Pensieri di un lunatico minore
One really should be more careful where one types rm -rf *, no? In a hurry to head to lunch with coworkers yesterday, I was blowing away a subversion tree, and managed to blow away almost everything in my home directory. This is now the 2nd time in my life I’ve done this (the first was in 1994), which I suppose isn’t bad odds. It was, however, illuminating how out of date my backups were, and how they didn’t necessarily coincide with what I needed to bring the site back up.
Onward.
Add on top of that the fact that I apparantly left my 60GB iPod on the plane coming back from Indianapolis on Thursday, and you have an annoying day. I called the airline, but shocker of shockers, nobody “found it.” Oh well, I suppose it’s a lame excuse to buy a new one.
No thoughts
Well, I took the plunge—moments after it was released—and upgrade to WordPress v2.1. It has a bunch of new things that I’m curious to use, and hopefully nothing will break. Since I wrote my own theme, and didn’t use anything fancy in it, I think I should be ok. If anyone sees something, please let me know.
No thoughts
Just for the record, I’ve never had to write much PHP in my life, as I’ve only had to modify a few things here and there. After having surmounted Zope, and a dozen other templating systems, including the atrocities known as ASP and JSP, I can clearly say that PHP sucks more than is humanly comprehensible. Perhaps it’s possible to write something vaguely sensible in it, but it’s painfully difficult.
Right now I’ve deployed part of the new design, but I’ve had to make some adjustments for the silliness of PHP and WordPress. What I haven’t included yet is the commenting pieces. That comes RSN.
No thoughts
I am in the process of moving my blog from one host to another at TextDrive. This involves moving the database and other pieces, and mostly has just given me some heartburn over the way to configure it through the web-based management components. Really, just give me a damned httpd.conf file, and be done with it. Otherwise, things are moving smoothly, and if you’re seeing this, it’s because it’s actually moved to the new host.
In other news, I also have a totally new site design that I’m working on. I had originally intended to move to Mephisto, but it’s just simpler to move the WordPress over. That just means I have to insert all the PHP tags to make it work. That’s a project for this week.
No thoughts
What does it say that I’m spending my Saturday evening toying with my blog? After a week out of town in Omaha working long hours to get a demonstration working for a big group of important personages, this is actually quite relaxing. While I keep thinking of moving to Typo, I don’t know that there’s any reason to do so, honestly. For now, WordPress works just fine for me.
In the mean time, I’m playing with some new layouts that other people have written. None make me happy, but I was getting tired of the old design. Until I get the itch to design my own, I think this one will work fine for me. If you have any complaints, please let me know.
No thoughts
Somehow, comments got turned off on all new posts. Not that people are flooding me with them! ;-)
No thoughts
For some reason, the comments on this site have been hozed for a few days. I ended up figuring out how to repair it (the joys of MySQL and mysqlcheck), but it seems the actual index file disappeared, and so the system couldn’t be fixed through the normal means.
Unfortunately, the gang at TextDrive, usually very helpful, were slow and of minimal assistance after it was reported 2+ days ago. Let’s hope this is a fluke.
No thoughts
I have started changing some of my longer posts (i.e. 5+ paragraphs) to have an excerpt on the front page, and the rest on a single-post page. I wonder if this is a preffered format, or if people would rather read the whole thing on one page. My biggest problem with not using excerpts is that when I write long posts, sometimes smaller posts after them get visually lost.
3 thoughts
I have reached an odd crossroads. I am contemplating moving to tagging (a’la folksonomies), rather than the traditional categories approach of marking entries on my blog. Originally, I had started using hierarchical categories, and found them, like hierarchical folders in email, a limiting exercise in needless fussiness. They didn’t really add anything worthwhile to what I was doing. Then, after the creation of things like del.icio.us and Technorati, and my work with things like the Dublin Core I started to think more around the ideas of tagging and metadata, rather than structure and organization.
Tagging seems to me to be more about inter-relations, and not organization. It is a way to find similarity and a path through the maze. This appeals to me, and so I’ve started looking at migrating to a tagging-focus, rather than categories. Categories, however, at least as they are implemented in WordPress are little more than metadata tags, so the first thing I did was start tagging things with multiple categories and flattening the categories so they were one dimensional in nature. This got me part of the way there.
Read the rest
1 thought
Ever since I upgraded to WordPress 2.0, I’ve switched strategies for handling spam on this blog. Before, I used a CAPTCHA, which I hated and tended to create problems for those who wished to comment—sight-impaired or not. Now, with 2.0, I’m using Akismet, which is a central clearing-house for spam prevention. To quote their website:
When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.
I assume one of the things it does is look for identical comments on multiple blogs. That can probably catch 80% of spam. The sad thing is that every day I have dozens of spam that it has caught. Before, they wouldn’t get to that point, but now I get to see the junk. Interesting, if pathetic.
No thoughts
Well, after a few weeks of WordPress 2.0 being out, I decided to update now that 2.0.1 is out. The upgrade was pretty much seamless, and in the process, I found a new theme I like a bit more. I really need to do one from scratch, but I’m lazy.
I’m sure this comes as quite a shock to everyone who knows me.
No thoughts
Seriously though, I’ve made some modifications to the WordPress plugin that I use and hopefully will iron out some of the issues related to those fun and exciting images. I wish the Internet wasn’t crawling with the lowest form of scum on the planet—spammers—so that I could just trust everyone.
No thoughts
Just so people don’t think I’ve been possessed, I’m in the process of changing the design. I’m hoping to find a nice one to start with and tweek it, but honestly, I’m not really content with anything I’ve looked at yet. Onward…
The photo in the header is one I took last year on a visit to Spring Green, Wisconsin (just a few minutes from Madison). The house in the distance is Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio, Taliesin.
2 thoughts
I just got home from Charleston, SC to find a ton of spam comments in my blog, however they’re quite bizarre in that they consist of random strings of characters (not even vaguely looking like words) and are pointing to machines that don’t exist. What was the purpose of this? So I’ve turned on pre-moderation again, until I can fix it to allow certain “regulars” to post without delay.
I’ve changed my mind. I’ve decided to use a WordPress plugin, SecureImage, which implements the whole CAPTCHA idea. It’s not perfect, but it’s likely to be close enough. If anyone has issues, please let me know.
3 thoughts
Troy Brumley points to some discussions of employers and bloggers. As someone who is both an employee of a company and a blogger, I wanted to express my personal thoughts on this in the form of some guidelines.
- You can not violate policies which do not exist. This means companies need to set policies, and in a reasonable way. “Thou shall never blog about anything” is both irrational and likely as illegal as “thou shall never quit and go to work for anyone else in this industry” has been found to be.
- Don’t be an idiot. Don’t bad mouth people in your office, and don’t discuss non-public information. Violating an NDA (which almost all of us are under with our companies) is violating an NDA, whether it’s at a coffee shop or published online.
This means don’t say something on your blog which would be inappropriate if said in a public context in general. Blogs are public forums, and must be treated as such. For those who want to break these rules, you should see the blogging in secret information I referenced earlier.
2 thoughts
... though not quite to that “deluxe apartment in the sky.”
The days of my main machine are numbered, and the building it is being stored in is being “gentrified,” which is amusing to no extent. Because of that, I’ve had to seek out a new hosting provider, and rather than depending on the kindness of friends, I’ve decided to actually pay for hosting for the first time in over a decade. It’s tragic, really.
For now, I’m using TextDrive, which is put together by a bunch of Ruby and Python heads, and so far seems to be a good deal, and reasonably easy to work with. We’ll see how things go, though, and I’m on a month-to-month plan, in case I need to move.
As part of that, I’ve decided to move from MovableType to WordPress, mostly because I’ve gotten tired of all the comment spam that I’ve been getting, but also because I wanted something a bit more dynamic. While MovableType v3.x fixes that in a lot of ways, I’m still curious to try the new system. Unfortunately, I ran into a few problems:
- The
import-mt.php script doesn’t work worth squat with PHP5, which necessitated running it with PHP4, then going back to PHP5 for everything else.
- For some reason, when the data is inserted into the database, it’s not marked as published. In fact, it’s not marked as anything, which means the system goes all wonky. A quick trip through SQLand fixed that problem.
- It added a user to the database without a name, which caused all the comment forms to be broken .
Other than that, I just had to do some fancy fingering with the Apache configuration script on the old site, and make it send the correct redirect (Redirect Permanent in httpd.conf parlance) so that everything would move. Not everything is moved yet, but I didn’t want to leave the blog in place that much longer, honestly, and I will get all the photo galleries and other things moved in the next couple days.
There’s a few more bits and pieces that need fixing, including the appearance of the site. The template I chose looks a bit like what I want, but I honestly prefer something even more minimalist, so that will be coming in the next few days as I translate my CSS classes to the new ones. Also, as the implementation of Textile in WordPress and MovableType are slightly different, I’ve got to clean up some bizarre behavior.
No thoughts
So, I’ve come to the point where I really need more than MovableType to manage my site. In the “days before blogs,” if anyone can remember them, I managed everything as straight HTML pages, but that’s long since gone. What I need really is a simple CMS that has a blog as its focus, but the ability to manage other pages.
I’ve looked around, and at dinner my friend James recommended perhaps Tikiwiki, but a quick look makes my eyes cringe. Not just bad site design, but it seems to try to be everything to everyone. What I’m looking for is pretty basic, but these are mandatory:
- MovableType-level blogging (this can be met with a bunch of products)
- Simple interlinking (though not necessarily Wikish)
- Version tracking so that someone can see what has changed on a page that isn’t a blog
- Writing in Textile, nothing else is acceptable for me
Nice to haves:
- Written in Python
- Commenting on non-blogish pages
I could make a blog do it, by just updating one entry over and over, but I’m not a fan of making a square peg fit in the round hole of blogdom. I am also not sure a Wiki is the right answer, as I tend to write in longer bits, and don’t like Wiki syntax. Right now, I’m likely to just go with PyBloxsom and add the features I need.
Thoughts?
2 thoughts
So, apparently the brilliant minds at Websense, makers of hand-holding software for protecting people from choosing to see sites their nannies don’t want them to see, has decided that my web site is “Adult Material,” akin to pornography, or some such. Finding this out from several other people, of course, as they didn’t bother to try notifying me of anything.
So I had to dig, find the non-working links in their support FAQ, and then finally randomly try a link that worked to get to their lookup database, which then required me to request an account, and then look things up, then fill in all the data all over again a second time as to why I thought it was incorrectly classified. Of course, there’s no “comment” as to why it was incorrectly classified, just its status, as though it magically appeared there without someone’s intervention, or some software’s intent.
All of this is painfully absurd, and while my friend James speculates that it’s much easier for people behind the electronic nannysoft to submit requests, I suspect that 99.999% of people who get a “blocked site” don’t ever complain to anyone because they’re afraid of getting in trouble. One could argue that people shouldn’t be visiting non-business-related sites, but that’s obviously a fallacy since people are constantly using the web for things unrelated to work—probably 80% of it is unrelated.
Now I wait.
Update: Well, it only took a couple hours, but here’s their response:
The site you submitted has been reviewed and the categorization has been changed to Message Boards & Clubs. This update should be available in the next publication of the database.
Not really what I’d call the correct grouping, but I don’t feel like arguing.
No thoughts
That’s it, all trackback pings are off, and I will be closing comments very quickly from here on out. The level of spam I have to deal with has reached a level I don’t care to tolerate, and in fact, I just suffered from 42 thousand trackback ping attempts. They were indiscriminate and just trying to find something to hit that was open. It sent the load on my machine over 100. 100.
These people are sociopaths, and those who support them are complicit in pissing on the commons of society. 90% of the email that hits my server is spam.
No thoughts
I received sometime today, 50+ trackback pings with spam in them. This has gotten to the point that even I, as a non-violent person, would not overly oppose the castration of anyone doing this, and their forcable removal from society. I can not explain the depths of assholitude these people have reached, and they are driving the Internet further and further down the drink. I’m very close to reaching the point of just shutting off all comments and trackbacks forever.
No thoughts
bc. 8:53AM up 67 days, 18:50, 2 users, load averages: 277.89, 233.78, 199.75
Holy crap! That was the load when I logged into chaos.amber.org this morning. It, according to some further records, skyrocketed close to 300, but I could no longer do anything through my SSH connection. For whatever reason, it then fell back down to normal about 10-15 minutes later. As far as I can tell, and from discussing with James, it appears to be Sawmill going insane. This is troubling because it has tended to be a very reliable product in the past, and blows everyone else on the market away in feature-performance-functionality. We’ll see if I stay with it, though. Maybe time to write something of my own.
It’s a testament for FreeBSD that the system took this level of load, and kept functioning long enough for the process to quit and everything to return to normal. Now if I could just get some real resource shaping in place so I can always have CPU for SSH. Alas uptime isn’t that impressive as the site it’s located at has had quite a few long power failures which drain the UPS.
No thoughts
So I continue to get comment spam, though not as much as I used to, and so I’ve instituted a policy where I close old comments. For those using MovableType on top of PostgreSQL, you can use this, run in a cron entry:
bc. /usr/local/pgsql/bin/psql -d mt -c “update mt_entry
set entry_allow_comments = 2
where entry_blog_id = 1 and
entry_created_on < (now() – ‘30 day’::interval);”
I’ve wrapped it so it won’t mess up, but this can be put on one line. Just replace the blog_id with your number, which you can figure out from the MT URL structure.
No thoughts
So, today, MovableType 3.0 was released, at least an early version. Unfortunately, the license has changed in such a way that I can’t upgrade to it. I run MT for quite a few friends, none of which are done commercially. Because of that, I’d have to pop $150 for the license, which I don’t care to do. There is a “free” version, but it is limited to 1 author, and if I read the license agreement correctly, it prohibits installing multiple copies on the same machine.
So, my site will be staying at 2.661, as will everyone else’s. That’s at least until I finish my own blogging software, which is being written in Smalltalk.
Update: Now, if SixApart were to move the current “license” (unlimited personal use) to around $99, I would gladly pay for it, just as I’ve donated money already. It’s a good product, and if they want to go after a higher end market and forsake the smaller market, that’s their choice.
2 thoughts
Now, I don’t know how many people read my web site, nor do I really worry terribly much about who they might be, as I write it as much for my own aggrandizement as I do any other purpose. Mostly I write it to get ideas and thoughts out of my head and into some form that is more substantial. As part of that, I’ve set up the system to generally allow comments on my ramblings, because it’s always interesting to hear other people’s thoughts.
Unfortunately, these comments are being abused constantly now by spammers, who exploit the good will of those of us who open ourselves up to others comments, for financial and personal gain. Leeches on society, destructive in the extreme. I now have 50+ IP address blocks blocked from commenting on this site, and honestly, am getting close to just turning it off entirely, as waking up to 20-30 spam ads that I have to delete is quite annoying.
Who are these people? Why are they so selfish? Or do they actually live under some delusion that we give a damn about their “supplements” and such? More importantly, who are the idiots and morons, the adults who still play in the shallow end of the gene pool, who buy stuff from these leeches who encourage their anti-social behavior?
5 thoughts
Spammers. Loath them. Loath them like the cockroaches the infect a house.
Of late, I’ve been getting more and more “comment spam” on my weblog, and it’s becoming annoying to a level that I’ve had to take a few steps. First, I’ve turned off anonymous comments—-if you’re not man/woman enough to leave an email address behind, go away. Next, I’ve disabled HTML in all comments, to reduce the number of links and at least reduce the “benefit” to these kind of leaches.
As always, I continue to expand my blacklist, but honestly, it’s getting to the point where if this continues, I’ll simply turn off comments completely and hope that other people can use Trackback, or whatever, to communicate—-thereby reducing the value.
Asshats.
1 thought
So I go through logs every once in a while, and here’s some fun little bits from the “home office,” as it were. First, the most interesting of the top 20 “search terms” that hit my site:
peanut butter jelly time donkey and 4 other plays on “peanut butter jelly time”banana puddingclear channel sucks
Odd, eh? As for breakdown of visitors, it seems odd but there’s a lot of people from Japan, Canada, Netherlands and Hungary. Hi!
Oh, and 55.37% of the referring search engine hits came from Google, which was double the next closest, MSN. And something around 8% of the people reading this site are using a Mac. What the heck are the rest of you using, a tin-can and string? ;-) Then again, 3 people are using a BeOS system… what, no Amiga?
Finally, it seems something like 200 people read this site regularly, which is about 200 more than I expected. Wow.
No thoughts
Unfortunately, because the Internet is now inhabited with the scum of the earth, leaches of society, otherwise known as spammers, who are trying their hardest to destroy everything that’s been created in the name of greed and other frightening concepts, I have now closed for comments all entries older than 1 months, and will continue to track this moving forward. On occasion, I am getting good comments in old entries, unfortunately, I more often than not am getting porn links put in, and I’m not going to tolerate this.
If you’re a spammer reading this, you are those that Dante confirms to the lowest planes of hell.
2 thoughts
I’ve reduced the number of items on the front page of this site from 15 days, to 12 entries. I’ve noticed that I often write some really long things that makes for a very long page on the front. You can always find the rest in the archives. I’ve also added a link to additional 12 entries on the front page on the right hand side.
No thoughts
Inspired by Erik Barzeski, I’ve decided to re-design by archives. Before, it was archive/0000000.html or some such, and this created 900+ files in a single directory. While FFS doesn’t have a major problem with this, I still think it’s “bad form,” and wanted to fix it. So now, things are layed out the way Erik recommends, and as is documented on the MovableType web site. This means it’s now archive/YYYY/MM/DD/... with index.html files for non-individual entry listings.
For those who might want to use a similar layout, here’s all that needs to be done:
- Go to the Configuration/Archiving screen on the MovableType web interface.
- At the bottom of the config screen there’s a set of archives to be generated, one of the columns is “Archive File Template,” which is not the most obvious thing in the world. You’ll need to change them, and here’s the ones I’ve used:
- Individual :
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d"$>/<MTEntryTitle dirify="1">.html
- Daily :
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d/index.html"$>
- Monthly :
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/index.html"$>
- Category : Left alone.
This creates a minor problem, which is how to deal with everyone who links to me from their site. There might not be many, but I don’t want to piss people off. My “short term” solution is just to leave all existing entries in place. After that, I’m going to implement some rewrite rules in
SkunkWeb to catch things that look like an old entry, and figure out how the heck to redirect people to the right place. This will probably not happen till I move all the entries into a database that is queryable, but it will happen, I think.
Ideas?
[Update: I was an idiot and didn’t fix up all the SkunkWeb components to be absolute references, so it blew up… that’s fixed now. D’oh!]
2 thoughts
You know, it would be nice if Address Book in Mac OS X actually would show someone’s age if you have entered their birthday. It’s not a big deal, but Claris Organizer did it, and it’s handy.
2 thoughts