GanttProject is a free project management software written in Java (cross-platform, runs in Windows, Linux, Mac etc.). The following is a brief review of the benefits and shortcomings along with download link.

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I am very happy to announce the much-awaited release of Comment Guard Pro for WordPress blogs. Comment Guard Pro is designed to unobtrusively protect your blog against all types of comment spams - trackback spam, pingback spam, robotic spam using comment form, human submitted spam (where the spammers actually goes to your site to spam you; they are the hardest to detect), referrer spam etc. We provide multiple layers of protection against all kind of comment spams.

Comment Guard Pro is a zero configuration plugin, even your grandma can use it. However if you want, you can configure every aspect of the system. You can make it your own, implement your own vision, replace, enhance and extend its functionality.

Comment Guard Pro is state-of-the-art comment spam detection software based on expert system to classify comments. Comment Guard Pro leverages several tried and tested comment spam fighting techniques & knowledge which is the result of several man-years of research into comment spam detection, both in-house and by the anti-spam community. We extensively tested and re-tested and fine-tuned the system with the key criteria - elimination of false positives and false negatives in comment spam detection.

Most spams are outright rejected without filling up your database and consuming your resource. Comment Guard Pro doesn’t normally ask your viewers to do anything extra like solving a problem etc.
Note: We reject a comment only when we are sure about its spamminess.

Comment Guard Pro was born after years of frustration with the state of comment spam prevention software available today. They fall in two major categories. Either they are ineffective in stopping spam (too many false negatives) or too strict and even deny legitimate comments (false positives). They are a pain in the neck for genuine commenters, resulting in bloggers losing their audience, and generate lots of false positives (marks a genuine comment as spam) which consume bloggers time to moderate. They also consume bandwidth and CPU by saving the junk comments in your database.

There is another issue. To eliminate false positives from existing plugins, you have to check their spam queue manually. It might be ok for 5-10 comments in queue, but not for say 2000-10000 comments in spam queue as is commonly the case with a widely used Comment spam protection plugin today. Most of such plugins protect against some type of comment spam or other but not the whole range. Frequency based spam detection techniques, for example, let in deluge of spams from new spammers. None of these are acceptable. Ultimately you get frustrated and tired of bloggng and suffer burn-out.

A big issue with today’s comment spam protection software is that you get a blackbox with no direct control over its actions. A widely used anti-spam plugin today is renowned for marking even the blog author’s comment as spam and another for even locking out the blogger from his own blog! The software today doesn’t respect your preferences. In short you lose control over your comments and have to blindly trust a third party for making the right decision about your comments; and often it fails.

Not any more. Comment Guard Pro puts you back in control over your comments. You control how it makes its decision. If you don’t like the logic employed by a pluglet (a rule) then you can decrease its score, change its decision on success or failure and you can even disable it. You can even add your own pluglets to implement your grand vision. You are the boss.

Comment Guard Pro gives you back the control and time to do what you do best, blog.

Comment Guard Pro is pluggable. You can individually control each pluglets, configure and fine-tune their functionality and weightage. You can also write your own pluglets to add more spam prevention techniques, gather more statistics or anything else you may desire like sending a cute / angry note to spammers and more. It comes with fully documented open pluglet API and examples to enable you to write your own pluglets.

It comes with lots of valuable features and functionalities. It was extensively tested for about a year with over 5 million comments. It came out with flying colors. Read more here (press).

You may be severely frustrated setting up OneOrZero Trouble Ticket System. The demo on their site works perfectly and yet the local setup doesn’t allow reporters to create task. The solution is simple:

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I have tried several HTML Editors over the years. One of the earliest WYSIWYG HTML editor I used was Netscape Gold / Composer, which was quite basic but probably the only one at that time (1995). For quite sometime after that I used Visual Page, even when the product was discontinued because of its simplicity and ease of use. I graduated on to Dream Weaver. Anyway back to the present when I moved to Linux, I was looking for a high quality HTML editor to be a replacement of DreamWeaver on Linux platform. I was looking for an editor with WYSIWYG capability with modern CSS based layouts. I needed something light-weight and yet with well rounded features. Syntax highlighting was a nicety but not necessity.

I tried several editors including but not limited to SciTe Text Editor, Nvu, Bluefish Editor, XEmacs Text Editor, KompoZer & Quanta Plus. Here is a brief overview of each followed by my recommendation.
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WordPress provides you the capability to write an excerpt for your post. A post excerpt is displayed as a summary of the post in front page and archive pages. It is also used in RSS feeds where summary option is enabled.

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I glanced over the Facebook source code for both index and search pages. As an enterprise developer of some experience, source code is always interesting to me as it provides an insight into the health of a company. The interesting highlights of the Facebook code are:

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I was contacted by ProjectLocker to review their new service: Subversion Analytics. I took the service through the paces using their demo account. If you are considering hosted Subversion and Subversion analytics service then this review is a must read for you.

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