Niels’ Homepage

Just added some more pictures from the aikido exams in Amersfoort on 6 October. You can find them here.

If you really like them as I do, just contact my lovely wife.

Ever since I changed my CMS to WordPress, the ability to comment option on my postings has been switched on. Of course I do not want all kinds of spam on my weblog, so at first I made sure that only comments from people I approved would be allowed on this weblog. This caused me to have to disapprove a lot of comments a day, so I installed the Akismet plugin for WordPress. That caught a lot of spam comments automatically, but the plugin retains the comments for 15 days before finally deleting them. So after 15 days I had +/- 900 comment spams in my database, waiting to be deleted once they are 15 days old.

Since I am a cheapskate (read: I don not want to pay for more storage than necessary). I was wondering how to reduce the number of comment spams that Akismet had to catch. So I installed a CAPTCHA plugin called reCAPTCHA. It has the nice side effect that it not only generates good captchas remotely and with disabled (i.e. blind) people in mind, it also is used to help in digitizing old books. The words that you type in are scrambled images from a book that needs to be digitized. What a wonderful project!

Lets see if this keeps down the amount of comment spam. And if you are wondering what the ’132′ means in the title: just show this number in binary using your fingers :).

Update 11:36:

First it seemed that the CAPTCHA plugin did not prevent comments from being processed by Akismet. After some Googling I found that the Akismet plugin had to be switched off. But reCAPTCHA is seems to be easily defeated as I already have 6 comments waiting to be moderated. So for now I will switch Akismet on again, saving me some time moderating.

Incredible but true, I passed my aikido shodan test today! It feels really good as most people are convinced I am more of a jiu-jitsu type than an aikido type.

The exam itself went really well. I wasn’t nervous at all and completely focused and relaxed. Although you wouldn’t think so if you looked at my face on the image below. Perhaps that is way people have the perception that I am more of a jiu-jitsu guy.

As far as I know I only made two mistakes: moving a bit too fast on kote-gaeshi and mixing up kata-otoshi and kata-ha-otoshi when asked to perform kata-otoshi.

Next time I hope to take part as Rick’s uke. He unfortunately did not pass his nidan test. But knowing his dedication I am sure that he will put on a great show in March.

A big THANKS! for Willem and Raymond for helping me pass this test and for Rick for still allowing to have a party at his house.