Thoughts From Eric Archive

As promised, I now draw back the curtain on S5 1.1b4 (try the testbed online, or download the 263KB ZIP file).  Here are the changes from 1.1b3:

• “Meta” keys—function keys, command, control, alt, and option—should no longer be trapped by keys().  Thus, for those of you who discovered that you couldn’t use command-W to close the window in Firefox/OS X, that should be fixed; hitting F11 to invoke full-screen mode should also work; and so on, and so on.

• While I was at it, I restructured keys() so that the only keystroke S5 pays attention to when in the outline view is “T”, to let you toggle back to the slide show view.  Anything else gets passed up by S5.  Despite this, Safari is still ignoring Page Up and Page Down while in the outline view.  I can’t for the life of me figure out why.

• At the suggestion of Romain Herault, I’ve modified clicker(e) so that it will ignore clicks inside of embed and object elements.  This will allow you to interact with an embedded object, like a Flash file or a video, without advancing the slide show.

  I’m aware that some people have run into problems adding videos to their presentations, but I’m not at this point able to take on the task of analyzing the problems and figuring out potential solutions.  If someone else wants to work on fixes, there’s every chance I’ll be able to get fixes into the next version of S5, but very likely not this one.  I have a similar stance regarding the long pause of unstyled content while the presentation loads.  If someone devises a fix, I’ll study it for inclusion in the next version.  I personally don’t have a problem with the pause, but I realize there are those who’d like to eliminate it, and if it can be done without causing problems I’ll certainly add it.  Just likely not in this version.

• PNG alpha channels are now honored in IE/Win, if only for img elements and not backgrounds.  You can see this happening on slide 5 of the testbed.  Woohoo!  This happens thanks to Erik Arvidsson’s pngbehavior.htc, a copy of which now resides in the default directory.  It may one day be replaced with IE7, but we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

  The one sort-of drawback to using this approach is that it seems to require that the call to pngbehavior.htc sits in an embedded style sheet, or else nothing happens.  This may very well have to do with the way the JavaScript monkeys around with external style sheets during startup.  If any of you IE/Win JS gurus can figure out a way to get the behavior to fire without having to embed it into the presentation, that would be stellar.  If not, it’ll just be documented as a “leave this in if you’re using alpha PNGs; otherwise you can take it out” thing.

One thing I’m still thinking about changing is the handling of the Home and End keys.  Right now, they move you forward or backward by one slide, just like the arrow keys and several others.  I’m thinking of making them jump to the first or last slide instead.  I’m hesitant because making the change means it would be much easier for a presenter to accidentally jump to the beginning or end of a slideshow with a single keystroke, and you can already easily jump to any slide by typing the slide number and hitting Return.  On the other hand, it’s a functionality that makes general sense, and it makes it much easier for a presenter to intentionally jump to the beginning or end of a slideshow with a single keystroke.  What are your opinions?

At this point, I would anticipate that 1.1 will have one more beta version to eliminate any bugs that are discovered as well as adopt any optimizations, and then it’ll go final.  I know there have been other feature requests (and may be more on this post, which is fine) but it’s really late in the beta cycle to add anything else.  Any new features will have a chance to get into the next version.

• S5 1.1b4 was published on Friday, January 28th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the S5 and Tools categories.
• There have been twenty replies.

I know it’s been a while since the last beta version of S5 was released, but between doing client work, flying to and from Albany (speaking of that, big ups to Dan “So Fine” Feinberg, Ed “The Shark” Skawinski, Ric “Darin” DiDonato, and the rest of the ITU Crew), diversions into PHP hacking, judging a markover contest, starting ballroom dancing classes, and spending time with my family, time has been a wee bit tight.  Things will only get worse once March rolls into town, so I’m going to try to push 1.1 into final status before February is done.

In the meantime, I wanted to point to some cool things that I’ve heard about with regards to S5.

• S5 was adapted to create an online tour of Epocrates, a popular medical reference package for handhelds.  Kat uses it, as a matter of fact.
• Ludovic Dubost, developer of XWiki, created an XWiki-based S5 creator, which you can read more about in his blog entry about it.
• Pelle Braendgaard launched soapbx.com, a Web-driven S5 editor.  You can pick a theme, write the content in a wiki-like form, and get a slideshow.  It was apparently developed using Ruby On Rails.
• Not quite ten hours after getting Pelle’s e-mail, a message from Lucas Carlson arrived regarding the creation of his own S5 creator: s5presents.com.  It too was developed using Ruby On Rails.
• Earlier today, Eric Eggert reported that S5 got coverage in the German version of Internet World magazine.  I’m sort of hoping to see a scan of the article at some point.  (Is it copyright infringement if I possess a scanned copy but can’t understand what it says?  Just wondering.)  Update: I’ve seen a copy of the article, so there’s no more need for scans.

In other, less specific news, I know that people have created or are working on creating translators of one kind or another.  A popular request seems to be an OPML-to-S5 translator of some kind, and there’s always the Keynote-to-S5 idea.  So I’m going to throw open comments for people to post links to S5-related projects, translators, and what have you.  Heck, if you’ve recently done a presentation using S5, let’s see it, especially if you created a new theme.  Just please leave this post’s comment clear of bug reports or feature requests.  As of this writing, you can drop those on the S5 1.1b3 post, or else wait for the forthcoming post on 1.1b4.  I hope that’ll go up in the next couple of days, but no promises.

• S5 Update was published on Wednesday, January 26th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the S5 category.
• There have been thirteen replies.

So when I said on Monday:

Got feedback?  Let’s hear it?

…what I actually meant was:

Got feedback about the code or how the package works once it’s installed in WordPress?  Let’s hear it.

I should have realized that otherwise, the comments would turn into an argument about comment spam, fighting it, ways the general idea could be defeated, and more.  Which they did.

Look, folks, despite what some people might tell you, I’m not so arrogant as to think that I could single-handedly solve the comment spamming problem for all time.  Even if I were, I very much doubt I’d be so clueless as to think that WP-Gatekeeper was that solution.  And if both those things were the case, I’m pretty darned near certain I would have very explicitly made the claim of having beaten the spammers.  Likely in big, boldfaced, red, capitalized, blinking letters, plus a background MIDI of “We Are The Champions”.

WP-Gatekeeper is not going to stop every possible comment spam attack, human or automated, for the rest of time.  Neither is any other defense you can name, without exception.  There may be measures that currently have 100% resistance to scripted attacks.  They will one day fail—I can pretty much guarantee it.  Even today, they are defeatable by actual humans sitting at computers and posting comment spam on every site they find.  That kind of spamming is very, very rare, but it happens.  I had such an incident within the last month.  If I hadn’t been keeping a close eye on new comments just then, I’d likely have missed it completely.

I’m fully aware that there are ways a spambot could defeat WP-Gatekeeper.  At the moment, none of them can.  That will one day change, of course, assuming challenges become at all popular.  Comment spam and the fighting thereof is a dance, a tennis match, an arms race.  Neither side will ever win.  As one side adopts a new tactic, the other side will move to counter it.  The countermeasure will itself be countered.  And so it goes.  Eventually, either spambots or spam defenses (or the two in combination) will become so advanced that they’ll gain self-awareness, and then we’ll all be royally hosed.

I know this.  You know this.  Let’s move on from there, okay?

In the end, the goal is to add another arrow to the quiver at the disposal of spam fighters.  Think this approach is wrongheaded, annoying, or otherwise pointless?  Fine.  Don’t use it.  For those who want to add this kind of capability—and since I instituted it on meyerweb, I’ve had not a single piece of spam make it onto the site or hit the moderation queue, whereas in my pre-defense days, I’d get at least twenty every day—then the package is there.  You can combine it with other defenses, if you like, for even more coverage.  I may upgrade it in the future, depending how far I get in learning PHP, mySQL, and form handling, and what feedback I get from people who know PHP better than I do.  I may not, in which case the system as it stands is effective, and probably will be for a while.  Even if I do one day abandon further development, the code is out there for someone else to improve if they so choose.

In the meantime, if there’s anyone who is using WP-Gatekeeper or has looked at the code, and has feedback on the coding or the way it works for the administrator of a WP blog, please feel free to share.  Also, if anyone can point me to an example of PHP code for collecting all of the HTTP_VARS that are returned by an XHTML form and then looking through them, even when the variable names aren’t necessarily known ahead of time, I’d really like to see it.  Thanks.

• Gatekeeper In Perspective was published on Wednesday, January 26th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Tools and WordPress categories.
• There have been twenty-six replies.

In my post on rel="nofollow", I mentioned the use of easily human-comprehensible challenge questions like “What is Eric’s first name?” as a way to defeat spambots.  There were two points made in the comments that I had considered but hadn’t brought up, given that they were tangential to the point of the post.  They were:

1. Spammers could set up a database of questions and answers used on sites.  They might or might not share it with each other, but the point is that if I set up “What is Eric’s first name?” as the sole challenge, the human running the spambot could build the ability to answer the question into the spambot, thus defeating it.  Quite true.
2. In order to make it more difficult to do this, there could be a set of challenges from which one is picked randomly.  So I might have three challenges asking for the first names of myself, Kat, and Carolyn.  Every time a comment form is delivered to a browser, one of the three challenges, picked at random, is included.  This would make it more difficult for a human spammer, since he (or she) would have to find all of the challenge questions. work out the responses, and build them all into a database, keyed to each site’s domain.

So over the weekend, I built as a proof of concept (and also as an exercise in learning more about how PHP, mySQL, and WordPress work) a WordPress package to do what described in the second point above.  It’s called WP-Gatekeeper, available from my WordPress Tools page, and if you’re brave you can give it a try.  Why brave?  Because the installation involves hacking a few WP files and adding a new entry to the admin menu, not to mention firing up a plugin.  And if you do it in the wrong order, you can break commenting for a short period.  There are DIY installation instructions on the WP-Gatekeeper page, for those who still want to proceed.  You also need to be brave because if you install it, you’re running code written—well, actually, adapted—by someone with only beginner-to-intermediate PHP skills.  I’ve been testing it locally and everything seems fine, but this is even more “use at your own risk” software than usual.  Got it?  Good.

Accordingly, WP-Gatekeeper is currently considered beta software.  I’m making it available now in the hopes that people more experienced than I with PHP and WordPress can take a look, hack on the code, and make it more efficient and the whole package easier to install.  I’m already aware that in WP 1.5, adding the admin page is much easier and doesn’t require hacking files, but I wrote WP-Gatekeeper in 1.2 and want it to work there, since that’s the latest public version.  Thus, any optimizations should work in 1.2.  When 1.5 (or whatever the next version number is) comes out, then I’ll worry about it.

Of course, there’s still nothing that prevents a spammer from registering questions and answers into a database, but the admin page makes it easy for a blogger to add, remove, modify, and re-key the challenges.  That will make tracking them more difficult, so long as a blogger puts effort into maintaining the list of challenges.  It gets back, in the end, to maintaining your blog.  The more maintenance you put into something, the better its shape will stay.

I’m also interested in suggestions for how the overall system could be made harder to bypass with a bot, and easier for a WP admin to run.  One feature I plan to add before going final is the ability to have the keys replaced on a regular basis, with the interval (daily/weekly/monthly/etc.) set by the admin.  The  other driving consideration here is that the system should be fully capable of working even if JavaScript is disabled.  It’s an accessibility thing; just go with me on this.  (Accessibility is the main reason I did this rather than install an image CAPTCHA solution, as it happens.)

Got feedback?  Let’s hear it.

• WP-Gatekeeper was published on Monday, January 24th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Tools and WordPress categories.
• There have been sixty-eight replies.

So… rel="nofollow".  Now there’s a way to deny Google juice to things that are linked.  Will it stop comment spam?  That’s what I first thought, but I’ve come to realize that it’ll very likely make the problem worse.  In the last few hours, I’ve been hearing things that support this conclusion.

First, the by-now required disclaimer: I think it’s great that Google is making a foray into link typing, and I don’t think they should reverse course.  For that matter, it would be nice if they paid attention to VoteLinks as well, and heck, why not collect XFN values while they’re at it?  After all, despite what Bob DuCharme thinks, the rel attribute hasn’t been totally ignored these past twelve years.  There is link typing out there, and it’s spreading.  Why not allow people to search their network of friends?  It’s another small step toward Google Grid… but I digress.

The point is this: rather than discourage comment spammers, nofollow seems likely to encourage them to new depths of activity.  Basically, Google’s move validates their approach: by offering bloggers a way to deny Google juice, Google has acknowledged that comment spam is effective.  This doesn’t mean the folks at Google are stupid or evil.  In their sphere of operation, getting comment spam filtered out of search results is a good thing.  It improves their product.  The validation provided to spammers is an unfortunate, possibly even unanticipated, side effect.

There is also the possibility, as many have said, that nofollow will harm the Web and Google’s results, because blindly applying a nofollow to every comment-based link will deny Google juice to legitimate, interesting stuff.  That might be true if nofollow is used like a sledgehammer, but there are more nuanced solutions aplenty.  One is to apply nofollow to links for the first week or two after a comment is posted, and then remove it.  As long as any spam is deleted before the end of the probation period, it would be denied Google juice, while legitimate comments and links would eventually get indexed and affect Google’s results (for the better).

In such a case, though, we’re talking about a managed blog—exactly the kind of place where comment spam had the least impact anyway.  Sure, occasionally the Googlebot might pick up some spam links before the spam was removed from the site, but in general spam doesn’t survive on managed sites long enough to make that much of a difference.

Like Scoble, where I might find nofollow of use would be if I wanted to link to the site of a group or person I severely disliked in order to support a claim or argument I was making.  It would be a small thing, but still useful on a personal level.  (I’d probably also vote-against the target of such a link, on the chance that one day indexers other than Technorati‘s would pay attention.)

No matter what, the best defenses against comment spam will be to prevent it from ever appearing in the first place.  There are of course a variety of methods to accomplish this, although most of them seem doomed to fail sooner or later.  I’m using three layers of defense myself, the outer of which is currently about 99.9% effective in preventing spam from ever hitting the moderation queue, let alone make it onto the site.  One day, the layer’s effectiveness will very suddenly drop to zero.  The second layer was about 95% effective at catching spam when it was the outer layer, and since it’s content-based will likely stay at that level over time.  The final layer is a last-ditch picket line that only works in certain cases, but is quite effective at what it does.

So what are these layers, exactly?  I’m not telling.  Why not?  Because the longer these methods stay off the spammers’ radar, the longer the defenses will be effective.  Take that outer layer I talked about a moment ago: I know exactly how it could be completely defeated, and for all time.  Think I’m about to explain how?  You must be mad.

The only spam-blocking method I can think of that has any long-term hope of effectiveness is the kind that requires a human brain to circumvent.  As an example, I might put an extra question on my comment form that says “What is Eric’s first name?”  Filling in the right answer gets the post through.  (As Matt pointed out to me, Jeremy Zawodny does this, and that’s where I got the idea.)  That’s the sort of thing a spambot couldn’t possibly get right unless it was specifically programmed to do so for my site—and there’s no reason why any spammer would bother to program a bot to do so.  That would leave only human-driven spam, the kind that’s copy-and-pasted into the comment form by an actual human, and nothing besides having to personally approve every single post will be able to stop that completely.

So, to sum up: it’s cool that Google is getting hip to link typing, even though I don’t think the end result of this particular move is going to be everything we might have hoped.  More active forms of spam defense will be needed, both now and in the future, and the best defense of all is active management of your site.  Spammers are still filthy little parasites, and ought to be keelhauled.  In other words: same as it ever was.  Carry on.

• More Spam To Follow was published on Friday, January 21st, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Web category.
• There have been thirty-five replies.

Just a quick note for people in the Cleveland area: I’ll be giving a talk this Saturday, 22 January, at the meeting of the North East Ohio Apple Corps in Strongsville.  The topic will be turning your Macintosh into a powerful Web development environment using resources, scripts, tricks, and tools available for free.  If you’re interested, drop by, and if you need directions, check out the NEOAC Web site.  I’m told that there will be donuts.  Mmm…. donuts.

• NEOAC Talk was published on Tuesday, January 18th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Cleveland and Speaking categories.
• There have been no replies.

This morning, Carolyn told me quite clearly that she wanted some yogurt for breakfast.  Technically, what she said was “more baby”, but I knew what she meant.

How did a 13-month-old manage to tell me what she wanted?  By using sign language.  Kat and I have been teaching her Baby Signs, which is a simplified version of American Sign Language.  I’m given to understand that Baby Signs figure in the plot of the recent movie Meet The Fockers, but don’t let that sour you on the idea.  The amazing thing is that it really does work, if you’re willing to put in time and effort.

At this point, we’re actually looking more to real ASL signs than we are to the Baby Signs vocabulary when teaching Carolyn new signs.  I think the real utility of Baby Signs is that it gets you started where it makes the most sense: teach your baby signs like “food”, “water”, “more”, and “all done”.  This allows the child to communicate their wants and needs long before they ever become verbal.  It works because motor skills advance more quickly than verbal skills do.  I’ll be very interested to see if Carolyn retains the signing as she grows up, or if she’s able to pick up secondary languages more easily.

Carolyn’s first sign was “hat”, which of course didn’t help at all with deducing her needs, but it was still incredible to witness.  I was actually there when she figured it out.  She was looking through a Baby Signs board book while I stood watching.  She stared very intently at a picture of a baby signing “hat”, and then put her hand to the side of her head, just like in the picture.  My jaw dropped, but I managed to keep quiet.  She did it a couple more times, then looked up at me.  That’s when I showered the praise.  It only took a day or two to teach her that the actual sign for “hat” is to pat the hand on the head, not just place it there, like she saw in the picture.  Now Carolyn signs “hat” whenever she sees a picture of one of her grandfathers, because they both wear hats all the time.

Her signing vocabulary is now about thirty words, and she’s actually devised two signs of her own—which means, unfortunately, that we have no idea what she’s trying to say when she makes them!  But we’ll figure it out eventually.

As for how “more baby” means “I want yogurt”, that’s because we quickly noticed that when Carolyn signs “more” what she really means is “I want”.  As for “baby”, the yogurt we feed her has a picture of a baby on each container.  One day she walked over to the refrigerator, patted the door, and signed “baby”.  Then she had to do it a few more times while the rest of us scratched our heads and said things like, “The refrigerator’s not a baby, sweetie.  What are you trying to say?” before finally figuring it out.

Sometimes I think she’s smarter than we are.

So if you’re a new parent or a parent-to-be, I strongly recommend that you try this with your own baby.  When a baby starts waving bye-bye, that’s when they’re ready to start learning sign language.  (We started earlier than that, hoping to lay a foundation, and may or may not have been wasting our time.)  It will help reduce frustration, and therefore tantrums, because you’ll be better able to meet their needs when they have them.  The system isn’t perfect, of course: any baby that gets too upset will be unable to communicate with anything besides tears.  It’s still a great thing when your toddler comes into the room and signs “food” long before the hunger starts making her cranky.

I wonder if the children of deaf parents, whether they themselves are deaf or not, have long benefitted (tempramentally and intellectually) from signing, and nobody outside the deaf culture bothered to notice.

• Signs of Intelligence was published on Sunday, January 16th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn category.
• There have been seventy-eight replies.

While watching a movie on TV this evening—all right, it was Volcano on the apparently mis-named cable channel American Movie Classics—I was amused to discover that the “bad” words had been edited from the audio track, but left completely intact in the closed captioning.  What, is there some kind of assumption that being hard of hearing also makes one hard to offend?

• Uncensored Caption Text was published on Friday, January 14th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Humor category.
• There have been sixteen replies.