Mark Roseman's Blog

Wiki spam.

Wiki spam has really picked up the last few weeks on a couple of our public sites (which are now cleaned up and now require passwords to make any changes). Admittedly, ProjectForum makes it a bit easier than most, with the 'post your comments' area, which most automated tools are more likely to figure out than the 'edit your page' cycle. Don't know that there's any simple answer beyond requiring passwords. Most attempts I've seen for wikis can catch some things well, but the variations in types of spam out there are huge. On the plus side, the onslaught did help identify a couple of bugs in ProjectForum, so not all bad news!

Keeping up is a waste of time.

Well, more to the point, just wasted another four hours of my life on a newer Linux feature (something to do with security-enhanced Linux). Migrating a server, and had a recent Fedora version installed on it. Installed all the bits of my stuff that I needed, and one piece just refused to run, giving an error about some program I'd never heard of. Hours of web searching later to figure out the root cause... hack config file, reboot... much better.

Feeling Old.

Managed to badly pull a muscle (or something) in my lower back late last week, and while it's gradually getting better, it's been very slow and is still giving me a lot of trouble. Between being careful not to hurt it more, limiting time spent sitting in an office chair, and not exercising, I think I'm going more than slightly stir crazy. Ugh.

New Calgary Restaurant - Gluten-Free!

Was surprised to find this Globe and Mail article about a new gluten-free restaurant. Finding places to safely eat for celiacs is a frustrating experience, and this is a great if surprising development.

Though not celiac, between Pauline and I one or both of us has problems with wheat, dairy, cow's milk, nuts, soy (the latest discovery) and we've been mostly vegetarian (though started eating fish again occassionally). We cook at home most of the time, and there's certainly a wide variety of products available these days, but I'm still convinced there's some sort of carnivore conspiracy working against us.

Protopage.

This is a nice example of those Ajax-based stickies/widgets desktops. As always, I can't help but think of making this a fully collaborative app...

New and Improved (?) Unix.

OS X works great... especially if it already does what you need. Adding other Unix stuff sometimes though... not so much. Moving my internal CVS from a Linux box to the Mini, setting it up to run as a cvs pserver. A bit complex in general, but not rocket science. Each improvement Apple makes though, ends up doing things in a slightly (or more than slightly) non-standard way. Need to create a dummy 'cvs' account... no, adduser and similar doesn't work (nor editing /etc/passwd). After a long search figure out the right (awful) way to do that in the new world order. Then, after clueing in that xinetd isn't used anymore as a way to start up things like cvs when clients connect, more net searches needed to find the replacement (launchd). More searches to find the right XML configuration file to put the new service in, and the incantation to get it started. A few more cvs misconfigurations, and finally everything gets working. Yuck. Not as easy as just clicking the checkbox to turn on Apache, to say the least!

Backup for Everyone.

Carbonite, the newest venture from David Friend and Jeff Flowers, looks like a good approach to backup. It will continuously scan your machine, and dump stuff (encrypted) to their servers, and is billed as a low monthly fee.

New Douglas Coupland.

Ooh, new book called JPod coming out shortly; Microserfs for the new world order.