Dec 18, 2004
Synergy is a very useful little application. It allows you to share a mouse and keyboard between several computers over a network, and even share the clipboard between them. Works for Windows, OS X and Unix (X).
This is great when I play Eve Online — it works just fine for games that have a mouse pointer. Games without a mouse pointer (such as the typical first-person shooter) keep control of the mouse on the computer it’s played on.
This is a very nice setup. I usually have my laptop next to the desktop monitor when playing Eve, to keep an eye on IRC activity and post on the forums.
One computer is set up as a server — this is the one that has the mouse/keyboard to be shared with the other computers. The others then start Synergy in client mode and connect to the server. Very easy.
No hassle with ports and IP addresses either; the server selects a name for itself and the clients, and then you configure the layout of the screens to decide what display the mouse should move to when it reaches the edge of that screen.
The clients just need a client name and a server name to connect to. Then you’re up and running.
Dec 14, 2004
I bought the new World of Darkness core rules some weeks ago, as an early Christmas present for myself. I’ve been quite interested in the Vampire setting for World of Darkness, but I’ve never actually played anything in WoD apart from two Vampire: The Dark Ages and Werewolf: The Apocalypse adventures at a couple of RPG conventions.
White Wolf recently ended all their RPG storylines and decided to restart the World of Darkness from a blank page, making fans all over the world scream bloody murder.
This time, the core rules are released in the World of Darkness rulebook instead of being reprinted in every setting book, and only contain rules for playing as a human. Individual setting books for each of the settings will be released, with rules for playing as that particular entity.
So far, only the new Vampire setting has been released, titled Vampire: The Requiem. I’ll probably pick that up at a later time, since this is the setting I’m really interested in.
The basic premise in World of Darkness is that the world is really a grim, dark place where monsters exist, but the majority of the population live on in ignorant bliss. A rare few, however, are Awakened and aware of the things that go bump in the night — vampires, werewolves, ghosts and demons. This was the setting in Hunter: The Reckoning in the last World of Darkness; humans who fought back against evil.
I’ll be back with more once I’ve read a bit more of the core book.
Dec 12, 2004
The change should have been completely transparent and invisible to you, so here’s the info: I’m running Wordpress now.
So that’s the fourth time I’ve switched blog CMS this year. Movable Type → Wordpress → Textpattern → MT again → Wordpress.
The main reason for switching is that the comment spam problem for Movable Type has become completely unbearable. It can quite literally kill a server. MT-Blacklist helps, but has a flaw that allows some comment spam to pass right through it.
And then there’s the whole “rebuild on every comment” aspect. If MT gets hit with 50 spams in 10 seconds, that’s 50 mt-comments.cgi processes that are all rebuilding a page. Sometimes the same page.
The TextDrive servers can easily push 20,000,000 hits per day. Yet mt-comments.cgi can effectively push the server load up into the 300s. This data speaks for itself — 94% of the hits are to mt-comments.cgi. 3-400 of them are proper comments, the rest is spam.
Wordpress and Textdrive are dynamic. There’s no page to generate every time a comment hits.
I still get spam, though. Spammers monitor web services like Weblogs.com and go spam them as soon as they see an updated blog there. I get some spam every time I write a new entry.
Enter Spam Karma. So far it’s stopped spam dead in its tracks, and this far more CPU efficient than MT-Blacklist. It works great, and the focus is to require as little interaction as possible from the blog owner.
In closing, Wordpress has matured immensely since I last tried it. This will be my weapon of choice for quite some time now.
Dec 11, 2004
There’s a discussion on the TextDrive forums about how the MSN spider bot behaves. And it’s quite rude.
Microsoft wanted to be able to boast with a large page index when their new MSN Search went public beta. So they released the leash on the MSN crawler and let it index at full speed, saturating the bandwidth of the victim site if necessary.
That equals about $150 of bandwidth bills in two weeks for TextDrive, or $4000 yearly. So it was banned for a while until it behaved properly. Paying $4000 per year just to be in a search engine is madness.
MSN Search isn’t very smart either. Quite frankly, it’s stupid. It wasn’t quite banned from TextDrive servers; it actually got a redirect via mod_security to the MSN Bot info page. It then parsed the info on that page as if it was the result from the pages it was denied access to, and added it as a search result for those pages.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I also had a visit from the Popdex crawler today.
My definition of rude and abusive bots is as follows: if it leaves a referrer without the referring page actually containing a link to my site, it is considered fraudulent behavior. If it gorges and gobbles pages at a rapid pace, it is considered abuse of my site.
The Popdex crawler did both. It crawled 350 pages in two minutes. Twice per page, for 700 requests in two minutes. And it filled my logs with fake referrals to popdex.com.
Bam. Banned.
Dec 5, 2004
I have just reinstalled MT from scratch, since I needed to upgrade anyway. That seems to have solved my problems with the comments.
And now, the joys of grabbing all plugins again and whipping up a better design that doesn’t feel like it rapes my eyeballs.
Dec 5, 2004
How come each and every flight company is utterly incompetent in the web department?
FlyMe.com says “2C error: TECHNICAL ERROR 96″ when I try to pay my ticket. Skyways gives an Error 404 on the booking page.
And now it appears that I have three booked tickets on FlyMe, thanks to that error. Now if I could only actually pay for one of them…
Incompetence.
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