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Changes needed in Industrialized Education
Created at 06:48 AM on Wednesday December 15th, 2010
I've always wondered about the state of our education system; how it functions, its goals and relevance to today’s society. This is especially true now that I have a child who will be starting public education in less than a year. Is it time to reevaluate and radically overhaul public schools?
Watch the video below and consider its message:
Spam spam spam spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!
Created at 07:18 AM on Thursday November 11th, 2010
It's been slightly over a year since I added the forums to my website. Until very recently I received very little spam even with guest/anonymous posting enabled. But in the last two months spam bots have started hammering the forums. Initially it was easy enough to remove the postings by hand; but the volume continued to grow and it became more and more work to remove them. Earlier this week I decided enough was enough.The only real reason to spam my forums is to cross post links in an effort to boost search engine rankings. So I've disabled links inside of guest postings. Hopefully that simple change will stop the majority of spam.
One of the best ways to stop spam is to simply not let the bots post. After digging around the SMF forums I stumbled upon a plug-in that uses Bad Behavior on the back-end. It checks for malformed responses, incorrect protocol implementations and other fingerprints to identify a spammer and deny them access. However the extension was written for SMF 2.x forums and I'm using a customized 1.x version. I ended up using the "generic" version of Bad Behavior and modified it to work with my forums.
And the Pièce de résistance: On each post submission I look at the history in the Apache logs; any attempt to bulk post will automatically result in getting firewalled. =)
Server Death
Created at 02:59 PM on Monday November 1st, 2010
All good things must come to an end. This includes faithful Linux servers. Two days ago my main Linux server of 7+ years started having hardware problems: the negative 12 volt rail started bouncing between -10 and -14 volts. Thankfully it continued to work long enough to migrate all of my data to a new box. The original box was running Red Hat 9 (Shrike). Periodically I'd update it; manually compiling the latest version of the services it provided (apache, bind, sendmail, ssh, etc.,..) This time around I decided to use Ubuntu Server 10.04.1 LTS (Lucid Lynx) and save myself a lot of headaches by using the built in packages. The amusing bit is most of the services are actually older than what I was running previously. Oh well.
So I've begun restoring services slowly. Its amazing how many tweaks, hacks and other configuration changes one can accumulate in seven years. ;) As always, the devils in the details. Some services are taking quite a bit longer to restore than I'd originally hoped (theres always a small learning curve when switching distributions).
So if you find something broken; acting odd or otherwise doesn't seem right please drop me a line and let me know. Thanks!
More Changes and Observations
Created at 07:15 AM on Thursday July 15th, 2010
I've been at it again; tweaking my website. I added AJAX to the calendar so one can browse through the months and years. I've added a "go to homepage" onclick event to the headers block (most websites implement this in one form or another) and fixed a few small bugs dealing with older articles in the history / news page.And I noticed a few oddities while reviewing my Apache logs:
It seems the vast majority of connection attempts from China requesting the MyEnTunnel page end up getting reset (104 connection reset by peer). I'm guessing the Great Firewall of China is actively blocking it...?
I've also seen a ton of requests for my favicon.ico from Firefox (and only Firefox). It requests favicon.ico every 20 to 60 seconds as long as the page is displayed in the browser. Initially I thought it was a bad proxy or some type of script doing this; however... While I working on my website my copy of Firefox started doing it. It doesn't do it very often; nor can I manually get it to trigger. It's very hard to reproduce and only seems to happen with the 3.x line. Occasionally it'll happen with other images as well. I know the browser has the object cached as Apache will constantly return 304 Not Modified to the requests. Has anyone seen this behavior before? A new (old?) Firefox bug?
And I've been debating adding a Paypal donate button to my website. I've had quite a few requests to make the service portion of MyEnTunnel work with Windows 7. And I would... But I don't have a copy of Windows 7 to test with! In the past several people have offered to donate to the project and I think this might be worth pursuing now. Is it worth the hassle?
And one last newsworthy item: MyEnTunnel has received another award! This time it won "Editor's Pick" from Software Informer [link].
Website Cleaning/Updates
Created at 01:45 PM on Sunday July 11th, 2010
Earlier today I spent some time cleaning up and removing random(garbage?) comments on the website. While doing this I noticed that comments ended up getting split between the forums and the CMS. In an attempt to reconcile this, I've started merging CMS threads into the forums and directly integrating the forums by linking to the topics.I've also decided I need to post more regularly. My last post was back in March over three months ago. Ideally I'd like to do a posting at least twice a month. And with all projects I've been working on I have quite a bit of material to add.
You didn't get mad...
Created at 04:22 PM on Tuesday March 23rd, 2010
I found this posted somewhere. I normally don't quote/talk about politics/life but this seems VERY fitting to re-post:“You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.
You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate energy policy.
You didn't get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.
You didn't get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.
You didn't get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.
You didn't get mad when we spent over 600 billion(and counting) on said illegal war.
You didn't get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq.
You didn't get mad when you saw the Abu Grahib photos.
You didn't get mad when you found out we were torturing people.
You didn't get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.
You didn't get mad when we didn't catch Bin Laden.
You didn't get mad when we let a major US city drown.
You didn't get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark.
You finally got mad when.. when... wait for it... when the government decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick. Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, are all ok with you but helping other Americans... well ***** that. That about right? You know it is.
-Anon”
MyEnTunnel 3.4.2.1 Released
Created at 07:11 AM on Tuesday February 2nd, 2010
Small update:Version 3.4.2.1 reduced exe file size by removing an unused library.
Small text changes only. There are no functional changes.
MyEnTunnel 3.4.2 Released
Created at 07:32 PM on Tuesday January 19th, 2010
A new version has been released that addresses a few lingering issues and adds some small features. Please click here for the new version.Website Caching Part Deux
Created at 07:06 AM on Monday January 18th, 2010
Don't you love it when you find a coding glitch? Ever since I wrote page caching for my website its not been adding page hits when it serves a cached page! I've missed thousands of page hits since it went live in July of last year. Arrrggh! Oh well, live and learn I guess.Forums
Created at 07:55 AM on Friday November 13th, 2009
Since I get a (small) amount of questions and comments about my software I've decided to add a forums section. This way others can find answers or answer other users questions. Will it be useful? No idea. But I'll give it a shot. If it gets spammed or flooded I'll simply remove it.« Older News