The frantic attempts at HTTP Referrer spamming are getting ridiculous. I added the HTTP Referrer block on the side and end up with mobs of spammers wetting themselves with excitement at the thought that they might be able to get some free advertising for their crappy web site or "product" that no one wants.

I'm pretty sure the spammers are getting stupider as well. If there was, say, one spam attempt per hour, I probably wouldn't notice it, but when you get idiots like the one at 82.222.180.53 who spam every 15 seconds, it's pretty hard not to see it and add them to your .htaccess file thus:

order allow,deny
deny from 82.222.180.53
deny from 66.230.151.210
allow from all

I suppose if it gets out of hand, I'll just remove the Referrer block.

Recommended (if you're having problems with the spamming geniuses):

Bad Behavior - a set of PHP scripts that does a pretty good job of blocking spammers based on profiles of known spambots.

3 stories that I've found funny (or at least, I had a chuckle when I read them) today...

Everyone loves a conspiracy theory, even if it's laughably tenuous. The comments on this article are what's funny though: "Professor of Pulled-from-asshology" indeed:

MacNN | Is Apple planning an OS switch?

Leave it to Apple to "fight" potential OS/X Intel pirates in a tongue-in-cheek manner. Unlikely to affect any pirates, but it's nice to see a company with a sense of humour:

Apple Hackers Encounter a Poetic Warning - Yahoo! News

And finally, this new Mac OS X worm:

"The malware infects other applications through the InputManager mechanism, inadvertently rendering them useless due to a bug in the malicious code."

Haha. Loser.

MacNN | New Mac OS X worm discovered

If you need to move snippets of information between computers (even between Macs and Windows systems), have a look at Share Clip. This is a very simple, free utility that lets you share (textual) clipboard data across your network. Simple to use, works well. Highly recommended.

Actually Critical Failure would be more like it

Having not used our Media Center PC as a Media Center PC for quite a while, I was incredibly frustrated when I tried to use it and had the Media Center functions fail with a wide array of cryptic and just plain unhelpful errors. Most of them "critical".

It seems that I blindly (and foolishly) installed the service packs that have become available over the past months, never checking to see if Media Center itself still worked. Which it clearly didn't.

Lots of time and web/newsgroup searching later, it appears as if somehow some of the bewildering number of dlls became unregistered (or perhaps the wrong ones were registered - one can never be quite sure what's going on in the world of COM).

To the rescue, however, comes MceRepair which, according to the author's blog will:

• Repair the ACLs to get COM+ Services working again (see KB909444)
• Repair the registration for .NET Framework v1.1 libraries (should fix the "Entry Point Not Found in mscoree.dll" error during registration).
• Reinstalls all MCE Windows Services
• Re-registers COM components of MCE
• Reinstalls managed assemblies into the GAC
• Recreates native images for managed assemblies (ngen)

Sure enough, running this, rebooting and restarting Media Center fixed the problem(s).

Thank you, so much.

Also helpful, if you're unfortunate enough to find yourself in the situation of trying to get your Media Center PC working again, is this link:

Aaron Stebner's WebLog : Media Center guide download errors and suggested fixes