Category: Miscellanea

Hotlinked images…

Wondering why you see this message?
Hotlinks prohibited

It’s because I’ve hit a problem lately with people hotlinking to this site. Most of the cute images you see here on the blog are redistributable things of questionable ownership to begin with, so do feel free to copy them. But when I say “copy” that means do a “Save As” and then upload them to your own blog/livejournal/myspace site, or whatever. DO NOT just copy the direct link and include that in an <img …> tag or similar, or do the same thing via one of the sites that hides the HTML from you.

This blog runs on my DSL line, and when a lot of people are all downloading images, that slows down everything else I do. Normally I don’t have tons of readers, and while hey, it’d be nice if that changed – though it would probably mean I’d have to WRITE more first, it would probably also mean it was time to move it to a real hosting provider who would then charge me for bandwidth overages :(. Either way, losing bandwidth to hotlinks to silly “forward” type images (the “Bible Warning” and the “Pancake Rabbit” in particular) is just a pain I’m not happy with.

We’ll see if that ugly link is sufficient to get people to stop. If not, I’ll just have to block them entirely, and then folks’ll just get the ugly “couldn’t load image” red x.

WordPress 2?

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.  It seems to work with my old home-grown theme, and the default it offers is still the 1.5 one, so I’ve kept my custom one for now.  So far it looks like most of my plugins work, and the new editor looks cool although may get annoying later.  We’ll see.

Anything you viewers notice? Let me know… I may try playing with some alternate themes later.

Tech stuff.

Two quick notes:
1) WordPress 2.0 is out. I plan to upgrade when I get back to the states; I’m not convinced it’s really going to be an improvement, but I need to keep up to date with the security patches, so there’s not much choice. Hopefully my old style/theme will still work. If not, expect a very bland defauly style until I have more time…

2) ReiserFS sucks for news spools, even with “notail” on, at least on RAID1. I’d wondered if that was it, and it appears to be the case. My leafnode spool runs to about 1.5 million articles, and 9GB; when I put in the mirrored drives, I put it on it’s own file system and switched it from ext3 to ReiserFS. I noticed then that it took about 6 hours every day to run texpire, which seemed long – but I hadn’t been checking since it had been growing. Well, “notail” sped it up a bit but it still took several hours…. so I got fed up, and with the wireless here, migrated it back to ext3. On ext3? (with dir_index on, data=”ordered”, and commit=60) it took a whopping 12 minuts… or a 40:1 improvement.

This is only a test…

Ok, this is just a test to see how well posting works from my little PDA thingee. So far I am not terribly impressed with how this site looks on the mobile screen but logging I and bringing up the post form works OK and the miniature keyboard is not half bad – if a little slow.

Anyone know about optimizing these thing for both desktop and PDA user? Does anyone out there with a Treo or Blackberry want to comment on the way the site appears on your device?

Update looking on the PC – one bad typo “botb” and one extra line break. Not too bad. Can we say “blogging through boring meetings?” anybody?

No! Not the … squirrels?

Russian squirrel pack ‘kills dog’

Squirrels have bitten to death a stray dog which was barking at them in a Russian park, local media report.
BBC News, Last Updated: Thursday, 1 December 2005, 18:14 GMT

Passers-by were too late to stop the attack by the black squirrels in a village in the far east, which reportedly lasted about a minute.

They are said to have scampered off at the sight of humans, some carrying pieces of flesh.

A pine cone shortage may have led the squirrels to seek other food sources, although scientists are sceptical.

I am so l33t!!!

There was planned downtime this weekend. The server now has mirrored hard drives, using the software RAID1 driver. And a hopefully much faster news spool on its own partitition, but that is a separate issue most of you are unlikely to see (if you actually know me in person and don’t already have one, do feel free to ask for an account…)

“None Dare Call It Stolen”

None Dare Call It Stolen: Ohio, the election, and America’s servile press
Posted on Wednesday, September 7, 2005.
By Mark Crispin Miller.

The national turnout in 2004 was the highest since 1968, when another unpopular war had swept the ruling party from the White House. Yet this ever-less-beloved president, this president who had united liberals and conservatives and nearly all the world against himself—this president somehow bested his opponent by 3,000,176 votes.
How did he do it?

via a diary on DailyKOS

Grrr… downtime.

I have zero idea how long the blog has been down; I may have to set up a script to mail me if it goes down again — being that as it may, it wasn’t software; the server was quite visible here in the apartment, and the SFChat.org address stayed up… it was a DNS problem.

If this means nothing to you, don’t sweat it. We’re back now, and should remain up and running until, well, something else goes wrong. I’m sort of tempted to see about moving the blog to a real hosting provider, but since nobody really reads this anyway, well, I like the geek factor of running my own server. It just has its downsides, as we’ve just seen.

Blogging and the Academic Job Search

From The Chronicle of Higher Education : Bloggers Need Not Apply

What is it with job seekers who also write blogs? Our recent faculty search at Quaint Old College resulted in a number of bloggers among our semifinalists. Those candidates looked good enough on paper to merit a phone interview, after which they were still being seriously considered for an on-campus interview.

That’s when the committee took a look at their online activity.

In some cases, a Google search of the candidate’s name turned up his or her blog. Other candidates told us about their Web site, even making sure we had the URL so we wouldn’t fail to find it. In one case, a candidate had mentioned it in the cover letter. We felt compelled to follow up in each of those instances, and it turned out to be every bit as eye-opening as a train wreck.

If I head back to grad school, I will take this seriously into account in terms of whether to keep this site live. As long as I’m in IT, I don’t think it matters. Heck, some eccentricity is expected.

(Passed on by an friend.)

“Housing may sting more than dot.com bust”

Housing may sting more than dot.com bust

Whether it’s a national bubble or just pockets of regional froth, an end to surge in home prices could inflict economic harm that would make the 2000 tech bust look tame in comparison.

Duh.

More discussion at “Housing crash to be worse than dot.com bust?” on AMERICAblog.