It eventually got indexed and got pretty trashed.  In the same vein as why I had started it, I secured it with various means (only registered users could post, simple captcha to create account) cleaned it up, and it had a long quiet life of it’s own with a few actual changes that were worthwhile. Every blue moon someone would put some spam on the site which was easy enough to clean out manually.

For several years it was easy enough to maintain with the manual method. At one point, I decided to go ahead and host my domain(s) so I embarked on another learning process from moving some existing web services (WordPress, Mediawiki, MyTinyToDo, etc.) with data from a locally managed “server” to a hosted one. Again, I kept the database intact and made the migration transparent just for the sake of a learning exercise.

Recently, my captcha must have been broken as in just a few days it logged up hundreds of changes which were almost entirely spam and link farms. I kept all the data and the database, but it will probably just wither away and die eventually.

As a side note, who knew that captcha was an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”

Comcast

I’m not sure when this started happening, but I can’t seem to isolate the problem and I’m assuming that Comcast is to blame. I’m running this blog on a PC in my house connected to the interWeb via Comcast residential high speed Internet. I’m keeping DNS humming along using DynDNS even though my “dynamic” IP address (via DHCP) has not changed since the Adelphia to Comcast migration (and hadn’t changed on Adelphia prior to that migration). Even before I was running this blog, I had a wiki using MediaWiki running (it still is).

Here’s what’s happening….I can add a comment or a new wiki page (which is an HTTP POST transaction) from home or remotely (outside of my LAN). However, I’m limited to the size of my comments (or wiki pages) when I’m remote (outside of my LAN).  Once I get more than a paragraph or so in a comment (or a wiki page) and hit “send” my browser just hangs.  Incidentally, this also happens when creating a blog post while logged in to WordPress.

I decided to run a test and had tail running on my apache server logs.  I noticed that when remote and creating small posts that my Web server would see the transaction and it would be posted.  I followed this with a large post and my Web server never registered the hit and my browser just hung.

I know for a fact that I created and edited several of the large posts on the wiki when I was away from home, so I know that this “issue” is new, but I’m just not sure how new.

Anyone have any suggestions or have a similar problem? If so, please post a comment below, but keep it short as if it’s long it won’t be posted…..

Parent's pond in Brunswick

So, I haven’t blogged in a long time. Since the family vacation in Maine I got a job, but that’s probably not the only or even the main reason. I just haven’t thought about it much and never made the time. I’m doing it now as I’m setting up a new server to replace my old Pentium HT that I bought in 2001.

Elvis has been up and running for almost a year and a half and I started thinking about all the energy it has been burning just sitting there responding to the occasional HTTP request. I also happened to have the need for a laptop on a temporary basis so I figured the two would dovetail nicely.

The laptop is a Dell Inspiron D410 subnotebook (Blackcow) that I bought used for a few hundred duckets. It’s more than capable of hosting this site as well as about a half dozen other sites that Elvis has been hosting. Some do get quite a few visits, but not enough to tax the Apache2 webserver nor the MySQL database on which most of the sites (this one not included as it’s an output of Mac OS X iWeb) use.

Blackcow is currently running Xubuntu Desktop (Gusty) with the LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) packages installed. It’s only a few days until Hardy comes out and I’m running the beta on another machine, but I figured since it is a laptop with some restricted drivers and that I’m not really using it for the GUI that I’ll wait until a few months to upgrade it to Hardy. In the meantime, I’ll use Elvis and my other machine (homebrew) to muck around with Hardy and even the Gusty to Hardy upgrade process.

Let me get it up and running then I’ll post a blog about the process and also post a blog about life and Picabo (Stacie’s filly out of Salsa).

The photo was from my parent’s pond on Christmas Eve 2007 in the evening.

BoswellWiki

I’ve spent the last few days installing various applications on my iMac and messing around with a lot of Unix style hacking.  The goal and the completed end result is a live running wiki.  I’m not sure where I”m going with it yet, but I would love to do something commercial with the wiki at a future date.  I’ve kicked around several ideas in my own head as well as talked to some other folks to see what they think.

The page is still a work in progress, but I encourage anyone who wants to to poke around and wiki to their hearts content.