milliAmp

This is the obligatory blog entry warning that I have upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 and to ask anyone who finds something that used to be working, now broken, to comment here.

I might make an AJaX Askimet spam counter plugin (if I can’t find one already done) for my sidebar. It’s amazing how much spam attempts to hit my blog. Is there a conspiracy going on. Does askimet make up spam to make it look like it’s stopping a lot more spam than is actually getting submitted?

Statistics time:

• I installed Askimet on October 11, 2006.
• Since then it has stopped 7,884 spam comments.
• That averages to 68 spam comments a day.
• 925 of those were in the last 15 days.
• The average over the last 15 days is then 62 spam a day.
• It is currently letting through less than 1% of that into my moderation queue.
• Because of my moderation settings, a total of 0 have made it to my blog.

I should really just turn on compulsory registration or try referer checking as well as Askimet but this is fun so I’ll leave like this for a while longer.

EDIT: After watching the access logs (using tail -f access_log | grep wp-comments-post.php) I have found a couple of interesting things. The first is that all the spam that is trying to hit my blog does in fact have a valid referer and a valid User-Agent. The referer is that of various posts in my blog and the User-Agent happens to all be "Opera/9.0 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)". These requests are either spoofed IP packets or are from a bot-net as the IPs are all over the show.

Just for fun, I’ve done a little .htaccess file hacking which now “403 Access Denied”’s them based on various information I’ve discovered from the access_log, I just want to see if I can stop the spam even getting to Askimet.

I just installed a syntax highlighting plugin “igSyntaxHilite” but man it has some things I don’t like. Hard-coded CSS instead of using classes and an external stylesheet, hard-coded Courier New font. Anyway, I’ll be looking around for another syntax highlighter or hacking this one up a lot (must check the license to be honest).

It makes me ROFL.

EOT

Sunday night I bit the bullet and bought a new hard-drive enclosure online. The enclosure I got is a Pleiages Taurus 3.5″ Dual-Bay Enclosure with built-in RAID0 (Stripe and Span) support. It hold 2 x SATA II hard-drives which I purchased from Tom, both 320GB Seagate drives and now I have a 600GB Firewire 800/400/USB2 external hard-drive for my storage pleasure.

It looks awesome, like a Mac Pro front, has the same power button as my laptop and looks damn hot sitting next to it. I’m transferring all my data from my 120GB External which I’m selling to Aimee. For some reason though the transfer is going unbearably slow. I have about 90GB to transfer, one HDD in the USB2 port, the double enclosure, Striped RAID in a Firewire800 port and it is transferring at only 8MB/sec which is pitiful.

Ah well, I guess I can live with it, only a few hours left now anyway.

EDIT It turns out the older hard-drive was only giving the data out at 8MB/sec which is annoying.

Looks as if the tickets for the Fall Out Boy Concert at the start of March are going to become hard to get soon.

The mezzanine floor where Aimee and I usually grab tickets sold out during the presale period and now the stalls at the back of the bottom floor have standing room only. I managed to get Grand Circle tickets (at the top) yesterday from the site using the presale password but I can’t imagine those tickets lasting very long as public sales started this morning at 9am.

I rocked around to Tom’s place this evening to find his flatmate Jo’s iMac G5 Kernel Panicing on boot. So, putting on the tech hat we tried Target Disk mode (successful at accessing the drive) and resetting the NVRAM didn’t do anything so we tried to figure out what was causing it all, anyway, so we ended up in Single User Mode, force fsck’d the hard-drive which was showing tons of journal problems. Fixed a ton of those, it wasn’t able to fix everything though, booted and bingo.

Long story short it was possibly the combination of transferring 40GB of files to the harddrive over Samba filling the HDD to 1GB free and then playing a movie over said Samba connection. These are the dying words in one of the coolest Crash Logs from the Kernel I’ve seen:

Jan 10 20:29:31 localhost kernel: netsmb_dev: loaded
Jan 10 20:42:16 localhost kernel: smb_iod_sendrq: TRAN_SEND returned fatal error 57
Jan 10 20:43:06 localhost crashdump: Unable to determine CPSProcessSerNum pid: 413 name: mplayer
Jan 10 20:43:06 localhost crashdump: Started writing crash report to: /Users/Jo/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/mplayer.crash.log
Jan 10 20:43:06 localhost crashdump: Finished writing crash report to: /Users/Jo/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/mplayer.crash.log
Jan 10 20:44:39 localhost diskarbitrationd[85]: disk1s2    hfs      651C7F29-1350-3F82-A747-FFEE52A28818 MPlayer                 [not mounted]
Jan 10 20:44:39 localhost diskarbitrationd[85]: disk1s2    hfs      651C7F29-1350-3F82-A747-FFEE52A28818 MPlayer                 /Volumes/MPlayer
Jan 10 20:44:43 localhost diskarbitrationd[85]: disk2s2    hfs      C5BA4CED-7491-32B0-A79A-5C8D9F4FC679 MPlayerOSX_8r5          [not mounted]
Jan 10 20:44:44 localhost diskarbitrationd[85]: disk2s2    hfs      C5BA4CED-7491-32B0-A79A-5C8D9F4FC679 MPlayerOSX_8r5          /Volumes/MPlayerOSX_8r5
Jan 10 20:44:53 localhost kernel: jnl: flushing fs disk buffer returned 0xd
Jan 10 20:44:53 localhost kernel: disk1s2: device is write locked.
Jan 10 20:44:53 localhost kernel: jnl: do_jnl_io: strategy err 0xd
Jan 10 20:44:53 localhost kernel: jnl: write_journal_header: error writing the journal header!
Jan 10 20:46:27 localhost kernel: hfs: WARNING - blocks on volume Macintosh HD not allocated!

Oh blog, how lonesome you must have felt. >_>

Anyway, life got crazy and as seems to be the norm, my blog was one of the first things to get neglected. Amazing, everything is finally starting to settle again. Yes, I did just imply that the christmas period was “settled” compared to whats been happening.

Another year has almost past, another year of Uni completed, not far to go now.

Still working for evos webdesign, making them websites. We move into an office from Monday which should be interesting, I don’t think it’ll really bother me whether I work at home or in the office, in the office I’ll basically be admin-ing the LAN/file-storage system and developing so it’ll be fun.

Aside from the 25 hours I do for evos, I’ve also got a related side-job from one my bosses’ parents. Developing an innovative new website thing which a bit of paper with my signature on says I’m not allowed to talk much about. Either way, it’ll bump me to 45 hours a week at my same payrate so that makes me happy.

It’ll probably be in January now but I’m finally getting a decent sound system fitted to my car, I already have the head unit (with a remote and ipod dock connector cable for my nano and cd player) and I’m looking at getting 2 x 10″ subwoofers for the boot to go with the 4 component speakers, and 2 x 6″x9″ speakers in the back. It’ll be totally rocking again, this time around a few steps up from what I’d put in my Escort.

Also, I tried to upgrade my Powerbook from 512MB to 2GB DDR2 RAM this week, deciding to try my luck with some from Dick Smith Electronics. Well, I tried two lots, both worked fine to start with and passed various RAM tests and Apple Hardware tests about 7 times but still froze after a few hours running. I don’t know if it was getting too hot and wasn’t very heat tolerant or just Mac OS X showing exactly how touchy it is about RAM but alas, the RAM has been returned and I’ll have to save up a bit more for some big name RAM like Crucial or Kingston.

Alright, I think thats a long enough catch-up for now. I’ll have more time after christmas once ‘So-nique.com‘ finally gets rolled out. It’s only been 2 and a bit years since Tom and I were asked to create it. I’ll have it up for christmas which will be great for them!

So I’ve just activated what must be most spammers greatest annoyance, Askimet. 12 spam messages in a month to my blog (when I haven’t even posted) was annoying, now it just doesn’t even arrive. How great.

This here blog is likely to get posted to en-masse after Uni finishes for the year (mid-November). Until then, life happens.

I am incredibly and hopelessly addicted to the Panic! At The Disco album A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out.

I’ve had the album for a good month or so now and have been listening to it constantly. Apart from the totally upbeat dance rhythms, I like the fact that words like “yeah”, “nigga” and “my bitches” aren’t all that common in their lyrics unlike the great majority of songs on C4 (New Zealand free-to-air music television channel).

One thing that I like that gives Panic! an edge over Fall Out Boy for me is the vocal talent and dynamics of the songs. Damn he can actually sing; does anyone know if he was singing broadway style before joining the band?

My only [minor] gripe is that the lyrics are sometimes hard to distinguish from simply listening to the songs. This comes about as the use of not-so-frequently used words and puns in their lyrics make some word choices not so obvious. Alas, the lyrics are included in the cover of the album. Since I compared to Fall Out Boy up there, I’ll also say that Fall Out Boy’s lyrics don’t seem to have the same vocal clarity that Panic!’s do.

Anyway, I don’t really have a favourite or worst song, I love them all, they don’t seem to be getting old yet either. My most-played playlist at the moment is sitting with 28 songs, Panic!’s album, Broken Dreams compilation and the Fall Out Boy album From Under the Cork Tree.

Hi everyone, my name is Alex and… I am emo.
Y’all knew it, now I’ve said it.

Panic! At The Disco on the web:

• Official Homepage
• MySpace page
• Wikipedia Article

I have yet to see the movie “Click” but either way, I want his remote. Now. kthx.
I do believe I am almost at saturation point as to hours per day vs hours of work to be done in said day.

I’m also dreading the size of the power bill for next month, I have this feeling it will be at least double our normal. Damn cold weather and stupid crawling bugs.

Grain mites increased power-usage in three ways:
* Vacuuming the pantry 5 times
* More lights on in the kitchen looking for them
* Dehumidifier on to get humidity levels down too low for them to breeeeeeeeed.

Ooooo, also, I got my new uniform for work yesterday. It is all bright and fresh and has random vertical yellow lines on the sides. The fleece jacket we were given looks warm, we shall see if it is so on Sunday, when I work next.