Archives, eh
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# ∗sigh∗
There’s comes a moment in everyone’s life when they look around at the detritus gathering at their feet like so much crumbling biscuit-constructed domicile and think ‘What the fuck am I messing around with someone else’s search algorithm?’ When you cast around for ideas and notice that there is this spunky, funky little company who have a search mechanism that might just work out, do some cool things and find a niche market all its own.
Of course, this moment always comes to me when the ‘someone else’s code’ has broken and I am trying to work out why. Previously it has been because a) Australia lost against England and I needed a way to stop Khendon commenting, or more likely b) I did things that required the indices be re-indexed. And, distressingly, it somehow always seems to happen on the same night that my net account gets shaped down from ADSL2 to 1996; I’m not even sure my current connection is reaching the dazzling, dizzying, asphyxiating speeds of your 56K modem.
I assure you, trying to fix the problem over a sub-56K connection is roughly as satisfying as delivering the Gettysburg Address to a crowd of Southern White Men – or Dr John Ray, same diff – via carrier microbe.
How did I use up all of my expansive allowance of twelve gig? I downloaded The Matrix 2.
Actually, no. I downloaded Das Matrix Zwei. You know the funny thing? The movie is so much better in German. Now I have an excuse to not understand the blizards of bullshit and I can, in all happiness and good conscience, cue up each action scene one after the other. Frown away, Neo. Rave, you hippy Zionites. Look for Walt, you very teutonic sounding Link. I won’t know about it cause wheee!!! Tight-leather clad Trinity just put a motor cycle through the roof of a building.
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# Bastards
Frustration is: Spending ten hours knowing that your website is down due to an application error, knowing – more or less – what is wrong and how to fix it, and being unable to because you can’t shell out past the network proxy.
Incandescent anger is: Arriving home and finding out that no, you were wrong, the problem was that the hosting service upgraded crucial bits of software and while doing so, took the extra step to make sure the upgrade was not backwards compatible.
I am a towering inferno of impotent rage. I was irritable when I got home. I am ready to rant – without credibility – about committing imaginary acts of violence.
Bah!
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# Identity crisis
Over the weekend I got accused of running a sports blog by a reader I didn’t know I had – wow, that’s three of you now. Personally I prefer to think of it as ‘Exceedingly thinly veiled attempts to wind up the English cricket fan who reads my blog’. I’ll have to add sports blogging to the list of what avocadia is. Such list now comprises:
- Whatever the fuck it is that didn’t scurry past my brain in time to avoid being devoured, crunched up and the remains spat out into the posting form.
- Sports
Since I am a sports blog now though, I guess I should note – much belatedly – that the Wests Tigers vs Cronulla Sharks game on Sunday the 15th was – in a word – dire. At the beginning of the season I had remarked to someone or other – it may even have been on this blog but I doubt it since it’s not a sports blog – that Parramatta would at best fail specularly at the end of the season again, since at heart they have a problem. They have a halfback who is pretty good with usually one breath-takingly stupid play in him per game – I’m thinking cross field kicks in his own twenty. Paired with this halfback, they have a breathtakingly stupid five-eight who has usually one pretty good play in him per game.
I remembered this at the Wests game – technically I suppose I should be supporting them because they are local, but I’ve supported Easts since before there was a Broncos, the previous local team, if you can call living 4 hours from their home ground “local” – because, well, the reverse pretty much sums up Wests. John Morris has been asked to hand back his ‘Slippery’ by the Official Nickname Bestowing Organisation. Well, they called themselves that when I asked, but I am pretty sure they were just five moderately amusing Balmain supporters a loooooong way from home – seriously, if I’d asked them for their passports they would have whipped them out before they remembered Leumeah technically is still part of Sydney. And Benji Marshall might as well have been nicknamed The Bible, since just about everyone read him at one time or another.
I mentioned to someone at the game while Wests were busy losing that 2005 started off a lot like that, Wests were the best team not winning any games in the comp – they were close all the time but couldn’t get that last try. There’s been a couple of close games so far for Wests, including the Golden Point game in the second(?) round.
Wests did end up winning the game when Benji Marshall in a complete fluke – hey, just like Bible again – jumped on a dropped ball and outpaced Kimmorley – it’s been a long time since the Newcastle and the Mariners – to score under the posts, setting up for another golden point, which the Sharks kindly gave to Wests by giving up a penalty in their own twenty while they had the ball in hand.
Overheard at the game, all directed at the Cronulla Sharks:- “Go back to Superleague!”
- “Go back to the Mariners…wait, no, go back to the Storm..err..the Eagles?”—odd how funny that sounds when half a dozen boozed up guys are chanting it at full volume
- “Keep running back to the Shire, there’s a riot on, you don’t wanna miss it, son.”
I should point out that someone near me in a Cronulla shirt replied to the last “Yeah, they just moved over from Maq Fields”
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# Stupid Comment Spam
I delete about fifty or sixty comment spam a day at the moment. Almost without exception, the spam is on this post about receiving a Cure CD set for Christmas
I wonder if it is something about that post – either content, title or that it is off the front page – that makes it so attractive to google juicers, or if someone just wrote a script that POSTs comments using that particular node_id.
I guess I’ll find out in the next couple of days. I’ll be rolling out a fix that should – I think – block scripts that simply POST comments without making a GET first by introducing UsernameToken…well, the Token part anyway, since there are no user accounts on this blog except mine.
Technically it shouldn’t even be receiving comments anymore, it is older than 90 days which is the cut off for comments on posts around these parts. Except…except at some point I seem to have allowed a change made while testing to slip into production, and the cut off is 9000 days.
Meanwhile, spammers will be first against the wall come the revolution.
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# behind the HTML
aloha, my name is gilmae. Well, actually, it isn’t but it is the one you’ll use. The name my parents gave me is exclusively for the use of my family and anyone who has a legal requirement to keep my identity for recording purposes – the government and banks and the like, neh?
Anyway, my name is gilmae. I live in Ingleburn, New South Wales, but I am really a Queenslander.
I’m really only telling you this, mind, because inevitably sometime in the future I will make a comment somewhere on the world wide web that will prompt someone to track me back here, trying to find out who I am. There is a not insignificant section of the online population that believe that using anything other than one’s birth certificate name delegitimises anything one has to say. That the use of pseudonyms is tantamount to intellectual dishonesty because the pseudonymous is presumed unwilling to stand by anything they say.
Pseudonymity is not anonymity, it is merely using a different label for one’s identity. So. If you have come here trying to determine if I am trying to hide from anything I have said under the names ‘gilmae’ or ‘avocadia’, I assure you I am a real person who stands by what I said. If you feel you need to verify my reality, there are about a million contact methods kept reasonably up to date at on my contact me node.
avocadia is the personal page of me. All opinions expressed within are valid in my reality.
Design – such as it is – and original content are copyright 2000-2007, and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. All other content is copyright their original owners and used under Fair Use terms.
blog.avocadia.net uses guacamonium, a weblog package written in Ruby and using the Rails framework. Use of guacamonium is free but ill-advised.
Some You Had To Be There terms are used liberally throughout this blog without any in situ explanation. To assist the understanding of anyone who reads this page – which is to say no-one, an inexhaustive list is supplied below:
- D is my wife.
- tWM is the teenager we keep around the house for…something or other. Whatever it is, it sure ain’t taking out the garbage, that’s for damn sure!
- Cino is the diety I worship, the goddess of coffee. An associated in-references is green tea, which is clearest evidence of the hand of the Evil One in the world of humans.
- avocadia: if you have to ask, you don’t want to know. In fact, most people who don’t need to ask don’t want to know either.
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# Stupid Comment Spam, revisited
Well, that worked. Haven’t seen a single comment spam in the last 36 hours since I made some changes. Unsure though if it is because the post they were spamming on doesn’t accept comments anymore, or if it is because of the changes I made. I suppose if the spam starts up again in the same volumes I will know it was the former. If it starts up again but in reduced numbers I suppose I can feel that my changes made some small difference. And if it doesn’t start up again at all, I won’t care because there won’t be any spam
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# Stupid Comment Spam, revisited
Well, that worked. Haven’t seen a single comment spam in the last 36 hours since I made some changes. Unsure though if it is because the post they were spamming on doesn’t accept comments anymore, or if it is because of the changes I made. I suppose if the spam starts up again in the same volumes I will know it was the former. If it starts up again but in reduced numbers I suppose I can feel that my changes made some small difference. And if it doesn’t start up again at all, I won’t care because there won’t be any spam
