We didn't think of this...
We didn't think of this when we where in college, we were too busy shooting cannons.
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April 29, 2006
April 27, 2006
Another odd combination game
Well, Audience participation again:
Another odd combination game. Please comment with your oddest combination day job, and night job.
Here is an example:
Domino's Delivery Man Transported Pizza, Corpses In Same Car - April 27, 2006
April 21, 2006
Annoyed
I found out today, that folks who use IE 6, are not able to comment here. Apparently IE 6 only allows cookies on a per domain level. Since my movable type installation is on one domain, and my blog is on another, typekey won't let folks sign in.
Of course everyone knows that they shouldn't use IE anyway, but since some of our employers haven't wised up yet here is the workaround.
- Go to Tools > Internet Options, then select the Privacy tab.
- In the Settings area of the tab, click Sites.
- In the Address of website field, type liferoads.reighley.net and click Allow.
- Click OK at the bottom of that dialogue box.
- Click OK on the Privacy tab.
This should take care of it. Someday I might consider moving the MT installation to fingertoe.com, but I am sure that is easier said than done... With typekey, I get zero comment spam. Of course perhaps that is because I get zero comments.
April 20, 2006
Never. Ever. Ever
Andee and I saw this on TV the other day, and where a little surprized.
NBC.com > Never Ever Ever...
Good moral advice for once from the TV networks... Too bad it was a joke.
Three!
Today is Nathan's birthday!
He is 3!
Happy Birthday Nathan!
April 19, 2006
Tormenting the cashiers
I have always wanted to play a game where I go and buy odd combinations of items at the supermarket, Mostly to measure the reaction from the cashier.
Example:
Two boxes of dulcolax
36 rolls of toilet paper
Another:
Pregnancy test
5 gallon jar of Pickles
Any other ideas? For one reason or another I suspect that Jess would be good at this game.
Example:
Two boxes of dulcolax
36 rolls of toilet paper
Another:
Pregnancy test
5 gallon jar of Pickles
Any other ideas? For one reason or another I suspect that Jess would be good at this game.
April 16, 2006
Relief
I sure am glad this is fake!!!
April 13, 2006
Revolutionary?
The Scuderi Group, LLC - The Technology Studies showed engine efficiency increases from 33% to almost 40% while toxic emissions are reduced by as much as 80%. Engine Efficiency The impact of this technology is simply staggering:This looks like pretty cool technology. Although I was also quite impressed by the Compressed air powered engines.
- This technology not only saves energy but also increases the power of an engine while significantly reducing its cost.
- Vehicles will be able to exceed all current mileage and emission standards without compromising size or performance.
- Consumers would save billions of dollars in fuel costs. Reduction in emissions would be in the hundreds of millions of tons per year.
April 11, 2006
Update on the Trackback Battle
I would say that my trackback hack has been a resounding success. So far I have prevented 673 trackbacks from wasting CPU time.
A few are still sneaking into my junk filter, but it is a huge improvement!
Personal DNA
April 7, 2006
There are no athiests in a disabled aircraft.
NewsWire Complete Issue
The video clips at the bottom of the entry are worth watching.. Sean Tucker describes the jumping out of his disabled airplane.
Victory!
Well, I think I finally defeated the spam bandits. At least for a while.
The basic problem stems from the complexity of Movable Type's anti-spam technology. The system does an excellent job of identifying and junking the trackback spam. Each one is analyzed in 4 or 5 different ways before it is published. When the system receives a huge volume of trackbacks at the same time, however, it can slow your server to a crawl.
Even when I turned off the "Allow Trackbacks" switch on my posts, the spammers where still able to get their trackbacks into my junk filter. This means that my server was still cranking away doing analysis.
My final solution was to edit the .htaccess file with RedirectMatch and some regular expressions to identify my old posts and point them to a plain old .html document. This bypasses my Movable type scripts all together, and should be much easier on dreamhost's server.
We will see! If you would like details of my hack, let me know. I don't really want to post it here for the enemy to see.
April 6, 2006
Broken Blog...
Well, Trying to get all of these trackback issues under control. It looks like I broke my Movable type installation pretty good...
My individual archives are not publishing correctly. Hopefully I will get it straightened out tonight. Right now I a bit too tired to think straight...
Bear with me!
Update-- I think I got it somewhat fixed... I think I will try to start fresh tonight. I think a lot of the problem is that I have upgraded too many times, and I have lots of legacy type code in my templates.
Trackbacks stink.
I noticed that some of my websites went down today for a little while. After a little while, I noticed that it was back up. Later, I got a note from Dreamhost, my web host indicating that one of my movable type files was being attacked, and had to be disabled.
Looking at my logs, it looks like I went through a trackback spam attack. The trackback system is a terrific idea, but it sure is implemented poorly. Since I have been using Movable Type, I have received 5 legitamate trackback pings and probably tens of thousands of spam pings. While the 3.2 version does a great job of identifying these pings as spam and does not publish them, all of the CPU cycles that are used examining these can be taxing. Especially when you are recieving a large volume all at once.
I looked for a patch to resolve the issue, but I really couldn't find that there where any known issues with the MT 3.2 trackback script. I did find a pretty cool plugin, that may help somewhat. AutoBan edits the .htaccess file on the web server to deny service to the IP address that is sending junk spams. With this system, the webhost's CPU will only have to examine the first Ping to determine it's validity. After that, any pings that are sent from the same IP address are totally ignored.
What would be really nice is to see the a simular technology that imports recent entries from the blacklists and pre-emptively blocks them.
It sure is a waste or resources. I don't understand why the spammers keep at it. Movable type doesn't publish many trackbacks anyway. Even if it does publish one, it includes instructions for the search engines that the link is not to be followed. I don't think many website visitors are stupid enough to click through and buy products from a company that has to resort to such weasely advertizing techniques anyway.
April 4, 2006
I should be awake!
On Wednesday at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06