Stop The Presses
The fact that an inch of snow paralyzes Raleigh even made the front page at cnn.com. Gotta love the South in winter.
In all seriousness, though, that was some nasty stuff. It has been below freezing for several days now, so when the snow hit the roads, it immediately froze to the surface and turned the road into a hockey rink. From downtown Raleigh north and west, it was almost impossible to drive. Which lead to wrecks. Which led to people taking 6-10 hours to get home.
The weird thing was that about 8 miles south of downtown, there was nothing. The roads were dry, only a dusting of snow on the ground. So I had a great trip home once I got there – my normal 20-30 minute commute home took an hour yesterday, much better than my neighbor coming from IBM in the park, who left at 3 and got home at 7:30.
There’s talk of more light snow on the way, so for God’s sakes, hurry up and buy bread, milk, and eggs!
Getting A Referral
The most annoying group of cock-smoking referral spammers are spamming sites in the fidelityfunding.net domain. Playing whack-a-mole by firewalling off IPs that are participating in the spam attack is like spitting into the wind. The size of the zombie botnet these spammers are using must be huge. Since nobody out there in network-land appears to be able to shut them down, here’s what I’ve done on my end:
I’ve set up an Apache mod_rewrite rule that will send a 403 – Forbidden status to any attempted HTTP access that has a fidelityfunding.net referral string. I’ve set this up for my site and for Ross, and it seems to be doing the trick.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*fidelityfunding.net.*$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*send-free-sms.us.*$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*online-deals-4u.info.*$
RewriteRule ^.* /nonexistent [F]
They’ll still show up in your logs, but not as valid page accesses, so hopefully your log processing software will treat it as unimportant data and not factor those hits in.
Update – The updated mod_rewrite block above stopped all referral spam last night for both Ross and I. Rock!
Everybody Wants To Be IOERROR
Thanks to a comment left here, and a link from that comment, I’ve found that at least two people are porting IO ERROR‘s wordpress spamassassin plugin over to MovableType.
I’ve installed the one from Tobias Hoellrich, so I’ll see how that goes. There’s apparently also another one in the works by Harry Jackson.
SpamAssasin’s bayes stuff does wonders in email, let’s hope it does the same thing with comment spam.
Framed Bridge
The Benjamin Harrison Bridge over the James River
Berkeley Plantation, Virginia
November 7, 2004
Macworld Thoughts
I followed the play-by-play from the Macworld keynote over at ISCA. Here’s my thoughts on the new stuff that was revealed:
Mac mini
Wow – this is nice. Really nice. A move Apple has needed to make for a long time. They’ve got their names back in peoples’ minds with the iMac and the iPod, now here’s a way to get people to make their next computer a Mac. A 1.25Ghz G4 with CD burner and a 40GB hard drive for under $500. Outstanding. And, recognizing that most PC switchers already have their own standard VGA monitors around, this one doesn’t come with the expensive Apple LCD monitor. You can plug in your existing (USB) keyboard, mouse, and VGA monitor.
I think this system is a real win. Barring any manufacturing problems, a tiny, quiet, usable home computer that provides the security and applications of the Mac should be popular. I know that it’s the computer I’ll recommend to friends and family looking for a new system.
iPod Shuffle
You got your jumpdrive in my iPod! You got your iPod in my jumpdrive! This tiny, flash-based iPod is also a real winner. It offers two modes of play – straight-through the playlist on the device, or a shuffle-play (hence the name). So you lose some of the control you have with the standard iPods and their LCD screens. But the battery life is great (12 hours), it doubles as a standard USB jumpdrive, and the 512MB version is only $99. For someone who wants the ease of iTunes to manage their music, and just wants to take their music jogging, to the gym, or anywhere else you won’t be fiddling around too much with playlists, it’s a great choice. Heck, $99 isn’t an absurd price for a 512MB jumpdrive by itself, much less the music factor.
iWork
The replacement for the Appleworks office suite was unveiled. It’s a two-app bundle, with Keynote 2 and “Pages”, a word processor. Nothing earth-shattering. Keynote is quality, and the bundle is cheaper than MS Office, though a replacement for Excel would be a logical fit into this suite before one could dump Office. As with most things in the Windows world, its success will ultimately depend on how well it can import and export Office documents. Nothing else really matters for most people. So this is somewhat interesting, but I’m not chomping at the bit.
iLife 05
Marginal improvements to the core applications mark this software package. iPhoto has gained hierarchical folders, which should help better organize pictures. The advanced editing should also be useful. The other features don’t look that interesting (different-sized books and slideshows, to name two).
iMovie and iDVD have gone into the HD realm, though I can’t see that as a big selling point yet. HDTV doesn’t really have enough market penetration to make this a huge deal. It’s nice if that’s the space you work in, but I doubt most people will make use of it. New themes and better editing tools are always welcome, though.
I don’t have much of an opinion on the Garageband improvements, as I’m not a musician and the addition of 8-track recording means nothing to me.
Conclusion
I think this keynote was a big win for Apple. Two outstanding new products that should hopefully become popular with both current customers and new users. I personally am trying to think about how I’ll justify getting a Mac mini and iPod shuffle to Holly. (No, Holly, I’m not actually going to get them).
Thumbs up.
Whack-A-Mole
I’ve spent far too much time today catching up on my referral spam cleanup. I finally broke bad and wrote a script to help me automate the data collection, reporting to the responsible people for the domain/netblock, and firewalling of the offending hosts. It’s still somewhat of a manual process, though.
I don’t hold out a great deal of hope from the notification part, but I think I should at least make the effort to tell people “Hey – your systems have been hijacked and are being used as part of a spam scheme.” I’ve only gotten one response back, though, in months.
At the very least, though, the exploited machines on the IPs I find won’t be bothering me again.
Photoblogging
In a quest to make this blog somewhat hip, I’m going to post some pictures from my iPhoto album that I think are particularly interesting. Look for them in the Photos category, and at fine supermarkets near you.
If you like a picture, let me know!