I experimented, and I discovered that if you really, really want to read the NY Post on your iPad, turn JavaScript off in the Safari settings. Commenters to Winer’s post also suggesting using an alternative browser on the iPad.

Winer writes:

The solution is completely obvious. Apple could stop sending back information to the servers that identify me as an iPad user. Or give me a way to edit that information.

So how does the Post know when you’re using an iPad? I assume the Post’s web server is using JavaScript to examine the user agent string communicated by the iPad on each connection. Winer’s proposal is that Apple change the user agent string so that it matches another browser’s.

The user agent reported by Safari on the iPad (wrapping the line so it fits) is

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us)
AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J3 Safari/6533.18.5

Apple could change the user agent string to omit mentioning the iPad or allow a user to set an alternative user agent. For example, this is the user agent reported by Safari from my MacBook Pro:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_7; en-us)
AppleWebKit/533.21.1 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Version/5.0.5 Safari/533.21.1

I tested the Cyberspace web browser on the iPad, and it is (so far) immune to the Post’s redirection. Its user agent is almost identical to the iPad’s but apparently different enough that it isn’t detected.

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us)
AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Mobile/8J3

• nytimes.com plus smartphone app: $15 every four weeks
• nytimes.com plus tablet app: $20 every four weeks
• nytimes.com plus smartphone app and tablet app: $35 every four weeks

This arrangement is odd; I read the New York Times using my computers at home and at work, on my iPod touch, and on my iPad. The content is the same; I’m simply using different devices, so I don’t understand why the cost will be different based on the combination of devices I use.

Most people will refuse to pay the subscription rates. But it has long bothered me that I’ve had free access for so many years. I read the New York Times more than any other news site, and I welcome the opportunity to support the newspaper financially since it is a great resource for me.

Ironically, although I’m willing to pay for access, I’ve already been offered (and I have accepted) free, unlimited access for the remainder of 2011:

You have successfully redeemed your free subscription to NYTimes.com. You now have access to the online benefits below:

• Unlimited access to NYTimes.com for the rest of 2011.*.
• Unlimited access to the NYTimes app for your BlackBerry®, iPhone®, or Android™-powered phone for the rest of 2011.

I guess I must be special (or something).

[Updated 22-Mar-2011]

Michael DeGusta shows on his The Understatement blog how out of line with other digital subscription prices the New York Times subscription is. (Thanks to John Gruber at Daring Fireball for leading me to this page.)

My primary complaint here is that the commercials and announcements from Webmaster Radio are in my opinion awful and completely spoil the podcast. I don’t listen to radio anymore, but Webmaster Radio reminds me of the Top Forty radio stations from the 1960s and 1970s. Webmaster Radio’s commercials and announcements are created with lots of reverb and sound effects that I find horribly old-fashioned and annoying.

The podcasts began with this disclaimer and warning:

The opinions expressed on this webmasterradio.fm program are those of the host, guests, and callers, and do not reflect those of the staff, management, or advertisers of webmasterradio.fm. Any rebroadcast or retransmission of this program, without the express written consent of webmasterradio.fm, is prohibited.

Do they have to lawyer up before a show? What are they afraid of?

I find Webmaster Radio’s web site is just as bad, with lots of tricky JavaScript and intrusive popup windows with offers to subscribe. My advice is not to go there.

I’m a big fan of WordPress, but I hope they can find someone else to host their podcasts.

Shervin Pishevar contributed a post today on TechCrunch about how to overcome this problem. Pishevar, the founder of the OpenMesh Project, is looking to provide network access to people living in such countries where the government has turned off the Internet and blocked mobile wireless networks.

OpenMesh’s basic idea is that we could use some new techniques to create a secondary wireless Internet in countries like Libya, Syria, Iran, North Korea and other repressive regimes to allow citizens to communicate freely. By creat[ing] mobile routers that connect together we could create a wireless network that mobile phones and personal computers can connect to.

Readers have made useful comments about the feasibility of this approach and have pointed out some alternatives that are already under way.

The fact that bloggers have to put up with comment spam is largely Google’s fault. Google in the past ranked the quality of a web site by the number of links it found to that site. If you wanted to raise the ranking of your site, one way was to post comments on many, many blog sites, where the comments contained links to your own web site. It wasn’t hard to write software to automate the commenting process.

WordPress, the blogging tool I use, requests that a commenter supply an email address, a URL for the commenter’s own web site, and the comment, which can include additional links. Many spam comments include a link within the comment; others put filler in the comment the link in the URL entry box.

Spam comments are easy to recognize. Here’s a sample of what they look like:

[Link deleted.] Hello there, just became alert to your blog through Google, and found that it’s really informative. I am gonna watch out for brussels. I will be grateful if you continue this in future. A lot of people will be benefited from your writing. Cheers!

[Link deleted.] Thanks for that awesome posting. It saved MUCH time :-)

[Linked deleted.] Wow! Thank you! I permanently wanted to write on my site something like that. Can I include a fragment of your post to my site?Definitely, what a magnificent website and revealing posts, I surely will bookmark your site.Best Regards!

taibiatrielay Usesentephesy Deepdiarlilia abiliaecope [Link deleted.] MenKeycle adegreeaxiore Seetlepet Remasleence

Hey! Would you mind if I share your blog with my twitter group? There’s a lot of people that I think would really appreciate your content. Please let me know. Many thanks.

Sweet blog! I found it while surfing around on Yahoo News. Do you have any suggestions on how to get listed in Yahoo News? I’ve been trying for a while but I never seem to get there! Appreciate it

Do you have a spam problem on this blog; I also am a blogger, and I was curious about your situation; we have created some nice methods and we are looking to trade strategies with other folks, please shoot me an e-mail if interested.

Who is fooled by simple-minded comments like these? Certainly not anyone who is actively moderating comments on their blog.

I get very few real comments on my blog. (I have approved 16 out of 333 comments submitted.) My policy is that I must approve all comments before they appear, and I am diligent about weeding out spam or comments that are not informative.

WordPress supplies tools for automating the blocking of comment spam, the most popular being Akismet. I am about to activate this plugin because manual moderation of comments is becoming a burden for me.

[Updated 28 February 2011]

Shame on me. I got fooled. A few weeks ago, I had received and accepted five long comments about Apple products from four different people. I was suspicious about the comments when I accepted them, but they contained no links, and the URL attached did not link to sites I considered suspicious.

But after writing this post and thinking about comment spam over the weekend, I thought I should investigate those comments again. I found the comments and copied two sentences from each into the Google search bar of my web browser. Google returned perfect hits for this blog and also for several other blogs or reviews at amazon.com or technology review websites. This meant that each of the four commenters had simply copied and pasted long pieces of text from other sources into the comment.

I think these commenters hoped that once I had accepted a comment from each of them (who I now believe to be a single person), they would be entered into a whitelist of commenters who did not need moderation, at which point they could spam my blog without my noticing. This didn’t work because I moderate all comments, and if there is a whitelist mechanism in WordPress, I don’t know how to activate it.

I have removed those comments. My status is now 11 approved comments and 351 spam comments.

[Updated 2 March 2011]

I activated the Akismet plugin on my blog today.

[Updated 3 March 2011]

Akismet is doing a fine job of screening out spam comments. Now I can focus on writing instead of spam.

[Updated 2 April 2011]

Akismet is saving me much time as my blog gets more traffic. I’m getting hammered by spam comments, but Akismet is taking care of everything.

Comment Spam Traffic at sphaerula.com

This is a figure of my current traffic stats.

Traffic at sphaerula.com

As I mention below in my reply to Emil, I have no idea whether comment spam gets counted in the traffic stats.

[Updated 8 April 2011]

Akismet announced today that it has blocked its 25 billionth spam comment.

WeatherSpark is a new type of weather website, with interactive weather graphs that allow you to pan and zoom through the entire history of any weather station on earth.

Get multiple forecasts for the current location, overlaid on records and averages to put it all in context.

Via Aleks Jakulin on the Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog, who comments:

Prediction and observation quantiles, historic data, multiple predictors, zoomable, draggable, colorful, wonderful.

Yesterday I needed some baseball, and I couldn’t wait. On iTunes, I found Baseball’s Best, the original television broadcasts of 154 of the best games for only $2 apiece. Last night, I watched “1989 ALCS, Game 4: A’s at Blue Jays.” It was great to watch my favorite Oakland A’s players again, although unfortunately it was Bob Welch who pitched that game, not Dave Stewart.

From John Gruber’s Daring Fireball site, I learned about a new iPad app called Pennant. This app, currently priced at $5, provides summaries of every baseball game from 1952 through 2010. The presentations are unusual and sometimes not quite as informative as I would like. I expect the app will improve with later versions.

I purchased the At Bat 2010 iPhone app last season, and I’m eagerly waiting for At Bat 2011 to be released. There has been no word yet on when it’s coming out.

[Updated 28 February 2011]

At Bat 2011 was released on Friday, February 25, in time for the first games of spring training. Radio and television broadcasts and video highlights are now available.

• Fast Train to Nowhere: Obama’s bullet-speed boondoggle draws fire
• Wail to the Chief: Obama panned left and right as $3.7T budget fails to rein in debt
• High Rent District: D.C.’s agencies that prosper amid cuts
• Opinion: Obama doesn’t make the cut

Otherwise, it’s still stuffed with a lot of shallow filler:

• “Varmint Chic: Want the thrill of fur but worried about the guilt?”
• A quote from Charlie Sheen
• Prince Harry as the best man at his brother’s wedding
• “Kids guzzle danger with energy drinks”
• “Gay Old Time: Retirement comes out in first-of-its-kind senior village [for gays]
• The daily horoscope
• The usual vapid gossip about celebrities
• A fashion section titled “Ladies and the tramp”
• A hard-hitting article about Tiger Woods’s recent fine for spitting on the golf course

In the meantime, the app is still dog-slow (and that’s a slur on dogs).

[Updated 2 March 2011]

I stopped reading The Daily shortly after writing this post, and I have removed the app from my iPad.

The Times article quoted “a link-selling specialist,” Mark Stevens, extensively in the article, including this gem:

“I think we need to make a distinction between two different kinds of searches — informational and commercial,” [Stevens] said. “If you search ‘cancer,’ that’s an informational search and on those, Google is amazing. But in commercial searches, Google’s results are really polluted. My own personal experience says that the guy with the biggest S.E.O. budget always ranks the highest.”

It is clear that, despite Google’s efforts, it is not difficult to fool Google’s algorithms for identifying important sites and giving them high rankings. As the quality of Google’s search results continues to decline, users of Google’s search engine are growing increasingly distrustful and frustrated.

One stumbling point in any discussion of The Daily is who the target audience is. The Daily has features of a very ordinary and old-fashioned newspaper, including gossip, the weather report, photos of celebrities, a crossword puzzle, a sudoku puzzle, and (Flying Spaghetti Monster save us!) the daily horoscope. This suggests a target audience not of sophisticated users of computers but of an older generation of newspaper readers.

One person in the discussion commented on how isolated the content of The Daily is from the rest of the Internet. Stories do not contain links to other information sources, and there are no forums or other ways for readers to provide comments or corrections. These are features an experienced user of the Internet expects to find.

All in all, The Daily is a very 20th-century product, and I expect it to fail.

For me, the app is not especially groundbreaking or revolutionary; it’s just a news magazine on a tablet. The app itself is technically disappointing. It is slow to load, and the carousel of contents is disappointingly jerky and slow. Many pages are unresponsive until the data loads; one of the worst is the page with horoscopes and the weather forecast. With version 1.0.1, I couldn’t change the page until the data had been downloaded.

I just installed version 1.0.2, but I haven’t tried it yet. Curiously, and unusual for an iPad app, I was told to delete the old version of The Daily before installing version 1.0.2. Deleting the app had the side-effect of removing The Daily from the iPad apps update page, meaning I had to find it again in the App Store and install it from scratch.

I won’t become a subscriber to The Daily, because the content is shallow and bland. There are too many photos of celebrities, and there is not enough real news. Any newspaper that includes horoscopes is not going to impress me. I don’t think I’m a member of The Daily’s target audience, and I’m not a fan of Rupert Murdoch and his tawdry media empire. So I plan to delete the app when the trail period is over.

Consequently, I enjoy listening to the Windows Weekly podcast hosted by Paul Thurrott and Leo Laporte. Windows Weekly is a product of Leo Laporte’s twit.tv podcasting company. Leo is a great guy and broadcasting genius who has built up a profitable and expanding podcasting business from nothing except his experience in broadcasting and computers. Leo is knowledgeable about Windows, but Paul Thurrott knows much more and has deeper connections at Microsoft and in the PC world in general.

Leo occasionally goes on vacation or has other obligations that prevent him from cohosting Windows Weekly, at which times Tom Merritt fills in. Tom was a long-time cohost of Buzz Out Loud along with Molly Wood and others; Buzz Out Loud was where the talented and popular Veronica Belmont got her start. Several months ago, Leo convinced Tom Merritt to join the twit.tv network, and Tom is now a cohost of several shows, including a daily show, Tech News Today (a good show that is spoiled by the presence of the vapid Sarah Lane).

To get to the point, I want to say that Windows Weekly is a much better show when it is cohosted by Tom Merritt than when Leo Laporte is present. Leo is such an Apple fanboy that when he is on the show, he continually directs the discussion to Apple’s products. Leo sometimes openly mocks Paul Thurrott in disrespectful manner. (Leo is probably the nicest guy on the planet, and I think he intends his mocking to be playful).

In contrast, Tom Merritt is deeply respectful of Paul Thurrott, and he also has a greater respect for the PC side of computing. Tom runs a much more straightforward show than Leo does, and he makes sure the show stays on topic. Tom is also more willing to delve more deeply into the topics Paul Thurrott chooses for each week’s show, and the result is that I learn more when Tom is cohost.

My preference would be for Leo to give up cohosting Windows Weekly and let Tom Merritt take that role permanently.

I am, as usual, not the first person to observe this problem. Jeff Atwood wrote a long post about this problem on his codinghorror.com blog. He provides many links at the end of his post to other blog posts commenting on the same problem. They make disturbing reading.

The WordPress people have also noted a problem with Google searches for WordPress themes. Siobhan Ambrose wrote a post on wpmu.org titled “Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else.” She found that of the top ten sites returned by a Google search for “free WordPress themes,” eight contained WordPress themes with undesirable embedded content.

[Update on 28 February 2011]

Google announced that they are making a significant change in their algorithms:

[I]n the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites….

In the meantime, Razib Khan provided a good example of the typical low-quality content on a content farm that shall remain unnamed here.

But recently I have started listening to The Talk Show, which is hosted by Dan Benjamin and John Gruber. Their show is low-key but informative, and Dan and John are not afraid to bluntly disagree on some topics.

My wife, who has a bigger vocabulary than I have, achieved a perfect vocabulary level of 55 and sent me a screen shot to prove it:

One secret to success is to set up the options to save your score so that you don’t have to start over each time. Another secret to success is to be persistent, because you’ll learn the words you need to achieve a high score.

I haven’t had the time recently to attempt a perfect score, but eventually I’ll get around to trying.

[5-Jul-2008] Five more levels were added in May, 2008, so now the top possible score is 60.

The premise is simple. The site presents a word and four possible meanings, and you click on the meaning you think is correct. With each correct guess, you earn 20 grains of rice that the site owner donates to the United Nations World Food Program. Advertisers pay to display ads on the site, so they are the ones who ultimately pay for the donated rice. The game is fun and addictive, and it has the benefit that you can learn some new words.

As a scientist, I have a pretty large vocabulary, so I can reach a vocabulary score of 48. My wife, who edits medical textbooks and consequently has an enormous vocabulary, routinely reaches 53. A score of 55 is the highest possible.

I have learned some new words, some useful and some not. When someone mentions they wore a rebato trimmed with vair, now I know what they’re talking about.

But one of the words hit my hot button. The word was nostoc, and the required answer was blue-green alga. This annoys me because it is like calling a dolphin a fish, a mushroom a plant, or water an element. The answer is incorrect.

What were once called blue-green algae are properly called cyanobacteria. The distinction is important, because cyanobacteria are prokaryotic organisms and algae are eukaryotic organisms.

While I’m ranting: It’s one alga, many algae; one bacterium, many bacteria.