Entries from August 2005.
Referers
When you end up on many websites as a result of a google search you often find your search terms highlighted.
This is quite nifty and useful.
I’ve had an evil thought on extending this recently: If somebody comes to your site via a google search with the term “&spell=1” wouldn’t it be great to stick a bunch of adverts on your page?
You can’t spell
CLICK HERE TO BUY A DICTIONARY
Well it amused me …
CFengine
CFEngine in three easy parts:
Drifted a bit aimlessly in the second part, mostly because I hadn’t actually intended to write more than once piece, but altogether I’m happy with the collection of articles.
Although it is becoming increasingly obvious I’m in no way a technical writer ..
Cat5
After almost killing myself and another laptop by tripping over a stray Cat 5 cable I’ve spent an hour this morning making my house tidier.
Rather than having cables laid around the edges of rooms and corridors they are now all tucked away under carpets, or pinned along walls.
You might imagine this is the obvious way to do it in the first place, and you’d probably be right!
But in my defense my house has only two carpetted rooms. The rest are a combination of polished wooden floorboards, and faux wooden panelling. Difficult to move, and impossible to lay cables underneath.
In fact I have only two carpetted rooms – both are bedrooms.
Although I know rugs are available I refuse to live in a house where I get out of bed and place my feet immediately on cold wood. I like a few seconds, or more if possible, of comfort before putting my feet on the hard floors in the morning!
FTPMasters
The ftpmaster team are doing a great job.
ITP bug filed: Sat, 20 Aug 2005 22:18:35 +0100. (Actually earlier, but that’s the date on the bug online).
Package uploaded: Sat Aug 20 22:48:59 2005
Package enters unstable: Sun, 21 Aug 2005 05:24:39 -0700
Wordpress
New version of WordPress available; get it or get hacked.
Referer Spam?
What do people here on Debian Planet do about referer spam?
I’ve seen several people mention using mod_rewrite with a massive list of keywords to drop bogus referers; but that just seems … doomed to failure over time.
I was considering a bayasian filter, or other learning AI system, to recognise valid referers by frequency count or similar. But I suspect that would fail too. (Since I’m getting 400+ bogus referers a day).
WordPress/MT plugins are no good, I’m getting the spam on virtual hosts. So something Apache-wide seems most useful.
The obvious approach is to see if the given referer actually exists, and contains a link to “my” page – but making a request back is going to cripple apache. So I guess that can’t work either.
Thoughts/Comments appreciated..
BTS
I wrote a brief piece on the new features of the BTS : The Debian Bug Tracking System gets upgraded.
I think I’ve managed to include all the recent changes, but comments are always appreciated.
Four Words
Forty-Two inch plasma tv.
Mmmmmmmm. It is due to be delivered in 8 days. I’m looking forward to watching lots of films on it..
(I’m currently without a TV, my previous 28” set having failed about four weeks ago. I’m currently watching movies on my laptop’s DVD player. Suboptimal).
Debconf7 : Edinburgh
Planning appears to be starting for this, according to a small flurry of mails I saw on debian-uk today.
So .. Edinburgh it is? Great. I should be able to attend and see all the visiting people.
I have no excuse given that I live here!
