Posted by Trejkaz
Fri, 02 Jun 2006 01:58:00 GMT
No, it’s not a post about my new glasses, although they’re pretty awesome.
I thought it was about time I updated the theme for the site, so I had a bit of a dig around on TypoGarden.org to find a decent theme to use as a basis for a new theme. I eventually settled on Unoriginal Sin, which looked nice and minimalist, although the JavaScript it was using to draw drop shadows broke Typo’s Live Search feature.
So I replaced the method it was using to generate the drop shadows, and fixed up the Live Search feature, and it ends up looking like this. I wanted to do some nifty fade out effects on the “sidebar” (they’re down the bottom now, so it’s hardly a sidebar) boxes, but it will require changing the page background and I haven’t yet found an acceptable background colour other than white.
You can download this theme if you wish to modify it for use on your own install.
Now I can resume working on other things.
Tags meta, theme, typo | 1 comment
Posted by Trejkaz
Fri, 07 Apr 2006 04:13:00 GMT
Right about now, I would have been somewhere between Kyoto and Tokyo, had my original holiday date not been postponed (it’s now set for September, on the assumption that I find someone to go with.)
But instead, I’m stuck in Sydney in autumn, in the shitty part of the season where it starts out freezing cold in the morning (so you wear a coat) and then ends up boiling hot in the evening (so you end up carrying the coat home.) Great stuff. I can’t wait for winter, at least the weather will be consistently cold.
The last three weeks have been a bit frantic.
A whole week was eaten by a house cleanup in preparation for a random house inspection. It really drove home a few things.
People should clean their crap up after they’ve finished using it. I generally do this, so as a result I didn’t have as much work to do as everyone else.
Professional cleaners are actually worth paying for. Or at least, they are worth it if the house is big enough. Particularly in a situation where nobody follows the roster past about four weeks, it will be much easier to just have housemates share the cost of the cleaner doing the work.
The current house has way too few places in which to store cleaning stuff. For instance, it wouldn’t have killed the owners to put in a fixed cabinet somewhere for storage of things like brooms and vacuum cleaners.
There is never enough capacity to throw out all the trash generated during a cleanup. This was especially true this time around as we ended up filling the general waste bin, the recycling bin, and generating 2m3 of bulky trash, and still having about 2m3 left over. It would be better if the council just asked you how much you had and picked it up in one hit, instead of imposing arbitrary limits which then necessitate rebooking.
Moving house is certainly an option from here but it’s always expensive and almost always means two weeks downtime while the DSL gets connected. Buying a house is starting to become an option too, but I think I’ll wait for a few more months before looking into that sort of thing. I can’t imagine being able to afford a very good place anyway. My limit under my current income is somewhere around $300,000… certainly a lot of small places do fall under that, but not any terribly good ones. Plus I’d have to make sure I can cover the mortgage payments by myself, because the banks don’t seem to care about income from renting out the extra rooms.
Other than that, the past week has been eaten up by setting up my MacBook Pro. like so many other people who bought this laptop, I’m affected by the buzzing CPU issue, which I’ve temporarily worked around by hacking QuietMBP to use less CPU, but just enough to stop the noise. Hopefully Apple will fix the problem in a software update, because I’d hate for it to be entirely a hardware problem.
Otherwise, the laptop is practically perfect. Mine got delayed, and by the time it arrived they were already into revision E, and all the original problems people were experiencing had been fixed (well, except the buzz.)
Tags macbookpro, meta, trypticon | no comments
Posted by Trejkaz
Mon, 13 Mar 2006 00:53:00 GMT
Is it just me, or has this weekend been particularly heavy with spam attacks?
First, I have my email spam. Somehow, a whole bunch of spams throughout the weekend completely evaded by server-side spam filtering. Thunderbird picked them all up as spam by the time I logged in from work though, so perhaps I can just go and re-teach the filter being used on the server. Or perhaps I can implement something like greylisting and stop a few spammers before they even get the mail into the server.
Next, I had the misfortune of being notified by Jabber of several dozen comment spams being made to my blog (Jabber notification is quite good for this sort of instant notification – I managed to kill said spams in no time at all.)
The first surprising thing about this spam is that I have disabled non-AJAX commenting on this weblog. Therefore, spammers either (a) know how to execute JavaScript in order to submit forms (which is an extremely scary possibility) or (b) have figured out how to detect Typo-based weblogs and submit the spam via a direct POST in the same way that the JavaScript would do it. Either is possible, given the persistence of spammers.
The spams also cut straight through Typo’s spam filter, so either they weren’t from known IP addresses, or they weren’t linking to known spam URLs. And many of them, even though the content was the same, were from many different IP addresses (side-note: if anybody ever tries to tell you that Windows is no good for distributed applications, these world-wide networks of zombied Windows boxes should be proof enough that it works fine for such applications.)
The next annoying thing was a significant amount of trackback spam. Trackback spam is particularly irritating because the entire point of trackbacks is to be automatic. You can’t have something automatic and prevent spambots at the same time. Thankfully though, the trackback spam was performed as a large number of trackbacks on a small number of articles.
In any case, the band-aid measure I’ve taken is to now block comments and trackbacks after 30 days. That way at least I only have to monitor the past 30 days for new trackbacks and comments, which is all on the front page of Typo’s admin interface.
The measure I’m probably going to have to take, however, is requiring a CAPTCHA for posting comments. Perhaps I can go with the trivial math problem approach, if spammers haven’t figured that one out already. At least that one is accessible, unlike image-based CAPTCHAs. Another way would be to require OpenID authentication for all comments, but that would only stall spammers until they set up their own OpenID servers.
For trackbacks, though, I don’t know what I can do except for turning them off… perhaps we just need a better database of known spam URLs.
Tags blog, meta, spam, typo | no comments
Posted by Trejkaz
Wed, 17 Aug 2005 03:44:00 GMT
Okay, everything seems to be in order.
Those of you using RSS aggregators at some point might want to change this feed to point at the following URL:
http://trypticon.org/xml/rss/feed.xml
I’m using a permanent redirect, which means that your aggregators should update the stored URL to this new URL automatically. However, if they’re anything like Thunderbird, they will redirect automatically, but won’t update the stored URL.
I’ll leave the redirect there until I get bored of it anyway. :-)
Expect various other parts of the site to break for a while, everything should be fixed shortly.
Tags meta, typo
Posted by Trejkaz
Tue, 16 Aug 2005 02:17:00 GMT
So I finally decided that I don’t need a wiki. I’ll lose a little functionality in the way of macros and convenient post entry by doing this, but it’s probably for the best. Any stuff which deserves a wiki, I might as well point at Wikipedia, since I can always add entries over there.
So it’s time to start moving stuff from SnipSnap to Typo.
Bear with me, this is going to be a bumpy ride. People using the feeds will see a post at some point in the future detailing the new URL for the feed.
Tags meta, typo
Posted by Trejkaz
Thu, 04 Aug 2005 05:28:00 GMT
The version of Typo sitting in source control actually has half the features I’d written down that I wanted to add to it.
In addition to this, I found a very nice theme in the tracker which looks remarkably similar to what I needed and got frustrated trying to make.
So let’s just say, “full steam ahead!”
Tags meta, typo
Posted by Trejkaz
Mon, 27 Jun 2005 23:55:00 GMT
The first candidate for replacement blog software seems to be Typo. Not to be confused with TYPO3, Typo is a simple weblog system based on Ruby on Rails, which should make it easy to customise.
Good:
- Based on Ruby on Rails, making it easy to customise.
- Uses AJAX tricks when posting comments and searching for articles, with cute fade effects.
- Has guest commenting built-in.
Bad:
- It would run on Ruby on Apache, making it harder to have a process like a bot running inside the server 24/7 than it is for a Java web server.
- No immediately-obvious way to integrate wiki-like features in, so I would need to leave SnipSnap up for the Wiki facility until a replacement is found for that. Or, just use static pages, and edit them manually, which I’m not completely against.
- Authentication would still be non-customisable, but maybe anonymous guest commenting is enough…
- Doesn’t store email addresses for guest comments (can probably be hacked in easily enough, though.)
Tags meta, typo
Posted by Trejkaz
Wed, 30 Mar 2005 10:39:00 GMT
Well, that was a spot of hell.
First, my original web host for this site decided that the Java process was using too many system resources… D’oh. I guess that’s Java’s weak spot, after all.
And then, for those who don’t already know, the ZIM Jabber server went down from hardware failure around 5 days ago. As this was my main means of communication (I have an account on Jabber Australia as well, but a few of my friends either don’t have secondary accounts, or aren’t on my secondary roster) it significantly delayed getting this web site back up and running at the new location. :-)
The best bit of it all is, the spool files got corrupted when the server crashed, and they got corrupted at random. I could either sift through all the files with an XML validator, or I could use a godlike tool like rsync which will figure out which files need syncing and do it all automatically. I think I’ll take rsync, thanks. :-)
So all the spool files are back and happy, but a few people might have lost a couple of contacts if they added them on the day of the major crash.
But hey, at least it’s alive again. Now I proceed onto making my personal web sites work again. :-)
Tags jabber, meta
Posted by Trejkaz
Wed, 05 Jan 2005 01:41:00 GMT
This is my first test of posting weblog entries via Jabber.
The post, when received by the bot, will search for user snips with a JabberIDLabel which matches the sending JID. After finding any snips with this JID, it then looks for a SnipLabel called “Weblog” which points to the blog which should be posted to.
The bot then sets the user to each snip it found, and posts to the associated blog.
Users who don’t have permission to write to the associated blog will simply fail to post and should get back an error message to that effect. Users who (maliciously?) add another user’s JabberID to their own user snip might still cause issues
Tags jabber, meta, software