Sorry about the past week. I've been to Welsh Wales where connectivity is poor for me. (I like it this way.) And the usual text notifications to tell me all's not well didn't materialise, since we were up, though not enough.

We actually crashed over 4,000s time in the pace of a few days.

I didn't know till a customer called, and I was able to remotely fix the issue within a half hour.

I've just moved houses too, and with a new number, not everybody was able to call.

Mistakes and problems pile up on each other to give us such a long outage.

My new number is: 0800 756 6722
# Posted by Steve at 1/6/08; 12:05:49 PM
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Oops! A holiday and an outage

Poor old Black Country Villian. He's been attacked by a message spammer. Comment, member and trackback we've dealt with before. Message spam is a little different, since they need to join up, then post messages. It wasn't just him my site had a few too, and one of my school sites, they joined but backed off sending the nasty spam. Perhaps they had a conscience.

But, since when a new member joins, we get an email notification, and in there a link, so you can delete the member and all their messages, it was easy to wipe them off, see the very satisfying screen off BCV below. However, this didn't stop them re joining and posting another flurry.



So, I've created a script, as tight as the comment checking, which looks for nasty words and doesn't allow the posting of messages containing such pornographic words.

But, as I've come to realise, this isn't the end. They'll try again, and again. Each time, as I operate a zero tolerance of spam, I'll delete, and figure some heuristics to stop further exploitations.
# Posted by Steve at 21/2/07; 4:54:28 PM
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Another spam attack

I'm blown away! I've had my beloved N70 for 15 months, and I never knew that it could shoot such good quality. Previously it would only take one minute of low, low quality .3gp, which was meant for sending to other mobiles as a MMS.

The mp4 is:

• 15 frames per second
• 352 x 288 pixels

Which isn't bad at all. 30fps and 640 x 480px is obviously much better. Still, I've ordered a 2Gb RS MMS disk for it at £25 including postage. Now, I'll be able to put lots of music and record many, many magic moments from my children's lives.

Here's a sample of my two children Opening presents on Christmas Day 2. (Watch out my Mam's in her dressing gown ;-)

Next on the to-do list is to email these videos from my mobile, into my blog(s) and grab the first frame as a thumb. # Posted by Steve at 3/1/07; 6:49:51 PM
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N70 does mp4

Need to point to my other business Walsall School Blogs. My old, old blog too. And oddly some fashion advice. More updates coming from Christmas 2, the Aberdare version, as it happens, during the weekend.
# Posted by Steve at 29/12/06; 11:46:28 AM
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My school blog

BBC: Tea 'healthier' drink than water: "Drinking three or more cups of tea a day is as good for you as drinking plenty of water and may even have extra health benefits"

I'm a 4 or 5 cups a day man. I'm going to live forever.
# Posted by Steve at 26/8/06; 10:28:35 AM
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Tea drinker from hell

One or two of you, are getting trackback emails! These are primarily spammers getting through my defences. In this war there is going to be collateral damage. It's the nature of war.

If you do get a trackback spam email. Please ignore it and soldier on. You need take no other action.

The troops in the frontline will recieve a BCC and use it to block similar TB spams and destroy the ones that get through.
# Posted by Steve at 1/5/06; 12:31:24 PM
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Fear not

I'm going to add Google Adsense to these blogs. Starting with mine. Currently, I'm only showing Public Service Ads, but apparently, once Google's spidered this site, I'll be showing proper ads. I'll then add them to all Blogs on this machine.

Since we're serving about 20-30,000 pages a day, I should get some small monthly revenue to pay for the hosting and bandwidth. I hope none of the blogfootball crew will mind about this, I'm sure you won't

Have a look at the traffic, most read yesterday and most read all time. I'm going to be keeping a better eye on the traffic, much of it is spam in some form or another. I reckon 50% of traffic is spam. Unbelievable? Yes.

In days gone by, I was complaining that 50% of traffic was crawlers and spiders. Now, it's referal, trackback and comment spam. Mostly I send back a 403 to these, and they suck not a lot of bandwidth. But occasionally they get over my barbed wire, and apparent site traffic shoots up.
# Posted by Steve at 13/4/06; 2:57:45 PM
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Google and traffic

Router is out. So, no notifications. New IP address, means DNS updating issues for some. It'll clear in a few hours for those in hard to reach places.

I'll pop to the shops in the morning to get email and everything back to normal...

Friday night, not good fun chasing connectivity problems. At least the websites are up. Mutter, mutter.

I'm doing too much muttering, of late. My mutter detectors are flashing red.
# Posted by Steve at 25/3/06; 1:38:49 AM
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Not a beach

We ballsed-up. Didn't pay the bill on time. Outage for over 24 hours. Across all sites and communities. Businesses, schools, groups, individuals and the long enduring Aston Villa blogs. In apology I sent out this message:

Just a quick service note. I wouldn't send you any other type of messages through this mechanism. It's about your site(s) at:
http://www.what.ever/
Note: you may not be the site(s) owner but you are marked as a site(s)managing editor.

We were cut off for not paying our bill! Since 8.30am Tuesday Jan 31st till 1.15pm today, Wednesday 1st Feb 2006. We've been that busy... Stupid, stupid oversight. I thought he'd paid, he thought... We've had a transition in billing and payments and have now set up a proper standing order.
As a systems admin, I struggle daily to keep the services running. To lose the battle for a stupid, stupid reason breaks my heart. I'm gutted.. In my 6 year history in running this service we've never been off for so long.

My sincere apologies. You can be assured that we'll not let this happen again.

If you're not satisfied with my apology, as you know, you are free to download your entire site and move elsewhere. We wouldn't dream of locking you in to a service you were dissatisfied with.
Regards,
Steve Hooker

One of the nicest return messages, of the many, was from George, my oldest blogger, from over at The Wrekin's site. I think he's 86, there abouts anyways. Retired Headmaster and local raconteur.

Steve, As the locals used to say, when they teached 'em to talk proper like we done - 'Dunner thee chafe my mate, thee'st be alrite.' I have made a lot more mistakes than you have.
Longer to do it.
Absolution and remission granted.
George the Ancient.

And the majority of the messages back have been of the ilk...
Anyway now you have finally gone and fucked up you know how the rest of us feel all the time ;-)
greg
Greg's over at the Save the Ladywell Pool Campaign's site. Which did 1600 hits in one hour today! Well done chaps!

I gotta say that it's been so nice to feel appreciated. I became a little emotional, almost filled up with tears. Oh, and BTW: you're all out of the kitchen and behind the settee now, (don't tell the burglars). Funny when I'm sitting down watching the news, to feel so many people, so close. Makes me chuckle sometimes. Out loud.
# Posted by Steve at 1/2/06; 11:11:44 PM
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RE: Service note about your web site

# Posted by Steve at 18/1/06; 1:14:22 PM
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DynoRod

Still fighting the good fight against trackback spams. Now that 27,000 extra spaces from those spurious TBs are deleted and a few other tricks to lessen the size of of our databases our 20 minute on the hour saves are only taking two minutes.

I've also found and solved a few other blockages that would bring the server to its knees for 10 minutes at a time, sometimes longer. This makes me feel like a hero. OK an unsung hero. So I sing to myself, "you're a hero, you're a hero," and this make me happy.

But stupidly, and demonstrates the folly of working till 2 am in the
morning, I left on logging for one of my back up routines. This morning,
from 3.37am till 11 ish when I awoke and saw the problem, the server was
on its knees. Now, it's switch off speed should once more be tickety-boo
and remain like that for ever, or until something else happens ;-) # Posted by Steve at 17/1/06; 1:44:04 PM
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Good server, bad server

Out of the current total of 199,000 pages (messages, stories, news items) I've deleted 27,000 trackback spams. I've added a check too, before they come to see if we've had TB spam like it and if so, not let it in.

Once a day the machine trawls through looking for old TB spam that hasn't been found for categorised before.

Like comment spam and referer spam, I can't stop it all. But I can keep much of it away and ensure that they get no benefit from their evil scams in anycase. Thus, Google will ignore links that are in comments and trackbacks.

At least my databases aren't carrying too much extra weight now. Can't pinch an inch ;-)
# Posted by Steve at 15/1/06; 1:46:37 PM
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Battle of the bulge

First thing I want to say is FUCKERS!

I switched on an email notification for trackbacks, since I want to
start using it more for our school sites to build a community. Thus,
someone make a trackback, you get an email informing you of such, just
like comments and discussion group messages, providing you have your
preferences set thusly. Neat, thought I.

Until, a few hours later and I notice that I've several such emails. All
for pills of some extending or calming kind. So I look inside the email,
helpfully it tells me which post is being trackbacked. Odd. It was from
a post in 2003. Looking in that post I noticed 60 or more trackbacks,
all for pills and porn.

Damn, we've been hit by trackback spammers! And they've been doing it
for months.

Hurriedly I write an adjunct to the comment spam scripts which hourly
trolls for comment spam. Last night I let it rip and it found and
deleted 27,000 spam trackbacks! Phoooo!

Now, this isn't really my problem, it's Google's fault for ranking sites
higher if they've links to them on other sites. Google thinks that
they're better than the rest and shows them higher in results. Google,
last Summer, told us server admins how to help it sort these out. Now,
their links are not indexed by Google at all. But still they come.

So with that number of extra entries in my databases and that it will
continue growing like a cancer, it is becoming a problem. And now I'm
getting hundreds of spurious emails a day. 99.999% is crap.

Anyway, rant over and many spams deleted the next task will be stopping
the trackback spams coming in the first place. And deleting, globally,
those that do get through.

I'll be keeping a tight ship here. # Posted by Steve at 13/1/06; 10:35:05 AM
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Back tracking on the trackback spam

Over the past few days I've been fine tuning this server, blocking referal spam, and fighting attacks.

Would you believe that some 'body' in Dudley on a Telewest dial-up has been attacking us? Yip! They've been trying the fp30reg.dll exploit. [Ed: Wassat?] It's a known Microsoft Front page exploit, where they hit a file in your system folder and can take over your machine! [Ed: But we don't run Front Page] Exactly. [Ed: So there's no point?] Nope. However, the exploit means that they send a referer that's a meg or two big. Since usual referers are only a few bytes, this can gum up our works. Well, 'can' being the vital word here. Better to say sometimes, or even just the once. Yesterday in fact. But I think I've sorted them now.

I've also been fine tuning the way we sometimes get 'gummed up.' We usually quit and restart at 6,000 hits, as we can get slower after that. But I've also added some routines to quit/restart after memory goes too low and when there are too many con-current threads running. Effectively, this should give us quite a bit of faster serving time. Sure, we're off-line for 2 minutes between quit/restarts but when back we're running super fast. Over-all I think the user experience should be all that much better.

As I eat my own dog food, I'll be seeing how the beast runs over the coming days, monitoring and fine tuning as I go. # Posted by Steve at 5/1/06; 2:58:54 PM
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Speedy?

# Posted by Steve at 2/1/06; 3:13:01 PM
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Testing auto FTP of thumbs

# Posted by Steve at 31/12/05; 4:28:42 AM
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Comment [2] Trackback [0] Podcast enclosure  1K to download
Re: Breathless

# Posted by Steve at 10/12/05; 10:44:40 AM
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test

We're going on a spam hunt, We're gonna catch all of them, What a beautiful day, We're not scared. Oh, oh! A discussion group, Tens of thousands of messages. We can't over it, We can't go under it, We've gotta look throught it! Bang, bang, you're deleted!

And so, everytime I get a spam message from my sites into my in box, I see what they're trying to sell, or promote, and add that to my spam keys. When the hourly spam delator next runs... Chipper chopper in all sites, the vermin get deleted. Any spam, resend it to me will ya?

# Posted by Steve at 2/9/05; 9:05:42 AM
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We're going on a spam hunt

We've been hit. There's always a way through, it seems. And while I've been away in Welsh Wales, we've been hit bad.

Don't worry. Don't bother cleaning it up yourself. I'll figure a pattern and mass delete the buggers.

It reminds me of lice at school.
# Posted by Steve at 25/7/05; 8:05:06 PM
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Comment spam

John Palfrey : "One thing that can help at this stage in the expansion of the RSS space is further capital, deployed in a deliberate manner, to take the most promising of these ideas -- technologies in the family of tagging, RSS, OPML, search, social software, and related next-gen standards -- to market in a way that supports the emerging ecosystem. There are many such experimental technologies that could and should take the next steps forward."

I like these words he uses, participatory democracy and online conversation. He's talking about the blogosphere. (And 'he' is the executive director at Berkman Center at Harvard, he's raised $20m so far to invest in these RSS/OPML/tagging technologies.)

OK, so you all know, by now, about RSS. Next up is OPML. This is much simpler. It's lists and outlines. If you've ever used Powerpoint's outliner, where you can move whole swathes of text up and down in an outline, or perhaps you've used outliners for 'to-do-lists' you'll get it immediately. Outlines are great for collapsing whole chapters and moving them around. Great for organising 'things.'

But the new clever part, is that these lists, can be joined together over the 'net. So, say you've a list you maintain for Aston Villa matches, where you review each game as it happens. It lives on your machine, you edit it every Saturday. It would join in with lists maintained by other supporters of other teams. Essentially, there'd be live lists where everybody could join in on.

Me? I have an idea/dream where all my friends publish a list of years gone by. We could then merge parts where we overlap, essentially telliing each other's life story though our own and our friends' eyes. Of course all this would be published though RSS too, so we'd see what was happening to our joint stories, as it was written.
# Posted by Steve at 1/7/05; 11:52:41 AM
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$20 to $80m up for grabs

Apple: iTunes 4.9: "Easily find and subscribe to free podcasts from one of the largest directories on the web -- the iTunes Podcast Directory. Featuring over 3,000 free podcasts from favorites such as ABC News, Adam Curry, ESPN, KCRW and more..."

So, if you want to become a podcaster, and be in iTunes, you can with our blogs. (New fangled news item Manila sites only--easy to switch from olde world flip page Manila.) # Posted by Steve at 28/6/05; 9:28:29 PM
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Real world RSS

There's an outage at one of our data centres till tomorrow morning at 6 am. This means stylesheets are missing, images too off some sites, mine included. Thus, this site and some others will be slow.

Sorry. All will be well tomorrow.

[Update:] This only lasted till 12.45am Tuesday. A 3 ¾ hour part outage.
# Posted by Steve at 27/6/05; 8:24:29 PM
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Outage!

BBC: Microsoft makes web feeds easier: "IE7 will have an orange button on the toolbar which will light up when it detects a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed on a site."

They're going to be doing more with it too Now, will you look at your aggregator again?. (One application, I'd like is a list of all the weekend things to do in Shropshire. Carnivals, fates, car boots and so on.)

More here from eWeek. And "we want RSS everywhere" as Microsoft bets RSS is the next big thing. # Posted by Steve at 25/6/05; 6:29:33 AM
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Told you all RSS was the way

A few weeks ago, my specialist who's been looking at some facial pains [sic] of mine, told me, "the lump in your throat—we'll want to have a look at that. We'll put a camera down and maybe take a sample for biopsy."

Today, I'm out. Nothing to see, nothing to sample, clear.

Yesterday, I went in, after reading this page which seemed to open itself in my browser. The BBC, eh! I'd suspected as much, and all the facts seemed to fit Oesophageal cancer. A low 5 year survival of 6-8%. They gave me a general anaesthetic, then I had to wait 5 hours for one of the docs to say, "are you still here?"

One in three of us will get cancer. On the ward, I was, by a long way, the youngest with a few 60-70 year old cancer survivors who were now in with new types of cancer. I bet they thought the same as me, "I'm too young to die."

So, it's the healthy life for me. The occasional ciggie or joint are binned. Cocoa not tea nor coffee, and apple juice. Oily fish or shellfish at least every other day, keeping red meats low. 5 portions of fresh fruit and vegetables, lot's of red skinned ones—anything with high antioxidants. Running up The Wrekin. I'm low on alcohol anyway.

But above all, I'm going to be good to myself and mine. I'll live everyday like it was my last: enjoy yourself, it's later than you think...

For life is quite absurd,
And death's the final word.
You must always face the curtain wih a bow.
Forget about your sin,
Give the audience a grin.
Enjoy it, it's your last chance anyhow,
So...
 
Always look on the bright side of death
Just before you draw your termnal breath.

Life's a piece of shit,
When you look at it.
Life's a laugh, and death's a joke, it's true.
You'll see it's all a show,
Keep 'em laughing as you go,
Just remember that the last laugh is on you.
And...

I want to go like the Godfather, chasing a grandchild around the tomato plants.
# Posted by Steve at 22/6/05; 7:08:12 PM
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Freaked

Guardian: Google shares are a bubble waiting to pop: "Who in their right mind would buy shares in a company at a price equivalent to 25 times its annual sales?"

Alert! Alert! If you have some, and I believe only US citizens can, sell 'em now. # Posted by Steve at 10/6/05; 8:14:19 AM
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We saw it in titsUp.com in 2000

Kurma's Blog:: "Turmeric is not just a pretty face. In Chinese medicine, turmeric is known to stimulate circulation, resolve bruises and clots, strengthen the gall bladder, inhibit dangerous blood clotting, reduce liver toxins, act an anti-inflammatory, and help metabolise fats."

My bald headed clients in Oz, have a very nice blog going. As you know (maybe) they're veggie, and have a supper cool chef now blogging. My advice, add him to your aggregator. # Posted by Steve at 8/6/05; 10:12:03 AM
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Kurma's Blog:

Welcome to California: "Podcasting is the latest in on-the-go, on-demand technology bringing the people of California closer in touch with their Governor. With podcasting, you can listen to the Governor's radio programs whenever and wherever you choose."

You too can be like Arnie :-)
# Posted by Steve at 7/6/05; 9:58:24 AM
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Arnold Schwarzenegger begins podcasting

Shropshire Podcast June 2005: "Music from Julie Wareing, a Shrewsbury virtual sound scene tour, Shropshire accents and the beer survey."

As is usual, I'm promoting this podcast without actually listening to it myself. I'll do that this evening. Click the icon below.
# Posted by Steve at 6/6/05; 8:38:50 AM
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Shropshire Podcast June 2005

BBC: Scot's podcast airs tartan talent: "The podcast's format is straightforward. Mark plays three featured tunes with "a wee bit of chat" in between."

We can do this here you know! # Posted by Steve at 5/6/05; 1:37:16 PM
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We need a podcaster here

My bald headed clients in Oz have pointed me two good sites.

1.)  Cooking With Kurma: "Welcome to "Cooking with Kurma", brought to you by Kurma Dasa, one of the world's leading proponents of pure and natural vegetarian cuisine."
The above geezer has started a blog, and through this I found his static site. Maybe it's because it's breakfast time and all I've had is Shreadedwheat and those pictures are mouthwatering... Gotta get more into cooking! And...

2.) Update from the caregivers: "Last Saturday, Gurudeva agreed to allow devotees to perform soft kirtan both morning and evening, just outside of his room. The kirtans have been very, very sweet."
One of their main dudes, he's in the US, is on his way out. About to turn up his toes. Kick the bucket, or as devotees say, about the leave his body. Such a nicer way to think about it. They have a lot of MP3s to listen to. They are rather long, usually 2 hours, starting with a good old sing and chant, a sermon, and then another sing. I like all these, the singing and chanting is nice to work to in the background, and the moving story from BT Swami, about his forthcoming departure is gripping. Remember, we're all about to leave too.

And if you want to hear some really happy old singing of the mantra, see one of my old posts for links or just try this corker.
# Posted by Steve at 2/6/05; 9:44:26 AM
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Two Krsna sites