It was bound to happen sooner or later. Today, I received a complaint that someone out there has been spamming one of the dotcomments installations on our server. “Oh, joy,” I thought. “Now what do I do?” As it turns out, I didn’t have to do much. The spammers were hitting the script, sure, but they were doing so in such a way that even someone with as poor of coding skills as I could block it fairly easily. I’ve now implemented the fix on all four appropriate comment systems.

Heaven help us, of course, if the spammers get more clever. It is remarkably non-trivial to excise individual comments from the files, and if that becomes a real problem I’m going to have to look at another comment system… thus abandoning all of the thousands of existing comments to date. May that day be a long one in coming, eh?

The webserver that this (and other, far more important and interesting) sites resides upon was taken down today, the hard drive removed and placed into a nearly identical chassis… that just happens to contain a much faster processor. And the entire process took less than half an hour from shutdown to fully resumed operations. How’s that for slick?

Now all I need to do is find out why Perl can bring a 2.4 GHz processor to its knees just by running a log-processing script and I’ll be able to rest a bit easier. Ugh…

In case anyone’s wondering: No, I’m not going to see that new Star Wars movie yet. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not this weekend. Hell, it may be June before I see it.

I want to take in the pretty special effects on the big screen, but I’m not braving the insane lines or participating in the opening-weekend hype machine. Forget it. Not this little grey duck. I’m sure it’ll be fun to look at but as ultimately meaningless as the last two. So what?

I’ll probably end up seeing the Fantastic Four movie when it comes out, too, and it has just as much chance of being pretty-but-stupid. (I leave it to folks more keenly perceptive than I to figure out why I’ll watch movies that are pretty but stupid, but won’t date women who are the same way. Hmm.)

Back in the distant mists of time, namely the mid-1980s, there was an animated series which ran on American television. And yea, it was good. And by “good” I mean “rather melodramatic, with uneven animation quality but a surprisingly compelling storyline.” This series was known to us as Robotech, though most diehard fans went on to discover that its origins were interesting and complicated.

The minds behind Robotech envisioned a follow-up series, one not born of Japanese content but instead wholly original while attempting to retain the storytelling panache of its lineage. Characters were drawn, scripts were penned… and music was composed and performed. Sadly, their efforts failed to bear the desired fruit, so the project known as The Sentinels only made it to print form and to a lone music track on a CD devoted to its predecessor.

Of the music that survives, one segment was to be used for a scene depicting the wedding of two of the principal characters from the first (and arguably greatest) segment of the original series.

I hope that answers yesterday’s question to everyone’s satisfaction…

Let’s have just a good old-fashioned roundup, shall we?

• When I put my Neuros on the charger last night, I expected it to actually charge the battery. Instead, I discovered this morning as I tried to turn it on at the bus stop, the battery had been discharged. Argh.
• GeoURL is back. Finally. Note the return of the corresponding sidebar linky goodness.
• Being one of the offices that’s cut off from the offices that haven’t been upgraded to the new VPN-based WAN sucks. A lot.
• Spending three hours cleaning particularly virulent adware off of a company laptop (that, of course, had never once been in my possession until now) sucks quite a lot as well.
• Backup Exec is really starting to annoy me. It refuses to actually behave in accordance with the settings I change, and it (ir)regularly gives a cryptic error when it tries to verify the backup. (If it would simply accept my “don’t try to verify the backup” setting change, I’d stop getting those errors, of course.)
• There just aren’t enough hours in the day to do all of the things I’d like to. (This isn’t specifically a “geeky” statement, but still. Ugh.)

Dear Apple:

I shouldn’t have to jump through so many damned hoops to reset an iPod, or to properly reinstall your iTunes-and-related software, nor should I be forced to re-disable all of the stupid defaults in Quicktime every time iTunes is (re)installed. It also shouldn’t be so damned difficult to convince iTunes not to start up every time any profile signs into the computer just because an iPod is attached (for the sake of charging).

After hearing all the raves and hoopla about what a great piece of music software iTunes is, and after actually working directly with it, I can only assume that most people don’t expect much from their software besides a shiny-looking interface.

Bah.

(This entry brought to you by one too many times spent wrestling Lil’s iPod and iTunes into submission. Ugh. And I’m the one who recommended the damned thing to her, so I have only myself to blame…)