aubreyturner.org

Although I’ve not had a lot of time for posting, I’m still having to fiddle behind the scenes to keep this site free of spam. 

Every couple of days some gomer with a zombie farm hits the old Movable Type installation with a bunch of poker trackback spams.  They don’t last any longer than it takes for me to smite them with MT Blacklist, but it’s still annoying to deal with.

However, this morning I noticed a new and more insidious form of comment spam.  Someone hit the EE weblog with comments that included links to weird spamlike Blogspot domains, which included numbers in the names.  Given the way EE’s Blacklist works, these don’t seem to get filtered, even if I add the domains to the Blacklist.  I’m not sure why.  Luckily there weren’t many of them and I deleted them within minutes of them being added.  I did find it slightly ironic, however, that one of the entries that got hit was about Spamming Bastards.

The other thing that seems to show up a lot lately are referral spams.  I’ve shut down most of them by blacklisting their common keywords and domains, but I discovered an ingenious new form of referral spam today.  Instead of directly putting their domain into the referral (which was getting them blacklisted or shut down) they put a Google search with their keywords in there.  This way it makes it look like someone landed on my weblog using those search terms.  Anyone hitting my referral page will see those search terms, and if they click on the referrer will land on a Google search page that highlights the spammer’s sites.  It’s an indirect Googleback referrer spam. 

I’ve removed them by blocking their keywords (somehow I don’t see a legitimate need for me to get referrals for “trixieteen” or similar nonsense). 

I’m going to pass on an email from TSRA with regards to donations for Mark Wilson.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I have had numerous requests about funds or memorials in support of Mark Wilson, the CHL holder who was killed in Tyler during the recent courthouse shooting.  Mark’s family has requested that any donations be made to the following charity:

Children’s Village
P.O. Box 6564
Tyler, Texas
75711
903-592-3421

Jim Dark
Executive Director
TSRA

Updated 3/15/2005: Change zip code from 75701 to 75711.

I’ve noticed that blue LEDs have become quite popular with electronics manufacturers, and especially in computer components these days. 

During my last cleaning I was advised by the hygienist to start using an electric toothbrush.  The braces give me fits trying to get everything out with regular brushing.  She gave advice on a couple of brands, one of which was Oral-B (Braun).  So I went out and acquired an 8850 DLX, mounted it on the wall in my bathroom, and plugged it in. 

The first thing I noticed was that it’s inductively charged.  I thought this was an ingenious solution to dealing with the problem of getting power to a unit that needs to be watertight, since it didn’t require any external electrical contacts.

Anyhow, the thing has a blue LED on the front that flashes while charging and stays on once it’s charged.  The problem is that the thing is so bright that the flashes illuminate my bedroom if I leave the door to the bathroom open.  I suppose I could just close the door, but I’ve gotten so used to having it open that doing otherwise doesn’t feel right (you get used to a certain “feel” to the room at night).

I suppose my point in all this is that blue LEDs are much brighter than the old red and green ones, to the point of being capable of lighting up a room.  I wish the manufacturers would take this into account and dim them a bit in the future.

Perhaps it’s time for me to find a new bank.  This kind of crap pisses me off.

Recently, JPMorgan Chase completed extensive research examining our company’s history for any links to slavery to meet a commitment to the city of Chicago. Today, we are reporting that this research found that between 1831 and 1865 two of our predecessor banks – Citizens Bank and Canal Bank in Louisiana – accepted approximately 13,000 enslaved individuals as collateral on loans and took ownership of approximately 1,250 of them when the plantation owners defaulted on the loans.

We all know slavery existed in our country, but it is quite different to see how our history and the institution of slavery were intertwined. Slavery was tragically ingrained in American society, but that is no excuse.

We apologize to the American public, and particularly to African-Americans, for the role that Citizens Bank and Canal Bank played during that period.

Although we cannot change the past, we are committed to learning from and emerging stronger because of it. Since these events took place in Louisiana, we are establishing a $5 million college scholarship program for students living in Louisiana.

Not only are they apologizing for something done by a completely different company, they’ve been guilted into coughing up $5 million in appeasement money.  If it’d been me, I’d have told them to ‘sod off’ (if I was feeling polite).

I started off with Bank One, which was assimilated into the JP Morgan Chase collective recently.  Of course, I wouldn’t doubt that Bank One would have done the same thing.

It’s tempting to ditch them over this, but it’s such a pain the ass to change banks.

A common problem faced by both Google and bloggers is that sometimes a post will unexpectedly become the number one link for a common search term, leading a gaggle of unsuspecting web users to the bloggers site.

It is certainly possible for a website to determine that a user landed there via a search engine, since the referrer URL contains the search terms and the URL of the search engine.  In fact, there is already a plugin for Expression Engine that examines the referrer field to highlight search terms in the text of the page.  It occurred to me that this could potentially be modified to redirect the user to an intermediate page for certain posts.  This page would warn the user that they had landed on a private weblog and give them the option of returning to Google or going on to the actual article.

The behavior of the plugin could be controlled through the addition of a new flag to the set of fields stored for each weblog entry.  If someone really wanted to do it nicely, a second field could be added that contained custom text to be displayed on the intermediate page for that specific post. 

I think of it as sort of like shields for your weblog.

If I don’t discover that someone has already done so, I may code up something like this when I get the time (which may be some time next winter the way things are going right now).

I decided to do my taxes this afternoon to get it out of the way.  Sometimes, especially on Sundays, I keep Discovery Channel or the History Channel on as mildly interesting background noise.  The History Channel was running a show on the mob and it struck me that the reason the government comes down so hard on them is that they don’t like the competition with regards to shakedown rackets. 

Anyhow, another thing that caught my attention was the selection of commercials that they were running.  I had noticed this last Sunday during MythBusters on Discovery, and it struck me again today.  It seems like running ads for Levitra and Cialis during Sunday afternoon on Discovery Channel and the History Channel is inappropriate at best.  I’ve always seen Discovery and the History Channel as being safe for kids.  If I had kids I’d hate to have to explain the concept of “erectile quality.”  For that matter, who would have ever thought that we’d even find that phrase outside of a medical study or textbook?

I was wondering why a year-old post I did on the Ft. Worth Zoo had suddenly started attracting attention from anti-gun trolls, and now I know why.  It seems I’m the number one search result on Google for the terms Ft Worth Zoo Address.

I suppose it’s time to turn off comments on that post, as I have little use for being called a “moron” by people who can’t spell or punctuate.

In my spare time (such as it is), I’ve been attempting to build and install a J2EE application server on a Linux system.  My intention is to use it for testing and some other development activities when the new project gets rolling (we’re in that interim phase between submission of the cost/timeline and being given the go-ahead to get started on development). 

I built an AMD Athlon 64 system and put SuSE 9.2 professional on it.  Now my office is already full of hardware, and it’s on the verge of being uncoolable in the summer.  So I decided I needed to put this new system somewhere else.  With all the fans it’s pretty noisy, so I decided to put it in the guest room.  It’s not used often, and if it’s being used then I can shut the system down.

Having decided on the placement, that left the issue of getting network access.  I didn’t want to hard-wire an Ethernet port in there, and I definitely didn’t want wires strewn across the floor between there and the office, which left me with the wireless option.  Wireless on Linux is something of a difficult area, though, since most chipset makers won’t release either a driver or the specs to create a driver.  However, Linux geeks don’t give up easily, so there are various reverse-engineered drivers available.  And for those cards that won’t easily give up their secrets for reverse-engineering, someone created a handy hack called ‘ndiswrapper’, which lets you load the Windows driver in Linux.  I did some research on the various sites and decided on a Linksys USB 802.11g adapter, since it showed support through ndiswrapper.

After installing SuSE, I noticed that the adapter wasn’t seen automatically, which was to be expected.  So I tried ndiswrapper with the Win32 driver.  It reported that it couldn’t see the hardware, which was sort of an inauspicious start.  Some research showed that a newer version of ndiswrapper corrected this problem, so I downloaded the package, installed the kernel sources, and built a new ndiswrapper.  That went well, and ndiswrapper reported that the driver had been installed and the hardware was present.

Then I ran into the 64-bit wall.  The driver wouldn’t load, since I was running a 64-bit system and the driver was 32-bit.  Some checking showed that there are very few 64-bit Windows wireless drivers, and to use ndiswrapper on my system I’d need one of those.  I briefly considered trying to run the system with the 32-bit kernel, but the SuSE installer was too smart for me.  There is no option (at least that I could find) to override the automatic architecture detection in the installer.  So I was stuck with 64-bit (even though the AMD64 architecture allows full backwards compatibility with 32-bit code).

A little more research into the area of 64-bit Linux with wireless showed that the solution was to find an adapter that used one of the chipsets that had a “native” Linux driver.  Some more research on drivers and chipsets allowed me to make a list of potential PCI cards to use and a quick trip to Staples yielded a NetGear WG311TNA PCI card.  I popped the card in, booted up, and SuSE automatically found the new card and let me configure it.  After all that fiddling, it was almost a letdown for it to be that simple. 

Despite having been out for over a year, I suppose 64-bit processors in the PC world are still pretty new.  What’s bad is that I didn’t even think about 64-bit being an issue.  Oh well, they don’t call it the “bleeding edge” for nothing.  If nothing else, I can serve as an example to others of what not to do.

I was listening to the radio this morning as I was getting ready and I heard an old Police song that reminded of one of my favorite song lines:

“We have to shout above the din of our rice krispies / we can’t hear anything at all”

Not sure why this line stuck with me, but I find it amusing.  If anyone is still reading this drivel after my semi-hiatus, feel free to chime in with your own favorites in the comments.

As I feared, this week’s work is proceeding at last week’s pace, the problem being that the customer has 6 or 7 projects in the pipeline and suddenly wants them all done at once…

Anyhow, I spent a few minutes at lunch watching the noon news on WFAA and finally heard some excerpts from the Bush tapes.  Given the initial hype by the media, I suspect that the actual tapes have got to be something of a disappointment to them.  As anyone who knows me knows, I’m not any sort of fan of George W Bush.  However, I didn’t hear anything damning in there.  I heard a guy who’s concerned about setting an example and not having people make the same mistakes he did.  No matter how much I disagree with the War on (Some) Drugs™, I don’t disagree that using drugs is stupid.  It seems that President Bush knows this from personal experience.  So what’s the big scoop here?