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Coming soon to this server, Downtime.

With my change in employment, I have to move my server, and I really want to move a lot of it off the physical hardware.  Well I have a lot moved, but the family and lug-nut sites aren't yet.  I'm awaiting some different hardware still, so tomorrow I have to take this box down, and migrate it home for a while, before I can set up my replacement box.

Not that it matters too much, I mean how often have I posted this year :)  Oh, it's my *other* services that matter to me.

Recently I was passed this interesting article describing the ways you can embed videos from The LDS Church's mormon.org in your blog/website/about me page.

http://www.sixteensmallstones.org/embeddable-distributed-content-from-mormonorg

The basic rundown solves the issue that I was looking for.  Which is the desire to "Web 2.0" embed video content from another source (yes, hotlinking is now in with permission).  In this case from mormon.org, which is not by nature a fully user managed site.  The basic concept of it doesn't allow for complete outside control, for reasons I can accept for now.  But the new videos are an excellent tool that  I would like to use.

The article also suggests some enhancements that normal geeks recognize from other shared media sites that are lacking, such as automated redirecting to mormon.org.  This of course is something that would be likely included if that was the design of the product, and hopefully I can help bubble the idea upstream to listening ears.

For anybody just happening to try and hit local geek James 'Neybar' Lance's web page, it happens to be down atm.  And why?

Clicking will bring up a larger image, but it says:

Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason a1 on CPU 0
You have some hardware problem, likely on the PCI bus.
Dazed and confused, but trying to continue.

Now that's a hilarious error message.  As for trying to continue, it's locked hard. :(  Poor James, new hardware time.

If for some reason you haven't already heard, SixApart has announced that version 4 of their MovableType blogging software is GPL.  This is great news, as it corrects a very nasty previous decision moving away from the GPL, which caused many folks such as myself to move off of it.

So it's time to go back.  Why? Well my previous software had some cool features, and was fun to hack on, but it had long been unmaintained, and I was tired of tracking it against some devel frameworks.  So, I'm moving back, to a beta version of MT.  Be warned that things will be changing a lot in the near future hear, as basically nothing is set up.

Sorry for the downtime earlier today, I know everybody was so eager to read the rest of my post. For some reason late last night the switch that this box sits on decided to freak out, and was only allowing a few bytes/s out. Of course openclue people were really missing out because Plug and Joseph's boxes sit on the same switch. Things are back up now though, all is well.. move along..

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Thought I'd pass along a great deal on a 512 mb SD card:
Kingston 512 MB Secure Digital Card $6.99
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When I installed mod_security yesterday, I was hoping for some good results. Those results I figured could be tracked by watching my visitor and hits statistics return to somewhat normal values, as well as seeing OS and Browser versions return to something more that I would expect from my geeky audience

Well, in only one day, I am proud to say that modsecurity has more than beat my expectations. Visitor counts have returned down to the humble amount this little blog can expect, hits are way down, and already, safari , mozilla, and Linux have moving back up in marketshare , instead of the hyperinflated number for the windows/IE bots that were hitting this box.
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In the last month I have been getting nailed with various forms of referral spam , and various annoying exploit attempts. Besides the sheer annoyance of it all, the way it screws up your logs and stats, I just didn't want them to think their stuff was working. So I finally implemented some mod_security rules into my apache.

I extended the default debian ruleset with a few that I found online, and things seem to be working well. I hope not too much of a performance hit on this little box (if so, please tell me). I've only had two issues with it so far:

1. Default rules blocked my cookies. The default rules had a very basic regex for cookie data, didn't' work with my system
2. Debug Log. The debugging by default is at 9, and that very quickly filled up a 2gb file, which then killed apache

Tuesday morning I attended Tim Bunce's Presentation on Advanced DBI (Slides Coming Soon). I attended this presentation several years ago, and wanted to see the updated version.

Tim Bunce is the creator of DBI, the Perl Database Interface, and a great source to tell you what you need to know about DBI. I'm appending my notes to the slides here, that might pull some of my perspective to them.

The biggest highlights of the presentation to me:

• Enhanced Debug modes
  • now can provide coderef's for dispatching at debug and error levels
  • Easy ENV vars to turn on debugging
  • Easy to enhance
• Enhanced Profiling
  • Multiple levels for great verbosity
• swap_inner_handle
  • this method is a "Brain Transplant Voodoo" method
  • Will allow some magic that we want to do with automated handling for read-only slaves, and write masters (See this space later for logic when we figure it out)

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The easy way to get started. Yes, the absolute minimum, but good links to get started with.

Haskell in 5 steps