The weather has returned to late-spring normal, thank goodness. I may be able to sleep comfortably tonight.
I certainly hope that’s so, anyway. I still have a very full schedule tomorrow, including a trip to work. Go, me.
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Die, spammers, die!
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?
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Easy Upgrades R Us
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…
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A Temperature Bell Curve
So let’s follow the numbers. On Sunday, the high was about 65. It was a bit warmer than that on Monday, right around 70. Today it hit the 80s. Tomorrow we’re to see 90 degrees, then again on Friday. Saturday it’s supposed to drop to the mid 70s, and on Sunday they’re calling for… about 65.
My body reacts poorly to drastic shifts in temperature, regardless of the direction of change. I fully expect for the next few days to be rather unpleasant, to put it mildly. Bah.
I suppose I should just be thankful that there are still some cool days ahead before summer lands on Portland for good and all, eh?
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Knowing one’s audience.
I discovered something this evening. If I’m going to watch something with my kids, sometimes it makes sense to bring something I can watch with one and something else I can watch with the other. For instance, tonight I watched a Nova program (about the Archimedes palimpsest) and two episodes of Tsubasa Chronicle (about a boy trying to rescue the pieces of a girl’s memory).
It shouldn’t take genius-level deductive reasoning to figure out who enjoyed which.
Mind you, I got a kick out of both shows, so it’s all good. I still really need to catch up on my anime viewing so I can watch more of the same stuff they’re watching, though. (Yeah, yeah, I know. Only so many hours in a day…)
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This has best not become a trend.
I got another random-listener phone call today. Different listener, this time from a non-blocked number. This time I had the presence of mind to ask, “Where did you get this number?” She said, “I, uh, heard it on the radio.”
So either she misdialed the number, misheard the number… or I need to break some kneecaps somewhere. Either way, if this becomes a trend I’m going to be talking to someone in charge. This could quickly become absolutely absurd. Ugh.