So… it’s ~70 degrees out and springish I have network cables draped over my desk to support a couple systems that I’m imaging right now and am really not wanting to sit here, but… I do have a few things to “clean out”…
Category: General Site Info
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Spam storm
Wow… just took a glance at the error_logs and saw numerous errors from Trackbacks and started browsing to find that the last few days we’ve been weathering a spam storm. Thanks to akismet and another tool I’ve only had maybe 2 comments stuck in moderation that were spammy, but several thousand have made it to akismet (and if I recall my OTHER filter catches 90% of the spammy stuff before akismet sees it…) So, I hope someones having fun…. realistically they seem to be coming from a variety of machines, likely a botnet. I saw one machine belonged to a netblock owned by the state of Ohio for public schools. There was another residential broadband in Texas… etc. etc. etc. So, surprise, there are still botnets in the wild and being used for spam.
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Link spam surge….
Spam spam spam spam…. the last couple days have been busy for the akismet spam plugin for my sites. They’ve been catching a lot of spam comments it appears. Many of them (the comments) seem to be filled with links to forum posts. I’ve noticed several have been shut down at this point. It’s not clear to me if the spammers are exploiting true vulnerabilities in the forum software, or simply finding forums that allow anyone to sign up and post. Either way, they’re leeching other peoples bandwidth to try to hussle (hustle?) their stuff. Along those lines, I wonder if there is a good listing/directory of legit sources of prescription drugs online? The topic is so awash in spammy/spamvertised/offshore based sites it’s hard to know easily who to trust/who not to.
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Post storm
It almost seems like I’m back to the 6-10+ posts I day I used to do around here… I should mention that I’m just clearing out a few things that I wanted to get posted and clean out the bazillion tabs in my browsing session that I’ve been loading the last month or so. I don’t expect to return to the news based/current events style posting unless it’s something I want to keep a reminder for myself of.
That much said, it’s kind of fun to be posting a few things again.
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Happy New Year
Yes, I’m still around and even though I haven’t posted, it’s been a busy few months. In some ways it’s been very nice to not force myself to read through a couple hundred news feeds a day to keep up with what’s out in the world. (Before Christmas I had started forcing myself to close the RSS reader after I “cleared” new stories and only check one or two times a day.) For a news junkie like me…. that was a bit difficult. But, right this minute I don’t know how many days it’s been SINCE I opened the news reader. Although I suspect I will in a day or two here, if for no other reason than to clean the slate… and maybe prune my feeds a bit. Some are just TOO frequent.
Let me take this opportunity to send a belated Happy New Year to anyone that’s wandering through.
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Time, value, ROI, Google and this site…. Googlebummed
This is a fairly significant “state of this site” type post and well… if you’re a usual visitor you might want to read/skim this one. It’s been about 15 months or so since the last big redesign of this site and as some long time lurkers may know, the updates were FEW and far between before moving to WordPress and this new layout. I mean, a year or so between updates was not uncommon. In the last year+ I’ve had a few spans where a month or so has gone by without posting, but in many cases I’ve been posting multiple (in other cases MANY MANY) posts in a single day.
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Clearing the deck….
As you mgiht can tell, I’ve been trying to “clear the deck” of posts that I’ve been meaning to put up. Some are just links to several pages that I’ve kept up for a few days because it was interesting. But just so you know we’re in the midst of a post flood.
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Bizarre Internet Explorer 7 problem – Several of my pages are not displayed AT ALL
I’ve been really itching to test this again since I first tried the Vista Beta. In my test of IE7 in the beta of Microsoft Vista, I found that this page came up as “Internet explorer cannot display the webpage.” The error page goes on to suggest a number of connectivity or availability problems. I even tested side by side with Firefox which WAS able to display the page and Explorer 7 which wasn’t. I thought it might just be a rendering bug of some sort, but today got a chance to try IE7 on Windows XP (RC1). So… the problem is still there, I can find NO other browser exhibiting the same behavior. It affects averyjparker.com, northcarolinagenealogy.net and southcarolinagenealogy.org, but NOT onlineradiotv.com (which all by the way are hosted out of the same VPS – so I know the VPS is up and the database server is just fine….)
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New Data Leaks section
I’ve added yet another category for “data leaks”. This is where I’ll put news along the lines of X company leaked data on yyyyy customers. It’s unfortunate that this is something that likely happens daily. There is no way that I can keep up with EVERYTHING, but I’ll try to post the bigger events in this category. I have many customers that say they’re concerned about people getting their credit card or bank numbers and for that reason they don’t do ANY transactions online or have any of that data on their computers. Well, I hate to break it to you, but the genie is already out of the bottle, because the companies that we do business with (ON OR OFFLINE) have all your data on computers and prohibiting yourself from online transactions is NO guarantee that you won’t have your data stolen or be a victim of Identity theft.
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Lot’s of things to catch up on/round up today.
I’ve got a slew of articles open that I’ve been holding to post about. I’ve also got a few other things to post, so this may be a busy posting afternoon. There’s quite a bit going on here, but things are RELATIVELY quiet out on the internet it looks like. A flurry of typing going on….