Generally speaking, there is nothing — nothing faster than c. Obviously I am talking about the alphabet the symbolise the speed of light, rather than this ancient imperative programming language from the 70’s. Whether C, the programming language, is the fastest is truly debatable. However most network engineers would agree that you simply cannot transmit any information faster than light (unless you live in the science fiction world with Hyperspace or Warp drive).

Who said the “old media” is dead and the “new media” has already won the race?! By no means! A PR stunt at A Current Affair (a TV programme in Australia, but don’t ask me about it as I don’t even have a TV at home) this evening featured a few shopping related websites, which sent a huge surge of traffic to one of my sites.

Check out this graph taken from Cacti:

People usually associate spams with unsolicited commercial emails that try to either sell you the “little blue pill”, or Nigerians phishing for your bank account details. There are many techniques fighting email spams, either at the server side or at your email client. However if you run a blog or a forum on the Internet, you would also have experienced fighting comment spams (unless, of course, that you run a spam blog yourself :). I have been blogging since 2001 and have employed various techniques to keep the spams at bay. Some of them worked well — at the beginning — but sooner or later spammers got smartened up and they can almost slip in a few spammy comments.

When I launched this blog 2 years ago, it was running Akismet for Drupal, and recently changed to Mollom, one of Dries’ startup company/project. It has been effective (except for the last few days). Mollom is sort-of similar to Akismet that it (1) uses a classifier to determine the likeliness of incoming comment being a spam (2) acts as a centralised database to collaboratively identify spams. Mollom does a few extra things when the comment is in a “not-so-sure” state, but discussing this would be beyond the scope of this blog post.

(Disclaimer: Aaron W. from Crucial Paradigm emailed me early last week asking for a review on their re-launched Xen VPS plans. So here we go — a review on their Xen VPS after playing with one for a few days.)

Crucial Paradigm is a web hosting/web design company in Sydney, Australia that have both Australian and US based operations (just realised that their office is around 400 metres to where I work). They have been in business for 5 years now, and early this year they launched their virtual dedicated servers service, providing fully managed Xen VPS hosted at the Equinix data centre in Sydney (which is on the same road where I live!)