Laurabelle's Blog

Months ago I attempted to get PPTP (pptp-linux) and rdesktop working under Linux but failed miserably. I had no idea what was going wrong, and I eventually gave up. Actually I don't know if rdesktop would have worked or not, because I couldn't get that far. I needed PPTP so I could authenticate myself and [...]

Well, I knew it was going to happen eventually. The Trackback spammers have finally found my weblog. They left fifteen little spams over the last three days, and I found it rather ironic that my last entry about fighting spam got more spam-pings than any other. This minor deluge of spam has at last prodded [...]

This morning I received a spam that rates higher than normal for stupidity. It rates above even the septic-tank spam of a few years ago (though what do I know about septic tanks?) This spam wasn't peddling drugs or large penises or nekkid wimmin. No, it was offering tech support for Solaris servers.

Yesterday evening I got fed up with a Firefox bug and decided to look for it on Bugzilla to see whether it had been reported. It was a very strange bug, involving the mis-display of transparent PNGs, and it only popped up in Windows, not under Linux. It turns out that the bug has already [...]

A couple of weeks ago I was trying and not succeeding in blocking external referrers from my CGI directory. I got my sysadmin to enable .htaccess and Mod_Rewrite for that document root, after which I declared success, but actually I never actually tested my rules. (Oops.) I was trying not to use Mod_Rewrite (since it's [...]

This weekend I noticed that Googlebot had started indexing the URLs of my newly renamed comment script, even though it wasn't actually crawling the pages. Since comment and trackback spammers don't need the content of the page, just the URL, this was not enough for me. I wrote to Google to find out what could [...]

Delilah (my Dell 8100) has served me faithfully for nearly 3 years now, but I'm almost ready to move to a desktop. This time I want to go the DIY route, because I don't think they make computers the way I want them. In preparation for this project, Jeff and I sat down a few [...]

I think Phil Ringnalda is right about nofollow: It only actually stops you from getting spammed when the ocean starts boiling, after we've forced every single person with weblog comments to implement it, and driven the unbelievers off the web. Until then, the spammers and the search engines are going to keep working you from [...]

Like Gloria Craney, I find myself obsessed by referrer spam. For the past few days I've often kept half an eye on my access logs, trying to make sure all requests get 301'd. I tweaked my .htaccess rules. I renamed mt-comments.cgi and mt-tb.cgi. I waged a defensive war. Along with renaming mt-comments.cgi, I also added [...]

If you tried to submit a comment a couple of hours ago, you probably noticed that the script formerly known as mt-comments.cgi was producing nice fat 500 server errors. Yup, that was me, tweaking (as ever) without having any clue what I was doing. Great learning experience, bad customer service. Bad Laurabelle. (Note to self: [...]