Here is my story – this blog has been setup about a year ago and just as it has been indexed by Google I started to have visitors, spam bots that is… I decided not to blindly install an anti spam plugins and see what they do but to take a more methodical approach. A bit of time invested in understanding ‘how stuff works’ can sometimes save you a lot of time later.

Phase one – the Big Gun.

If you have used wordpress for just a little bit of time you must have heard about Aksimet. It is a service provided by the Wordpress authors, that ‘learns’ what comments should be treated as spam. Since it is a single service that analyses comments from many blogs it has the possibility to find ’spam patterns’ and block them. It is very effective, but of course not in bullet proof. On avrage  1 of 70 spam comments has not been marked as spam. So – succcess!

Phase two- the Good Ol’ Boys.

I decided, to see how classic image based CAPTCHA can improve the situation, and if it will lower the total amount of spam in any way.  I decided to use reCaptcha (WP plugin) as I just love the idea that stands behind it – you need to solve 2 words – one that will do the ‘captcha’ thing and second one will help to digitize scanned books. So a bot should not be able to post a comment at all – but as we know most image captchas are broken… so is reCaptcha – the amount of spam comments dropped  merly by 20-30%… anyhow always a bit less to look through on the list.

Phase three – the Stinger missle.

Antispam Bee – the very lightwieght plugin that adds another layer of protection, by giving additional hidden input fields, that cannot be filled out by humans but bots will try to put something in them thus compromise themselves. With Antispam Bee enabled I was able to filter out what Aksimet missed. If I set the options to instantly delete the spam comment and not put it in the spam queue, the spam problem has dissappeared.  As I never trust the automatic solutions I decided to put all messages to spam queue for occassional review.

Hopefully there will not be any civilian loses, but if you cannot leave a comment, leave a comment to let me know ;).

Windows Azure, cloud computing/hosting platform has been announced on the recent PDC 2008. Now as the dust settled I decided to give it a try. For the moment it is still available as a CTP – Community Technology Preview, so if you like you can test its functionality and deploy applications into ’the cloud’. At this time the pricing for the paid version of this service has not been determined but as Microsoft promises it will be competitive with the pioneers of cloud based storage, Amazon’s Web Services. So, lets get started with going trough the process of deploying a simple Hello World (or Hello Cloud) application, in this case made with ASP.NET (as it is possible to write your apps in Java in Ruby also)

First things, first.

Before you we can start, we need to collect a few SDK’s from Microsoft.

Windows Azure Software Development Kit (March 2009 CTP)

Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio March 2009 CTP

Microsoft .NET Services SDK (March 2009 CTP)

SQL Data Services (SDS) SDK (CTP)

While the above files are being downloaded its time to take care of formalities. To register for Windows Azure CTP go here. (You will need a Windows Live ID).

Hello Azure!

If all went well during  installation we should have following additional project templates available in Visual Studio:

We choose a web cloud service and following solution structure is created:

First project is a Service Configuration (we will need to provide some information here later on) the second is the actual Web Role project similar to typical ASP.NET project.

Lets just put some text in the Default.aspx and head straight over to our Azure Services Developer Portal and create a New Hosted Services Project:

Microsoft does not require much text boxes to fill out:

…and:

After successfully creating a project lets copy the Application ID:

…and paste it in our Service Configuration project’s properties in the Portal tab.

DEPLOYMENT

As you see in the image above we have to ‘containers’ for our project, Staging and Production. To deploy your project select the Service Configuration project and hit Build –> Publish. The Azure site will be opened along with a contents of the bin/Debug(or Release)/Publish folder. Click Deploy and select respective file from the Publish folder:

After we click Deploy again files will be uploaded and finally you will see following screen:

So we have successfully deployed our project into the staging area, we can now run it and use the temporary random url to check if all is OK. (You need to wait until the Web Role status changes from Allocated –> Initializing –> Started).

After that we can hit the arrows to promote the project from Staging to Production, and that it. In my case http://kamilzadora.cloudapp.net is serving my Hello Cloud app! (please note that by the time you read this post this link may not be valid).

I hope to write about Azure Services a bit more as we didn’t even touched the storage and SQL options.

Configuration

By default, this feature is disabled and is not explicitly configured neither in web or machine.config. To enable it, add following in web.config:

For more information refer to anonymousIdentification Element (ASP.NET Settings Schema) entry in MSDN library.

One little thing not mentioned in docs, quite obvious (…after a few hours of scratching my head) is that in order this to work you need to be sure that authentication is set to Forms:

Usage

In my example I will assume that I would like to have a not very bullet proof method to prevent users from submitting the same form more than once. For the simplicity of this example I will use simple XML file and Linq to XML to store information about user rating of the sample picture.

First, lets create a new XML document with following contents:

I have created a simple form with 2 Labels, RequiredFieldValidator and RadioButtonList and a Button:

With everything in place its time to write the Button Click event, currents user AnonymousID is available as property of Request object (Request.AnonymousID):

protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

XDocument x = XDocument.Load(Server.MapPath("~/results.xml"));

//checking if user has previously submitted his rating

if (AlreadyVoted(Server.MapPath("~/results.xml"), Request.AnonymousID))

{
Label2.Visible = true;

Label2.Text = "You have already voted.";

}

else

{

//adding the submited results

var result = new XElement("result");

result.Add(new XElement("userid", Request.AnonymousID));

result.Add(new XElement("datetime", DateTime.Now.ToShortDateString() + “ “ + DateTime.Now.ToShortTimeString()));

result.Add(new XElement("value", RadioButtonList1.SelectedValue));

x.Element("results").Add(result);

x.Save(Server.MapPath("~/results.xml"));

//calculating the average rating

string avg = (from q in x.Elements("results").Elements("result")

select (double)q.Element("value")).Average().ToString();

Label2.Visible = true;

Label2.Text = "Thank you for your vote. Current avarage:" + avg ;

}

}

Above code is quite obvious, if AlreadyVoted method return true, it means that user AnonymousID is in our records:

public bool AlreadyVoted(string path, string userid)

{

if (File.Exists(path))

{

XDocument xml = XDocument.Load(path);

bool q = (from uid in xml.Elements("results").Elements("result").Elements("userid")

where uid.Value == userid

select uid.Value

).Any();

return q;

}

return false;

}

After few submits the contents of the XML file are:

  
    5af9d0a8-0c7d-43f2-beb0-caff2783add8
    2009-05-03 01:29
    3
  
  
    77501434-9cbd-45f9-8c42-625dbfc2b471
    2009-05-03 01:31
    3
  
  
    16f17754-2998-4c03-a468-df6bce29e49d
    2009-05-03 01:48
    5
  

This is the simplest example of using the AnonymousID you could imagine. Full
source code: [download id="1"].
For more examples and details refer to HttpRequest.AnonymousID Property on MSDN library.

As I wrote some time a go, Jeff Atwood form codinghorror.com and his gang, are preparing new Q&A site for system administrators and IT professionals. Serverfault.com will be a sister site of stackoverflow.com, it will be possible to move the questions between sites, and they will share the same engine powered by ASP.NET MVC framework with only content specific modifications. The logo contest held on the 99designs site is resolved and the results can be seen above. Sincere congratulations to the winner, Joshua Cliff and the runner ups: Umasankar Arumugam and Daniel L. Also. Big thanks to Jeff for honourable mention of my humble person.

The site itself is going to lunched be the end of this month. To read more about the contest you should go read the official entry at blog.stackoverflow.

Well, I guess there are is no third site coming up in near future… but maybe some day I will be able to actually win something at last…

Bellow you can find my submissions for the contest:

As I wrote some time a go, Jeff Atwood form codinghorror.com and his gang, are preparing new Q&A site for system administrators and IT professionals. Serverfault.com will be a sister site of stackoverflow.com, it will be possible to move the questions between sites, and they will share the same engine powered by ASP.NET MVC framework with only content specific modifications. The logo contest held on the 99designs site is resolved and the results can be seen above. Sincere congratulations to the winner, Joshua Cliff and the runner ups: Umasankar Arumugam and Daniel L. Also. Big thanks to Jeff for honourable mention of my humble person.

The site itself is going to lunched be the end of this month. To read more about the contest you should go read the official entry at blog.stackoverflow.

Well, I guess there are is no third site coming up in near future… but maybe some day I will be able to actually win something at last…

Bellow you can find my submissions for the contest:

Few days ago I finally got my  G1 and have started looking around on some hacks and programming related stuff made for Android OS. While I was browsing through the Market app on my phone,  it is safely to say that I was intrigued when I found out that there is Mono library available for download.

Android OS is build on top of Linux kernel, and running the Mono was surely possible (with some tweaking of course). The author of this first try Koushik Dutta, has a couple of detailed posts with instructions how to do this yourself and run Mono on G1 (you need your phone to be rooted). Source code is available at http://code.google.com/p/androidmono/

Google’s official position is rather predictable , that  is – no official support in predictable future. The ‘Don’t be evil’ company and Open Handset Alliance would like to keep their feet dry from anything not from Open Source stack. After all, they did not went the easy way and use the for eg. JVM in the first place to be free from Sun, and got their own VM, Dalvik, so although Android OS apps are written in Java, they are compiled to Dalviks own bytecode.

Unfortunately I am afraid that without official support, it is unlikely that Mono will be used widely, that is beside the programmers/geeks community. But will see how situation develops, as the Miguel de Icaza itself, some time ago outlined a couple of ways that Mono could exist on Android OS:

• CIL to Dalvik recompiler: Translate CIL bytecodes into Dalvik ones, like (like Grasshopper does) and provide a class library add-on.
• DalvikVM: Implement a VM similar on top of Mono that can run Dalvik bytecodes side-by-side with other CIL code. This would be similar to the IKVM approach: a JavaVM for CIL.
• Dalvik Support in Mono: Paolo suggested to add support to the Mono VM to have a Dalvik loader and turn the Dalvik instructions into the internal Mono IR (the rest at that point would be shared).
• D/Invoke: Add support to the Mono VM to transparently call code into another VM. Very much along the lines of P/Invoke or COM’s it-just-works support.

I think that having Android OS to be compatible with .Net Compact Framework would bring benefit for users and for Google as it would speed up adoption for enterprise apps. Windows Mobile position on this part of the mobile market is very strong and this year they will try to expand with WM 6.5.

From now on my blog is supporting OpenID both for comments an for login.

I find  OpenID as a wonderful solution for the nightmare of having dozens of logins and passwords for the sites you use.  If you do not have an OpenID yourself I encourage you to follow this link and get yourself one.

Sounds nice indeed. So, it came to my mind, why not to try to duplicate it? My goal is to make a prototype of wooden or plexi board that would be touch sensitive – if I would get 5 cm of precision on 50 x 50cm sourface I would be extreamly satisfied.

So far here is what I think I will need:

Hardware:

• At least 2 elctret microphones (piezoelectric sensor.s are hard to find where I live Ok, not really if figure out how the sales people name it…)
• At least 2 cheap USB sound cards to have the microphones connected to.
• Plexi or wooden board approximately 50 x 50 cm, not more than 1cm thick

Software:

• App to gather the samples and map them to the points on the boards, maybe noise removal would be nice .
• Self-learning neural-network that will be trained using the gathered samples to match the ‘taps’ to the points on the board.

Well, I guess this may be not so easy to get any results, as there are many problems easy to foresee, that can make this a total failure:

• How the sound samples should be presented to the neural network? Should a time delay, phase shift, or anything be used to distinguish the sources of sound?
• Will 48kHz or 96kHz sample rate be enough?
• Will the cheap USB sound cards be enough?
• Will the elctret mics do the job?
• How the neural network should be designed?

I hope the share you with some initial results any time soon. If any could point me to some resources that could help please do so. :)

Good luck for Jeff, Joel and their team with their new project!

• First of all they do not took from me the previous options.
• The second thing – I can have a real Gmail and Google Reader on my startpage.

I really missed the possiblity to use those services as I were accessing them the usual way, but no more! I’m now just 1 click away (and without a page reaload or new tab/window) from using the famous “J” shortcut to browse through unreaded RSS feeds, or switch to read unread e-mails and compose new.

In general, iGoogle experience is becoming more and more desktop like with features like maximizing gadgets accesing Google docs etc. and still its easy, fast and in result of above extreamly useful in everyday use.

The only uncool thing is that it is still not a default option for Polish Google site, and that caused I missed the initial realease by quite few (dozens of) days… The only reason I found it is that, at work, I started using Firefox with default website language set to English…

Better later then neve r.