blogwaffe

I got spammed.

I don’t mean that some previously clean email account got those first couple emails that cause people to cower in terror before the inevitable flood of enlargements, pharmaceuticals, and money makers. Though, as an aside, that just happened yesterday.

No, I mean my blog got hit. Not hard, but even one unwanted comment would be enough. I got six. The offending omments all got caught by wordpress‘s coment moderation filters, but I wanted more. So I futzed around a bit with the code and installed a more powerful moderation plug-in. Hopefully, since the number of hits this site gets is minimal, no one will want to take the time to figure out how to circumvent these new methods I’m using. But I’ll be watching.

[SIDE=/photo||18/]2[/SIDE]

Trying out Latexrender and its wordpress plugin. [tex]\displaystyle \pi = \sum _{k=0} ^{\infty} \dfrac{1}{16^k} \left[\dfrac{4}{8k+1}-\dfrac{2}{8k+4}-\dfrac{1}{8k+5}-\dfrac{1}{8k+6}
ight][/tex]

Finally got around to generalizing my little side popper app so it can deal with text input from blog entries as well as the wp-people data I designed it for. Check it [SIDE=/I appeared magically! And I didn’t screw up any funny characters! €! euro!/]out[/SIDE]. Still needs work, though: it can only handle straight text, not general HTML, and I’ll need it to if I want to use it for the picture album idea I have.

It’s decided; the best idea for a blog ever goes to one \_jeff_{krimmel} for his coverage of his Madden 2004 football double elimination tournament. Others may have had similar ideas in the past, but Jeff’s is the first I’ve seen, so he get’s it: the honour of an oh-oh-ficial blogwaffe shoutout.

He starts off with a good description of the situation and continues with an in depth commentary on each of the games he’s played. Humble enough to admit and explain his limitations, but still very concerned about the outcomes of the games. And who wouldn’t be? He’s got a lot riding on this. Like getting Ariele pissed off that he’s spending too much time with Madden.

Minus a few tweaks, I’ve finally got everything settled on my server. It was actually all surprisingly easy considering I had no idea what I was doing. Now that I’m hosting my own site, I have more control and can offer more functionality. It’s amazing how much better a truly database driven website can be over a “flat” design.

Excuse the mess while I change bloggin engines. Should be back to normal… sometime.
Theold site is (more or less) archived here

Damn you charter cable! Here I am spending hours trying to figure out what’s wrong with my webserver (it couldn’t be seen from outside the router), and it turns out that you’ve been blocking port 80 all along. You asses! What the hell kind of problem do you have with me having a webserver?

Huh?

Tell me. Now. ‘Cause I’m listening. ON FREAKIN’ PORT 8000!!

New domain: www.blogwaffe.com
New webserver: my old laptop
New blogging engine: … patience

So after a few days of compiling, my latop (~Dell Inspiron 7000) is up and running with Gentoo. Perhaps the biggest hurdle to usability was the button on the case that the lid presses when closed. This button suspends the computer. Since I wanted the laptop for a server, and since servers serve fairly poorly when suspended, this was unacceptable. I tried to install ACPI, but the daemon consistently refused to load no matter what kernel I used and no matter how completely I saw ACPI support compiled into those kernels. I finally decided my laptop was not compatible.

So I tried APM. The only useful feature that APM allowed was turning off the screen’s backlight. It had no control over the lid-close-button event. So, hell, I don’t need the button there, anyway, I thought. I’ll just take it out. I disassembled my entire laptop, removing drives, keyboard, screen, various bits of thermal shielding, etc. As it turns out, the button is not easily removed. This is an understatement. Not wanting to break out the soldering iron, I, after hours of attempting software control, and an hour or so of taking apart (and putting back together) the laptop, decided to cut off the button.

So I cut off the button. It works great now; I can close the lid, have the screen turn off and let the thing run as long as I want on less juice than a typical light bulb.