Solipsism Gradient

I’m starting to play around with uploading photos to Flickr and showing the last 5 or so on the left here. Pardon our dust, you may have to reload to see the latest version.

Update: seems to work OK now…

Seems I plain forgot about it, due to the trip and all, but on Sept. 21st it was this weblog’s third anniversary. Guess it’s been duly commemorated…

jeff wrote:

An email to your .mac account just bounced back to me… Not sure what’s up with your email account.

I don’t have a .mac e-mail account anymore, so that’s valid only for IM. I try not to show my e-mail here for non-logged in users, to avoid the spambots; but it’s rainerbrockerhoff.net.

Michael “Dowbrigade” Feldman wrote:

Sometimes the Dowbrigade feels stumped for subjects to Blog on. It’s not that your faithful correspondent lacks for ideas, rants or motivation. Rather, it is that so many fecund fields are off-limits to our free-ranging interest.

We cannot blog about our place of full-time employment, after an unfortunate incident last semester in which only our wicked wit saved us from untimely termination…

…We cannot blog about the intimate details of our married life, as we know Norma Yvonne reads the Dowbrigade, and its a bad idea to share a bed with one of your expository subjects…

…In fact, we cannot blog about women, since if experience has taught us anything, it is that we understand less than nothing about the opposite sex. That is, much of what we thought we understood about them has been proven disastrously wrong…

…We are reduced to meta-blogging like this, and reprinting amusing minutiae and telling details from the media pool in which we tread water, waiting for good fortune or bad to deliver us from this literary purgatory

Well, I feel his pain; sometimes there’s much happening, but very often it’s not a subject.

However, I’m pleased to report that some marginally bloggable stuff is actually happening inside the twisty, little passages of XRay 2’s code. I stopped worrying about the UI for a couple of months and became obsessed with writing the Ultimate File Item Browser Cache Background Engine. (You should be glad I’m not writing this in German, where this would be one huge compound substantive. )

Anyway, most of it is actually working well enough now, and once I get some weird interactions with volume mount points working, the U.F.I.B.C.B.E. will be pronounced “good enough for a beta”, and I’ll get back to work on the actual file browser frontend(s) it is supposed to be the backend for.

In order to do so most efficiently we (meaning my wife) decreed that a working vacation is called for, where we’ll be away from normal life and mostly offline for a full month. We’ll leave in a few days – details will be posted soon – and proceed to Northern Italy, where two nearly consecutive mediterranean cruises are scheduled. More as it happens!

On Sep. 12th power went off in Los Angeles, where DreamHost hosts my web pages. Everything seems to be working again, I’m not sure yet for how long they were down, but from the stats it looks like several hours.

Seems it was human error; someone overloaded one small part of the system and everything else shut down overprotectively. Obviously these things can’t be tested in practice. Still, analogies with certain pieces of software occur to me…

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

…and I’ll have to do something about these trackback spammers ASAP; I wonder why they suddenly came out of the woodwork again.

Seems I finally found a way to block trackback spam, whew. Referrer spam still goes on, but as I don’t publish referrer links, it’s innocuous – except for driving up my bandwidth stats a little.

A third type of spam is people registering and pointing at porn/gambling sites with their homepage link, but I’m blocking them now by not showing that link for new users, and not allowing it to be filled out on registration. So if you’re a legitimate new user and have a legitimate homepage to show, please e-mail me.

Back all in one piece, including the new iMac G5. More later…

…and I’ll have to do something about these trackback spammers ASAP; I wonder why they suddenly came out of the woodwork again.

I’ve been playing around with the stats available on DreamHost, and the results are interesting.

Fully a quarter of site visitors now come from Google and from VersionTracker.

Over a third of visitors, unsurprisingly, use Safari. The next popular browsers are MSIE (hm), Mozilla derivatives and NetNewsWire, that last one with about 10%. The number of bots is higher than I expected; some bots even download .dmg files, I can’t imagine what for.

The failure reports are the most interesting part. Fully 12% of accesses over this month so far seem to be various forms of attacks, mostly the tired old attacks against phpbb forums using one of the published scripts. A few people try to run one of the awstat scripts (which I don’t use), or some Microsoft-server-specific thing (which I don’t use either). For the last 3 days, about 60% of all requests have been phpbb attacks, like in the peak days in January, when the Santy worm was going around. Don’t these people have anything better to do?

At the same time, this weblog has been hit daily with comment spam, referrer spam and link spam – the latter by people registering with fake web addresses which redirect to some gambling or porn site. I’m not accepting any such users – they’re very easy to spot – and their links would be tagged with “nofollow” anyway. I don’t publish referrer lists, so referrer spam doesn’t work either. If comment spam volume grows, well, I’ll have to install a little modification to have posts wait for moderator approval…

phpbb