levork.org

I’ve wasted two hours today deleting comment spam and trying to spam proof the two Movable Type based blogs that coexist here, since I’m fairly positive that none of their readers are that interested in the enlarging of body organs. MT-Blacklist, which has been installed for a few months, just wasn’t cutting it for me, so it was time for more drastic measures. Comment moderation wasn’t feasible; Dorritta has better things to do this month (like marking exams) than delete 192 pieces of mail related to spam comments from her blog.

Elise has a very good summary of how to better spam proof a Movable Type installation; so far however it seems that the best part of the solution is James Seng’s “captcha” plugin, which adds an obscured picture of a number, e.g.: and then expects the commentor to type it in before the form is accepted, with the idea that a spam bot shouldn’t be able to turn the image into the correct number. As a computer graphics person, this makes perfect sense. Implementing my own solution occurred to me before I came to my senses and typed “image recognition movable type” into google. Installation was reasonable (fortunately I already knew what “libgd” and “Perl-GD” were from work). Unfortunately by adding this spam proofing, I’ve ruled out the possibility that visually impaired folks (or users of Lynx!) can add comments – and I’m the kind of anal person who puts “alt” attributes on absolutely every “img” tag. I’ve also realised that my adding comment capability to my own blog is probably not worth the effort. So, a big thank you to spammers of the world for making the Internet a more unfriendly place than it should be. I can only hope there’s some corner of hell kept toasty for you and your friends responsible for the 893 pieces of junk mail sent this week to my main e-mail address.

Speaking of sister, she recently mentioned getting published on her blog but didn’t provide a link to the journal. Well, here’s the table of contents at any rate. A comparison of that with my publication history should convince you that we can’t possibly be related and that one of us is in fact adopted, or according to Mom, found in the cabbage patch.

Covad was in today, wiring up my phone line for DSL. I switched from Speakeasy’s standard ADSL service – requires landline service, no wiring, self installation kit with phone filters – to their Onelink plan – no landline service needed, wiring required, technician install. I started the process on September 22nd, one week and a half later it’s apparently all done. The eventual plan is to ditch the tyranny of the landline (as well as the monopolies of QWest local and AT&T long distance services), and maybe get Vonage VoIP service or just use my cell phone regularly; it depends greatly on calling plans to Canada. More on that as it happens.

Unfortunately they gave me new IP addresses, which means having to change my DNS entry. Just to make life interesting, it seems like a perfect opportunity to upgrade this box from RedHat 9.0 (and its lame version of X which doesn’t support acceleration on my graphics card) to Fedora Core 2. So levork.org and all other domains that leech bandwidth are valued guests here will probably be interrupted tonight. Just a friendly advance warning to y’all who link directly to images here without attribution. (Grr.)

Worked today, not because I’m such a lame workaholic, but because I’m taking Friday off: I cashed in some air miles to visit Susan. Alaska Air really does have a good program: eight trips to the Bay Area or so, booked online, earned me one saver ticket. When booking two weeks ago, I couldn’t get a ticket for the Labour day weekend but with a bit of work schedule juggling that hasn’t proven a hardship.

The transition of this web site is pretty much complete. I was wrestling with people and bots still having links to old pages until I discovered that mod_rewrite and the magic of regular expressions neatly solved this problem. So now the archives are all back, along with the old syndication link, and for the most part I think I’ve worked out all the other linking issues.

Hyperlinking just isn’t all that, is it? You’d think we’d have come up with something less transitory than just strings and filenames by now. Really I just want to point at “that page with that picture of that outdoor pavilion in Korea”, no matter where it ends up, rather than have to remember to fix pictures/korea/gyeonghoeru.html when I move things around. Surprisingly Microsoft seemed to be scratching the surface with WinFS, although disappointingly Longhorn won’t have it, and who knows when the idea will propagate to the web.

Drove up to Vancouver Saturday, came back yesterday – first time I’ve driven such a long distance. No incidents to report. I discovered that I’m a more aggressive driver than imagined – seems I’m incapable of doing less than 60 MPH in the slow lane on I-5, and so ended up spending a lot of time doing 80 in the fast lane instead. As for the trip itself, it was really a iPod smuggling run (Roz wanted one for David), but I did bring back a few boxes of old books – music, David Eddings, and the like.

The car has been insured, passed the smog test (needing only a gas cap replacement, the inspection of which seems to fall under the purview of emissions control), and has been properly transferred to my ownership. I have not hit anything or anybody – other than my narrow driveway, scraping the right side of the car three times to date. I’m so glad I swallowed my pride, took advice, and accepted a beat up car which turned out not to be so beat up after all, because I’d be literally crying over the scrapes if it was a new Z4. As it is now I just shrug. In my defense, the retaining walls begin immediately after the sidewalk, and it’s an awkward right turn on a busy street. Despite the added expenses which just add up, the insane cost of parking downtown, and some jittery nerves which haven’t gone away it’s just so freaking cool to be able to go grocery shopping and stock up on lots of stuff. (Those of you who’ve been driving most of your lives are rolling their eyes at this point. Hey, I still take the bus every day.)

The July 4th weekend was an anniversary with Susan, so naturally we spent it together in the Bay Area. We had dinner at Chez Panisse, which was worth absolutely every penny spent, munched on kettle corn while experiencing the superhero angst that was Spider-Man 2, and watched fireworks at Jack London square in Oakland. I thought the display was mildly disappointing, although I was satisfied somewhat by the exploding happy faces. Anniversary: it’s been one year of dating. I can’t imagine life as a single geek again. If I’m lucky (and I have been, to date) she’ll overlook the serious geekiness (Wow, it’s Doc Connors! The Lizard! I had the first issue of Spectacular Spider-Man with him on the cover! And look, there’s Stan Lee!) and also the current obsession with plums and apples (I have two abundantly bearing fruit trees on my property).

A little bit of overdue maintenance: I’ve decided to switch this blog over to blosxom. The easy part is done already – you can check it out here, it looks almost identical at the moment. Since my current scheme is text based to begin with (albeit one monolithic file), and since Wayne already turned my text to html formatting code into a blosxom plugin (which he unfortunately called “fongination” – I need to have a little chat with him about that – yes, we use blosxom quite extensively at work) it was pretty simple to get this far. I have to rethink some of the permanent link, archive page, and navigation stuff though, and I could probably spruce up the CSS a bit.

Bizarre web statistic of the day:

 > grep house_move1.jpg access_log | grep 0[78]\/Mar\/2004 | wc -l     161 

161 reloads of one image from one IP address, and still counting. Yep, some silly person is morbidly fascinated with a very dirty fridge.

The hard drive on this server died yesterday. The blog’s back up but I’m still ironing out some issues. Back to regular programming shortly.

I ordered DSL through Speakeasy on the 6th or so, and the DSL modem and self-installation kit showed up on Wednesday. That made it eight days, start to finish, amazing compared to the month-long waiting period the last time around. And the hardest part about the installation this time was deciding where to put the somewhat noisy server machine. Certainly no need to schedule a technician to check the phone box and install a splitter. I now have these ugly filter devices hanging off my phone lines, but that seems like a small price to pay.

So I can now happily resume the compulsive checking of my referer logs, as levork.org and the other couple of domains I own have all been moved to the guest bedroom. The wiring situation being what it is in this house, I didn’t have much choice about this. For example, there’s already Cat5 cable connecting the master bedroom on the top floor and the “music room” in the basement – but no three prong outlets down there.

One of those domains I “own” is dorritta.org. I bought that for my sister a couple of Christmases ago; not one of my more inspired gift ideas, but she’s hard to shop for. Today I finally did something useful with the domain: I set up Movable Type in the hopes she’ll do something with it. Blogs are cool; blogs by people who are actually English doctorate students should be much cooler. Or at the very least more grammatically correct.

Yes, Dorritta is her first name. That’s two Rs and two Ts. Not many people have her name spelled this way, so I was able to easily get the domains. I’m not even sure it’s her legal name though – you’ll have to ask her why she believes her name is misspelled on her birth certificate. The point is somewhat moot since all of us call her Mimi (her middle name), or “Mi” for short – where “Mi” describes the low-pitched, rumbling, cow-like noise made by my mom when she’s angrily asking after her second daughter. (Ask me for a passable imitation.) Noone seems to know how Dad picked her name. We all have weird names, but at least Rosalind is a Shakespeare character, and I was apparently named after the guitar player. This lends credence to the adoption theory. Bring that up and she’ll get annoyed; ask her about her proper Chinese name and she’ll get angry. (And I’m indirectly involved in that one, which is surprising if you consider I wasn’t even born yet, although I guess that was pretty much the point.) And hopefully this slanderous paragraph gives her something to discuss (or perhaps angrily rebut) on her web page.

I’m 24. As David so charmingly put it, in a couple of years from now I’ll be Christmas fruit cake (nobody wants them after the 25th, har har).

In two separate conversations with entirely different people, I have inadvertently used an invented abbreviation – “boxin” – when I really meant to use “botox”. I’m not sure why botulism would have entered my conversation enough to warrant that sort of thing. It’s not like I plan biological warfare – or cosmetic surgery, for that matter.

On an entirely different note, my dreams have been getting more and more weird and surreal. I can’t remember last night’s (repressing, as usual), but I still vividly remember an image from one a couple of weeks ago – laboratory mice dissolving into puddles of goo inside little dark cages, pouring out into my hands.

Just a little insight into my twisted psyche, folks. Nothing to see here.