Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
I noticed that a very large proportion of the comment spam I get is all on one blog entry, number 20. So a quick
update mt_entry set entry_allow_comments = 0 where entry_created_on < now() - interval '180 days' and entry_author_id = 2;
and now nobody can comment on entries that are older than 180 days. I'm just wondering if I should do the same with the other blog authors.
I haven’t been blogging much. Part of it is that I’ve been busy at work. Part of it is that I have writer’s block – I want to finish up my “bad work experiences” series and I want to write about the cruise, but I haven’t felt like it. And part of it is that I’ve done some good work on my CoPilot waypoint generator.
Continue reading “Not blogging much…”
For the past couple of days, this “Willow Internet Crawler by Twotrees V2.1” has been agressively crawling my site. And I mean agressively – they download every single page as quickly as they can, with no pause between them. This is a bit of a pain, because it means they are sucking down my bandwidth that I’d rather use for live human beings or better behaved applications.
But today was the last straw – I have a robots.txt file because when web crawlers hit my image gallery, they tend to cause errors in the php code that gets logged in /var/log/messages. So today I noticed a “Last message repeated 147 times” message scrolling by, I looked and sure enough “Willow Internet Crawler” isn’t obeying the spider guidelines – they haven’t even looked at my robots.txt.
first thing I did was go to their web site – and discovered that under “Contact Us”, you can only see their email address while your mouse is hovering over the title – once you move the cursor away to actually type in a mail program, it goes away again. And the address isn’t in the same place as what you are hovering over. Making it a (probably purposely) difficult to cut and paste the address into mutt.
So fine, you want to be an asshole? I can be an asshole too. I opened up /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, found the “allow all” line, and added a “deny 68.244.166.8” after it, restarted the web server, and now I’m watching “Willow Internet Crawler” get a lot of 403s. So fuck you, Twotrees.net, and the horse you rode in on too.
Since I got back from the cruise, my PowerBook has been occassionally showing the “no battery” icon. The first time it happened, I had to reboot in order to fix it. But when it happened the this time, I tried taking out the battery and putting it back. And it worked. Hooray. But unfortunately while I was opening the Powerbook again, the left hinge broke. Waaah.
Pictures:
Man, I sure hope it holds out until the next qpromo.
