Oh. My. Good. God. Today is a strange day.

As people might know, I like looking at my web server stats. I was just having a quick check this morning, I always like to check the referrers, the most common search terms and the most popular files.

Today I proudly announce that I am top on Google for Poo Pictures. What the hell is going on? Here is the evidence:

While I was busy laughing at my questionable status amongst poo lovers in the world, I happened to notice the Ebay sponsored ad in the right hand column.

I thank you and goodnight 🙂

OK so I upgraded to WordPress 2.0. Cool. I also included the new Spam Karma 2.1 and Referrer Karma 2.2. I still have some wrinkles to iron out, but it should be good. The point of me telling you this is to let you know that if you get any weird messages about being a referrer spammer then you should let me know and I’ll whitelist your domain or the domain you came from.

Well the upgrade process wasn’t quite smooth. I did a fresh install last night on my own machine to see if it all hung together correctly, including whether the Rubric theme for WordPress 1.5.x worked on 2.0 and it all went great. So today I set about upgrading. I backed up my files, backed up my database and then went ahead with the upgrade. What did I get? A blank page. Ulp. Deleted the live system, deleted the db and then reinstalled my old db and my old files. Checked everything, all cool. Back as we were. So I double-checked the upgrade instructions and upgraded again, same result – blank front page.

I was just about to curse something and start again with just a plain WP2.0 and then add in Spam Karma, Referrer Karma and Rubric to see what was cauing the problem, but then I got bored and went off for a few hours.

When I came back, I decided to see if I could view the admin pages and low and behold, by blindly typing in the admin page address I could see the admin pages. That meant it wasn’t all bad. I decided to check whether the theme was installed properly and it seemed to be but I selected it as the theme again to make sure. Checked the front page. Bingo. Upgrade done. I guess my db was incorrectly referencing the theme or something.

I just had a few other bits and pieces left to sort out with Spam Karma and Referrer Karma and then it was done. I still have to get Referrer Karma to use the Spam Karma blacklist and sort out a few other things and then I’m done altogether.

I’ve watched a few films recently and so I thought I would share them with you, you lucky, lucky people.

The Producers

When I first saw this on the TV adverts, I thought it would be shit and then the idea started to grow on me so I went to see it. In a word – don’t. It irritated me so much that I walked out before the end of the second scene – the first scene after the intro and according to Radio 1 the day after, it seems I’m not the only one. It’s horrible, screechy and hideously over-acted to the point where it’s just too much and it’s worse than bad theatre. I just hated it. It’s true however that I don’t like musicals anyway and it never occurred to me that this was one, but it was just irritating.

Just Friends

I sneaked into this after walking out of the The Producers, as it was the only film still playing at that time, in fact it still hadn’t started so we saw the whole thing. If you like that American Pie, Road Trip and Without a Paddle kind of American high-school comedy then you’ll like this, it made me laugh hysterically in places. It also features the fabulous Amy Smart. If you don’t like those then you won’t like this. I have to say though, that in this case the lead male role was probably less of a likeable character than most of these kind of films, he wasn’t the kind of lovable dumbass, more a complete arsehole at times, but meh, these kind of films weren’t written with moral recompense in mind. Good mindless fun if you like that kind of thing.

March of the Penguins

I wanted to see this since mid-December when it first started attracting media attention after sending America into raptures, but it seems that it’s not on widescale release in the UK, even after the adverts claiming it was on show nationwide after an initial limited release at the end of last year. In fact it took a great deal of effort to see this.

Narrated by Morgan Freeman, it covers a year or so in the life of the Emperor penguins of the Antarctica, from leaving the sea and their 70 mile walk to their breeding ground, to finding a mate, breeding, nurturing the egg and the fight for survival of both the parents and their newly laid egg in the Antarctic winter. This a cute, lovable and informative film. If you like nature documentaries or have a heart at all, then you’ll love it. It wasn’t quite as heart rending as I was expecting, just a lot of giggles at the awkward, clumsy, fish-eating buffoons and lots of ahhs at the babies. Watch it if you can.

OK. I guess that’s it. Over and out.

Well WordPress 2.0 just got released and I’m waiting for my blog spam filter – Spam Karma 2 – to get a final update release to support WP2 and then I’ll be in feet first. It would be nice if the Rubric theme that I use were to get updated for WP2 also, but maybe it just works out of the box, I’ll have to test.

So I was looking into versions and stuff for my blog upgrade and the guy who remade the rubric theme to work with WP1.5 has a little thingy at the bottom of his page that says how many referrer spams have been blocked by Referrer Karma. It turns out that it’s by the same guy as Spam Karma and integrates with it. Thats great. Spam Karma solved my spam problem, but I still get thousands of porn web sites claiming to link to me, when they actually don’t, they’re just referrer spamming, which ruins my stats because I like looking at who links to me and where most of my traffic comes from. I think maybe 2 or 3 of my top 20 referrers are legitimate, the rest seem to be Italian hosted porn sites and drug sites. So anyway, I’ll be adding this in too as soon as I get WP2, Spam Karma 2 and rubric installed.

Anyway, while I was looking around I came across this article about the state of blog spamming, which is kinda worrying and it’s over 2 years old. I guess this is way old news to those of you who have been paying attention to this kind of thing for years and well, I kind of knew most of this anyway, but this article makes for pretty stark reading.

Sleep well 🙂

Yes, I think this is the last of tonight’s 3 updates of the sad and lonely. Well, bugger it’s Christmas in about 22 hours. I hate Christmas. I hate all of the commercialism and the whiny carols shitting out of tinny car park speakers from the middle of October. I hate the way theres a Christmas related stall on every spare patch of city centre land, their attendants try to stop you in the streets, won’t take no for an answer and look genuinely offended when you tell them you’re not intersted and brush past. Everybody seems to want to sell you a bit of Christmas and I fucking hate them all. Fuck. Off.

All that said, I do like Christmas really. I like the time off work. The sitting around in the uneasy peace of your family Christmas dinner, where the year-round niggles of day to day existence together are put aside and you can actually talk to one another for a change. Anyway, this wasn’t supposed to be a rant about Christmas or anything, just an update about life in general. One has been overdue for some time, I know because people start to complain when I don’t update my blog. It’s strange, but they become compulsive reading, even when they’re just another load of drivel, which I have been known to produce from time to time and this one is no exception. So, on with the show…

Well yeah, I’ve not been up to too much recently, apart from working, eating and sleeping. I have my plan to take over the world, but I’ve already written about that. I’m really looking forward to that. I bought The C Programming Language, though I’m not sure how much I’m going to do. It’s strange, I did an entire degree and never learned to program properly in anything, but of all languages I’ve dipped my toe in, C++ made the most sense. Although I understood the principles of object orientation, I never learned how to apply them programmatically and so C, along with being the Unix language of choice aside from Python for GUI apps, made sense. I’d like to learn to program in C properly. It is highly likely however that the book will just sit on my bookshelf or next to my desk along with the other 20 or so books I never get to read apart from in an emergency.

I also bought The Boo Radleys Anthology on a whim. I’m not sure what led me to that, but I used to love some of the Boo Radleys EPs when I was at school and for the most part, the early ones aren’t available any longer and I don’t have a vinyl deck any more. Sadly, the Boo Radleys were best known in the mainstream for the absurdly chirpy summer hit Wake Up Boo! from around 95 or 96, but that wasn’t their musical bag especially, more a proof of concept that they could write great pop songs if thet wanted to – and they didn’t want to. Better tracks to listen to if you can are the blistering 12″ version of Lazarus, Does This Hurt? from the Boo! Forever EP and The Finest Kiss from the now unavailable Every Heaven EP, released on the ill-fated Rough Trade label. The band originated within the psychedelic trance pop genre known as shoegazer but developed beyond it. Fucking great band.

Other than all that, things are going ok. Work has settled down and I’m now feeling reasonably confident with my role, it’s been a heavily pressured few months up until this point though. I’m enjoying playing with Vexim, a virtual mail hosting layer for Exim, with a web interface, virus scanning and spam filtering. Great news. I still hope to get a working Xen system going, but thats been on the back burner for the last few months while I do real day to day work.

If I don’t post again before, I wish you all a fantastic Christmas and a prosperous New Year. I’m off for another JD and coke.

Hobbit

To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
brought to you by Quizilla

Ok, well things have kind of settled down here a bit. My car is fixed (rotor arm replaced – fascinating ;)) I’ve made some good progress at work, though I have now have a whole bunch of new things to get around to, but hey it ain’t gonna happen for a week or so cos I got a week off 🙂

The house is kind of sorted, we have pretty much everything we need (yes, including a cheesegrater and a garlic press – what the hell was I on about?) and I get paid next week. I’m gonna spend next week straightening up my home office, the spare room, the shed and bits of the kitchen which are the only parts of the new house that are completely untouched by the hand of organisation.

My plans for after I get the office arranged are to get on with learning some Python, PyGTK, PHP and playing with Xen, Qemu and my Alpha Server which was given to me by Sparkes. I also want to get my teeth into the LPI syllabus, which I’ve been meaning to do for the last 2 years or so but never really gotten down to, but now I’ve decided it’s about time I get serious about it.

LUG Radio Season 3 has finally begun after what seems like a lifetime of waiting and episodes 1 and 2 of the new season are already out, plus planning for LUG Radio Live 2006 is already under way.

So I think thats about all for now. Incidentally if anyone has any advice on booting a Digital Alpha Server 800 5/400 from a Debian Woody Alpha installation CDROM, then I will be listening, my 2 attempts have been futile so far.

No, sadly this post isn’t going to be either profound or about how the world would a better place if I were in charge or anything. It’s going to be a little bit more self-congratulatory than that.

I’ve said before that it never ceases to amaze what people search for that brings up hits for my website. I was checking my apache stats again and the second biggest search hit that led to people to browse to my website was, after my name of course, “Windows is shit”.

That made me laugh a little so I did a quick check and I’m the top hit on Google for “Windows is Shit”.

Wow. That makes me really important 🙂 and possibly in danger of litigation…

Yeah I know and so do you. I blew my bandwidth limit. I don’t know how or why, but, and I think I said this last time, I’ve changed spam filtering software and I think the difference between the 2 on an implementation level is that the new one takes the whole spam comment and stores it in a database while the old one used to just ignore it as soon as it recognised it as spam.

In other news, I moved house last weekend, I’ve spent all week getting the house straightened up and we’re having my birthday party/moving in party this Saturday night. If for any reason you’re invited and haven’t got back to you about how to get there, give me a call or an email. By the end of today we should have a new washing machine, working radiators and a spare room. That just leaves my pit (aka office), the TV aerial and the telephone cables to attend to.

I thought my car was giving up the ghost this week but it turns out it was just in desperate need of some oil. It’s been spluttering for a while now and I knew I needed some oil but I didn’t know what type. Finally I found out, bought some oil, put it in last night and it drives fine this morning. Thought I was heading for an expensive fix-up job there. In a shocking discovery yesterday, I realised I have just about exactly the right amount of money to pay all of the bills and buy food for the rest of the month and pretty much nothing else at all. I might not even be able to afford that. Think we might be eating 9 pence beans for the rest of the month. This once again means that unless you’re paying there’s no point in inviting me anywhere 🙁

I remember reading a blog post somewhere, I don’t know where exactly, where the writer moaned about people droning on about the miniutae of their miserable lives and I agreed with him, now here I am writing one of those posts.

Well let me tell you.

Well it’s my 29th birthday in 28 minutes, if only I’d written that a minute ago eh? I’m moving house this weekend and will be having a house warming party the weekend after. I’m getting shit loads of 419 emails and I mean loads. Sparkes gave me his Digital Alpha Server 800 today and I gave him 2 486SX laptops for him to play with Minix 3 on. I might have a look myself to be honest. I still have to work out how to get the Alpha to boot from the Debian CD, it’s not apparently straight forward.

I’m still busy at work, ploughing along with the daily admin tasks while trying to catch half an hour or so to play with Xen, Python, tape backups (!= fun), moving people over to my new mail server and so on and so on. I downloaded the Dive Into Python book and printed it at work as it had work related benefits. I don’t like reading from a PC screen too much, but I now I have a 5 or 6cm thick pile of treeware. Now I know why PDFs are called the portable dekstop format. I haven’t had much of a chance to read to yet though.

As for the house move, I have single handedly moved most of my stuff to the new house. The only things left in my current house are my PC equipment, my desk, bookcase, bedside table, clothes, TV, toiletries and crap likes alarm clocks and bedside lamp etc. I’ve filled almost the entire floorspace in what will be my home office with my unsorted crap. I overheard my housemate say down the phone that, “Adam’s got so much crap its unbelievable.” And to be honest, I have. I’ve got loads of books, boxes and computer paraphernalia. I don’t know where it all came from.

I think I’m going to have to move my blog hosting. Sparkes was kind enough to provide this hosting for me, but I think I’m outgrowing it, either that or I’m getting spammed out of existence.

I moved to using Spam Karma 2 as recommended by The Mysterious Cities of Bald to deflect the evils of blog and comment spam since Spaminator stopped getting developed and wasn’t much more than 50% effective. Well since then the amount of comment spam that I have to moderate has dropped to 0, seriously. It’s all still sitting there in the background, but Spam Karma 2 is filtering the lot out so I don’t know it’s there. I’ve been checking it quite frequently and there are no false positives, its great.

The problem comes from the fact that my data transfer has increased 10-fold in the last month, I’m hitting my bandwidth limit and I’ve only got about 8 MB disk space left since I uploaded my LUG Radio Live photos to my gallery. Now I think that’s mainly to do with referral spammers. For the non-techies it’s a long story, but for the techies, all of my top 20 referrers with the exception of maybe 1 or 2 are referral spammers. With no technical understanding of either approach, I’m guessing that Spaminator just stopped the communication process when it decided the comment/trackback/referral was spam and Spam Karma allows the process to complete and just drops it in the spam hole before deleting after the specified amount of time. I might be completely wrong here, as I said I have no technical reasoning behind my theory, I’m just scratching around for an answer to how my bandwidth usage has increased by 1000% in a month. I can’t suddenly be that popular, I haven’t written anything that interesting recently and I know I’m not getting linked from elsewhere that much. I can’t think of another reason. So, I’m thinking of moving my website, blog and gallery to new hosting. I work for an ISP so it shouldn’t be a big deal, it’s just that I’d prefer a dedicated machine rather than shared hosting, that way I can afford to play a bit more with stuff without putting any of our other customers at risk. We’ll see on that one.

Oh erm, I gotta go, it’s late and I’m up early in the morning 🙁

LUG Radio Season 3.

With thanks to MrBen (look at the Season 3 link).

OK it is about as official as it is going to get. I’m moving into my own place. For me it’s the third time I’ve moved into my own place, hopefully this time I won’t have to move back in with my parents again – it’s so expensive to live on your own these days.

All this means I’m shit outta time and money. I’ve been paying the obligatory IKEA tax, went twice in 2 days (they closed before we could get everything we went for…) Also blew a fortune in ASDA and still have to get a TV, some glasses, a bin, bath towels and a cheesegrater. Also on the desire list are somewhere to hang coats, somewhere to put shoes, a garlic press, a kitchen table and chairs and a variety of other non essentials but these can wait. What we want most of all is a shower but this presents a problem. The house is old, the walls aren’t straight and aren’t tiled, the bath isn’t fixed to the wall and so on. Looks like baths for a while then.

What this also means is that we will be having a house warming party. I move in on the 28th assuming there are no hitches which is a Saturday night, 2 days after my 29th birthday and 3 days before Hallowe’en. It makes sense to have the party then. Being house proud as I am, it also makes sense to do the untidy bit while the house is untidy.

As for being poor and out of time this means that if you want me to go out for a few beers it’s unlikely to happen in the next month and in fact if you knew how much my rent was going to be it may probably not happen for a good few months. Also if you want me to do anything that isn’t already on my agenda then you’re probably going to have to sit at the back of the queue. You could of course bring the mountain to Mohammed and pay me for looking at it 🙂 (That one goes to the ever growing list of people who have covered their Windows boxes in spyware and adware and want me to reinstall them for you).

While we’re talking about time, where does it all go? I get up at 7, I do not pass Go and I do not collect £200, I get to work for 9, I get home at 6, I’ve eaten by 7 or half past, even when I’m not out doing something (4 out of 5 weekdays) I do life organising stuff for about 2 or 3 hours and that’s it. Time to get my stuff ready for work and go to bed. Now remember, I’ve been a musician and a student for the last 11 years or so, I’ve never done the 9 to 5 thing regularly before. Frequently I make it to bed an hour later than I should have done and end up wiped out in the morning. How do you people do it?

On Saturday Jeff Waugh of Ubuntu Linux is coming to visit Wolverhampton Linux User Group, of which I am a participant, on his world tour. That should be great fun.

Out.

As per Planet Ubuntu:

Which File Extension are You?

Woo, I fuckin rool 😉

I haven’t said anything useful in a week or so (some might say years…) so here’s a brief update.

I bought a new PC case with fans everywhere and also a hard disk fan for each of my disks. The whole thing works great and looks good too, very robust. It’s good to be back in amongst the speed demons, though I’m grateful to my AMD 1200 machine for carrying me for 2 or 3 months while I get myself back on track.

The other weekend I gave away all of my old computer crap that has been lying around in the garage for the last few years. Thats about 10 or 12 old PCs, 4 PC cases, loads of various PCI and ISA cards, hard disks and so on. Just heaps of it. It’s good to clear out and it all went to a good home, I didn’t throw anything away. I kept just enough to cover me in case of disaster. I’m now down to a modest (for a geek) main workstation, backup workstation, spare PC #1, spare PC #2, Smoothwall machine, laptop, work iBook, old iMac and Sun Ultra 10. The 2 spare machines are for playing with and setting stuff up on. The Sun Ultra 10 and iMac were to play with different architectures and I was going to set up the Ultra 10 as my webserver. The iMac is kind of redundant since my employer bought me an iBook.

The old Smoothwall machine is now also redundant as of today as I bought a Linksys WAG354g to consolidate my existing firewall box, wireless access point, ADSL modem and network switch into one little box. And what a little box it is. It’s smaller than your average Cable modem and comes with an ethernet cable, telephone cable and microfilter – everything you need. It is built on Linux and the source code is GPL’d. The OpenWRT project also produces a Linux distribution that runs on it, so you can configure it exactly how you like it if it doesn’t already do what you want.

On the house scene there has been a bit of a move. When returning from a weekend in Cheshire visitng my friend Carl we passed the 3 bedroom bungalow owned by my friend’s mother which has been lying empty while she redecorated it from the ground up. It is nearing completion and they have been living elsewhere, but due to a combination of difficult circumstances they weren’t sure whether or not to move back in. It seems that we could kill 2 birds with one stone by moving in ourselves. It is considerably more than we would be willing to pay but it would help them out of a difficult situation, provide us with a very nice place to live and we have the opportunity to offset some of the cost by having an extra person live with us if we can find someone suitable. Quiet, tidy, studious, non-smokers in full-time employment are welcome to make a pitch.

Aside from all that things are going OK. Work is going fine, busy as usual, I was away in Gosport for a few days last week visiting one of our main clients.

I think the challenge for the next few days and weeks (in a note to self kind of way) is to work out whether we can afford this house on our own and if not find a likely lodger, fill in some forms, get a new car tyre, read some of the books that are stacking up next to me, learn some python/PHP/shell scripting/regular expressions and play with Flumotion.

Peace out.

I’m looking for a place to live. It shouldn’t be that hard. I’m 28 (a month away from 29 – ulp), I have residual university debts which I’m trying to pay off but I earn well enough and I live in a highly urbanised area.

So guess what? It’s going to cost me around £1,300 to set foot over the doorstep of my new abode, wherever it may be and finding it ain’t no picnic either. The lower limit seems to be around £400 per month for a 2 bedroom pigeonhole above a shop in a dodgy area. There are a few decent pads for a reasonable price but I’m stumped for the deposit and the fees.

The regular way of doing things so far as I am aware is to apply to the council housing department and to various housing associations, but I have made contact with them and they tell me I don’t stand a chance as I don’t have children, a medical condition or lack of a roof over my head and I will remain on the waiting list for at least 5 years. True enough, housing should go to those most in need, but fuck, what am I supposed to do? I’m nearly 30 for fucks sake and I can’t afford to move out of my parents house even on 2 wages? 5 YEARS??? Is there really such a lack of affordable housing?

Looks like I’ll either be saving for a few months or taking out a loan.

It shouldn’t be this hard.

Got back from What the Hack late last Sunday in time to visit my girlfriend, whose birthday it was and who was gracious enough to not dump me for going away over her birthday.

Man, what a time. To be honest I didn’t do anything or see anything. We got wasted every night. Jono, Aq, Bill, Matt, Garp and Graham who were my travelling companions and myself spent the 4 days or so sitting around hacking on a few things in the non-security sense. Jono played with gstreamer 0.9, while I tried not to die of a hangover.

Aq, Jono and Bill also spent a good amount of time laughing at the chinny raccoon and gimping up suitable mockups of all manner of chin related articles, culminating in the Little Book of Chin (link sadly dead). For anyone who hasn’t got a clue what this is all about, it is embedded in British schoolboy humour and is to do with the fact that when someone is lying you say they have a Jimmy Hill chin (Jimmy Hill is an English ex-footballer with an infamously large chin who became renowned as a pundit for talking crap). Therefore you might start stroking your chin is you are implying someone is bullshitting. Furthermore you might say that you, “Chinny reckon” in so much as you reckon (not) with added chin, hence you chinny reckon. Jono and Aq employ this mightily on LUG Radio.

Anyway, in true Planet Gnome style, here is the 5 things I learned at WTH:

1. Geeks can’t dance for shit. I’ve never seen anything so funny, it’s like an American high-school movie with all of the ‘cool’ kids taken out and all the dorks taking their chance to shine. Awful.
2. Having a gay, Germanic looking geek head bull-like towards you, stop dead in front of you and stare at you for 5 seconds longer than is comfortable with their head at a coquettish angle, is scary enough to make you clench so tight that your bumhole turns into an impenetrable wall of steel.
3. Night-time musical entertainment sure wasn’t any higher than an after thought on the agenda, if the quality of the output was anything to go by.
4. Eindhoven is a quiet, unpopulated city, where there are very few people walking about. We concluded this to be because everyone was at work and not hanging around like jobless, dole scrounging wasters like in England.
5. There are a lot of dull, braying, over-confident arseholes making a fuss of themselves in front of everyone, unaware of the fact that they are short, fat, squat looking and lacking in any kind of social skills. Sadly most of these people were British.

And there you have it. That was What the Hack.

It’s nearly 4am and we’ve had 2 hours sleep. We’re just leaving for WTH and Jono’s grumpy 😉