We've been having a lot of problems with our comments being spammed, mostly by interesting porn sites, which initially we thought we could solve by banning the relevant IP address. All this actually ended up doing was banning everyone from commenting on the site (I think this was due to the DNAS function..?) so apologies to our regular commenters, especially the Cornish Dragon AKA Simon de Merryfield.
I’ve successfully managed to upgrade our sites blogger engine to Movable Type 3.121 which includes the TypeKey which is a comment authentication service. Although the MT upgrade was successful I still haven’t managed to get the comments working yet. You’ll need to register with TypeKey in order to leave a comment and it looks like I’ll have to edit the sites comment script to inform new commenters. Once I’ve figured out how to do this myself (customize the error page, or install MTBlacklist 2.0 plugin me thinks) I’ll let you all know too. In the mean time if anyone else knows how feel free to comment :-)
In a desperate attempt to prevent continuous spamming of the site, I banned a series of IP addresses from commenting. Although, we have not had any spam since (or comments...!), I accidentally managed to ban a few friends in the process...apologies!
I've just discovered a new (to me anyway) Wi-Fi service from Meteor Networks covering the hotel we're staying at in Paris. Finally it seemed that someone had appeared to have figured out a nice and easy way to get wi-fi to the masses. It doesn't utilise WEP encryption and as long as your not using a proxy server (took me ages to figure that one out!) it will allow you to connect using any browser. I'm currently using Palm Web Pro v3.0 by Novarra (www.novarra.com) on a Tungsten C and I also checked it on the default browser - Palm Web Browser v2.0.1.1 by Access and it seemed to work fine on both.
Once you start your browser, and your connected to METEOR (found IP address etc), hit refresh and it redirects you to a log in page. Here you have 4 payment options. The first is to simply input a password from a payment card (bit like a top up card for phones) which were available in the lobby. The other options are paying by credit/debit card, SMS or by your mobile number through your operator (eventually to the phone bill, arghh reminds me of dial up!). The SMS option involves sending two txts but upon reading the description 'Remember that a 10 mn connexion costs 3 euros + SMS (that is to say two SMS at 1.5 euros each)' I decided it would be cheaper to use the top up card or credit card options. Although I wasn't going to risk it I should give them the benefit of the doubt and put the 10 mn down to a translation thing and not meaning 3 euros for 10 minutes! In the end I just bought a top up card for 5 euros which gave me 30 mins.
Unfortunately the data transfer speed was pretty slow so my 30 mins was quickly up. This pretty much finalises the conclusion on that alone as it's definately overpriced. I suppose it is limited by the number of users connected but I can't imagine that it was being used extensively at the time. Should have guessed from the transfer rate on Meteor Networks own pages, which it lets you navigate through prior to logging on. It's this fact that has lead me to believe that it has something to do with the security (cookies etc) that limits it's overall performance.
It's short fate was also sealed when I found that a friendly neighbour had left an open access point which worked fine, and much much faster but only if I dangled out the window, ah well, one can't be fussy :-) This piece of luck also highlighted another annoyance as even though I was connected to the open wi-fi point on hitting the homepage function it would link back to the Meteor Networks log in page. I was worried that it had modified my homepage but this was not so, probably more likely that it was due to the poor signal availability from the open access point.
So the final conclusion is that it's too expensive, especially with the slow transfer rate, and they need to reduce the amount of bandwidth taken up by the security function although I would like to understand this further. Also helps if a friendly neighbour isn't covering the same area with a free and faster service, shame really, nice try though!
PS whilst writting this blog on the palm and getting truly annoyed with the copy limitation of the clip board in the palm OS, Memo Pad v4.5.1P in this case, I accidentely discovered that Word To Go has fixed this problem (thank you DataViz) so I now write all my blogs using Word To Go :-) – update – unfortunately although the copy and paste function is hacked within docs to go as soon as you try to utilise it in another palm program (palm pro V for example whilst trying to update blog) the restriction is re applied so scratch that last note :-(