I had been making a case to attend OSCON2006 this year, the logic being that it's a better fit for what I'm doing now than WWDC is. OSCON is a gathering of open source projects and programmers/developers, with tracks on various cool open source technologies, methodologies, etc... WWDC is a corporate developers conference, aimed specificially at core Apple technologies (with some obvious trickle-over into open source as well).

The sub-thought was that I could save some coin in our budget by going to an open source conference, rather than a high-end corporate one.

I was just clearing out the last of the comment spam - I'd let it stew in the database (unpublished) but thought I'd take a quick peek to see if there were any false positives. I thought I'd found one - a comment marked as spam, but with content portraying sympathy with my plight against these spammers - that they must be stopped.

A Spammer Responds (screenshot): This spam roach was trying to get whitelisted by commiserating on the evils of spammers... It didn't work - Akismet sniffed it a mile away.

Last year, Flickr was offering some cool free stuff to help promote the site. There were stickers and buttons showing the Flickr logo and the famous Flickr Dots.

They ran out, promising there would be "... more good stuff" - and now, a year later, there's still nothing.

I mean, come ON, Flickr. I'd pick up an official Flickr shirt (polo or T), a baseball hat, and some other stuff... Doesn't have to be free, but where's the goods?

The spammers started trailing off not long after I wrote the previous post - before hitting their target of 20,000 spam attempts in 24 hours. They punked out at about 18,000 - then I closed the door with the Bad Behavior module.

It was kind of interesting leaving the spammers swarming around my blog as a honeypot, but the load was just getting annoying. Since enabling Bad Behavior, Akismet has had to deal with less than a dozen spammers getting through in about 24 hours - and I haven't had to deal with (or even be aware of) any of them. That's a wee bit of a change...

The onslaught just keeps coming. It's on pace to easily meet 20,000 spam comments in 24 hours. I had a very small handful of false negatives, but they were easily dispatched by clicking a couple of checkboxes on an admin page.

20,000 spam attempts. Peaking at multiple attempts per second, with over 500 spam bots simultaneously spidering/spamming the site. Drupal seems to be holding its own, triggering throttles to shut down higher-load functions so the site remains responsive.

I'd tried Akismet before, and wound up reverting to Spam Karma 2 - actually, I think SK2 was interfering with Akismet, so that likely wasn't a fair comparison, since both were running at the same time.

But, I've been running the Drupal Akismet module for 10 days now, and it's been performing absolutely perfectly. For example, this blog has been under a sustained spam attack for the last 12 hours or so - over 400 600 spam attempts just last night (200 just while writing this post) - and not a single one of the roaches got through. I just went through the Akismet comment moderation queue to look for false positives, and there wasn't a single one. So it's batting 1000 under a significant spam attack.

I just upgraded our TLC development/staging/small-deployment server from MySQL 4.0 to 5.0.22. I'd never upgraded a MySQL server before (always just installed a fresh copy on a new box, or updated along with MacOSX) so I wanted to do some testing before making the plunge on a deployment server. We've got a bunch of databases on that box, running everything from weblogs.ucalgary.ca to some custom apps written here.

I did a quick RTFM , but the MySQL manual recommended not jumping right from 4.0 to 5.0 using the normal upgrade process. It said to go to 4.1 first, then to 5.0. So, I did some more Googling, and realized that a full mysqldump and restore would do the trick, without requiring the milk run through 4.1.

I think about half of these are from Brian's trip to Croatia...

Teemu Leinonen posted a link on the IIEP-OER list, referencing the LeMill project he's working on. I just checked it out, and it's pretty cool. This one is based on the Plone content management system / framework, so it's great to see what can be done on top of these maturing platforms.

It's still being developed, but it looks like LeMill is another great option as a CAREO replacement. It's got some things in it that CAREO lacks (collections - an evolution of "subscribed objects", tagging), but doesn't have comments/discussion for each item (yet?). It's multilingual, easy to install, and runs just about anywhere.

It's been about a month since I made the switch from WordPress 2 to Drupal 4.7 to power my blog. There have been some ups and downs, but I have to say that I have absolutely no regrets about the move, nor do I plan on moving back any time soon.

Some things I still miss from the WordPress days though -

• commenters able to subscribe to a thread of comments via email. sounds old school, but it REALLY helps keep conversations going.
• actually, that's just about it.

There are some little niggles, like not being able to use the Flickr.module to integrate my Flickr sets here, but that's a limitation of DreamHost's security setup (disabling fopen), not of Drupal. If that REALLY bugs me, I'll look at hacking the Flickr.module cache code to not require fopen...

I took my Canon Digital Rebel XT to Evan's soccer practice/game on Saturday, hoping to get some shots of him and his teammates playing the game. I also wanted an excuse to fiddle around with some of the settings and modes on the XT to see how they perform.

Wow.

I turned on rapidfire/burst mode, which can pump out 14 shots in about 3 seconds. Absolutely perfect for capturing the right shot in a game of soccer. I wound up shooting over 150 pictures during the 25 minute game! 99% were deleted, but the 1% that I kept were amazing - and likely impossible to have captured without this mode.

Patti and I were discussing our ePortfolio project the other day, and we were basically throwing back and forth various versions of "the students won't it because (a) they don't have to, and (b) it's not theirs."

The "they don't have to" part could be misconstrued as meaning "their profs didn't make them do it." That won't work, either. The students have to feel that they want to do this. That they have to do it themselves to make sense of what they're learning and doing.