Archive for the 'Site news' Category

I will be away from home for the next week and a bit. I’m flying to Las Vegas in a few hours to attend a work-related technical conference. That ends next Friday, at which point Irene is flying down to join me and we’ll spend a long weekend seeing the sights in Vegas.

I will have Internet access, but I doubt I’ll be making any updates or blog postings while I’m away- I expect to be pretty busy. Rest easy, though: I’ll be back in ten days, refreshed and ready to post- hopefully you’ll all survive without your Uber Geek fix

You may noticed that some odd changes here during the past day or so. This is part of a long term plan I’ve had to tidy up and “rethink” the structure of the site.

The plan is to have easily accessible links to posts specific to each category as part of the main site navigation. The categories I’ve selected are:

• Gear: Computers, video, hardware and general gadgetry
• Games: computer and console titles, both reviews and general discussion
• Girls: women that geeks who like women will like… I have work to do here, but expect to see Number 6, Seven of Nine, and others showing up here
• Geek Miscellany: Science, advanced technology, and related topics that don’t fit in any particular category
• Rants: My occasional (usually over the top) opinions on things like politics, the news, and other stuff
• Life: what is happening in my immediate vicinity- family, around the house, and the like
• Critters: News and information about the animals that share our domicile
• Site News: posts like this one that talk about this blog

Each of these choices will lead you to a page that gives a brief description of the category and contains only matching posts. Once I get things working the way I want, the main or “Home” page will only list brief summaries of each post. At the moment, the categories are more or less in place, but some of the site navigation features aren’t working quite right yet. I expect to have the main details ironed out in the next couple of days, so bear with me.

I discovered a problem with my blog when I posted my rant about my Cisco RV016 earlier today. After all my network shuffling around, the website was loading very, very slowly. The Wordpress blog was taking several minutes to render, whereas the other blogs on the server were behaving normally.

I tried a great many things, including running database recovery diagnostics and upgrading my Wordpress version, before finally figuring out the cause. My network changes resulting in my server no longer having correct DNS settings: you could find it, but it couldn’t find the rest of the internet. I suspect the page generation delay was happening because of the Google Adsense stuff on the site, which wants to talk to Google… but I’m just speculating.

In any case, the problem appears to be solved now… five hours after I discovered it. I’m going to add this to the list of things I will blame on my Cisco RV016 router/switch…

UPDATE: I have uncovered and repaired more problems, but these ones I can’t blame on my much maligned Cisco RV016

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in December of 2005 I added Google Adsense features to my site. As I said back then, I have no illusions of actually making money off of Adsense. Starting year three, my “a buck or two a month” estimate is holding remarkably true. I’m up to about $45 sitting in the Google coffers, waiting to reach $100 so I can claim my riches.

More interesting to me is the ebb and flow of statistics and traffic relating to my site. Back when I started with Adsense, a good day on my site was about 50 page impressions: now a good day is about 500 page impressions, and a “slow” day is about 150. So traffic is up, but arguably the number and variety of people exploring the web is also up.

But why do people come to my web site? I don’t do anything to “advertise” it, and I break one of the cardinal rules of building an audience for your blog: my topics are all over the map. A good blog is one that picks a specific topic and sticks to it: I, on the other hand, blog about whatever interests me at the moment. Yes, that means much of what you see here is related to technology (computers), computer games, and science. But there are personal rants here as well, and boring stuff about things that have happened around the house.

I have no desire to “restrict” my posting to specific topics, but I think I should do some work to better structure the site by category. I imagine it would be nice for folks interested in my, say, computer hardware, to have a well defined button to push to see that content. That stuff is actually pretty easy to corral here on this site with my current categories, but I don’t think everyone knows how to use those- expect me to make some changes there in the next year to make this easier. I’ll probably be using those buttons at the top of this page for this purpose: my challenge right now is figuring out what categories make the most sense for my visitors.

Why is this a problem? Well, if I look at my Google stats and my own local statistics software, the top handful of “hits” to my site based on keyword searches are:

• Mary Carey
• Teresa Noreen
• Asus M2R23 motherboard problems
• Battlefield 2142 vista
• exploding biceps

Well… I’m not partial to setting up categories based around “sexy women” or “exploding biceps”. And the really odd thing is: I have literally dozens of posts on computer hardware and games, and only a couple of posts regarding models / sexy women, yet somehow those posts drive more traffic than everything else combined. So I’ll have to give this some thought… maybe I need a “Girls Geeks Lust after” page?

The exploding biceps thing, though…that really freaks me out.

P.S.: your challenge for the day is to find the exploding biceps post on this site…

P.P.S: your other challenge is to post a comment on this thread telling me how you found this site, and what might make it easier to find what you want. My guess is, I’ll get zero comments on this topic, since everyone is here looking for partially-clothed women and exploding biceps…

I’ve updated to the latest version of WordPress (2.3.3), the software that makes this blog work, and also updated half a dozen of the plugins on my site. In *theory*, none of the changes should be noticeable to anyone visiting here.

However… I’m doing this rather quickly, and undoubtedly something is broken now. If you notice any problems… well, feel free to complain to the management

One of the objectives of my web server upgrade was to end up with a Linux/PHP/mySQL configuration that would work with Gallery 2. All of the photos on my site have been managed via Gallery for years now… unfortunately, so long in fact that the version of Gallery I’ve been using is three years out of date.

Not any more: I was finally able to successfully upgrade to Gallery version 2 tonight. The process was reasonably smooth: a couple of hiccups slowed things down

• I lost all of the long descriptive text I’d written for some photos the first time I imported: I redid the whole process, and using the tools Gallery provides in their migration plugin I redirected my lengthy “titles” into the new description field. Downside: all of the photos now have the default generated titles provided by the old Gallery: things like “aaa” and “aab”. Not a big deal, I guess
• once the migration succeeded I had a bit of trouble getting links to the old Gallery to “redirect” to the new Gallery. I fixed the problem by creating an empty ../albums directory in the G2 home directory and placing the appropriate .htaccess rewrite rules within

Everything appears to be more or less working: you can see the new gallery at http://gallery.kgadams.net. Excuse the default appearance: I’ll get that fixed up once I know a bit more about what the options are. Next on my list is getting the random photo block on this page working again, then I’ll attempt to embed Gallery as a page on this site.

UPDATE: I have the random photo plugin working again: the pictures are appearing properly in the right navigation bar of this site. You should also now see a “Gallery” link above (I’ll likely rename this to “Photos” or something later). Click on that and you’ll see the whole gallery. Currently there are some serious problems with formatting of that page- the fonts are unreadably small, for example. I think I have a handle on how to get that fixed, but I won’t get to it until later. I also may do a re-import of all the photos: the “descriptive text” problem I noted above bugs me, and there is another approach to the problem I will try

I still haven’t completely restored the Gallery here on my ol’ website. The Gallery itself is still here, and still works fine, but the code that puts a little random picture here on the blog isn’t working quite right so I’ve left it turned off for now. My intent is to upgrade the gallery software itself before I re-activate that plugin. It is only a couple of hours of work, but I’ve been distracted this week. I’ve also been researching a few nice new features of the updated Gallery that I want to incorporate into this blog- we’ll see how that works out.

I’m off to the Casino shortly to see my Mom and sister, and then I have a bit of office work to do… so it is unlikely that the Gallery update will get done today. Mostly, though, I didn’t want any of my regular visitors (all three of you ) to think that I’d forgotten.

I seem to have reversed the forces of entropy! The new server is basically operational, and this blog is now being served by fresh, clean hardware. I’ll post something detailing the innards of the new box this upcoming weekend.

Interesting gotchas from the install

• always pay close attention to disk space when migrating / backing up old servers: I spent several hours trying to fix a problem that was nothing more than my old server running out of disk
• Linux drivers still have problems with network autonegotiate: Or maybe it’s Cisco/Linksys with the problem? For about a decade now, twisted pair Ethernet hubs and NICs have often failed horribly when trying to agree on 100 versus 10 Mbps, and particularly on full versus half duplex. I noticed my file transfers between my two Linux boxes were very slow (on the order of 60 KB/s). I checked my Cisco hub status monitor and, surprise of surprises, both Linux boxes had negotiated themselves a half duplex connection. I changed their configuration to forced 100 Mb/s full duplex, and suddenly I was getting upwards of 6 MB/s of encrypted transfer
• Linux GUI software is sometimes better than the command line: Examples include:
• • installing OS packages/software components- in the GUI, you get a nice list showing what you have installed already and can search component descriptions visually
  • sftp: the command line sftp must use horrible default settings- I was barely able to get to 1 MB/s using it between two computers on a 100 Mbps LAN (the maximum on a 100 Mbps network would be around 9-10 MB/s); the GUI based FileZilla, on the other hand, happily pushed bits at about 6 MB/s
  • USB file system mounts: plug a drive in to the computer, and the GUI autodetects it and pops up to tell you it is mounting it and it just works: basically, just like Windows and OSX

  I am leaving the GUI (KDE) running on this box; now if I could only get the remote desktop (tightvnc) to work without corrupting the keyboard input, I’d be set

• sometimes it is best to give up: One of the things that didn’t work quite right was my install of vncserver/tightvnc. This software allows me to remotely connect to my Linux box with a graphical interface: I use it around the house (not over the Internet) when I’d rather not go and sit in front of the server. Unfortunately, the current install with Mandriva only works until you try to actually use it: at that point, you encounter two problems
• • the vnc session fails with a fatal “fixed font not found” error. I fixed this by installing the XFS package, but it took me several hours to figure out
  • at this point I was able to open a session and see it on my other computer. Unfortunately, anything I typed came out garbled: E.G.: typing “l” would seemingly send an “r” character

  I banged my head against the wall for hours trying to get this fixed, then read this post. Apparently, this “bad character mapping with Mandriva’s tightvnc implementation” problem has existed for months…

• Avhai/ZeroConf/Bonjour are cool: I decided to set up the new server so I could get at its filesystems using my Mac. to that end, I configured Avhai. To get this to work, I followed some guides referred to by this guy. The short story: install and config netatalk, then install (if necessary: it was already installed in my Mandriva build) Avhai for the afp service you just added. Avahi and its friends are really just advertisers: they aren’t “services” in and of themselves, but the let other machines on your network know what is available. For the record, my file share services are blocked by my firewall: sorry Once complete, the services offered by my Linux box show up on the Mac: file shares, terminal services, and potentially other things. I also noticed that the network performance of AFP seems better than SMB. Note that this is purely a seat-of-the-pants observation

There will likely be a few more brief outages over the next couple of weeks as I finish up installing things and tuning the configuration a bit.

I broke the website earlier today. I think I’ve established the Computing Law of Quantum Superposition. Specifically: a computing system is in all possible states until it is observed, at which point it collapses into a single state. Unfortunately, the single state is always “non-functional”.

In the process of making configuration backups I somehow a) corrupted several database indexes; and b) caused the server to run out of disk space. These two things meant that the server stopped working, which caused me to try a series of completely logical and totally wrong approaches to fixing what was at the time an unknown problem.

I have this blog back up and running, at least. The other websites on this server, including my photo gallery, are temporarily down until I deploy the new server.

My apologies for the disruption!

Running a public website of any kind means having to deal with various unwanted guests. This blog, for example, receives around 300 spam comment posts a day, and any number of attempts to break in.

With a little bit of research, a site administrator can reduce the effort of managing all of these intrusive visitors to a minimum. The trick is to choose the right tools to keep the site accessible for legitimate users without making it too easy for bad guys to get in or generating a lot of daily work to keep things going.

For this blog, Kelly’s World, I use two tools that work well with WordPress:

• Akismet, which comes with WordPress, and analyzes submitted comments for characteristics that suggest the comment is spam. This is basically the same idea as an email spam filter, and it works pretty well
• Bad Behavior, which is an optional plugin that can be used with WordPress and other blogs/site content management tools. Bad Behavior looks at characteristics of the site *visitor*: their browser, their IP address, characteristics of their HTTP traffic. If something looks fishy, Bad Behavior can prevent the visitor from getting at the site at all. Bad Behavior works pretty darn well too. Or it did…

Bad Behavior has been working great for a couple of years. On Thursday I attempted to access my blog from work, and got the “you’ve been blocked” message from Bad Behavior. I didn’t think much of it: although where I work is pretty clean from a security perspective, there are several hundred thousand users sharing a few thousand outbound IP addresses, so I could see a false blacklist entry getting added somewhere. But today my friend Chris emailed me saying he had been blocked as well, so I went into full investigation mode…

I don’t know whether I have the problem fixed. Apparently, however, there was a problem with Bad Behavior’s back end configuration, and a patch had to be released to correct it. I was using Bad Behavior 2.0.9: the patch is 2.0.11.

If you are trying to comment on my site (and aren’t some sort of Russian pornography spam bot), please email me at kadams at kgadams dot net. Replace the at with an “@” and the dot with a … dot. You know the drill. Let me know when you encountered the problem, and I’ll look into it.