Anthony’s Ramblings

Did an ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’ yesterday and updated the ol’ server to Debian 5.0. For the most part, everything went fine. I did encounter one weird thing. The latest version of MySQL would not install, complaining about not having version information for libz.so.1 located in /opt/mono/lib/. It was very, very strange (I don’t ever remember installing Mono). I Googled around a bit, and found that other people simply deleted the file that the MySQL installer was referring to (as there was another copy somewhere else on the system and some path specification was messed up…something like that).

In any case, deleting it (and the entire /opt/mono directory…I don’t need it) seemed to fix the problem. MySQL is working (or else you wouldn’t be reading this). :shrug:

A lot, but at the same time, not much, has happened lately.

Home Hunt
Brianna and I started looking for a house a month or so ago, and things were going along quite well considering the economy. We put bits on three houses. With the first house, we were beat by a larger offer. With the second house, we were beat with a cash offer. With the third house, our offer was accepted! However, there was a catch. The house needed a lot of work. After a lot of “I think I can do this”, then “oh crap we can’t do this!”, then “wait, yes we can”, we decided to negotiate with the bank to see what they’d be willing to do for us considering the condition of the house. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to hear back from the bank because…

Unemployment
Brianna was laid off on November 3rd. It was very sudden and not expected in the slightest bit. The company she worked for lost $60k in monthly revenue. She was newly hired (started August 15th) and she was low on the totem poll, so she was the first to go. This was devistating, but manageable. It only meant one thing. We couldn’t buy a house. So, our house plans were put on hold. Oh well!

Re-employment
Brianna starts a new job on Monday! I think she’s close to a world record of going from laid off to hired in less than 2 weeks. I’m very happy for her (and me). She was paranoid that, considering the economy, she’d be without a job for months. I speculated that she’d be without a job for no longer than a month. Looks like I was right! She wants to wait at least 3 months until we consider buying a house again. This way, she can adjust to her new job and be assured that her position isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

You know what this means?
I think I can, finally, bring the server home. I’m cheap and don’t want to pay for the electricity, but it would be much better if it was within reach rather than sitting 100+ miles away. If the server was in a space where I heard/saw it on a daily basis, it’d really encourage me to tinker…and that’s something I love to do. We’ll see!

I really aught to blog more. Even though nobody reads this, it’s kinda cool to go back and read about some of the things I’ve posted about in the past. Also, I feel it’s good exercise for my brain! Unlike some, I really try to write, spell, and use grammar properly (but in no way am I perfect).

Last thing…I think I need to re-asses “categories”.

I installed a nifty plugin that allows me to configure Wordpress to send e-mail through an SMTP server, rather than through PHP’s ‘mail()’ function. So now I have e-mail bliss! I will be e-mailed when anyone leaves a comment. I’ll be able to keep on top of the comments easier . Also, for those of you who are regular visitors and are annoyed by the “captcha” when leaving a comment, you can now create an account on my blog. Registered viewers are able to bypass the name, e-mail, and captcha fields (they’re auto-completed for you). Nifty, eh?

I’m also looking into setting up e-mailed updates. If you leave a comment on an entry and somebody comments after you, you will be notified about the new comments. I can’t find any obvious settings for this in the Wordpress admin page…but I may be blind. Soo, I asked about it on the Wordpress support page and am awaiting a response.

Akismet: A centralized blacklist that comments left on your blog are checked against. Any comments that Akismet may miss and you mark as spam are contributed to the Akismet blacklist. This helps build a blacklist so bulletproof that you should never have to worry about comment spam again. It is explained better here.

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I’ve been trying out Akismet for a few days. It definitely gets the job done in terms of catching comment spam. However, it still is not as good as a captcha.

Before I started using a captcha, I was getting at least 50 comment spams a day (sometimes up to 200!). It was ridiculous! I was fed up with the spam. So I decided to give SecureImage a try. It took a little tweaking and searching for a decent font. Once I got it working, it worked like it was supposed to. Humans posted comments…bots did not. I never ran into a single piece of comment spam again. The captcha did not allow bots to successfully post!! Whoo!!

About a week ago, Sam had sent me an e-mail about Akismet and wanted me to try it. I figured it was worth a shot, so I disabled my captcha and put Akismet to work.

The first night running Akismet went very well. It caught 2 comment spams! I was shocked. Only two?! Surley it had missed something! Nope…it didn’t. The second night it caught 4. Third night, 16. And tonight, 46. Akismet never skipped a beat and caught all the spam. But wait, the spam is coming back…with buddies! Ahhh!!!

I gave these numbers some thought, and only have one conclusion. The captcha was deterring bots from even bothering an attempt at a comment post. Disabling the captcha with a return spam rate that is very low…it’s got to be doing the trick. I can’t think of anything else. This is especially good news for those who pay for bandwidth by the unit. Hmm…maybe spambots have the winter off?? Nah.

Akismet does exactly what it’s designed to do, catch all comment spam, and it does it well. However, if you are picky like me and don’t like to see wasted bandwidth, CPU cycles, and hard drive writes due to the spam flowing through your WordPress database on your home-brew server with a measily DSL WAN connection, a captcha may be the way to go. Of course, if you could care less about the unnecessary load on your host and its Internet connection, Akismet does work.

To sum everything: As annoying as a captcha may be to your blog visitors, it is still the better way to eliminate comment spam.

Whoo…it’s been a long while since I’ve posted here. Here’s an update (more frequent posts will continue).

blogy.org

As a spastic choice, I decided to purchase a whole domain name just for my blog. Update your bookmarks! My blog can now be accessed at http://www.blogy.org. Not exactly sure what made me decide to do this…but it is cool, after all.

Glasses

Second on the news front. A couple weeks ago I decided to get my eyes checked. I’ve always felt that I wasn’t seeing things as well as I should be…but recently (past few months) it seemed to be worse. I found myself scooting closer and closer to things to see them clearly. So, I got my eyes checked. Both of my eyes are in need of a corrective lens…but my left eye is worse than my right. The eye doctor told me that since my left eye was the weaker link, my right eye made up for it. Since my right eye has had this extra strain on it for some time, it has finally started to “give up”. So, as of July 2nd, 2005, I wear glasses. It’s alright, I guess. I can see better!

iBook

There were a couple older Apple iBooks laying around at work, not being used. So, I decided to adopt one. It’s been keeping me from buying a new Apple computer, because let’s face it…I miss my Mac! I sold my Powermac on eBay a few weeks ago. It was just sitting in the garage collecting dust, so I figured I might as well get a few bucks out of it. It’s new owner is pretty nice, and is a big Mac fan, so that’s good. He really likes the machine. Of course, it’s left me here pondering how much a new Powerbook would cost me (of course with an educational discount through either my work or the college). But, until I’m ready to put down $2,400 down for a new Powerbook, this ol’ iBook will be sufficient. It’s a G3 500MHz, 256 MB RAM, 10GB HDD, 12 inch LCD. It runs Tiger very well, considering how old the laptop is. Then again…benchmarks have proven that Apple can develop a new OS but have it run just as fast, or if not, a sliver faster than the previous. Now that’s efficiency.

It took me a while to find a theme that I liked, but…here it is! This theme is coded very cleanly…very easy to tweak with. I was able to remove navigation that was at the top of the theme, along with some items in the sidebar. I’m probably going to do what Sam suggested a long time ago, and base my website on my blog. Once I finally start working on my website, again, I you’ll see the heading navigation appear.

The theme is Orange Sky by Nao.

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 1.5! Now, all I need to do is find a new spiffy theme.

The admin pages don’t seem to like Safari, too much, and the default theme does not show up under Safari.

I’ve been having a terrible time with comment spam, and feel that the easiest way to deal with it is to force anonymous commenters to enter a random string of letters and/or numbers that are displayed but not readable by bots. I’ve posted about it on WordPress’s website here.

I may open up the users section, to allow people to create accounts for comments (if they’d like)….but I haven’t decided, yet.

I oughta just upgrade to WordPress 1.5. I hear it’s better all ’round.