A CHL Instructor’s View

September 11, 2008

September 11th, 2008

Filed under: I remember when — chltx @ 6:56 pm

Seven years ago today, a handful of young Arab terrorists were able to murder more than 3,000 people because US airline crews were unarmed.

Terrorists and other criminals prefer ’soft’ targets. Nothing deters violent crime more effectively than the possibility that the intended victim might shoot back.

Nothing.

September 10, 2008

WordPress Upgrade

Filed under: General, Internet — chltx @ 6:19 am

Silly me, I have been running an old version of WordPress for this blog ever since I started it. I was blissfully unaware of the existence of any newer versions, and I was wondering why I had to come back so often to clean out the spam comments (that’s all I’ve gotten in the last few months, just spam). Well, I found a nifty automatic upgrade script (Martin Avis, who publishes “Kickstart”, an email newsletter that I follow, listed it as one of his recommendations).

I installed the updater (that took a few minutes, since it wasn’t completely clear where to put the files), and the rest was relatively painless. It also prompted me for a database update, and an update to my Akismet anti-spam script. When I came back to view what changed, I found a number of interesting new features, which will take me a while to digest…

I also put in some changes to the comment facility. You now have to create an account and sign in before you can post a comment. I will still be hand-moderating all comments, but I’m hoping that task will be much easier and faster now, since there is some chance that the spammers will find it too troublesome to bother posting here. Maybe that will free up some time to write new posts!

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