Im Voraus » the blog itself

Still alive

Conor — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 10:47:39 +0000

I’ve been traveling a lot lately. Did indeed hit up Hong Kong, as promised, and Macau, and then Keelung, Jiufen, Baifu this past weekend.

I’m far, far behind on my Flickr activity. Tomorrow I have a lot of midterms, so I’ll be inside all evening flipping between studying and tagging and uploading.

Honestly, I just couldn’t let two Friday Random Tens happen in a row.

Ooooo, got me.

Conor — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 05:31:14 +0000

I meant to post this a while back, when the article was current, but never got around to it. Its from an Ars Technica writeup bashing Google’s Second Life wannabe:

Apparently, a WordPress theme, Flickr photostream widget, and a Twitter Flash badge aren’t enough to show off one’s personality anymore;

I felt that one. May 2006 live forever!

Time for a blogging marathon

Conor — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 08:22:13 +0000

I know I haven’t been keeping up with new posts, and I’ve gotten yelled at about that quite a bit. I have this morning off, it’s raining outside, and I’ve made tea. I have many hours before I need to be at work for the evening shift, and I will try to bang out entries this afternoon.

It’s become more urgent because I was offered more hours tomorrow, so I’ll work a double shift then, too. At the very least, I’ll have all of Sunday off! Holidays are grand, no?

Till soon.

I’m not feeling particularly loquacious at the moment

Conor — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:49:47 +0000

Hanging out with a bunch of friends, so don’t have much time for a post, but I thought this warranted special attention.

I loves it.

Hosting issues, posting will resume soon

Conor — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 17:41:47 +0000

Although I’ve recently renewed my hosting package, there’s been a mixup with some interlocking domains and it makes updating anything on my online space extremely difficult. I hope to get it settled soon, at which point I’ll be back and posting far too often.

I am an educational resource

Conor — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 11:35:00 +0000

Vanity time. Check out how I get all the sick traffic I do.

Pretty 1337, huh? I’m so glad someone was googling “beer pong in German.”

Also, keeping in the spirit of the title of this post, are you confident you know what “pong” means?

pong [pong, pawng]
–noun
1. an unpleasant smell; stink.
–verb (used without object)
2. to have a disagreeable smell; stink.

[Origin: 1915–20; of obscure orig.]

Interesting! Found it out by searching for “beer pong” on LEO, and getting “miefen” back for “pong (Brit.) [coll.].” The entries reference each other, which pissed me off, but fortunately Dictionary.com came through and now I know what “miefen” means.

You mief, dude.

H8 my hosting provider

Conor — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 22:23:06 +0000

Got hoards of e-mails about the site being down for all of five hours. Thanks guys. It’s a long story as to why (not really, but I’m too pissed to tell it at the moment), but I assure you all it has nothing to do with the NSA and the mosque post I made yesterday.

Really.

Anyway, tomorrow I’m supposed to pick up a Christmas tree for my dorm floor for installation in the kitchen. Should rock.

I’ll be back online posting all sorts of wonderful news I didn’t get to tonight.

Till then.

Poor performance

Conor — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 02:03:08 +0000

I’ve been getting a lot of complaints about every page on this blog loading very slowly lately. I’m trying to fix it. I assure you it is not heavy traffic, as that’s dropped off in the past few days (either due to lack of content or the horrible load times).

I’m getting tons of “File does not exist” errors regarding a “404.shtml” in the root directory of this domain. Very bizarre.

Today I altered some mod_security filters, but I’ve since undone those changes, and no improvement in performance. I think what may have broken it is that I was trying to sync my blog with some new software I got. I’d read that perhaps WordPress was being cautious and a bit overzealous in blocking requests, and so I tweaked the mod_security stuff. No go, the software didn’t work.

Now I’ve got some additional research to do, but I wanted to make it clear that I’m aware of the problem.

UPDATE: Pretty sure I have it under control now. I’m tired and I don’t feel like going into details now, but I’ll make a post later for posterity—as well as anyone Googling for blog speed tweaking.

Please comment if it’s still slow for you. You shouldn’t need to clear your cache or anything, it should just be magically snappy again.

And watch that damn Viking.

I hate toolbags

Conor — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 13:27:30 +0000

If there’s anything in this world I’ve learned from my bro Nick, it’s the art of griefing n00bz. This is a fundamental life principle. You eat, you breathe, you grief n00bz. Don’t make the mistake of thinking I listed those things in order of importance, though.

Apparently some toolbag made a post about how the WGA is on strike and so in order to show solidarity with their cause, nobody should blog today. Because that helps somehow.

Fortunately there’s a really good rebuttal to it on Mashable entitled Blog Nothing Day: No Thanks.

I didn’t even have any content for today, so I probably wouldn’t have posted. But now I’m gonna. *Shakes fist*

Notice: only uptime

Conor — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 18:55:43 +0000

OK, so the upgrade went through fine and I didn’t even have to pull the site down to do it. I did have to flash some ugly pages up for several minutes while the database was updating, but hopefully nobody saw that. Next time I promise to sandbox ahead of time, or at least put up an “Upgrading!” page in place of the blog for the duration of the procedure.

I’m pretty pleased by the new version. There’s finally integrated tagging, so I can uninstall the third-party plugins I’ve been using to tag posts for content. Hopefully the site will load snappier, too, as there were tweaks to database calls.

From here on out there are some layout changes I’d like to make to the site, starting with how tags are displayed. Maybe I’ll add a tag cloud for the heck of it, though I don’t think I’ve enough entries yet to make that worthwhile.

Suggestions welcome.

Notice: possible downtime

Conor — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 13:23:14 +0000

Sometime over the next several days I’m going to upgrade the software that this blog is running on. I’ve heard that it’s quite a nice version, but also that it may be a bumpy road. So I’m currently in the process of backing everything up in case things go south, as I’d like to be able to restore this version (2.2) if it turns out I can’t get the new one in place smoothly.

Here’s hoping.

Milestones

Conor — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 17:43:40 +0000

Logging in to post the other day, I noticed that the number of comments on this blog has finally exceeded the number of entries. (Yes, I’m discounting comments by myself.) This is a good sign. Thank you very much for making me feel fantastically important. I encourage all of you to start blogging if you aren’t already, so that I may gleefully subscribe to, and of course comment on, your blogs.

This morning I read a headline on Slashdot that mentioned an interesting milestone. It appears that the cybercrime racket is now more profitable than drug trafficking globally. Who knew? Or rather, who didn’t? From the article:

McAfee CEO David DeWalt, said that cyber-crime has become a US$105 billion business that now surpasses the value of the illegal drug trade worldwide. Despite the increase in government compliance requirements and the proliferation of security tools, companies continue to underestimate the threat from phishing, data loss, and other cyber vulnerabilities, DeWalt said.

[...]

But law enforcement’s ability to find, prosecute, and punish criminals in cyberspace has not kept up: “If you rob a 7-11 you’ll get a much harsher punishment than if you stole millions online,” DeWal remarked. “The cross-border sophistication in tracking and arresting cyber-criminals is just not there.”

Anyway, it’s neat to see moments like this when priorities are shifting to follow possibilities.

That last statement refers entirely to the quoted article.