Mixing Technology

Posted on Saturday, 11th June, 2005 by ianmacd

I’ve spent the last couple of days tweaking a few small aspects of the site. The CSS that lays out the main page’s three column look is now as it should be, I believe. Previously, it was a rather hit-or-miss affair, with the potential for the AdSense to overlap the main, centre column at low resolutions. Everything should display properly now at any resolution.

The Amazon links in the sidebar now provide an image of the product to which they refer in the small pop-up that appears when you run your mouse over the link.

In case you’re interested, I thought I’d document the various bits and bobs on which this site runs. The following components are used to bring you caliban.org.

The server is Apache 2.0.52, running with PHP 4.3.11 and mod_ruby 1.2.4.

The blog is constructed around Movable Type 3.17, with MT-Blacklist 2.04b and the latest beta snapshot of SpamLookup providing anti-spam capabilities. New blog entries are entered using Markdown, rather than raw HTML. I find Markdown to be much more convenient, as it simplifies the commonly needed stuff, whilst still allowing the full spectrum of HTML to be used as necessary.

The Amazon products are periodically pulled from Amazon’s AWS API, using Ruby/Amazon 0.9.0 and stored in YAML format. These are then reloaded and processed dynamically when the front page is requested, thanks to some server-parsed Ruby scripting within the page, interpreted using eRuby. The final display of the data in a nice little pop-up is handled by version 4.17 of Erik Bosrup’s excellent overLIB library for JavaScript.

The stock quotes come from version 0.2.1 of Ruby/Finance. The quotes are regularly refreshed and saved as YAML. The server-parsed Ruby code loads the file and displays the quotes whenever a page request is made.

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Busy Day

Posted on Friday, 10th June, 2005 by ianmacd

A busy day today. Sarah had to be at Blossom for her first parent/baby support group meeting. I had a dental appointment for a cleaning at 11:00 in Palo Alto.

Afterwards, I took a game back to Fry’s and then went to pick up Sarah from Blossom, where she was now engaged in a post-partum appointment with Rosanna, our midwife.

Once Sarah was ready, we headed over to Michael’s for lunch. I gave Geoff a call, who was more than happy to use us as an excuse to chill out and watch the ravenous local birds try to steal our food. It’s always good to see friends.

By the time we got home, it was about 15:45. Where did the day go? Both Sarah and I were knackered and Eloïse was sound asleep, so we took her upstairs and the three of us went to bed. Sarah was woken by Eloïse at some point, but I got a good three hour nap in before Sarah woke me. I felt as groggy as hell afterwards, but the sleep was much needed.

Rosanna weighed Eloïse today. She’s reached a respectable 3870g, so those boobs are definitely doing the business. It somehow suddenly seems amazing to think that one can sustain the life of another human-being, using nothing but one’s own body. I’ve always known that, of course, but it suddenly seems awe-inspiring.

It’s another busy morning tomorrow, with the second of our infant massage classes.

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Tempus Fugit

Posted on Thursday, 9th June, 2005 by ianmacd

Eloïse’s fourth week on Earth draws to a close today, so we’ve whipped up some more photos to satisfy the grandparents. Taking photos is something we need to be more disciplined about or else we might regret it later. We’ve been pretty lax about capturing quality shots, because we’re just so busy with her, but with a memory like mine, I really need these visual mementos.

The baby massage is going well. Yesterday, Eloïse let me progress through all the leg and foot manoeuvres to start on her stomach. Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far with her belly before she became overwhelmed and started to cry, but we’ll just take it a day at a time.

We found a nice local café yesterday; I was very surprised to find that the place on Showers Drive that I’ve passed by hundreds of times is actually nicely laid out inside and, more importantly, makes decent sandwhiches and drinks. It’s not open at the weekend, but something tells me we’ll be spending quite a few weekday hours there in the coming weeks.

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The Cult of The Marines

Posted on Thursday, 9th June, 2005 by ianmacd

Using a new tactic that the Scientologists can only wish they could adopt, the US Marines have taken to kidnapping reluctant young men and applying the techniques of deceit and treachery in their rather desperate attempt to recruit bodies for the ignoble cause.

That one came in from Geoff. Geoff, when are you going to get a blog up and running, so I can send you a trackback ping?

Updated 18th June 2005

A follow-up article with readers’ reactions has been published.

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Anti-Spam Defences Holding

Posted on Wednesday, 8th June, 2005 by ianmacd

My new blog anti-spam defences seem to be holding up well.

The current configuration starts with MT-Blacklist, which blocks more than 95% of the comment and trackback spam by checking for blacklisted strings in the various fields of the incoming data.

The little bit of spam that makes it through is then funnelled into SpamLookup, which does some advanced extra tests, including a check to see whether a trackback ping originates at the IP address of the blog claiming to be sending it and a dynamic check to see whether a comment is being sent via an open proxy. Clever stuff.

I also have MT-Moderate installed, which allows SpamLookup to also moderate trackback pings.

This combination of plug-ins is working very well. It could be that SpamLookup on its own can do the job and that I could simply disable MT-Blacklist at this point, but I haven’t felt inclined to try that out just yet. For now, I’m happy to see how many comments and pings get denied or just moderated.

It’s lamentably insane that this problem even exists, but since it does, as with e-mail spam, one simply has to have effective measures against it.

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