As reported by Photomatt over here:

Want to know a secret? If you have Flock you can get on WordPress.com without an invite. Enjoy!

What is “Flock” you ask? As it’d turn out, Flock is a fork of the amazingly popular web browser Firefox, with some rather interesting additions to the codebase. One key feature specifically that’s drawing a lot of attention is it’s built-in blog editor. That’s right, you can post to your blog right from within your browser, using an advanced editor from any webpage, anywhere. Pretty damn slick of you ask me!

And what’s this WordPress.com [link] business? Well, it’s the free hosting blog provider that is powered by none other than WordPress. This means you have access to the same powerful blogging tool that’s powering this website, for FREE, and already hosted and setup for you! Now that’s bloody awesome. Unfortunately it’s invite only… well, unless you download Flock.

So go ahead, download Flock, and give it a shot, you might just like what you find.

[faced with a 20th century computer]
Scotty: Computer. Computer?
[Bones hands him a mouse and he speaks into it]
Scotty: Hello, computer.
Dr. Nichols: Just use the keyboard.
Scotty: Keyboard. How quaint.

And what was he trying to do with that computer? Why lay out the design for Transparent Aluminum of course, something which in their time was a simple compound they created, yet in the time frame of the movie seemed light years ahead of itself. The audience watched in awe as this material was used to hold back a tank for whales, all the while dreaming of what could possibly come from such a discovery.

Well now it appears, Transparent Aluminum is becoming a reality, thanks in no small part to a group of engineers working for none other than the Air Force. As posted over on the Air Force Link:

The Air Force Research Laboratory’s materials and manufacturing directorate is testing aluminum oxynitride — ALONtm — as a replacement for the traditional multi-layered glass transparencies now used in existing ground and air armored vehicles.

So it’s aluminum, and it’s being used to replace glass transparencies. Yup, sounds like science fiction is becoming science fact! Talk about a leap in technology. And not only is it transparent, but it appears as though it’s VERY durable, as is stated later in the article:

Traditional transparent armor is thick layers of bonded glass. The new armor combines the transparent ALONtm piece as a strike plate, a middle section of glass and a polymer backing. Each layer is visibly thinner than the traditional layers.

ALONtm is virtually scratch resistant, offers substantial impact resistance, and provides better durability and protection against armor piercing threats, at roughly half the weight and half the thickness of traditional glass transparent armor, said the lieutenant.

In a June 2004 demonstration, an ALONtm test pieces held up to both a .30 caliber Russian M-44 sniper rifle and a .50 caliber Browning Sniper Rifle with armor piercing bullets. While the bullets pierced the glass samples, the armor withstood the impact with no penetration.

So give it about 10 years or so, and let them get the price point down (currently sitting at about 5 times more expensive than the traditional glass product), and we might actually see this being used in commercial applications. Can we say bullet proof windows in your standard home? What other applications could come from this miracle material? Leave your opinions, and lets see what we can come up with for this stuff.

The next step in this series is to check out plugins that would allow me to fight back against this spam… And so, the first plugin I tested is known as Bot Check, which forces spam authors (at least in theory) to go thru an additional step of verifying a graphic string before allowing them to post random crap on my blog. Great idea, but upon attempt to install, I discovered my host is lacking one of the libraries I need to run it. Sure, I could email them and ask em to enable it… But I’m feeling rather lazy, and should I decide to move hosts, I don’t want to have to carry a huge list of addons I need for them to activate on my account before I can get up and running. So, on to the next option.

Next in line? A rather interesting non-wordpress specific package known as Bad Behavior. What’s it do? Well, I’ll let them explain it…

Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts which prevents spam bots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spam bots. It goes far beyond User-Agent and Referrer, however. Bad Behavior is available for several PHP-based software packages, and also can be integrated in seconds into any PHP script.

Sounds pretty cool huh? I thought so. Not only was the installation a BREEZE, but it allows me to log all the bad requests, find out what their doing and how, and even goes as far as to allow me to white list people in the event that they were blocked when they should not have been. All without me really having to modify anything at all in this package. Me like!

What do you know, tried out two packages, and the second one did everything I wanted and more. Not only that, but I get the peace of mind that now spammers will have to fight thru yet another iron curtain to get into my blogs comments. This is very very appealing to me, and I can’t wait to find out how much of an impact this is going to have on my current spam levels. My prediction? I think it’ll help significantly. But only time will tell, and here’s to hoping.

So I signed up for an account using my normal “web blog posting” email address, and what do you know, I’ve now got a Gravatar of my own. That was easy… a little too easy… Ok, so it’s not a scary thing at all, but hey, sounded good at the time. I’ve now updated the website to support Gravatars, and I would encourage anyone who comments on various blogs to sign up for one. Not only that, but if you run a blog, please, make your site gravatar capable (heck, the instructions are right there on their website). I’ve always liked avatars in Forums, and this takes it to a whole new level. Love it.

So yeah, head on over to the Gravatar website, and check it out. It’s worth your time.