1995 – Brendan Eich reads up on every mistake ever made in designing a programming language, invents a few more, and creates LiveScript. Later, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of Java the language is renamed JavaScript. Later still, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of skin diseases the language is renamed ECMAScript.

One Div Zero: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages.

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In March 1949,[...] an article in Popular Mechanics, describing a state-of-the-art computer called the Eniac, speculated on what lay beyond: “Where a calculator like the Eniac today is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs three tons,” the writer predicted, “computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only half a ton.” To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the half-million dollar machine, the supercomputer of its day, a group of electrical engineering students at the university of Pennsylvania duplicated its circuitry on a silicon chip measuring 7.44 by 5.29 millimeters.

“A Shortcut Through Time“
George Johnson
p.103-04

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Hmmm… “1 Theme of Choice from Blogalized.com“. Not too bad. I’ve been thinking about maybe sprucing the place up a bit….

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Here’s the link:
Northern Gentleman

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To make a long story short, the donation links on this site have not been working properly. Any donations made before yesterday did not reach me. None. PayPal tells me that all lost donations should have been returned to the sender after 30 days.

Mea culpa. This was entirely my fault and not PayPal’s.

So, thank you to Markus H. and the “Gryphon” folks — I got your donations just fine.

And thank you to anybody else who donated; but I never received it. That’s right — other than the two mentioned above, I have never received any donations through those links. I have no idea how much money I’ve lost, but the various software has had thousands of downloads. :\

How did it happen? One word: Spammers.

My original PayPal email address was “paypal” at this domain. After a time I started getting a bunch of spam on that address, so I made a new address, added it to PayPal, and removed the old address from PayPal. (I use the service for things other than receiving donations.) The bit I forgot to do was change all those donation links. Result: People were sending donations to a non-existent email address.

If you donated more than 30 days ago, you should have had the money returned by PayPal. If more recently… I guess you’ll get it back 30 days after you sent it — I haven’t seen it.

To be honest, I was getting kind of annoyed that I had had so many downloads, and nobody had donated. That’s what finally led me to checking out the link code (which is how I found the error). So again, a hearty “Thank You” to anybody who has donated to support Nerdaphernalia. So sorry I doubted you!

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So I checked out the author link. Not totally spammy, really. The guy has some legitimate articles about blogging on there (assuming he didn’t scrape them from other sites). Then, three posts down, I see this post:

Comment Spamming? Really? Says Who?
December 7th, 2007 · No Comments

Recently, I have been reading about comment spamming. You know, where you go around various blogs and leave your comment just to get a link. And I don’t agree that it doesn’t work[....]

<snip>

Hmmmm. You backlink your blog to my site, and lead me right to a post about how you think spamming people’s comments is a good idea.

D00d, that’s got “Akismet submission” written all over it. Seeya.

Moron.

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Dunce Cap was inspired by this plugin by Travis Hines. It allows you to “tag” your commenters with an image.

Currently there is only one image/tag built-in, though you can easily add you own using the Options screen. See the comments to this post for a demonstration, and if you install it, Read the “readme.txt” — it has some important info. As this is a beta, it currently requires one extra step before it will actually do anything.

I fully intent to add more built-in tags, and to rename this to something more generalized (and less negative). Suggestions are welcome.

Download: dunce.zip

[Update: The full plugin is out under a new name: Comment Spotlight.]

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This article was originally published at Nerdaphernalia. Planet WordPress is authorized to reproduce WordPress-related entries. If you're reading this at any other web site, the site owner is stealing copyrighted work. Please visit the original page:

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