Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

The machine that used to serve this blog (an aging Sun Netra T1) had been starting to show its age for a while. Rock-solid hardware though it is, it really is no match for the bloated scriptware running websites in the 21st century.

It has now been replaced by a shiny multi-core amd64 machine from iXsystems.

As part of the move to new hardware, I decided to replace Apache with lighttpd and move some more stuff into jails. This should ensure that the beast continues to be fast even if stuff gets even more bloated.

This was a remarkably smooth ride.

12:14 EDT

My old floating head was starting to show its age. It had been in place since November 2006. A couple of weeks ago, Wouter hackergotchified the infamous "pointy hat" photo for Planet grep and I'm rather chuffed with the result.

It'll last a couple of years again, I'm sure.

Because I have a million other things I should be doing instead, I wasted a couple of hours this morning adding reCAPTCHA to my blog. While my geeky questions were fun and fairly effective, I had trouble with spammers learning the answers to the "easy" questions and geeks not knowing the answers to the "difficult" ones.

This exercise again confirmed in my mind that Python is a dreadful language. Besides the fact that it's not C, the ridiculous indenting rules and the way that it tries to implement every single programming paradigm ever invented make it practically impossible to quickly hack something in.

I was also reminded that the "web" sucks. In the twenty minutes my blog was completely unprotected, nearly a hundred garbage-posts got in. Bah.

All credit (and blame!) to Zombie. :-)

I also garbage collected some of the dustier CAPTCHAs whose answers were a bit too ambigious. More suggestions always welcome...

And people complain about my CAPTCHAs... Despite the CAPTCHAs, I'm still getting some comment spam. Strangely, it seems to come in "bursts" and the assholes always target the same entries to spam.

I wonder how they're getting past the CAPTCHAs.

Oh well... I've added a blacklist of words I don't expect to see in comments. If you run into the blacklist (unlikely), try a synonym. Be creative. :-P

Spam sucks.

Since Timothy likes my CAPTCHAs so much, I've been thinking of more to add.

Constraints: they must be geeky and the answer must fit in the box. I will not ask my commenters to prove Fermat's Last Theorem or Euler's Identity.

Mmm, well ... No, I will not make the box larger. :-)

Any suggestions? :-) Shoot!

Instead of hacking pyBlosxom, I just used mod_rewrite and tcsh:

[261] (philip@dorfl)~% set new = 'http://www.paeps.cx/weblog/travel/$1'
[262] (philip@dorfl)~% foreach file ( `find $home/weblog/travel/ -type f` )
foreach> printf 'RewriteRule ^weblog/life/(%s.*) %s [R=301]\n' $file:r:t $new >> $home/www/.htaccess
foreach> end

I'm sure I could write a script to magically deal with every 404 in /life by checking if it exists in /travel but... I'm lazy and this Just Works[tm].

I noticed this evening that my life category was filling up with travel stories. I've moved those into a new category travel. Now I need to find a way to convince pyBlosxom to let me put posts in two categories (the obvious idea of using symlinks doesn't work) because I don't like killing "permanent" links so gratuitously.

In an attempt to scare away some of my readers... No, wait. Scratch that opening sentence. Let's try again.

Today was a national holiday in Belgium (for some reason, has something to do with religions and dead people - neither of which I'm particularly enthusiastic about) and I couldn't think of anything more interesting to do.

I'm fairly pleased with how the hackergotchi came out. I'm not very good with graphics and I'm not all that familiar with The Gimp. There was a nice video linked from the Wikipedia hackergotchi entry, hoewever, which pretty much held my hand. The maker of that video may collect his free beer at the earliest opportunity!

For those who are interested in that kind of stuff: I used this image taken at Le Roy d'Espagne on this year's FOSDEM beer night. A screenshot of "the making of" is here.

If you aggregate my blog on a planet which supports hackergotchis, feel free to use mine. Please please please mirror the image though. Bandwidth to my blog is limited and it's a bit silly to waste it on my floating head!

Now to bed. Back to work in the morning and a bike-ride after a sleepless night is a scary prospect...

By popular request (well, a recent email from Jan and a not so recent one from Marius), I've enabled comments on my blog again. I have taken some measures to avoid spam, but I can't guarantee that they are perfect. If you spot any comment spam, please tell me about it (philip@paeps.cx).

Note that this might make rendering pages a bit slower, Python is a bit of a beast on a slow webserver like the one this blog is on.

Enjoy! :-)