I've been receiving and increasing amount of comment spam on my blog. The problem is "people" selling Viagra, porn, penis enlargement systems, etc. want free advertising and want to increase their ranking in Google's Pagerank algorithm. So, these "people" use programs to automatically submit comments in blog entries. I had added a spam filter, but it didn't fully eliminate the problem. I was receiving 10-20 spams per day some days. So I dealt with the problem by closing comments on old entries. I did this by installing a program called pgadmin3, which allows me to connect to PostGRESQL databases and modify them as one would in Microsoft Access. There is a table, mt_entry, that holds all the entries and has a field, entry_allow_comments, indicating if additional comments are allowed. Using an update statement, I set every entry to have a value of 2 here, meaning closed for comments.
My birthday was last month, and my brother gave me the game Rome: Total War. I suggested it as a possible gift idea because it received high marks on several game review sites. I have been spending most of my free time playing it these last few weeks (and that's partly why I've not had any blog entries). The game takes place around the formation of the Roman empire. It features interactive battles with reasonably realistic landscapes, fortified cities, and armies of thousands of 3D animated soldiers, replete with emotions, and of course 3D sound. It is an impressive game. I just finished the full imperial campaign, which took most of these last weeks.