The stampede parade starts in a few minutes, so it’s officially Stampede Season. The Canadian Forces just buzzed the UCalgary campus with what sounded like a CF-18 - I couldn’t see it, but that’s the only thing it could have been. They have one down on the grounds for display - having to drive it through city streets at 2am the other night to get it downtown. It would have been kind of surprising to look in your rear view mirror, and see a CF-18 pulling up behind you…
I was thinking I’d start hitting the wall as the week progressed, but I’m still riding, and feeling better. I thought I’d be feeling pretty dead by Thursday, but this morning’s ride was a new personal best, and I feel great.
The only thing I’m a bit concerned about is the weather. Supposed to get thunderstorms this afternoon. That would suck if it hit while riding. Not the end of the world. I’ve been wet before. Better to get soaked on the way home, than on the morning commute…
A quick tour of the NMC Second Life campus. I walk around the virtual poster session, go for a walk/fly, and take a quick look around. Click the “play " or “download " links to take the tour.
The poster session seems odd at the moment - I’m not sure faithfully reproducing the physical world is the best way to take advantage of the virtual - but it may seem better on July 12 when the presenters will be on hand for discussion.
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I was just clearing out the last of the comment spam - I’d let it stew in the database (unpublished) but thought I’d take a quick peek to see if there were any false positives.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 triedAkismet 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.
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.
