The BCS results are in. And the latest members of the We Wuz Robbed Crew are Auburn (relegated to the Consolation Bowl) and Cal (playing in the Missing $10 Million Bowl).

The BCS did its job: the AP, ESPN, and computers agree that USC and Oklahoma are the top 2 teams. And they’ll meet to determine this year’s champion on the field. If Auburn has a complaint, then let them look towards the AP or USA Today. If they had agreed to defer their initial polls until October, then Auburn might have been able to catch Oklahoma. Instead Auburn started at #17 and never got a whiff of #2.

A Cal-Michigan Rose Bowl would have been nice. But Cal had their shot at USC and came up short. That loss cost them control over their bowl destiny. Of course Texas came up short in their own match against Oklahoma. If Texas coach Mack Brown’s shameless pandering to the voters was responsible for Texas passing Cal while Cal was winning games and Texas was idle, then all I can say is that what goes around, comes around.

This release of my comment and trackback package allows you to reject comments and trackbacks that contain an excessive number of links. It also corrects an error in the regular expression used to extract the host name from links.

I suspect this will be the last version using the Perl Storable module. My recent experience with comment bludgeoning has demonstrated the limitations of the current adminstrative interface. And I think that I’m going to need better query capability to remove those limitations.

Features

• Composite Trackback RSS feed
• Composite Comment RSS feed
• HTML Sanitization from Brad Choate’s Sanitize Plugin for Moveable Type.
• Tag Moderation for Trackback and Comments – trackback pings and comments are immediately available with most html tags removed (p allowed for readability). Sanitized tags are displayed upon approval.
• Outbound Link Blacklist – trackback pings and comments that contain outbound links to banned sites are blocked. The user is responsible for providing a function identifying banned sites.
• Rejection of trackback pings and comments that contain an excessive number of links.
• Trackback and Comment deletion (unfortunately, this does not propagate to the RSS feed)
• Comment Editing

Requirements

• Web Server capable of running cgi scripts
• Perl with the following Perl Modules:
  • File::Spec
  • Storable
  • CGI
  • CGI::Cookie I believe that these are core modules as of Perl 5.6.0.

Download standalone trackback and comments.

18 Mar: Downloading Comments and Trackback Pings

These methods support Lewis’s argument that the valuation of different skills was inefficient in the early part of this period, and that this was profitably exploited by managers with the ability to generate and interpret statistical knowledge. This knowledge became increasingly dispersed across baseball teams during this period. Consistent with Lewis’s story and economic reasoning, the spread of this knowledge is associated with the market correcting the original mis-pricing.

I wonder if Billy Beane regrets cooperating in the writing of Moneyball. The idea was sure to spread, but the it might have spread more slowly.

This fledging domain name registrar [GoDaddy.com] has committed to airing one spot during the Super Bowl commercial mayhem in hopes of scoring “huge exposure” for the GoDaddy.com brand.

As a satisfied GoDaddy.com customer, I’d like to join John Moore in his plea that GoDaddy.com save the $2.4 Million. Spend the money on something that actually means something. Not on a three to four week ego boost from talking about your Super Bowl ad.

Brand Awareness pays off when you sell products that appear alongside the competition in the consumer marketplace. But when I registered ideoplex.com, I chose GoDaddy.com based upon internet research into customer satisfaction with domain name registrars.

Spend the money on improving customer service and direct your advertising at media that targets your market.

Roger’s Cadenhead’s Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition is now available. In Rogers’ words:

I wrote the book to encourage Movable Type webloggers to get into the advanced publishing capabilities of the software, such as template design, plug-in programming, and XML syndication with Atom and RSS.

He’s also giving away 5 author’s copies of the book. My move to TextPattern is still in the works, but a good Movable Type reference could be handy.

I may be winning the war against comment spam, but I’m losing the war against vandalism. During the past 24 hours, I’ve deleted more than one hundred comments along the lines of:

• Please check some relevant pages in the field of… Thanks!!!
• Please check the sites in the field of- Tons of interesdting stuff!!!
• In your free time, check out the pages about…
• Please check out the sites in the field of…

There was a certain thrill in besting the spam-master when it was a contest of wits. Now that the minions are just bludgeoning me with blunt weapons, the thrill is gone.

In another example of bad things happening to good people, Notre Dame fired Ty Willingham. It was a sad day when Willingham left Stanford for Notre Dame. Although I understood that Notre Dame was an opportunity that he just couldn’t turn down, I felt that Ty and Stanford could have been a long term success together. And I didn’t think that he would be able to recruit at the level Notre Dame requires.

I think that the last point has been proven true - Ty hasn’t been able to attract the football talent required to be a top 10 team. Now Notre Dame can select a new sacrificial lamb - a failure will be discarded in 3 years and a success will be burnt out in 5.

I think this is a sign of progress - my most recent comment spam has been devoid of links. I’m guessing that the spam-master is trying to sneak something through via tag games and the sanitize_html code from Brad Choate‘s Sanitize Plugin for Movable Type is eating it up.

Tough loss in the snow. I’d like to blame the MasterMind for not having the Broncos ready to play. But after review, I attribute this loss to bad luck in bad weather.

On offense, conditions negated the rushing game. The Broncos rely upon a strong cutback move by the running back. In the snow, the offensive line wasn’t able to reliably create the hole and the Droughns was unable to exploit it when it was there. Although he rushed for 102 yards on 28 attempts, the Broncos were unable to sustain drives with the rush.

On defense, Champ Bailey had a tough day as Jerry Porter had several big catches against him. I attribute that more to good play by the Raiders than bad play by Bailey. If the receiver can make his move and the QB can place the ball then there isn’t much that a defensive back can do in the snow.

I think that the bottom line is that the Raiders did a better job of adapting to the conditions and making the plays. The offensive line gave Collins time to throw and Collins made enough good throws to win. On the other side, the Broncos had opportunities to put the game away and were unable to seal the deal.

Next week a must win game in San Diego. With a win the Broncos will lead the AFC West (tied with the Chargers at 8-4, but with a 2-0 head to head record). With a loss, they’ll be 2 games back in the division and scrambling for a wild card spot.

PS My apologies for missing Week 11. I did not see the game.

A reader writes in and takes me to task for not commenting on the Big Game. Personally, I felt that my post, Go Bears, said more than enough. But since I’ve been asked …

Thanks to cable and FSNY, I was able to watch the Big Game at home. I was quite impressed by the Stanford defense. Stanford had no business being in this game, but trailed by only 10-3 at the half. But the Stanford defense tired, the Cal offense got untracked and the rout was on.

Unfortunately, tempers started to flare and the game became ugly. I’m sure that you can point fingers at either side. But I’d like to know why Tedford called for a halfback pass with the game in hand at 27-6 in the 4th. The TD on that play increased the lead to 34-6 and play seemed to get especially rough from then on.

But that’s water under the bridge. I’m hoping that Cal holds on to its BCS ranking and goes to the Rose Bowl. I may even root for them to win that game.