indiboi.com

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I have absolutely had it with comment spam and Movable Type.

There have been twenty-one server fails in the last twenty-two days and every single fail is the result of outdated Movable Type comment scripts.

I made the decision, silently, the other day that if overall system uptime since July fell below the threshold of 99.9% drastic action would be taken. As a result of the daily server failures this month that threshold did fall below 99.9%, an unacceptable situation.

I feel Movable Type is utter garbage, it is the McDonald’s of the blogging industry at five star restaurant prices. Major hosting companies, the sort that small companies like mine aspire to be someday, took action in December to disable Movable Type commenting. They did so because it was killing their scsi backed dual xeon servers with 4GB+ of RAM dead cold. I do not have the income to even fantasize about having such a server at the moment, but I also do not have the client based to warrant such horsepower either. It would be a tremendous waste of money.

I didn’t disable the scripts, I kept working on solutions (and finding they failed) to avoid doing so. I don’t feel it is fair to force users to shell out $70 to $100 because that’s what the Trott’s feel they deserve to bugfix older versions of the CMS. Even if they port those bugfixes back to the older versions, one must rely on the user to actually implement them… and as is evident, Windows server admins, whose sole career description is to implement bugfixes, consistently fail to do that… how can we expect casual bloggers to do it?

The final solution was inevitable. Regardless of how fair it is, no one user can be allowed to run software capable of disabling an entire webserver. There are free and superior alternatives, Wordpress is one of them. Users must either upgrade or change to a server-friendly CMS or their comment script will be disabled, it’s that simple.

I refuse to upgrade the webserver to deal with comment spam, it should not be necessary. I refuse to continue losing money because clients leave due to the server being down. I refuse to lose yet another night of sleep because of Movable Type. I refuse to allow Movable Type to destroy my company!

The worst thing, I’m deathly afraid of going on my little vacation this weekend, what if something horrible happens while I’m on the train in the middle of nowhere? Sure, there will be people watching things while I’m away, that is always the case, but this type of problem requires highly experienced server administrative skills to deal with.

Within moments of enabling very strong global anti-spam measures, this particular website was put under severe denial of service attack. Apparently I didn’t clamp down the throttle enough, but now I’m limiting my own personal website to five document requests per every five seconds, considerably tighter than any other website on the server.

I finally figured out how to interface Jay Allen’s blacklist with mod_security today, all the while filtering only dynamic pages instead of all requests, and to top it off, I was able to turn the filtering off for cms entry posting pages, so users aren’t being filtered for writing about the evil spam bastards. As an added benefit, referrer spam is also going to be cut down, as the same blacklist is being used to block referrers from attempting to access dynamicly generated pages.

It is so very infuriating that there have been fourteen server fails recorded by the monitoring service and each one was due to comment/trackback spam attacks. The very sucky part of it is that each fail is recorded as a minimum of five minutes down, even though nearly always it is considerably less than five minutes; that means the server is recorded as being down for a total of approximately 1 hour and ten minutes during the month of February. It certainly hasn’t been down that long, but that is, afterall, what the records will show! I am not happy about this at all.

Now, hmmm… all that remains is making sure the blacklist automatically updates everyday as it should (which I’m not sure if it did today as it was supposed to), and I also need to finally finish the ‘re-branding project’ that is pretty much finished, but, egh… not live yet. I’ve been very, very lazy about work the past two weeks… hmmm, I wonder why? ;) Could it be that I’ve had something much, much better to be focusing my energy on? Yea, I think that is it.

I started this entry the other morning fully intending on writing out something… epic, but scratch that, for now anyway.

Last week I met an absolutely amazing guy, in the last ten days we have only spent one evening apart from each other, so amazing that the one evening where we could not see each other I found myself disappointed. He is kind, sweet, loving, intelligent, phenomenally attractive, and I highly doubt I’d ever hear the phrase “romantic bullshit” pass his lips. This is exactly what I’ve been wanting, this is the way I’ve always felt it should be.
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I was, for lack of a better word, excited when I weighed myself the other afternoon and the scale said 210. I was wearing jeans with a belt and a sweater, so this morning I decided to weigh just me, without the extra clothing… the scale read 205. That puts me at losing 15 pounds since my last major weight realization toward the end of October.

Just a quick and rough calculation puts the rate of weight loss at a bit more than half a pound per week, well within the generally acceptable 2 pounds per week limit.

The nicest side effect is that the skintight red shirt Matthew gave me for my birthday now fits! Well, it fit before, but I was uncomfortable with how it actually looked on me.

The worst side effect is that my hideously expensive leather pants will never fit me again, I just tried them on and they fall immediately off, even if I pull them up as far as I can. To make the waist small enough to stay on creates the impression that they’re double pleated, yuck! I suppose I can reward myself with a new pair, right? ;)

I have 25 pounds left to rid myself of to reach the target weight of 180 pounds, if I’m indeed 6 feet tall, otherwise it’s 30 more to go (being 5′11″). My target weight is the weight where my BMI puts me into the range of “normal” versus “overweight.” I’ve already successfully conquered and broken out of the “obese” category, yay! I’m at 27.8 right now, once I get to less than 25 true celebration will commence.

As the title indicates, my phone number has changed. It is no longer a Pittsburgh number, finally. Yes, the phone number I have been using for the last four years is no more… *play taps* If you would like the new one, give me a heads up via email or IM.

As a completely unintentional side benefit, the FREAK that has been calling and leaving static/background noise only voicemails can’t reach me anymore. Whoo!