kaioa.com

Spaaaaaam

Usually spam comments are easy to detect. It's either some canned text (which is used everywhere) or a pile of quickly assembled semi-nonsense sentences generated by a little script (or even a cheap chat AI). That stuff is very easy to identify since it's either blatantly obvious, pure garbage, or completely off-topic.

Just a few minutes ago something different slipped through the recently installed filter. At first glance it looked pretty innocent:

Stealthy spam (in light not-published-yet-pink)

I got a lot of comment spam recently. Since comments are moderated here for legal reasons, no one ever noticed. But boy it was annoying. By the looks of it it was some botnet. Random IPs spread across the world, posting the same kind of rank pushing junk over and over again.

It was some new kind of spam using Google Notebook as shell site. That is they spam links to a specific notebook page which in turn links to their page(s). The reason for doing so is twofold: a) Google has a high rank (no matter which search engine you use) and b) the ranking goes up if it's referenced from a high ranked site. So, it's basically the same old deal just with a booster on top.

In order to get rid of this nuisance I wrote a small module, which hopefully shouldn't get in your way. While there are several 3rd party anti spam modules, I decided to write a custom solution because they usually last longer. A single website simply isn't worth the hassle.

Mmm... crispy sectors

It's toast

The weekend started with a premonition. Well, maybe "bad omen" is more accurate. Some rather bad SQL errors showed up, but they were sorted out quickly. The next day the site disappeared. "403 - forbidden", it said. That's just great. Did I already mention that I'm amazingly unlucky these days?

Page 403s, FTP says the password is wrong, but email works. So, I waited for the phone support hours to start. Gee. Fast forward about an hour and I got some techy to talk to. Apparently some HDD failed, it got replaced, some files were wiped (well, all of them - except for some now empty directories), and some access rights were nuked as well.

*plop* :'(

I'm actually not dead

Just a bit unlucky. Twice in a row. Being without net access for about 2 weeks is somewhat akin to a new experience. I can't really remember how I did things before the internet. Almost everything I do requires a working connection. I need it for documentation, looking up synonyms/words, downloading/updating libraries/frameworks/compilers, bouncing ideas around, etc.

Everything seems to depend on it. Heck, I couldn't even make phone calls. Maybe I should get one of those annoying mobile phones. Meh.

Not everything was bad though. Having a few days without any PC running wasn't all that bad. I also got around playing some games. No More Heroes (Wii) and God of War 2 (PS2) were actually pretty entertaining. So, I'll dive into that for now.

Just finished upgrading this site. The upgrade went well on my test server and fortunately it also went well here. There was some odd issue with phpMyAdmin's backup though. Everything is UTF-8, nevertheless the dump started with the following line:

CREATE DATABASE `foo` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET latin1 COLLATE latin1_swedish_ci;

Swedish? Well, "latin1" was already totally off, but that? Uhm.

Well, it was good for a laugh. Fortunately the dump itself was still UTF-8 encoded and everything was fine - after getting rid of that really weird line, that is.

About 2 weeks ago my old (really old) machine fell apart and I had to order a new one. Without the net access I had so much time on my hands. It's magic. Heh.

Finally I got around playing some games and watch some DVDs. God of War (PS2) and Zelda:TP (Wii) were lots of fun. A less well known, but very entertaining title was Odin Sphere 『オーディンスフィア』 (PS2). It's somewhat of a successor to (the even less known) Princess Crown 『プリンセスクラウン』 (Saturn/PSP). Genre wise I would call it a 2D fantasy action RPG where the action is delivered in some side scrolling beat'em up fashion.

Odin Sphere features hours of excellent voice acting (I'm not sure about the english VOs tho), and a very distinctive art style. It's really something different. The animations are partially done via some 2D bone system for example. There are vibrant colors all over the place. It looks beautiful and surreal at the same time. Highly recommended, but be warned - it's a long game. It takes at least 80 hours to finish it.

I checked out the Video module for Drupal, but it doesn't really look like what I need. I prefer a 1:1 mapping for screencasts, which allows you to read menus and dialogs easily. Youtube doesn't really cut it. It's too small and the visual quality is pretty poor.

With the Video module I can only embed videos directly into the website, which isn't all that feasible since the videos will have rather big dimensions, which in turn may break the layout (or any future layouts). You can of course work around that with custom node types, which use a different theme. But that's way too fiddly.

The alternative? Grabbing a decent FLV player (I picked flowplayer), 21 lines of php and 3 lines of .htaccess. And that's it. Well, it's not that user friendly. I have to upload the FLVs plus some configuration file for each video manually via FTP, but I'm fine with that. The creation of a really short screencast with a length of 2-3 minutes takes already about 2-4 hours. One extra minute of fiddling won't hurt much. ;)

After almost 2 years I took the IotD gallery off the web. Leaving it there was simply too risky (from a security standpoint) and updating it was too troublesome, because I used modified modules. It simply wasn't worth it anymore, I'm afraid.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

It's time to get things rolling! :)