Victor Hurdugaci

Easy trick to reduce spam in WordPress

Sun, 04 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0800

Last year I neglected this blog and after a while I discovered that it wasn’t working well anymore. Requests would time out, the admin panel was loading slow and the experience sucked even with caching enabled. After doing some investigation, I found out that comment spam was the culprit. There were thousands of spam comments every month and many more attempts that were hitting the server really bad. The chart below shows that at the peak there were more that 125K comments per months that Akismet was catching. I had ReCaptcha enabled but it looks like there is a way to bypass it since the comments were ending up in the database.

The books I read in 2014

Fri, 26 Dec 2014 00:00:00 -0800

2014 is almost over, which means it’s time for me to share the books I read this year. The plan was to read 1 book per month but I only managed to read 10 books. Here they are:

Plant soil moisture and light monitor

Thu, 04 Dec 2014 00:00:00 -0800

In this tutorial I am going to show you how to create a soil moisture and light monitor for your plants using an Arduino. You can use it to keep track of when your plants need water and light. I’m also going to show you how to collect the data on a Raspberry Pi and display it on an LCD.

Raspberry Pi sync date and time

Sat, 22 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0800

The Raspberry Pi does not have a RTC (Real Time Clock) module and it is not able to keep the date and time without a power source. If your Raspberry Pi is not connected to the Internet, you are out of luck and the only option is to buy and install an RTC module. However, if it has Internet, you can make it sync the date and time from a time-server.

SerialProtocol - let the devices talk

Thu, 13 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0800

SerialProtocol is a software protocol for sending structured data via serial between two Arduino, two Raspberry Pi, or an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi.

Is Amazon Kindle Unlimited worth it?

Fri, 18 Jul 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Amazon announced Kindle Unlimited, a new service that gives unlimited access to 600.000 books for $9.99/month.

Bose QC15 vs Audio-Technica ATH-ANC7b

Sat, 12 Apr 2014 00:00:00 -0700

We recently moved in a new building that has open offices. It get pretty loud sometimes with ~10 people in the same room. I wanted something that can isolate me from the noise and since I don’t like ear plugs, I decided on noise cancellation headphones. After reading some reviews I tried Bose QuietComfort 15 and Audio-Technica ATH-ANC7b.

Advanced bindings with the Windows Azure Web Jobs SDK

Mon, 27 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0800

The Windows Azure Web Jobs SDK is a framework that simplifies the task of adding background processing to web sites. You can get more details about it by reading the Getting Started guide or Scott Hanselman’s introduction. Scott describes the Web Jobs SDK very well: “minimal ceremony for maximum results”. The Windows Azure Web Jobs SDK (codename SimpleBatch) is a very simple framework but provides some powerful binding capabilities.

Books 2013

Sat, 04 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0800

Following last year’s tradition of writing about the books I read in the previous year, here is the list of books I read in 2013:

The case of a hard to reproduce bug

Sat, 28 Dec 2013 00:00:00 -0800

This is the story of a bug that was hard to reproduce. It is about the investigation and it shows how well intended code can make bugs even harder to reproduce. The bug (and the fix) is trivial. However, a combination of factors make it remarkable.