5,000+ Spam Comments!
May 10, 2007 by Jason · 4 Comments
About an hour ago this site rolled past 5,000 spam comments caught by Akismet. As far as I can remember there have only been a couple that snuck past and had to be manually classified as "spam". I wish my email filter worked this well. If anyone has any suggestions as to a client-based spam filter that integrates well with Outlook other than SpamBayes let me know.
New development environment coming soon…
Up until now I've been doing all of my package builds on physical systems. Given that electricity is expensive, that space is at a premium, and that I haven't turned on my air conditioning yet and it's getting pretty hot, I've decided to start building the repo packages in virtual machines inside of VMWare Server The bad news is that I'll probably take me most of the weekend to download and install 4 VMs. The good news is that I just said 4 VMs instead of 2 VMs. That's right, I'm going to start building EL5 packages.
P.S. - Oh, and yeah, I know that MySQL 5.0.40 has been released. I've got binaries for 32-bit systems already built but I'm not going to update the repo until I get the 64-bit binaries for EL4 created.
WordPress Plugin: “Block Countries”
April 16, 2007 by Jason · 69 Comments
As was mentioned in my "To the jerk stealing my content" rant, I've recently developed a WordPress plugin that can be used to block certain countries from accessing a blog. After a few days of tweaking, I believe that it's finally ready for a public release. I give you... "Block Countries"!
I'm actually surprised at how quickly this plugin was completed. I started with ZERO idea as to how to build a plugin for WordPress but within a couple hours I had a bare-bones plugin that accomplished what I needed it to do. Of course, it then took most of the weekend to clean it up to the point where I would feel comfortable telling someone, "Why don't you try this out on your blog?".
To the jerk stealing my content…
April 11, 2007 by Jason · 4 Comments
You! Yeah, You! You know who you are... Cut it out!
Not only are you the biggest tool on the planet for stealing other people's content, but you don't even seem to have the decency to NOT hotlink files from my server. Bandwidth isn't free you know! If you'd only asked if you could use some of my content on your site I would have gladly said yes, provided that you gave credit where credit is due and provided a link back to the real article.
In any case, your lack of consideration has caused me to spend my lunch break today writing a plugin for Wordpress that allows me to block users from certain countries. It's a little rough around the edges right now but I'm going to polish it up over the next couple days and I'll probably release it to the public so that others can block your thieving-self...
MySQL 5.0.38 packages updated
April 6, 2007 by Jason · 14 Comments
I've rebuilt the MySQL 5.0.38 binaries in my yum repository to take care of a small bug that I introduced for new installs.
It seems that the database initialization script that runs on the first launch of mysqld (part of the 'mysql-server' package) has changed a bit between 5.0.37 & 5.0.38. Unfortunately, not noticing that, I tossed a couple of new .sql scripts in the wrong package. This, as it turns out, only affected users who were trying to do a clean installation of mysql. If you were upgrading from the stock EL4 version, from the 'centosplus' repo, or from one of my earlier releases then you weren't affected.
New Repository Addition: Subversion
April 5, 2007 by Jason · 8 Comments
There have been a few requests in the post comments and via email for a version of Subversion that works with my updated version of httpd. Well, after ripping my hair out for the past couple days trying to get around a few blocking issues, I finally built Subversion packages for 32- & 64-bit systems.
First, unlike my httpd, PHP, and MySQL builds, I wanted to stick with the version of Subversion that came with RHEL & CentOS 4. I really didn't see the point of upgrading to a newer, less tested, version on this particular package. That said, the version of Subversion that comes with EL4 didn't particularly like the version of apr that is included in my repo. That meant that a straight rebuild of the src.rpm wasn't possible (it was failing the apr-related tests during the build).
New PHP packages available by popular request
April 2, 2007 by Jason · 8 Comments
Since there have been a few requests for some of the less-common PHP modules (and because these modules are available in the 'centosplus' repo) I decided to build them and have them added to my repositories. The 32- & 64-bit repos now have packages for php-dbase, php-mcrypt, php-mhash, and php-tidy. A few dependencies for those packages popped up (such as libmcrypt, tidy, and mhash) so those have been included as well.
I've also received quite a few requests for a subversion binary package that will work with the newer version of httpd. I'm a bit busy right now, but I'd expect that I'll be able to get to those requests within the next few days.
XCache 1.2.0 src.rpm Updated
February 23, 2007 by Jason · Leave a Comment
For those of you using it, the src.rpm for XCache 1.2.0 in my PHP Caching and Acceleration with XCache tutorial has been updated to fix a bug that might occur on some servers (see this ticket for more information).
The 15750 Hz “Noise” from my TV is driving me NUTS!
January 27, 2007 by Jason · 10 Comments
Can anyone else hear the 15750 Hz tone generated by most TVs? My girlfriend was telling me I was crazy and that the sound didn't exist until my Uncle Chuck explained that the sound does exist while we were back in Illinois for my Grandmother's birthday & Christmas.
I've got two TVs in my apartment (a 15-ish-year-old 20" GE and a 3-year-old 36" Toshiba) and I can hear both if they are on no matter where I am in the apartment (2 BR/2 BA, separate kitchen & dining room; it's not a small place), even if the doors are closed.
I'm almost ready to go out and spend $3000 on a nice 1080p LCD screen so that I can sit in the living room in peace because even turning the volume way up (with 500W of Klipsch power behind it) doesn't drown it out... Heh, the only good news is that all of the big-box retail stores are getting rid of their CRT screens (or at least tossing them in the back corner of the store) so if I do break down and decide to go shopping, at least I won't get a headache at the same time.
We Have Drop Shadows!
Alright then! We've got drop shadows! The designer of this K2 skin put out a new version that includes drop shadows around the post area. The three skin images are still bugged though. Every single one is a JPEG and they're all way larger than they need to be. I slimmed them down from 65KB to 4.5KB (using Paint.NET and pngcrush), putting the front page of this site under 80KB, including HTML, images, CSS, and JavaScript.
Next up to bat, fixing the problem with the right edge of italic text being cut off if it hits the edge of the content column. If anyone knows how to fix that, let me know.
