Year: 2004

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Unscheduled downtime

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The server hosting my domains has been under attack from the spammers, and ended up going down yesterday afternoon and today. Downtime wasn’t long – long enough to eliminate the problem; but I’m concerned this is the start of a persistent problem when I heard what caused the shutdowns: yesterday’s attack was a Movable Type comment spammer attack, and today’s problem was a copy of mt-blacklist that spiraled out of control.

Hosting Matters, my hosting company, was on the problem immediately, and solved it quickly – but there is only so much they can do. The problem is installations of Movable Type that are wide open, or only partially protected. And it seems like part of the problem could be inproper installations of mt-blacklist.

Those of you with Movable Type are going to have to put whatever measures you can into place, not only to protext yourself, but also to protect others on your servers. I imagine that if enough hosts run into this problem with Movable Type, they may restrict its use.

No, let’s be a bit stronger with this statement: they will start to restrict its use.

If you’re running Movable Type, you really need to upgrade to whatever installation is the most secure, and you’re going to have to install mt-blacklist for that installation. At this time, this is the only known comment spam application that seems to help with the problems. I believe that the most recent release of Movable Type is 3.0, a developer’s release; Jay Allen has put out an emergency release for this version.

However, I can’t recommend that people go to a developer’s release unless they’re comfortable working with a version of the software that is intended primarily for developers. Not unless Six Apart comes out with some form of official recommendation that Movable Type users go this route. I’ve sent an email to the folks there, telling them that I’m getting emails from folks asking help, and what course they should follow. When I hear back, I’ll post an update.

If the official word is to go to 3.0 and the emergency release of mt-blacklist, and you’re having problems with the upgrade or installation, I’ll volunteer to help those who need help, either with upgrading to 3.0, installing mt-blacklist, or both. I’ll also help Movable Type users to close down older comments – older comments are the ones being attacked–using direct SQL statements, as long as they’re willing to give me temporary database access. Knowing webloggers, I’m sure that others with experience with Movable Type will also offer their help.

In addition, those with the 2.6x installations that have followed these comment spam protection steps that I outlined long ago have said that they haven’t had comment spam problems since. I don’t know for sure if this is still true or not. If true, and you don’t want to go to 3.x, you might want to consider checking out these steps. Again, holler if you need help.

You might be thinking of jumping to WordPress right now just to escape the comment problem. I can understand your wanting to do this–the comment spam problem is out of control. However, if you’re happy with the tool and Six Apart and the only reason you would do this is comment moderation, you might want to hold on making a switch until you see what the 3.1 release has; then if you decide you want to make a move to WordPress, or Textpattern, or any other tools, and need help, holler.

Regardless, you can’t leave your Movable Type installations unprotected, with open comments. You’re going to get yourself kicked off your server.

As a note unrelated to Movable Type, email spammers have been running ‘dictionary listing’ spam attacks against my domain and others. What this means is that the spammers randomly generate names, attach these to domain addresses and send them out. If a name doesn’t bounce back from the email server as not belonging to a person, the spammers then know that they’ve most likely found a valid email address.

Hosting Matters is going through some extraordinary efforts to try and stop these attacks, and there is a chance that emails to me have been bounced, or will be bounced. If so, send me an email to my gmail account, listed in the sidebar, and I’ll see about getting you back in.

Update

Since Hosting Matters isn’t comfortable specifically saying that MT was the problem this week (because there were the spambots, too), and since the folks that asked for help haven’t said anything online, I do come across as alarmist.

Perhaps I am. I’ve been told that MT 3.1 should be out by month end of so. Since there is little outward indication of problems with MT other than this post, I withdraw my statements in this post.

Best of luck to the Movable Type users moving forward.

Categories
Burningbird

It is all about me

I’ve added an ‘about me’ link to the sidebar. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time, though my About page is probably not as professional as many of the ones I’ve read elsewhere. Oh well — life is full of wonderous variety, as they say in the movies.

Seriously, when I get the ‘professional pages’ in my site up (not this weblog, no worries there– it will always remain as funky as I can make it), I’ll replace the About Page; but I figured it’s fun for now.

A succinct version of this page could be that I’m a Moron on the Pilgrim Specification Adherance Scale. I hope that I’m a fairly successful Moron, and that I keep my forays into being an Asshole to a minimum. I do try, though, for the Expert Moron ranking in the technologies I work with frequently–except for syndication feeds I hasten to add, where I’m happy just to remain a simple Moron.

When it comes to RDF, I even wavered for a time as Angelic (though some thought I tended more to Asshole than Angel); but then the W3C came out with changes in the released specifications, and my work was pushed back into being Moronic again.

Ain’t that just the way it goes?

In the About page, I also mention my Port-a-Bloggy business, and the camera fund. I have a new port-a-bloggy customer waiting in the wings for WordPress 1.3 to release and then *poof* I’ll have him off Movable Type and into WordPress, quicker than a cat can clean its whiskers with a spit soaked paw. Just think–I can do the same for you.

I’ll have you know, that WordPress is very sexy. Just ask any WP site owner, they’ll say that their sex appeal has increased by a factor of 2 since they moved to WordPress. And you’ve never been moved until you’ve been moved by someone like me.

I did want to say thanks to those who have helped so far with the camera fund, or have trusted me enough to manage the move of their weblogs. I also wanted to thank those who have come out with tips on what to do with my current quirky camera. Because of them, I can continue to take the photos just like the ones posted this week until I do get my new camera.

Those with a modem, tremble with fear.

Categories
Diversity XHTML/HTML

The women of XML

Dare Obasanjo wrote a terrific post in response to my noticing that the Applied XML Conference had no women speakers. He listed out several women in the XML world who would be great speakers, several of whom I was familiar and agree with him, 100%.

In particular, I would be intrigued by a presentation by Lanqing Dai, who is now working with WinFS, but used to work with the XmlDocument class. The subject of WinFS came up in conversation in a thread associated with a post I wrote over at Practical RDF, and I’ve been wanting to learn more about it.

(Yes, time to drop some of my bias about Longhorn and take a closer look at the technologies.)

Another person to add to this list of exceptional XML leaders and practioners would be Dorothea Salo, who recently gave a tutorial on XML classification systems at Extreme Markup, and who was also one of my tech editors for the Practical RDF book.

Categories
Plants

By any other name

I do love roses. I know that the orchid is more exotic, and the daffodil more egalitarian; the tulip more proud, and the sunflower more bold; the daisy is more shy and the iris much sexier, while the carnation fills buttons the world over. And how can I forget the buttercup and dogwood, or the rhododendron that provides the only color in areas bleak and gray. There are a thousand, thousand other blooms to choose from, and the rose so ordinary…but I do love its promise.

O my luve’s like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my luve’s like the melodie
That’s sweetly played in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:
O I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only luve,
And fare thee weel awhile!
And I will come again, my luve,
Though it were ten thousand mile.

Hee. Who else? Robert Burns

Categories
Photography

Camera tricks

I did manage to get some fairly decent photos today. Using the speedlight white balance helped, though I wish I could figure out what is causing that odd blinking symbol to show in my camera’s preview – it’s not mentioned in any Nikon 995 article or manual. Whatever is happening, plays havoc with the focus. If you have any guesses, please drop me a note.

Thanks to Sheila Lennon who helped me identify that odd tiny little oval symbol as the ‘date not set’ indicator. Yeah, I know: Shelley! Duh!

I set the date when I bought the camera, and haven’t touched it since. However, I must have unset it somehow in all my tinkering around. It was one thing I just didn’t think to check.

Nice to eliminate the blinking, and thanks much to Sheila. Unfortunately, focus is still screwy and white balance is off (now, these menu options I am familiar with) but it does okay for photos here to the weblog. Good! More bandwidth sucking pages, just for you all!

Anyway, with patience and a lot of missed shots, some water lily photos – thanks to Rev Matt, who turned me on to them.

True, a rose and not a water lily – but you have to embrace the roses when you can; before they’re gone and all you’re left is a stick in the mud, the ghost of a scent on the breeze, and a pansy at hand…if you’re lucky.