Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Thrashing Server

Well, last Sunday, we released a new version of Perian. It didn’t occur to me at the the time that this would mean a large number of people would be visiting the site. Anyway, Monday morning I noticed that the web server was very slow, which began my fun. I decided that the best course of action was to increase the number of servers. The system had CPU to spare as well as memory, so this is the natural choice.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Firewall Ban Activated

Well, shortly after my last post, the Chinese spammer struck again. I just blocked a bit over half a million addresses in China in response. I have no tolerance for such things, I don’t trust anyone in China to care enough to do anything about this guy; so blocking is really the best recourse.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Turn the Firewall Around

I’ve noticed that a large proportion of spam showing up on my sites is coming from China, trying to promote chinese businesses. One annoying individual in particular likes to spam trac, by creating a username of “add” and spamming after logging in. In the past, I tried deleting the spam, removing the account, and then banning the IP address, but this moron just does it again from a new IP address.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Monday, September 15, 2008

Decline of Local Bookstores

Today I went to a local Barnes & Noble to purchase some books. The books aren’t the current best sellers, but they are quite well known, so the store should have had them. Since they were science and religious in nature, I looked in both sections. After 30 minutes, I found numerous books on the same topics, but none of the ones I wanted. This was frustrating to the point that I wished for a card catalog like a library just so I could figure out where the store would put them.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Wall•E

Some friends and I went to see Wall•E last night. It is definitely the funniest movie I have seen all year and I’m glad to see that Pixar hasn’t gone too far downhill. I was afraid that Disney would attempt to destroy them, but it seems they haven’t succeeded quite yet. On the other hand, the movie did have a lot of technical point which were severely wrong. One scene had a space ship traveling through a large sphere of satellites to get away from Earth.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, June 28, 2008