Category: numlock.ch

i’ve finally migrated my tiny “blogroll” to blogrolling.com. no changes content-wise (so far). i’m still waiting for the most cynical blog (“the dullest blog in the world”) to rise from the dead. else i will have to remove it *sniff*.

blogrolling.com does not really offer the thing i am looking for (a pull to push converter for better scalability). looks like i’d need to implement such a service myself. like this, i could also implement notification upon new comments on others’ blogs. i don’t get why comments aren’t included in any bloggersoft’s rdf feed i know of. the rdf grammar is pretty general actually.

mettlerd@o2 mettlerd $ uname -a
Linux o2.numlock.ch 2.6.0-test6 #1 Thu Oct 2 17:02:21 UTC 2003 i686 VIA Samuel 2 CentaurHauls GNU/Linux

currently, the kernel config is far from being optimized (features, size, performance) and i haven’t applied the latest exec-shield patch yet.

later i will eventually do some rudimentary performance comparisons between 2.4.22-ac1 and 2.6.0-test6.

[update: i’ve just applied the latest exec-shield patch]

gee.. now even my change/b/log is getting spammed (as seen with online guestbooks before)! i’ve just noticed a – now deleted – comment entry looking like a spam message. it obviously wasn’t posted by a person but a bot running on a box at 66.111.50.170. among others, it reads: “If you find this entry inappropriate please remove it from your database!”. as if spam could ever be appropriate.. darn dingo.

it’s time for spamassassin for blogs. eventhough – unlike andreas’ experiences – i’ve noticed more false negatives recently. this might have to do with several rbl shutting down service after suffering dos attacks – allegedly by spammers. furthermore, spammers become more sophisticated, now often sending image-only spam messages, preventing many text-based filtering approaches (as only the headers are left for analyzing).

another (most effective) solution would be to disable anonymous comments (which scuks). if the spamming problem persists, there’s no other choice left atm.

need to get some useful moveabletype plugins. for blogrolling and such. any recommendations by chance?

further i should review my mt setup. some valuable features apparently still don’t work (e.g. e-mail notification upon posting, pinging sites(?)).

i need at least:
– blogrolling (or similar functionality)
– plugin to integrate some feeds such as those by /. or the lkml

found the reason for basic auth not working correctly: sha1 hashed pwds apparently don’t work anymore (on my box). thx to Jouser, quasi, gryzor on #apache for hints.

now i’ve regenerated the htpasswd file using md5 hashes instead (work-around). mind that md5 is considered to be less secure than sha1 in general (see e.g. this posting). for numlock.ch, security is good in either case as nobody except yours truly is supposed to have access to those hashes anyway.

regarding the citation you find in the upper right corner of this site: Jouser pointed me to this shopping page on cafepress. funny :)

remerged apache2 and mod_php, made some adjustments. works fine now.

borland togethersoft controlcenter licenses can be downloaded again. sorry for the break.

atm, there are still some issues with basic auth (does not affect /dm).

(btw. if you encounter client-side problems, consider this ;)

due to unknown (really weird) problems with upgrading apache to apache2 several services don’t work the way they should. among them the download manager (/dm) for together control center which doesn’t work at all. as i lack the time to fix it right now (my flight is in about 8.5 hours and i’ve neither slept nor prepared my luggage yet), there’s nothing i can do for it at the moment. eventually i’ll try to fix it from remote. if not, this site (i.e. some of its services) will be out of service for at least one week.

i am really sorry for these inconveniences and beg your pardon. rgds dan.

The IFI has just renewed its Borland Together ControlCenter licenses. The new license file is available for download at https://news.numlock.ch/dm/

feedster now partially supports the robots.txt standard.

scott: regarding caching of robots.txt, i’d prefer

1st priority: “Expires” header
2nd priority: UTC rule as above

sounds reasonable (and not too difficult to implement) for
Feedster. If Feedster indexes a domain.com in a session-like
manner, fetching /robots.txt once per session as 2nd priority
would probably be reasonable as well.

(excerpt of my reply of july 19)

reasons: it’s more blogger friendly (handing over control of caching to them) and it makes more sense in modern (short-lived) times. regarding images: remember robots.txt addresses any kind of files (it specifies retrieval based on location, not content). if you plan to offer some fine-grained copyright handling in addition, robots.txt should always be respected nevertheless (it’s the only indexing standard we currently have).

i guess i should take a look at cfengine. i am not overloaded with system administration work at all (as i am a lucky guy running gentoo linux ;) but cfengine nevertheless looks like an interesting approach. large-scale system automatization is still one of the biggest advantages of unices compared with other oses. the thing i miss with them is a unified object-oriented (rather than flat) access structure (similar to snmp, but deeper and more powerful).

btw. iirc there once were rumors that ms will implement oo in their next major shell release.. i hope linux will have it sooner (though chances are bad ;)