arcturan Mega-gin to melt into the mixture (it must be properly iced or the benzene is lost).
• Allow four litres of Fallian marsh gas to bubble through it (in memory of all those happy Hikers who have died of pleasure in the Marshes of Fallia).
• Over the back of a silver spoon float a measure of Qualactin Hypermint extract, redolent of all the heady odours of the dark Qualactin Zones.
• Drop in the tooth of an Algolian Suntiger. Watch it dissolve, spreading the fires of the Algolian suns deep into the heart of the drink.
• Sprinkle Zamphour.
• Add an olive.

There is a small problem mixing it, however. There are a number of environmental and weapons treaties and laws of physics which prevent the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster from being mixed on Earth. But there is a version made of Terran ingredients you can drink:

• Take the liquid contained in a 200 ml (6.75 oz) bottle of EverClear to remind you that your head will be clear forever if you drink too many Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters, and that your brain will clear of anything soon after you start drinking some, if not before.
• Into it, slowly pour a 750 ml (25 oz) bottle of Bombay Sapphire to remind you of the marvelous beauty of the old Santraginean seas, or an equal amount of Jeremiah Weed in acknowledgement of what has happened to the Santraginean Seas and their lifeforms.
• Now add 750 ml (25 oz) of Cold Wild Turkey, letting it run into the mixture as we run through life to remind us of all the lifeforms we meet and experience while hitchhiking through the galaxy.
• Speedily stirring, add 375 ml (12.7 oz) of Tequila, mixing it in to commemorate the galactic hitchhikers who died of pleasure among the vapors and gasses in the marshes of Fallia.
• Over the bowl of a silver spoon, let flow 1 litre (34 oz) of rum in memory of the waterfalls and their glorious rainbows encountered on your journeys through the galaxy of life.
• Next, drop in the worm found in a bottle of Mezcal, watching it dissolve into the mixture. If the bottom falls out and the worm survives, drink at your own risk.
• Finally, sprinkle into the mixture some Gatorade to commemorate the lifeforms which have vanished and are becoming extinct, both sentient and non-sentient, especially those most in need of aid.

And finally, drink… but… very… carefully…

Cheerio, partner.

V.

Plastic brain scar,  I want laser, I’m your chauffeur with high gloss highs, take you where you want.
Can’t stop, oh, off the train; train, aie, aie, yeh…
Wolf lady sucks my brain, apricot, sunrise came, L.A. nights, Just roll in.
Can’t stop, oh, off the train; train, aie, aie, yeh…
Can’t stop, oh, off the train; train, aie, aie, yeh…
Nasal douche, poolside line, Soft lit tan, what’s your sign? Hold my hand, just roll in.
Can’t stop, oh, off the train; train, aie, aie, yeh…
Can’t stop, oh, off the train; train, aie, aie, yeh…
Can’t stop, oh, off the train; train, aie, aie, yeh…
Can’t stop, oh, off the train; train, aie, aie, yeh…
Can’t stop, oh, off the train; train, aie, aie, yeh…

I wonder what’s going on.

Cheerio, partners.

V.

In Canada and the USA (I simply can’t call those 50 states “America”) it’s TV, pronounced “tee vee.” In England it’s “telly,” pronounced, well, “telly.” I don’t watch telly a lot; just a couple shows and some football matches. I like to watch a show called “Tercer Grado” (Third Degree) also known as “Los Periodistas” (The Reporters). It is a political debate show. However, I watch it because, well, it’s funny. The reporters use all their available weapons (words) to attack each other’s opinions, which is, for itself, a hard job: it’s easier to attack the man instead of the idea. This is a source of unintentional humour I find quite amusing.

I like to watch another show, Law & Order: Criminal Intent. I don’t know why; it’s not the acting, not the characters, not even the script, but I like it. I liked a Canadian show for its scripts: “Little Mosque on the Prairie.” Its not a big-budget show (not a low-budget either) but is well written.

Except for the occasional newscast and those shows, I don’t watch anything else. If somebody recommends me a show, I download a couple episodes or read the synopsis. If I like it, I download the rest or buy the entire season in dvd. So far I’ve only purchased “Seinfield” so far, but I want to get “Mythbusters.” I’ve watched “Dexter” and “Scrubs.” That’s it. I watched the first season of “Desperate Housewifes” and “I Love New York,” the last one just to see how low the contestants could reach.

And you? Do you have a favourite show, program or series? If so, mind to share it with us?

Cheerio, partners.

V.