PsychoPhil

Archive for the ‘Site News’ Category

After nearly 11.5 years of use, I have finally killed the email account phil@psychophil.com.  I was spending far too much time trying to filter the mountainous amounts of spam that has been pouring into that account.  It was a losing battle.  Recently I have been receiving 700+ messages per day.  I had resorted to using GMail to pop the account and filter out the spam.  It worked, but I realized the other day that I had received just two valid emails to that address in four days….  intermixed with a few thousand spam messages.  This address has just been in use far too long and it made its way on to far too many spam lists to be of any use.

I’ve gone as far as to completely remove the MX records from the DNS information.  Unsurprisingly, I’ve noticed an immediate reduction in the amount of traffic coming over my link.

edit: in case you’re wondering, the above graphic was created with the Tombstone Generator.

A couple of months ago I mentioned an annoying problem I was having with the RSS feeds on this site.  The feeds on the sidebar to the right and the dashboard on the backend of the site would never update unless I physically forced them either by deleting and recreating the widget or going into the SQL database and deleteting the cache entry from the options table.

I was convinced that the cache/database or some other portion of this site was corrupted and wasted quite a bit of time digging through everything remotely related to RSS in the code and database always coming up blank.

Today in the office I was working on a completely unrelated problem when it occured to me…  maybe it’s not actually the software/database at all.  I remoted in to my firewall, started up the monitoring then hit the main page of my site.

HTTP-Proxy Error: Cannot parse start header

Crap.  All the time I spent and it wasn’t the site at all.  The HTTP proxy service on the firewall, while letting the original feed downloads through, was blocking subsequent RSS feed updates that the site was trying to pull down with a Conditional Get when the content had changed.  A quick edit to the Proxy service and the feed refresh is no longer blocked.

Problem solved.  I’m annoyed I spent so much time looking in the wrong location, but problem solved.

from WordPress 2.5.1 to 2.6. Painless as usual.

Though I do still have a rather annoying problem with RSS. The feed on my site appears to work fine but I cannot get an updated feed from anywhere else. Example: the RSS link on the right to my ‘Political Stuff’ blog. It never updates unless I manually go in and edit the widget. Then it pulls down a new copy of the current RSS feed. I would blame the widget for that except it also occurs on the dashboard back-end of the site. The display of the WordPress development RSS feed also never updates unless I force it. I’ve had this problem for a very long time over many versions of WordPress and its really starting to become annoying.

So I was a little overzealous in my spam cleanup and ended up deleting a couple of valid comments (I thought I was in the moderate queue when I was actually in the comment queue (which comments waiting to be moderated also sit in for some reason)).  So if you’ve noticed one of your recent comments missing, sorry.

Done.

Also, because of a massive avalanche of spam, the Trackback/Pingback features have been disabled (not that anyone was using them).

It looks like crap now (well, crappier), but I’ve finally updated this ancient WordPress 1.5 theme to work with widgets in a dynamic sidebar (thus the crappy sidebar).

Speaking of WordPress, if you’ve been putting up upgrading to version 2.5, now is probably the time to get off your butt and get to it. I’m running across several reports of active wordpress hacks that are injecting link pages and hidden adsense code into vulnerable installs (including ZDNet apparently).

Massive Number Of Blogs Hacked

Edit: No, really. Upgrade.

Upgrade or else!

Okay, people, if you are running any version of WordPress older than 2.3.3*, you need to upgrade now. Seriously. WordPress 2.3.2 and older have security holes that are being actively exploited by hackers to inject spam links into blogs which are not maintained. And search engines like Technorati are de-listing hacked blogs. Are you listening now? Do I have your attention? Upgrade your web apps before you get hacked and your site drops off the search-engine radar.

I took all of 15 minutes (including download time) from my busy schedule today and upgraded the site to WordPress 2.5. The upgrade was, as usual, quick and painless. The new version is a pretty significant change behind the scenes so the jury’s still out on the new features/layouts until I’ve had a bit more time to play around with them.

side note: this template is really starting to show its age. I really need to get around to updating it. At the very least I need to add in widget support.

I upgraded to the WordPress 2.3.1 software earlier today. I’ve also been experimenting with a few new themes for the site as well. I still like the old theme (mainly because I put so much time into customizing it) but I wanted to play with WordPress’ ‘widgets’ features which only work with newer themes. I figure this is as good a time as any to see what’s available out there.

Things have been busy as hell lately. Mostly kids and projects at work. The work changes have been especially fun since just a few of months ago things where feeling very much like a rut. We’ve recently started up a couple new and exciting projects now and its good to actually be looking forward to going into work in the morning again.

But thats not the real reason for this post (though it helps partially explain why things have been so slow around here lately).

You may have noticed that a few of my recent political posts have been crossposted to a new site (there’s also a RSS feed for that site in the sidebar). For the most part, I’ll no longer be putting political themed posts on this site. Anything new will be going to the new location. There will probably be posts relating to local/regional politics (i.e.: my semi-regular school rants), but they will be the exception and not the rule. For now, my del.icio.us links will continue posting to this site. I may look at focusing those to particular sites in the future, but I don’t have the time for that right now.

Why this change? This was brought about from a chance meeting a few months ago that has led to me now being paid to write political entries on to be unnamed site. I’m writing under a pseudonym (um… a different pseudonym) and there are a few restrictions on what I can write about and when after somethings been covered on the other site. Its a bit of a strange agreement, but there’s a check behind it so I think I can manage to live with it.

I didn’t have to separate the political topics from this site, but I thought this was as good a time as any to do it. It’ll help me keep things organized and keep each site more focused on its purpose. Besides, I know I have a few readers who aren’t going to be upset seeing my political rants go away.

We just want the smear.

Back in October of 2006, I wrote two entries about a photoshopped picture. Someone took some pictures of a girl in a bikini off of a couple of websites and modified them to look like Michelle Malkin. The links to these two entries are:

Future women leaders of America: Beware of Photoshop
(Entry contains link to story written by the woman who’s images were ‘stolen’).

A followup to the previous story
(Entry contains original image and the photoshopped image).

I never paid much attention to the traffic on those entries or the image until recently. While browsing through the site traffic statistics, I noticed a large amount of traffic going not to the Malkin articles, but directly to the photoshopped image itself. So… on 7-18-07 I changed the image I was hosting to the one below. As you can see, I added the ‘It’s not real. It’s Photoshopped’.

Within two days, traffic to that image dropped 80%. Within a week, the traffic levels was identical to the rest of the site.

Sorry to spoil your fun.

The backend of this site has been upgraded from WordPress 1.5.x to WordPress 2.2. I was expecting to run into a few problems but suprisingly enough, with the exception of two unimportant plugins, I ran into no problems at all. I was rather surprised to see that the front end of the site works and looks exactly the same as it did prior to the upgrade. Kudos to the WordPress team.

edit 6-21: now version 2.2.1

For the past 4 years on 9-11, this site has been taken down and replaced with a 9-11 ‘Never Forget’ page.

I receieved a request for that page today, so I thought I’d post a reminder that the page can always be found right here.

(yes, the archives only go back to August 2003. This site existed in forms other than a blog before then).

For quite a while, this blog (and a few others) and my Gallery site, have been shoehorned onto a server that was WAY too small. Only 4gb of disk space. I actually haven’t posted any new pictures to the Gallery in quite a while since the drive was full. To save space, any pictures I had been posting over the past year were resized by the Gallery remote upload program to save drive space. This means that for many pictures, the full sized version (around 1600×1200) is not available to me unless I go hunting around on my XP system at home.

This situation had finally annoyed me enough to do somethin about it. Yesterday I migrated the server over to a new 40gb drive. I did this by following the instructions (most of ‘em at least) found on the Hard Disk Upgrade Mini How-To. I did two things significantly different from the FAQ. To minimize downtime, I partitioned, formated (with bad block check) the new drive on a seperate system booted with the Knoppix Live CD distro. The bad block check on a drive this size (and the speed of the system I was using) means this process took a couple of hours. I then followed the FAQ’s instructions with the installing, mounting a copying of data from the old drive to the new one on the server and then verify the contents of the new drive. Basically, once the new drive was set up, it all boiled down to a fairly simple copy command. That that windows (you just can’t migrate a windows system to a new drive without using some third party application)!

After this process, the FAQ lists a fairly convoluted way of modifying the LILO settings to get the system to boot from the new drive. I didn’t like the instructions so I just did it my way. I removed the original drive, switch the new drive to the primary IDE controller, booted the Knoppix Live CD distro again and followed my own LILO instructions I had posted earlier.

The whole process took a little over three hours, but as I said before, most of that was taken up by checking the new drive for bad blocks. The migration was flawless (at least, I haven’t noticed any problems so far) and its so nice to have such a huge chunch of drive space (a little over 34gb now) available.

So I borked this blog’s server yesterday and knocked it offline for about 18 hours. As you can see, its back up.

All I did was shut it down to install another hard drive. The one in there now is running low on space and I wanted more room for the Gallery site. After I installed the drive and started the machine, I was greeted with the letters LI on the screen and nothing else. Great. Lilo (the boot loader) is hanging. Its been years since I’ve seen that prompt. It means something is wrong with the MBR (master boot record) on the main drive so the system will not boot. Again, great.

The server isn’t exactly a critical system, and I don’t really have time to work on it until later last night at home. Turns out the fix took all of 10 minutes. Most of the downtime was spent waiting to work on it and then waiting to get it back on the rack.

Once home, I booted the system with a Knoppix 4.0.2 live CD (meaning the entire linux system runs from RAM and the CD, no hard drive needed) to attempt to rescue the server. This was the first time I’ve had to use a live Linux CD to rescue the system and it worked quite well. All I needed to do was run Lilo with the correct config file so it could rebuild the MBR and allow the system to boot from the hard drive. There’s plenty of sites you can find through Google that give the steps on how to do this, but they all seem to assume everyone uses /dev/hda1 as root. I used the recommended Debian config which is a small partition (/dev/hda1) which is mounted as the directory /boot on the main root drive (/dev/hda2). The /dev/hda1 partition contains the kernel image and other files needed for booting the system. So here’s what I had to do to repair the MBR:

(The commands above assume your current lilo.conf is correct. If not, you should make any changes to it before running lilo.)

Once Lilo re-wrote the MBR, the system booted without problems. I’m not really sure when lilo broke, but given that during reboot the system complained /dev/hda2 had not been checked for 544 days and forced a fsck of the partition, I had a clue. At some time during that 544 days of runtime I must have installed a newer version of lilo and just forgot to re-run it to convert the MBR to the newer version.

544 consecutive days of runtime which only ended because of a hardware upgrade. Are you listening Microsoft?

edited 4-12-05 to correct some pretty serious (and obvious) syntax errors

About a week ago I was in IM with another blogger bitching about the amount of comment spam I had gotten that day. Nothing made it to actual posting (it was all held in the moderate queue) but it was still annoying as hell. It was suggested I install the Spam Karma plugin to take care of the problem. Now I’ve been aware of Spam Karma for quite some time but have just never gotten around to installing it. What can I say… after years of hard work and dedication, my procrastination skills have been polished to near perfection.

Finally realizing that the time I spent actually deleting spam would be better spent procrastinating something more important, I got off my ass and install the plugin. Shit works.

* Total Spam Caught: 485 (average karma: -184.98)
* Total Comments Approved: 19 (average karma: 7.26)
* Total Comments Moderated: 0
* Current Version: 2.0 final

Thats after six days. Not a single false positive. And in case you’re wondering, default settings. If you’re using WordPress (1.5.1 or higher), install this plugin.

Speaking of version numbers… right after I installed the Spam Karma plugin I upgrade this WordPress install to version 1.5.2. See what happens when I stop procrastinating? I start working on other crap as well. By my estimates this plugin install has set my training back at least a year.

Ya know, that new header looked a hell of a lot cooler in Photoshop. Now it just makes want to claw at my eyes a bit. Oh well, too lazy to change it now.

Update: Alright, I couldn’t stand it. Still not what I had in mind, but much better. If you’re curious, the really ultra crappy header can be found here.

Every year since 9-11 I’ve shut down my site and replaced it with a static page for a majority of the day. The page I use can be viewed here.

Given the recent controversy over the Flight 93 memorial, I thought this photo would be an appropriate reminder:

(taken from Pajamas Media Sept 11th slide show)

Cox & Forkum has a good roundup of links.

Site has been upgraded to WordPress 1.5.1.2

I’ve been fighting an annoying format problem with this theme for a while. It only popped up in Firefox (that i know of. The only other browsers I tested were IE and Opera) and it only screwed up the layout some of the time.

I believe I’ve finally tracked it down to some really bad HTML that was coming out of my random gallery photo php script. I’ve disabled that function for now to make sure it is indeed what was causing the problem. While tracking this problem I ran the site through the W3C validation service and found quite a few embarrasingly blatant XHTML errors in the sidebar code as well. They’ve all been fixed.

I’ve now had a couple people let me know they’ve had problems viewing the site. Specifically, certain versions of IE display a download box instead of the actual site. I never noticed a problem since I spend most of my time in Firefox. I used IE on a couple different computers here and at work and, of course, could not replicate the problem.

I was browsing through the WordPress support forums and its turns out that this is a known bug. Apparently the fix is to run the WordPress upgrade.php program (even on clean install sites like this one). I say apparently since I have no way to check if the fix has worked or not.