Site Administration

F'in Comment Spammers

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Okay, I don’t know what it is but in the last two days I have had to delete about seventy different spam comments. WTF. I don’t know if Akismet is just not up to the task anymore or what, but this is crazy. I think it said about 3750 spam comments blocked when I clicked the “Delete All” button for the latest batch of 100 or so. They come in waves, too. No idea if it’s an indication of the popularity of my site, but I doubt it. I think tomorrow I will write two new utilities for my blog: 1) A script to automatically close comments for certain types of articles after a certain number of days. For instance, …

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Wow. One Year.

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On August 8th, 2005, at 3:43 AM CDT (-0600) I posted the first blog entry of my life and found something to do with my insomnia. It is now one year later. 155 written posts, 75 auto-posts from del.icio.us. That puts me writing three times a week, on average, which is way more than I ever dreamed I would. I love it. Thank you to everybody who reads what I write. Thank you to everybody who links to my site, commented, thought I am nuts, or added me to their feed reader. Every time I look at my stats I am flattered. Thanks all.

last.fm

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So I started this blog with the idea that I’d write about system administration topics. My forays into last.fm are another example of how I’ve been failing to write about what I started to write about. Maybe that’s okay. 🙂 Introspection aside, I added a page pointing to the last few things I’ve listened to. I didn’t want to put it on the main page because it takes a while to load. Last.fm is pretty damn cool as a data collector and sorter, and I’ve found some new music that way. They are getting more commercial which dulls the experience a little but it’s okay for now. Update 7/7/07: I took that page down. While we’re at it Yo La …

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Time Flies

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Ah, July. Sorry folks, I kinda took it easy during June. Lots of stuff was going on in my life, some bad stuff, some good stuff, a doctor figured out my knee, vacations, and a whole lot of baseball, at least for me. I can’t really compete with people who go to every Brewers home game, for instance, but three separate MLB parks in eight days is my record. And I only had one hot dog, and one beer. Weird month, that June. It was refreshing to step back from the technology for a little bit and recharge. It was also nice to have my left knee back, at least temporarily, from my patellar tendinitis. It’s funny to walk normally …

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Thanks VMTN

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Thanks for the links, VMTN! For those of you not familiar, the VMTN is the VMware Technology Network. VMware is a pretty cool company, all things considered, and the VMTN is their umbrella for all the community stuff. They’ve really done a great job fostering user groups and whatnot around their products. I know the Wisconsin VMUG is pretty sweet, and much of that is because of the excellent sales/support guys we’ve had over the last couple of years that really helped pull it all together. They mention searching the forums for LBA, and finding a lot of data about the problem. For me, I’m not a big forum guy, and in talking with a number of other VMware admins …

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VMware Workload, Environment, and I/O

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If there is one thing about the intarweb that really, really sets me off it’s when people reply privately to public inquiries. I usually see this in list archives where someone posted “Hey, I’m seeing a certain problem, has anyone else? Email me off the list.” Hell no. You posted your question publicly, let the response be public, too. Now I have the problem and I have no idea what the solution was, because you kept it private. Why the person replying to you replied privately is beyond me, too. The internet is a big conversation, you idiots, and you’re whispering. If you comment on a post here there are three things that might happen: 1) Nothing. I don’t have …

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Comments

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Okay, so I discovered today that in restructuring my email I wasn’t forwarding my mail right, and therefore missing some of your comments. Ack! Sorry folks. On the bright side I did cut my spam down by about 30%. dr_justice, I will answer your question about our VMware I/O problems in a post later today. Thanks for the words of solidarity, Mark! And lastly, Jon, doing the right thing seems to fall into one of two categories: – the right thing is hard to do. – the right thing is easy to do, but is indistinguishable from the wrong thing to do, so you can’t tell if what you’re doing is right or wrong. Update: there is another category for …

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Vacation

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Hey, sorry I’ve been quiet these last couple of weeks. I’ve been building up to a vacation, which I am on right now. I’m actually about to leave for San Diego, heading to Coachella this weekend. I so needed a vacation, especially after preparing for vacation. You ever notice that if you’re stressed out it just gets 500% worse right before you leave? Who’s your backup at work? What do they need to know? Finish that script. Charge your iPod. Find your camera. Do laundry. Pack. *sigh* I did finally do something about comment spam, having just discovered 221 comments in moderation. The “Did You Pass Math?” plugin is the winner. Can you add 2 and 3? 7 and 5? …

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Spam Sucks

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“There’s no such thing as tough. There’s trained and untrained.” – Denzel Washington’s character John Creasy, Man on Fire. I have 19 comments, all spam, waiting to be moderated. They have all arrived in the last 12 hours. Time to deal with this situation. A blog cannot operate without comments. It’s a conversation, even if I do sometimes talk a lot. Ten minutes in a room with me and a spammer will never send spam again. Ten minutes in a room with me and a script kiddie will never h4X0r any b0X3z again. Grrr. I’ve got all comments set to be moderated — I’ll build a way out of this tomorrow. In the meantime, sorry if your comments get delayed.

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