I was listening to WBEZ this morning and the traffic report came on … The reporter indicated that a particular road was very icy, but the city was sending out a salt truck to “make it better”.
Immediately the Beatles song “Hey Jude” popped into my head with slightly altered lyrics …
“… take a salt truck … and make it better …”
OK, yeah, I am easily amused.
For some reason, Tivo has been recording a lot of old SF shows recently.
A lot of these shows I’ve been fans of in the past … Star Trek: The Next Generation, Highlander, Seven Days, etc.
As I watch these shows I’m amazed at how bad they are. I’m truly amazed that I considered these shows good at one point. I was actually a fan of many of them.
Now I find the acting wooden, the special effects primitive, and the plots flat.
Of course some of the shows I thought were bad initially are still just as bad … like Star Trek Voyager (then why do I still watch it on occasion?).
Maybe it’s old age? I wonder if, as time goes by, I’ll start considering some of the shows I like now to be just as bad?
As I mentioned a few days ago in twitter, the outflow pipe of our sump pump froze.
I had gone down stairs to get something from the utility room and found that the sump pump was running … and didn’t stop. The pump sounded OK, but no water was draining from the pit. I turned the power to the pump off and triggered the backup pump … which ran but didn’t remove any water. This meant that the pumps themselves weren’t the problem. I went outside and discovered that the outflow pipe was frozen solid. Clearly not a good situation.
I’ve never understood the rationale behind the various web scripts that claim that they are ‘poisoning’ spammers lists.
They claim that, by putting a bunch of garbage email addresses on a web page and encouraging spammers to harvest the page, they are poisoning a spammers email list and thus making the list useless so that they will discard the list.
Where did they ever get the idea that spammers CARE about the good & bad addresses that they harvest. Considering how much it costs them to send spam, they wouldn’t are one lick if 90% of the addresses on their list is valid or not. Especially since most spam sent these days is done by infected personal computers controlled by ‘bot herders‘.
I often watch the log file on my mail server … and observe the servers trying to deliver mail to mangled and non-existent addresses. It’s clear the sending system is just blasting names at my server without any consideration if the address exists or not. My mail server software (sendmail) had an option to throttle the connection of any system that gets more than a certian number of bad addresses. I also have a script that monitors for that behavior and adds a firewall rule to completely block such systems.
My advice to those who create such scripts … focus your energies elsewhere … right now you’re just wasting your time.
Oh, by the way, for those of you who are trying to use “User-Agent” lists to block harvesters … don’t waste your time on that either. Harvesters, like spammers, will never clearly identify themselves as such … and will use a completely legitimate user agent when spidering your website. Additionally, they will absolutely ignore any robots.txt file that you have in your site.
There are, however, systems that use a somewhat similar technique to stop spammers … but are much more effective. Instead of just trying to poison a spammers list … they use traceable email addresses. This means that, when a harvester visits a page with this traceable email address, they log the IP the harvester is using and the email address that is harvested. This way, when spam is sent to the address, they know when and how the address was harvested and where it was sent from. Theoretically the spammer is reported both to the ISP that the mail was sent through AND the ISP that was used to harvest the address. Project Honeypot is one such anti-harvester organization.
Hmmm … depending on the cost and schedule, I might be interested in attending Wordcamp Chicago.
I’m now running WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate 1.
Keep your fingers crossed that it doesn’t screw things up completely.
Actually, I’m not especially worried … in my little playing around with the beta versions, it’s been pretty stable.
Ginny has been bugging me about the problem she’s been having posting to her blog from the iPhone and other third party tools that she uses.
The problem has been narrowed down to a bug in LIBXML2 that causes leading angle brackets “<” to be stripped off of posts when processed through the XMLRPC support in PHP. I logged the issue in the WordPress bug tracker, and the consensus is that the problem started manifesting after an automatic update applied by Fedora 8.
Well, to solve the problem I’ve moved Ginny’s blog to a temporary server running in a base Fedora 8 install in a VMWare instance. Luckily WordPress stores most of it’s content in the MySQL database (not the images, unfortunately). A bit of NFS magic to mount the appropriate directory in the virtual system, and it’s working fine. The server itself only has Apache, PHP, MySQL client, SSH, and a few other bits & pieces to keep it running. No automatic updates, GUI, compilers, etc.
Once the bug is fixed (either WordPress, using a different XML processing mechanism, or LIBXML2) I’ll move her server back to the main server.
In the mean time, her blog is going to run in the virtual machine ‘Hobbittown’ (named because it’s small).
Well, the election is over … and, as many will tell you, it’s quite a relief.
While, in general, I agree with this sentiment … however, without a doubt, this has been the most interesting & engaging campaign & election in recent memory. The number of people who went out and actually voted is a testament to this.
Even the primaries were interesting … in my entire life, I cannot remember a primary where my vote actually made a difference. This time everyone’s vote made a difference … down to the last state.
As most who read this blog know, I have been an Obama supporter for quite a while … but I have to say, the caliber of the Barack’s campaign was quite nice … he definitely took the high road and resisted the temptation to spread lies & rumors. McCain’s campaign, not so much.
To my mind, this election should demonstrate to the world what our country is all about … we can put aside prejiduces, petty differences, and elect the person best suited for the job at hand … regardless if they are black, white, man, woman, etc.
I am definetely looking forward to the next four (or eight) years.
Well, it’s been a fairly busy two weeks …
And, tomorrow, it’s back to work.
Well, mostly back to work … I really didn’t leave. Like a glutton for punishment, I checked email periodically and had to address a few issues. Nothing major though. Hopefull, when I get back, the I18N project will be done and we can get on to real development again.
Kind of a busy two weeks … Ginny and I were on vacation. Because of the cost of our last vacation (England & Ireland), we decided to make this a “Staycation” … basically stayed home and didn’t go anywhere big.
One of the things we wanted to was finish the floor in the smallest bedroom. This was a project we started about 6 years ago … we had these grand ideas of turning it into a reading room, with a hardwood floor, a nice comfy chair, plenty of book shelves, etc.
Well, the project started out fine … but ended up completely stalled due to problems with the flooring material we chose.