Ack!

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After a full week’s work, I did manage to get my webserver up and running again, complete with upgrades, so djwudi.com, hanscomfamily.com, and geekmuffin.com are all active again, and starting to regain content.

I am still having one issue, unfortunately. I’ve tried to install both Image::Magick and NetPBM (two image-processing libraries), but for some reason MovableType isn’t seeing either. This means that when uploading images to the MT install on my server, MT doesn’t give the options to resize the images, automatically create thumbnails, etc. Everything else is working beautifully, this is the only aspect that’s still giving me issues. Grr.

The other downside is that I’m now facing RSS overload, as I haven’t paid any attention to NetNewsWire for the past few days. I’m currently looking at 691 unread posts to go through. Yikes!

Now on LiveJournal – me!

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I only found this out a short time ago, but it appears that the online journaling site LiveJournal has limited support for picking up RSS feeds. As it turns out, someone added Eclecticism to their list of available feeds — so if there are any LiveJournal users who stop by here at any time, you can add me to your ‘friends’ list by adding [woody_eclectic].

I just wish there were a way for me to figure out who all had me added. According to the information page, there are three LiveJournal users who have me in their friends list. I know who two are…but who’s the mysterious third?

Maybe I’ve got a secret admirer.

Ooooooh.

Make it rain…

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Well, okay, so I knew that it was raining pretty hard as I went to work today. It had been raining when I woke up, and I hadn’t heard it let up at all, and it’s always kind of fun to see the streams running down the hills in the downtown Seattle area.

I didn’t realize that it was this bad, though (if King5 asks you to log in, use king5\@djwudi.com / kingfive)!

After a brief respite, heavy rains resumed Monday in Western Washington and four rivers that spilled over their banks late last week were on the brink of overflowing again. Motorists were finding flooding on city streets, including Aurora Avenue near the Seattle Center.

Something Positive

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I really was planning on getting something done today. Unfortunately, I haven’t — and it’s all Royce‘s fault.

He sent me a link to Something Positive, a web comic that I’d never heard of before.

I’ve spent the entire day reading it. So far I’ve made it from the very first strip from Dec. 19th, 2001 all the way up to April 16th, 2003 — about a year and a half of strips. I’ve still got about six months to go before I catch up to today. Unfortunately, I do need to take a break for a bit, and go out and bounce around for a bit.

Still, the strip is hilarious. Often very wrong, but that just makes it all the better in my book. Go check it out.

And I want my own Choo-Choo Bear!

You’ll understand if you read the comic.

Trust me.

:)

iTMS Link Maker spewing popups?

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It looks like the extra code that Apple supplies when creating links with the iTMS Link Maker is causing pop-ups to appear in some browsers. This is the text of an e-mail I got tonight, and the response I gave. Has anyone else seen this happening, or are there any other ideas of what might be going on? Are new updated versions of IE that have been patched due to the Eolas lawsuit already in the wild?

On Saturday, Oct 18, 2003, at 19:14 US/Pacific, Owen van Dijk wrote:

Hello Michael,

Through a link I stumbled on your weblog. Suddenly I got a popup saying if wanted to install the “iTunes detector” from Apple. I have never heard of such a plugin, not on a PC ( I use windows xp, ie6 ) and not on a mac ( I am also the lucky owner of a powerbook 12\” :) ) could you please explain what this plugin does or why it is embedded in your site?

Wow. Good question.

First off — I’m really sorry about a pop-up showing up! I had no idea that would happen (and, to be entirely honest, I’m not entirely sure why it happened…but I can guess).

With Apple’s release of iTunes for the PC and the revamping of the iTunes Music Store, they’ve made it easier to link directly to items inside the iTunes Music Store. There are two ways of doing this — either with a simple link (like INXS Need You Tonight), or with a more complex link that’s generated using their iTunes Link Maker.

When you create a link with the iTunes Link Maker, it generates two snippets of code — one for the link itself, and one to put in the head of your html page. According to Apple, “The first text box on this page contains code to include in the HEAD section of your HTML (once per page) to detect if iTunes is present or not. This will cause your links to behave intelligently if iTunes is not installed on the user’s computer.” Since I added a link to the iTMS at the bottom of my page (down with the Amazon links), I also added that snippet to the page.

My guess is that that’s what causing the popup to show up on your browser. I’m not entirely sure why you’re getting a popup asking for confirmation, unless it is related to the recent changes being made in IE due to the Eolas patent suit against Microsoft (though I wasn’t aware that they’d actually started distributing changed versions of IE yet).

In either case, that’s something that I don’t want my visitors to have to deal with, so I’ll be taking that code out of there. Thanks much for letting me know about it!

The offending code has been removed from my pages, along with the iTMS link that I had in the ad box at the bottom of the pages. Bummer, but as long as the simple style of linking works, I’ll be able to play with it whenever I want to.

Bayesian spam filtering for MT

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There’s another option in the fight against weblog comment spam now that looks on first blush to be an incredibly effective solution — implementing Bayesian spam filtering on MovableType.

The advantage of this plugin over other solution (e.g. blacklist) is that after certain amount of training, it requires little and no maintence. Training is also similar then importing and exporting blacklists. In addition, it takes whitelist into consideration, not just blindly ban a host or subnet. (This is useful for those who has the misfortunate of been near a spammer). It also consider the whole content, including URLs, IPs, common words, etc into consideration.

The disadvantage is this plugin is that the AI engine is only as good as you train it. If you don’t put in some initial effort to train, it don’t work well. Secondly, if you train it wrongly, you get wrong results.

Looks quite impressive, and I’m planning on implementing it for my hosted sites once I get MT set back up again.

testy.littleville.com

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I’ve been having an odd problem that I’ve noticed in the past, but am just now starting to attempt to track down, in that my server keeps insisting that its domain name is ‘testy.littleville.com’ rather than ‘www.djwudi.com’. Here’s a copy of the nslookup results for djwudi.com…

Server: dsl231-041-022.sea1.dsl.speakeasy.net
Address: 216.231.41.22

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: djwudi.com
Address: 216.231.44.57

…and one for the nslookup results for the server’s IP address…

Server: dsl231-041-022.sea1.dsl.speakeasy.net
Address: 216.231.41.22

Name: testy.littleville.com
Address: 216.231.44.57

I spent some time trying to track down where that particular domain name was coming from (configuration files on my server? oddness with speakeasy.net, ZoneEdit [who handle my DNS services ], or MicroMax Information Services [who I registered my domain through ]?) with no luck until I did a whois on the littleville.com domain and got the following:

Domain Name: LITTLEVILLE.COM
Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, INC.
Whois Server: whois.networksolutions.com
Referral URL: http://www.networksolutions.com
Name Server: NS2.SPEAKEASY.NET
Name Server: NS1.SPEAKEASY.NET
Status: ACTIVE
Updated Date: 11-mar-2003
Creation Date: 23-jul-1999
Expiration Date: 23-jul-2008

Odd, as I haven’t ever dealt directly with Network Solutions. So, at a loss as to whether or not there’s anything that I can do to solve this, I’ve sent a plea for help with all of the above information to both Network Solutions and Speakeasy.net. Hopefully this gets resolved soon — it doesn’t seem to cause major issues, but it has bit me a couple times during my setup process, and I’d be much happier if my machine knew what its name was!

Update: Turns out it was a simple tweak on Speakeasy’s end:

Speakeasy controls the reverse DNS entries on all of its IP space. When an IP is reclaimed and assigned to a new customer the reverse IP is not updated to the Speakeasy standard.

I have made the needed changes to reflect your domain.

These changes will take effect and begin propagating during our next nameserver update/reload. This happens six times daily, at 11, 3 and 7 pm and am pst.

By the time I got home and found the e-mail, the change had gone through, and my server now correctly identifies itself as djwudi.com. Rock on — thanks, Speakeasy!

Slight IMAP issues

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Work keeps progressing on re-creating the djwudi.com webserver. Last night’s project was setting it up as a working mailserver using sendmail and IMAP. Much progress was made, and I’m just facing one last issue that I can’t resolve, and if there’s anyone out there who might understand a bit more of this end of things than I do, assistance would be greatly appreciated.

I have sendmail and IMAP working for the most part — I can send mail from the server from the command line using the mail command, the server is receiving e-mail, and I can log into the server via IMAP using Mail.app from my G5 to check my e-mail in the account that I set up. However, I’m having no luck in sending e-mail ~~through the IMAP connection~~ from my G5. Every configuration setting I’ve tried just results in an error of one sort or another (either the server refusing connections or (null) errors after sitting and waiting for a while). At this point, I’m more or less stumped.

The steps I went through last night to get the mail side of things set up (so far) are detailed on my rebuilding djwudi.com post. If anyone could give me some pointers, I’d greatly appreciate it!

Update: With a little more work and some pointers from Phil, I got it. Rock on. Progress!