it could be called work – Page 12

Why some of us dropped MovableType like a hot rock

Movable Type Publishing Platform: Comment spam load issue:

Recently, however, there have been a number of reports about the escalating effect of comment spam on Movable Type installations, especially evident in shared hosting environments. At first, we assumed that these problems were caused mainly on legacy systems (i.e. MT 2.x) running without the benefit of the modern anti-spam measures (e.g. TypeKey, comment moderation, MT-Blacklist v2.x, etc.) built to protect Movable Type installations. After further analysis and load testing, we’ve actually found that this is not the case.

In fact, we have found that there is a fairly major bug (in terms of effect, but not code size) which causes page rebuilding even in the case of a comment submission which would be moderated and hence should have no effect on the live page. This means that even if you are using comment moderation in Movable Type and even force moderation in MT-Blacklist, your server load is impacted just as if a comment had been posted to the live site. This bug has been fixed in development.

Well, yeah, that would be bad: the software goes through the motions of posting a comment that has already been blocked with all the resulting load of page rebuilding. That would be bad.

Right now, I’m kinda happy I can just rename the parts of my site that generate comments and the site still works (woo hoo!) and spambots are a thing of the past . . . . when the collective brain trust at 6Apart can make that work, then we’re onto something.

your tax dollars at work

The Newest,Fastest Proxies,All In ProxySky.com:

tracking down some spam, I find that a. it originates from a .mil address, b. it’s a misconfigured proxy server, and c. the email addresses for the contacts don’t work.

Outstanding, as someone would say.

The host doesn’t seem to be reachable right now, so perhaps someone has secured it already.

Apparently, I’m not the only one troubled by this:

[IP] more on Tenet suggests limiting the Internet to approved users.:

A month ago today Gadi was looking for a contact at US .mil, this morning I had the same need, as a node in the nipr.mil playpen was a major player in a 100+ node ddos directed at a web blog customer we host — it had a high rate of fire, accounting for over 20% of the total POST methods.

Email to the DO was a waste of time, but I did find a useful contact.

One of the nodes used in today’s ddos against that customer blog appeard in a seperate multi-thousand ad insert (unpaid, naturally) attack on another of our customer blogs, accounting for about half of the total POST methods.

nipr.mil is where my unwelcome visitors seem to have come from, as well.

scratch/mix/burn

The conversation about digitizing old vinyl was interesting. It lent some insight into the perceived state of the art, for one thing. For example, someone wished for a way to split album sides into tracks: that already exists, so I wonder how the perceived lack of that keeps people away from migrating their old LPs into more useful bits.

The back and forth about whether or not you could use a soundcard was puzzling as well: my experiments (once I figured out how to connect it all together) went just fine: I didn’t get any noise or internal crosstalk through the soundcard. It’s not like there’s a microphone in there.

Of course, the real upshot of this is a desire to get back into this myself: I still have lots of sides I need to convert. It’s just time-consuming and requires a bit more focus than ripping CDs: there’s the prep work of getting the media ready — cleaning and dust removal — then you need to listen to the process and make sure you don’t get any skips: clicks and pops can be cleaned up but skips can’t skips can’t skips can’t skips can’t skips can’t be helped.

On the 30,000 LP project, I’m not sure how it’s going to go: the guy who owns the vinyl isn’t the same guy who wants to digitize it and it’s not clear they’re on the same page. Watch this space for updates.

wrapper script for converting streams to iPod-available files

This is cool, but looking through it, it’s really just an automation of this post from the ever-itchy PDP-XI.

Releasing RadioPod:

I’ve cobbled together a server app, RadioPod, to record streaming radio stations, convert them to MP3s, and then provide an RSS 2.0 feed for a PodCasting application to download and then throw into iTunes ready for my iPod. I’m using it for The Today Programme off BBC Radio 4 every morning. It’s jolly nice to walk the dogs and listen to James Naughtie.

Ok, it’s barely any code at all right now. What is, right now? But give me a few weeks to get this book finished along with it (more on that later) and we’ll have the web interface up and released, and we won’t have to use cron and suchlike. Meantime, it’s all on SourceForge. Anyone can have CVS that wants it, and everything’s in the public domain.

I’ve got a project on Sourceforge. I feel all grown up now.

Just goes to show that the same itch is often scratched by more than one person.

home-brew news service

I thought once the election was done, I would write less about political stuff. That was based on my hopes for the outcome.

But I’m not cluttering up this space with it: I have posting it all over at GrabTheMic | Giving a Voice to the People.

GrabTheMic is a bottom-up media service that delivers 100% community created content and encourages open dialogue as opposed to one-way op-eds. Anyone can create an account, post content, comment, and vote to decide what makes the front page.

Some interesting viewpoints, mostly lefty, but I learn from it all.
Now playing:AfroCelts – Ayub`s Song – As You Were

To Write Well, Read

The New York Times > Opinion > To Write Well, Read:

To the Editor:

Re “Modifying the Subject” (Education Life, Nov. 7), about a revival in grammar instruction:

What really makes good writers is reading. I grew up in a family whose love of books bordered on fetishism. At Christmas and birthdays, books were the gifts of choice. When I was an adolescent, my natural desire for battery-powered playthings was rarely indulged; as a 40-year-old, I consider myself lucky to have missed the intellectually stunting onslaught of video games.

Reading, and not the memorization of rules, is what instills the instincts necessary for good writing.

Scott Cole

Ashland, Ore., Nov. 7, 2004

An Alphabet of Quotes:

I got into my bones the essential structure of the normal British sentence — which is a noble thing. (Winston Churchill)

That’s a very good way to learn the craft of writing — from reading. (William Faulkner)

How else do you enrich your vocabulary with new words if you never read any? Or how else to savor the different uses of words, alone or in clauses, phrases, and sentences, if you never take the time to enjoy them?

Following Mr Cole’s advice, you end not knowing many — or any — rules but you know when something sounds right. I’m happy to get it right without citing chapter and verse as to why.

Now playing:The Bob (Medley) by Roxy Music from the album “Roxy Music”

food for thought

The New York Times > Washington > Campaign 2004 > The Democratic Nominee: Clinton Tries on His Long Coattails for Kerry: â€œIf one candidate’s trying to scare you and the other one’s trying to get you to think,â€ he said, â€œif one candidate’s appealing to your fears and the other one’s appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope.â€

The New York Times > Washington > Campaign 2004 > The Democratic Nominee: Clinton Tries on His Long Coattails for Kerry:

“If one candidate’s trying to scare you and the other one’s trying to get you to think,” he said, “if one candidate’s appealing to your fears and the other one’s appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope.”

We’re at our best when we face the future together, not when we’re hiding from it — and each other.

Now playing:Starless by King Crimson from the album “Red” | Buy it

not in the top ten

As the nation tightens its borders to students and scientists and subjects federal research funding to ideological and religious litmus tests, many other countries are stepping in to lure that creative capital away. Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, and others are spending more on research and development and shoring up their universities in an effort to attract the world’s best–including Americans.

Zmetro.com: Decline of the US Creative Class?:

The strength of the American economy does not rest on its manufacturing prowess, its natural resources, or the size of its market. It turns on one factor–the country’s openness to new ideas, which has allowed it to attract the brightest minds from around the world and harness their creative energies. But the United States is on the verge of losing that competitive edge. As the nation tightens its borders to students and scientists and subjects federal research funding to ideological and religious litmus tests, many other countries are stepping in to lure that creative capital away. Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, and others are spending more on research and development and shoring up their universities in an effort to attract the world’s best –including Americans.

I’ve been following this idea for awhile 1, 2

Ben Hammersley mentioned the idea of people pulling up stakes and taking their talents to the United States of Europe, if things became intolerable (read: intolera[ble|nt] people were in charge after November). Looks like it’s happening to some degree . . .

now with del.icio.us

I realize that, along with a lot of other people, I have fallen prey to the peculiar American frailty which has given us so many bad presidents. I refer to our national tendency to treat presidential elections as though we were all high-schoolers choosing a Prom King.Thus, when it comes to qualifying for the American Presidency, a grating accent can be a bigger political liability than a record of homicidally misguided policies.

I have added a del.icio.us list as a sidebar or linklog to keep track of noteworthy items that don’t need commentary but deserve some attention.

You can even subscribe to the feed.

by the numbers

The inimitable John Gruber shares his traffic numbers, as background to why he dropped Google Adsense and now sells his own sponsored placements.

He does 6,000 page views per day, and finds that his Google AdSense numbers match his server log numbers pretty closely. Google has historically counted mine a bit low, for reasons I’ve not understood (about 7:1 low). My daily average page views since Jan 1 are 2,736, while Google puts them at 391. The graph below tells the tale: other than that weird spike August, things have been reasonably steady but declining, especially after I switched to WordPress. Oddly, traffic volumes increased since then.

I expect part of the problem is the large amount of robot/search engine crawler traffic I see. Obviously, they’ll count as page views but will not call up any ads to be served. But that doesn’t explain the decline since WordPress was implemented . . . . there’s something about dynamic versus static pages that seems to be a problem. I don’t know what difference it could make, unless GoogleBot doesn’t grok query strings in it’s indexes (I find that hard to believe, though).

Continue reading “by the numbers”