An unoriginal Christmas gift

Happy Christmas to you all.

Do you know what my Christmas present was? Another gift sent via Outbrain:

At least the colours are seasonal!

Denial of Kudos Attack on my blog

A couple months ago I set about trying to garner a few sympathy votes for my blog by complaining about the low star ratings that many of my posts were receiving. And as a demonstration of how not to carry out a controlled experiment I changed the ratings widget at the same time, from the Blogger default to Outbrain. One or other of these measures succeeded and my ratings improved no end.

Over the last few months I've been getting pretty good ratings, at a rate of about 35 a month, mostly 4 or 5 stars. It makes my heart glow rosy pink when I think that people have appreciated my work enough to rate it.

Then at the beginning of December my blog received some unwelcome attention. Logging onto Outbrain one evening, I noticed a crop of about 20 ratings, all sprung up since that morning. Odd, I thought, since that's half my usual monthly quota. And they were all angrily red - 1 star ratings - rather than the glowing golden fours and fives I'd been attracting. The next thing that stood out was that they were all from the UK (Outbrain logs IP addresses with each rating, though it only shares country of origin - it would be useful to see more details), and all posted within the space of a few minutes, faster than anybody could click through the posts. Alarmed, I checked the visitor logs on Feedburner and Google Analytics: tellingly, there were no corresponding visits logged from the UK. My conclusion? This bore all the hallmarks of a Denial of Kudos attack.

But that was just the beginning. Since then, I've racked up over 360 ratings, 1000% up on my usual tally. Most from the same place (so far as I can tell), all the same damning rating. It doesn't happen continuously; usually a block of 40 or so "spam" ratings will appear each day over a weekend, then nothing for several days.  I'm at a loss to know who or what's behind it. It's almost as if someone is monitoring the average rating, then shooting single star ratings at the blog to bring down the score if ever it rises above some mark.

Kate at Outbrain confirmed to me that it does appear to be a bot that's posting these ratings, running in an environment without cookies, which is how it evades the usual guards against multiple ratings. A few other UK blogs have been targeted, but why mine should be among them, I don't know. Outbrain manually cleared up the first hundred or so spam ratings, bringing my average ratings back up again. But more have appeared since then, which explains the current lacklustre scores. I have been promised a second spam clear out, but it has yet to happen.

Is this the handywork of some script-kiddie? Or somebody more malicious? It's definitely a very high-tech way of forestalling any pride I might experience in my work.

Anybody else suffered anything like this?

Announcing a new family development project

The family Jack is proud to announce a new project, code named Baby Jack 2.0.

My wife and I decided that the Agile methodology would not be appropriate in this instance, so we will be following the traditional Waterfall pattern. Requirements analysis has been completed (boy or girl will be just fine; complete set of appendages is a must). For the Functional Specification and Design stage we were fortunate in having complete blueprints that we could appropriate for ourselves - reverse engineering DNA is beyond my current skillset, even taking into account the potential of C#4.0. Build is now well underway: after 12 weeks we have a complete implementation, and we're just working on scaling the product up and out. We aim for a single delivery in the June timeframe, based on current progress.

An early screenshot is shown below:

Typealyzer says I'm a Scientist

I submitted my blog for a personality test today, and I suppose, since it didn't write itself, the result must apply to me. According to Typealyzer, I am a Scientist:

The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking at almost anything and figuring out a way of improving it - often with a highly creative and imaginative touch. They are intellectually curious and daring, but might be pshysically hesitant to try new things.

The Scientists enjoy theoretical work that allows them to use their strong minds and bold creativity. Since they tend to be so abstract and theoretical in their communication they often have a problem communcating their visions to other people and need to learn patience and use conrete examples. Since they are extremly good at concentrating they often have no trouble working alone.

What are you?