I just checked in on weblogs.ucalgary.ca, and was greeted by a wonderful surprise. Justin Trudeau was on campus on Friday November 24, and the full audio of his talk was posted to weblogs.ucalgary.ca as a podcast. I've grabbed the file, and have listened to the first couple of minutes, but this should be a great talk.

For anyone who doesn't recognize the name Justin Trudeau, he is the son of former Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, and is making quite a name for himself as both a public speaker and leader of youth activism.

After switching from BadBehavior+Spam.module back to Akismet, I assumed I'd be in for a bit of an onslaught of spam. I was braced for impact. I can't believe the sheer volume of sustained attempted spam comments that are constantly being flung against this blog, 24/7 now. It's peaked at several attempts per second, which was adding a bit of a load to the server as it struggled to thwart the forces of evil.

OK. Even I am getting sick of the incessant "spam blocking update" posts, but I figure if it helps even one other person put the brakes on the attempts of the evil spamroaches, it's worth it.

So, here's the latest. I got frustrated with the number of spamments that snuck through the combo of Bad Behavior and Spam.module, so I disabled both. I've reverted to using only Akismet.module, with the experimental spambot detection/prevention enabled.

I had been running an out of date version of Bad Behavior on my blog because the Drupal module requires BB 1.2.4 - but I think the evil spambots were getting around that old version.

So, I just took a stab at updating my copy of bad-behavior.module to work with the latest and greatest Bad Behaviour 2.0.7. I'm not sure if I've missed anything, but if seems as though it's suddenly become successful at blocking the annoying Apkakkallli spambot that has been attempting to vandalize my blog for the last few days. The server seems much more responsive, at least. Maybe it's successfully banning evildoers?

I'm seriously considering moving my blog to Drupal 5 Beta 1. It seems stable enough, and the performance (especially with Aggressive Caching) blows Drupal 4.7.4 out of the water. That's becoming a pretty serious factor for me, as the insane onslaught of comment spam just keeps bringing my server to its knees (I'm looking at YOU, Apkakkallli!)

There are only a handful of modules that I use that don't have Drupal 5 versions. Of those, I could probably limp along without them until D5 versions are available.(computed field, img_assist, recent blocks, TinyMCE...)

I was just checking in, and on my Sitemeter stats page, saw an interesting recent visitor:

Visit from the Bat Cave

I didn't realize Batman had moved the Cave so far from Gotham City. But, in another score for Drupal, the Dark Knight is researching how to move from Wordpress to Drupal.

Evan and I went for a nice winterish walk today. Picnic at a local playground, then down to the neighbourhood Starbuck's™ for something warm. He sure does like the hot chocolate with decadent whipped cream on top. I brought the camera along, Just In Case™ and let Evan take some shots while we were warming up.

He composed, focused and shot the photo of myself completely on his own (granted, in autofocus, but it was on center-single-point-autofocus, so he could have easily focused on the Petro Canada station in the background). Personally, I think it's one of the better photos of myself that I've seen. Not bad for a 4-year old. I should start saving up for a Hasselbad for The Boy™.

I headed downtown this morning (waaaaay earlier than I'd have liked) to attend the Lexi.net Online Identity Conference. I was curious to see what an internet-related conference would look like in Calgary, having been involved in others elsewhere. I wore my NV '05 t-shirt, of course :-)

I got downtown too early - the buses out of Tuscany go straight downtown, but the last one passes my house at 6:45. So, I had some time to kill before and after registration. What to do... I know! A photo walk down Stephen Avenue Mall!

The database gods are laughing at me. This time, the mysql database for my blog fell over. Died. Unresponsive. It was an ex-database. Pining, as it were, for the fjords.

The blog dropped offline for an hour or so, and when it eventually came back, there were all kinds of scary database error messages being spewed into the log. I took a closer look, and the Drupal "cache" table was wedged and corrupted. Thankfully, it's just a cache, so I nuked the table and recreated it fresh. Easy peasy. I've got lots of backup snapshots, so it would have been almost as easy to restore any other table, but with the potential of lost content (posts and/or comments).

I've been following the activities of educators and ed-tech folks in Second Life. It seems like it could be a really compelling virtual environment to help enhance online learning, by providing a shared quasi-physical face to face venue for distributed groups that wouldn't otherwise have one.

The amount of effort and care being put into these virtual places is stunning. The architecture is impressive, and the potential to create your own regions is compelling. 

I've been struggling with this for what feels like months. On a project, we're using a third party hosting provider, who offers us space on a managed server, complete with everything we need to run Drupal in a shared hosting environment. We're running a copy of Provisionator on the server to help us deploy lots of Drupal sites easily.

Here's where it gets messy. We can create new databases just fine, but importing a .sql file takes for freaking ever. Imports that take 3 seconds on my Powerbook can take 90 - 300 seconds on this server. Running the import on a dual G5 XServe with the same version of MySQL finishes the job in about a second.