Thanks Legion for the bug report. This was a new feature created for the school weblogs and shouldn't have had any effect on other sites.
It did.
It doesn't now.
# Posted by Steve at 4/11/06; 10:54:49 PM
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Password bug fixed

From Friday last week, I'd lost my personal computer. My hall.dll, boot.ini and file structure went knackered. Thus, I've lost some email.

Somebody somewhere asked if I had some logs for a referer they'd received. I do. But I don't know who you are, can you re-ask? And tell me as precisely as you can when the referer happened, to the day, give or take one. I'll then send you the raw logs—which is the best I can do.
# Posted by Steve at 18/10/06; 11:31:40 AM
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Somebody somewhere

Wired: Spam + Blogs = Trouble: "Splogs are the latest thing in online scams and they could smother the Internet."

The splogosphere, explained.

Via Spamhuntress.
# Posted by Steve at 15/9/06; 7:28:20 PM
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Not just my paranoia

I went away Friday 4.00pm. Around 8pm the mail server stopped and needed an OK click. This brought the webserver down, an hour or so later.

Home from Wales 9.00pm Sunday, and got it all working again.

I've got a once every 60 days email security do-dah, I should have brought foward the OK a few hours. Sigh.

I should have checked that my post about the overflow I sent Friday from my mobile was posted. But switched off receiving emails to my phone for the weekend. I had, then, a weekend off, and wasn't concerned enough. Bad of me.

Good of me to read the newspapers. To play ugeo cards (?) with Brad, have food with my folks, go see the horses in the County Park--twice. Watch telly. Figure and install a CCTV system for my dad. Time goes so quick. (Later: Brad's got a rare one Dark Neos, worth $38!!! eBay's cheaper though.)

If this happens again can someone txt me 07886 301 767. "Oy! Sever's down." Wake me from a slumber.
# Posted by Steve at 10/9/06; 10:24:07 PM
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Outage for the weekend

BBC Spammers manipulate stock markets: "The team found that a spammer who bought shares the day before starting an e-mail campaign and then sold them the day after could make a return on his or her investment of 4.9%."

# Posted by Steve at 26/8/06; 10:18:31 AM
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Something to try at home

WebProWorld AdSense Bad For Your Business: "To make a site work good with AdSense or Overture the first step is in building a site that is totally useless or close to it."

I'm not making much money with the Adsense here. There's a lot of truth in this discussion. Certainly, I've been caught landing on a crap site and clicking an ad to get out of there. And I've never, ever bought anything from an ad click through. I can't see web ads continuing. The bubble will burst.
# Posted by Steve at 7/8/06; 8:52:11 AM
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The slippery slope

Spamhuntress : Inventive spams: "Comment spammers are getting more and more inventive. The "quality" of the spams have gone up recently.

Any time you receive a comment that seems on topic, or seems personal, you need to check the link included. If it's spammy or commercial in nature, chances are, it's spam. Don't approve it."

Most likely I'llcatch it an delete it. But if I don't within a day or two, delete it yourself. Go to your discussion group view, look for the comment and chipper chopper... Open the discussion group view of the item you wish to delete, at the foot of the page there's an admin box, there, delete this item?

And watch out for Russian girls—they're geezers after your money. # Posted by Steve at 7/8/06; 8:46:19 AM
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Be careful out there

Yes, we had 'connectivity issues' yesterday and today. Yesterday, late afternnoon, we were hit hard by a referral spammer. Now, these things come form different IPs, different countries, but carry all the same referers. In actuality, it's one person, sending out instructions to drone or zombie machines they've taken over. Anyway, we were hit hard. I came home wanted to do something on my site, saw I couldn't, so in the famous server dude words of, "fuck it!" Crash restarted.

This lead to a bit of corruption in one of my roots, the config.manila.stats.refer.steveswar to be precise. Come the early hours of the morning, when I do root compaction to clear crap, the damn thing hung.

When I awoke Sunday, saw the problem, tracked it down, jettisoned the erroneous table and restarted, we'd been down for some six hours. From 4.00am till 10.00am approx.

Apparently it's a pair of Polish brothers who are responsible to most referral spam. (I was going to link to back up that claim, but 'Spam Huntress' is suffering a Denial of Service attack, probably from the very same Poles. So I can't link deep into her site—see the screen shot. Stick your head too far up beyond the parapet, and they'll come after you.)

# Posted by Steve at 9/7/06; 5:19:57 PM
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Damned Poles

I've been spending more time on my spam defences. There's a ton of info here, including IPs, names, addresses and  a new idea for me: headers. I hadn't realised that spammers sometimes send unique headers in their requests.

To add to my list of referal, comment, member, and trackback spammers, I need to add spam bots!

List of bad bots: "A short list of bad spiders and nasty bots." Except that it isn't short! And it isn't available as a file to download, so I'm going to have to spider it myself. Kill them Chinese bots :-)

List of user agents of bad bots: "Some of these robots are designed to copy entire web sites, some to harvest email addresses." Again a nice long list, but no download. Still dead handy, thanks dude. We're safe from email harvesters here.

Traps for bad bots, crawlers and spiders: Some nice explanations of traps. No, not saucers full of beer, or yogurt pots with honey in.

# Posted by Steve at 27/4/06; 4:08:40 PM
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Bad bots, crawlers and spiders

# Posted by Steve at 27/7/05; 3:11:42 PM
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Killing comment spam

Photoshop and crashing nightmares! From yesterday afternoon, I was chasing my tail. I had so many crashes, getting so far in a project only to have the Photoshop doc refuse to open—corrupted. I struggled on, listening to XPs complains about the video card/driver, reinstalling the driver, switching cards, no joy. Here's some tips I found below as footsteps in the snow for others.

Photoshop - Photoshop Crash in XP: "This last Monday I called Adobe. Turns out the Adobe tech had me go into my Documents and Settings, dennis, Local Settings, Temp folder and empty it. It had over 65,000 files in it. Instantly all returned to normal." This seems to be the main cure for me. My temp folder was 22 gigs worth of 100 or so of Photoshop temp files. Plenty of small stuff too, all that could be deleted has been. Sure this is the cure, 22 gigs of rubbish is no good!

Open Tech Support Community - Win XP Computer Crashing Randomly: "Check to see if your CPU/motherboard temperatures are really high, and see if your voltages stay in the +5%/-5% range. Finally, I'd suggest that you "simplify" your hardware configuration by removing/disabling as many unnecessary devices as possible, such as a network card/modem and sound card. Also, make sure that the inside of your machine is as dust-free as possible like redwench suggested. Lots of dust could equal lots of crashes, possibly because your CPU is overheating due to a buildup on the heatsink/CPU fan." Having never, ever, ever, dusted nor vacuumed a computer, I worried that this could be true. Running the Hardware Sensors Monitor, it shows my motherboard temperature to be 67° C!! I took the cover off and now it's down to 54°, still in the red. I will clean and dust, later. But still I think it was the huge temp folder. Still, as many crashes happened when I wasn't even running Photoshop...

Photoshop for Windows - PS Crashing XP: "I narrowed it down. My Photoshop7 crashes Windows XP down to reboot when I use the Lasso tool and add or substract. First it runs stable for weeks, and increasingly it begins to crash down after shorter periods, at the end a few seconds after I choose the Lasso tool." This was exactly my problem. I'd pull out the lasso and... But my crashes were everywhere, anywhere, not just Photoshop. The XP errors were mainly video card/driver related, but updating and swapping these about were not the answer.

AntiCrash: the most powerful anti-crash tool for PC. AntiCrash can intercept and fix up to 95.8% crashes, errors, freezes and blue screens. When a crash occurs, AntiCrash fixes it automatically; you have nothing to do! I've installed this, but since deleting the rubbish from the temp folder, not had cause to fall into it—yet.
# Posted by Steve at 1/7/05; 9:21:41 AM
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Photoshop Crash in XP
Photoshop repeated crashes in XP with lasso tool
Blue screen video drivers and XP

After one comment from Australia that I had the g-g-gaps again, I spent all day yesterday, and when I say ALL DAY I mean all bloody day from 10 am till after midnight fixing my dropped floats.

Dealing with complex stylesheets is one thing, dealing with many complex stylesheets is another, dealing with the inconsistencies in browsers, is, hell!

Still, all fixed now, no more g-g-gaps.
# Posted by Steve at 18/5/05; 3:24:05 PM
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Stylesheet hell

Gak! Three power cuts today so far! Started at 11am keeping us off air till now.

According to the Shropshire Star, it was down in Ironbridge. Some lines started to bow and the pulled the switch. The outage wasn't just here in Dawley, but throughout Shropshire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire.

That's OK then, I always feel vindicated when I can get a link.
# Posted by Steve at 9/5/05; 1:21:22 PM
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Power failures

Almighty Internet, father of our ISP, maker of all things cyber, servers for all men; we acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us. We do earnestly repent, and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; the remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable. Have mercy upon us, have mercy upon us, most merciful internet; for thy ISP and our blog's sake, forgive us all that is past; and grant that we may ever hereafter serve our surfers and please them in newness of bloggings, to the honor and glory of thy blog; through blogs our bloggings. Awwww-gawd.

There, that should do it. Peace and quiet today, huh ;-)
# Posted by Steve at 12/4/05; 8:22:51 AM
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One last trick

Telewest are reporting another problem, this time it's Midlands wide. From 1.30pm till 6.30pm we were off today, Monday. I hate Mondays.
# Posted by Steve at 11/4/05; 5:54:42 PM
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Mutter mutter mutter

I can't go a way for a weekend without trouble? There was some serious outage over the time I was away. Once on Friday, which was cleared when I called my ex to give it a tickle, and once on Sunday, when I got back. I couldn't quite make out the problem, since the Frontier screen wasn't responding, and within a few clicks the dialog box saying Frontier had crashed, blah blah came up and was dismissed my my auto dismissers...

I don't know why it hung, and I don't know why my auto stuff didn't/couldn't do their stuff. Looks like I'll have to wait till it happens again and try and figure it from there.

At least I'm not going away again for a while.
# Posted by Steve at 10/4/05; 8:47:43 PM
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Bloody computers

We are! Telewest outage all over Telford. Even our TVs were off. From about 8pm, till 11.30pm. Nothing too exciting. PIA sure. I began this service in early 2000 BTW, the Villa blogs in July of that year. Over the last 5 years, we've had better outage explainations. The best, I think, was in California, in 2002. 12 hours while the L.A. Police chased a robber, who had our server, and several others and various goodies in the boot of their getaway car. That's what I was told. I'll dig out the link later. We joked about bullet holes, but it was OK.

I'll dig out tonight's service report link later too, off the Telewest site, they're usually pretty good like that.

To cap it, today, over half our traffic has been pointless referal spam. Half. Coming in at 5 per second, from various IPs, can't catch them with that, can with key words in their domain names, but these vary so much too. If you check your referals, only editors can see them now, you'll see some of the weird and wonderful names they use to disguise themselves.

It's been a bumpy road sometimes, I'll keep up the good fight and find another ISP somehow, good luck, chaps. It's a horror out there ;-)))

  # Posted by Steve at 7/4/05; 10:36:32 PM
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Are we back?

It seems as though my tricks for killing comment spam have worked, the servers I maintain are not letting any more through, though I see this as only temporary, as eggs is eggs, the buggers will eventually figure it and I'll need to plug that hole too.

But the referer spam is something else. Really something else. At times it can be really heavy, most I can bat away before they get deeper in an get to a page, but some are getting through. So, I've hidden all referer pages behind a #security script that only allows editors viewable access.

This won't stop them but hopefullly will further dis-incentivise them to spam further. I know they check these pages to see if their evil work has made it through. Now, they'll not know.

I already hide the refererpage from search engines, so they don't index it anyway, and the rel=nofollow is supposed to stop the links being indexed as well, but still they come.

Currently, I do a check on every referer to see if it has daft words like (dash)viagra or (dash)adult in them, but these change so often it's a daily job just keeping up.

I wish they wouldn't bother, they get no benefit. But for them and their robots it's no bother to do.

[Later:] Legion tells me of porn sites in his referers. Phhht! Where did they come from? I'm on to them and adding them to our checks.
# Posted by Steve at 7/4/05; 9:38:05 AM
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The Eastern Front

I popped off to Stoke's Waterworld for the afternoon with the kids, while I was away an internal DNS problem reared its ugly head at approx 2.30pm. Not till 6.30pm were we back on line.
# Posted by Steve at 5/4/05; 5:44:33 PM
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Minor outage

I don't know how I did it. I just did what I did again and again. First I was only getting windows sounds, then after quit and restarting iTunes once more I have music.

4 hours!

Computers really need to be much easier, much more reliable. And no, this isn't a Windows thing, I've had similar woes with Macs. Most people when they fuck up, would throw the damned thing out and get another one. I was getting pretty close to this myself, and I'm supposed to be a techie, a geek.

Right a few more files to find and I'll put the beast back together and push it far under the desk, in the darkest corner, where no one can see it, where it can see no one. Till it says sorry.
# Posted by Steve at 28/3/05; 5:18:50 PM
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We have sounds!

"To play XviD movies you first need to install the XviD codec on your computer."

What I don't get is why this doesn't come with XP nor XP SP2. I guess it's all a matter of licences. I need this to play my DVD quality videos off my digicam. No sound though. Still woes with the hard disk crash. Installed and reinstalled my sound card driver—silence :-(

Why do 'puters have to be so hard?
# Posted by Steve at 28/3/05; 4:46:03 PM
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XviD Codec v1.0.3 - XviD Movies

Being a devoted Dad, I take copious numbers of pix when I get going. And here I'm about to upload loads from Saturday's visit to Hoo Farm. Shown below is the 200 pixel folder, the 150 is similarly full. All images are titled by naming the file.



But when I upload these as thumbs, my script will look in each folder, the 100 first, then 150, 200 and so on. Once in the folder it'll find the first by alphabetical odering. This would give me a jumble of thumbs, starting at the smallest going to the largest and run alphabetically. I'd need to reorder by time—by hand! Yeuch! That's something a computer should do.

So, I'll need to add this to the script, it'll upload them as it finds them, but it'll store the creation date from the camera's EXIF XML stored in each image. Then when it builds the final gallery...
# Posted by Steve at 21/3/05; 11:36:16 AM
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A bug to fix in the power thumber

I've always had this in the back of my mind and last night I showed my paint job visuals to my cohort, "I like it, it looks brilliant, but on another car."

Mine's too old. Too scutty.

I had to agree. I think it would do more bad than good and will stick to the 12,000 leaflets for the time being. Later, when I can wangle some newer cars...
# Posted by Steve at 11/3/05; 10:58:22 AM
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The wrong car

# Posted by Steve at 10/3/05; 10:14:32 AM
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Something new, something good

I'm still waiting for my bleedin' camera! I bought it two weeks10 days ago, today the geezers gone ship it, from Germany. This is the worst service I've ever found on eBay. His email is only via eBay and takes ages to respond—up to 48 hours. And I've no German, he has a little English so I've been using Bable Fish to understand what he's saying and translate my short notes to him. If he'd used payPal, there would be no sweat. No need for the crap I've had these past 10 days.


# Posted by Steve at 18/2/05; 11:03:51 PM
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Where's my MPEG4 DVD quality camera?

We're off. We've waited months and months. And since Telewest can't afford to pay for Sponge Bob any more, we're really, really looking forward to seeing him again.


# Posted by Steve at 11/2/05; 2:35:45 PM
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Comment [0] Trackback [0] Podcast enclosure  651K to download
Sponge Bob

Ok, easy for me. Since I know how to do it and, funnily enough, I've a BA (Hons) in graphic design. I try to remember that when I'm knee deep in computer code. Anyway, this is one that I'm cooking for now, and yes, it will too be editable through a web page for mortals.

# Posted by Steve at 2/2/05; 10:24:46 PM
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Told you it was easy

# Posted by Steve at 1/2/05; 8:56:22 PM
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Curing Float Drops and Wraps

# Posted by Steve at 23/1/05; 12:15:45 PM
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Nofollow May Be a Rank Solution

# Posted by Steve at 18/1/05; 8:30:35 PM
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Google's Aging Delay for New Sites