MiguelitoNet

It’s that time of the year again; the days are getting long, flowers are blooming, weather is getting warmer.. and [Summer http://www.miguelito.org/gallery/album02] is killing birds.

I can’t really blame her.. I mean, she is a bird dog afterall. I just feel sorry for the poor sparrow chicks that she snags. My front yard is the exact worse mix for the birds. Plenty of trees and bushes for them to setup nests in.. unfortunately, when the chicks are just learning to fly, right about now… if they fall into our yard, Summer thinks they’re fair game. I don’t think she means to kill them either, I think she thinks they’re playing with her. She kind of stalks them, but then picks them up and when they move in her mouth she spits them right out. When they try to hop away, she gets really playful and barks jumping around and following them. Unfortunately, she’s not exactly gentle with them, and ends up hurting them, usually killing them.

She already killed 2 birds Wednesday night, and almost got another right when we got back from our morning walk yesterday, but I rescued that one. What was kind of funny about that was that I got the chick out of the yard and it was hopping away, chirping for it’s parents, but the parents were so busy sqwaking at Summer and me, that I don’t know if they ever heard the chick and helped it.. last I saw it was all the way across the street and getting farther away.

Oh well… hopefully she doesn’t get too many this year.

Posted in: Misc by Miguelito /
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So, because of what I talked about in my [previous http://www.miguelito.org/mig-archives/000213.html post] I’ve edited awstats a little and added in my own referer URL checker… so ha!

Output from awstats shows this now:

www httpd {566}$ /usr/local/awstats/wwwroot/cgi-bin/awstats.pl -update -config=www.miguelito.org
Update for config “/etc/awstats/awstats.www.miguelito.org.conf”
With data in log file “/var/log/httpd/access_log”…
Phase 1 : First bypass old records, searching new record…
Direct access after last parsed record (after line 5230)

CheckReferer called with Referer URL: http://www.ua-princeton.com/
Rejecting Refer URL http://www.ua-princeton.com/ base on hit count of 106
Warning: awstats has detected that some hosts names were already

resolved in your logfile /var/log/httpd/access_log.
If DNS lookup was already made by the logger (web server), you should change your setup DNSLookup=1 into DNSLookup=0 to increase awstats speed.
Jumped lines in file: 5230
Found 5230 already parsed records.
Parsed lines in file: 38
Found 27 dropped records,
Found 1 corrupted records,
Found 0 old records,
Found 10 new qualified records.

If I get any requests, or just have the time to make some diffs soon.. I’ll post the code for download here for anyone that wants it.

Posted in: My l337 skillz by Miguelito /
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So email spam is bad enough, spamassasin blocks a lot, but damn they still get through. Then I had to deal with comment spam.. which got bad enough that I require typekey registration to comment now.. and that spam is gone. Now, it’s referrer spam.

For those that don’t know, apache (the web server software I use) can log the referrer, or web site that linked to mine. It’s interesting to see the stats of who linked to me, and to follow those links and find out why or who they are. You can see the ones that refer to my site the most in my [stats http://www.miguelito.org/awstats/awstats.pl?config=www.miguelito.org page]. But lately there’s been a lot of referrer spam… to porn sites, and mostly.. online casinos and poker sites. I implemented a blacklist plugin for awstats (the stats package I use) which works pretty well.. but they kept getting through so now I block all URLs with any of the words: poker, casino, roulette, etc..

So today I look at the referrers that top my list and #1 is www.ua-princeton.com… and guess what? That bastard is an online casino site too.

Guess I’m going to have to implement my own plugin to not only check a url against the blacklist, but to look at the webpage and if it’s got too many keywords like poker, casino, etc.. then boot it.

Posted in: Uncategorized by Miguelito /
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So I signed up and started using the new groups.google.com interface for reading usenet periodically, and made my first post a couple days ago. I always use new email aliases on my domain for each site I sign up for, so that I know where spammers got my email from.

In less then 48 hours from my first post (in an sdnet.* group no less) I started getting spams to the alias I use there. And a couple were the phishing scams that pretend to be from paypal/ebay/banks/etc to trick you into entering your login data at a spoofed url.

Sheesh.. these spammers are fast, and annoying as hell.

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Seems that ol’ Rachel’s been inside my head again. She has written basically exactly how I feel about cats, and why I like dogs better. The only difference I would note with my dog compared to her’s are that, due to being 1/2 lab, human contact means everything to my dog. While Rachel’s dogs might just ignore her, my dog goes friggin’ nuts when I get home.

BTW, for those that think I actually hate cats.. first, read Rachel’s post, then realize that I don’t hate them, I just don’t understand why people would want one as a pet. Rest assured that you can invite me to your house, and if you have cats, I won’t drop-kick your cat, or do anything else mean to it.

However, now we have this interesting issue in the news about allowing hunting of wild cats in Wisconsin. What gets me about this whole issue is the amount of people that are going nuts fighting against this. Perhaps if those people had gotten off their asses, and applied even a tiny percentage of the energy they’re expending now, to helping control the cat population before it got out of hand, then there would be no need to talk about hunting them. But now it’s too late, and something needs to be done, since the wild cats are having a negative effect on the environment.

This leads me to what I really hate about cats. Not all cats.. some people do keep their cats indoors. But too many cat owners allow their cats to run wild through the neighborhood. I read about public ordinances where dog owners have to pickup after their dogs (which I do, and think is the right thing to do when walking my dog.. I take baggies and pick up after her) but people seem to think that allowing their cats to enter other’s yards and crap is just fine… usually they love to add “well they bury it.”

Anyone that owns a dog who’s ever found a kittie cookie in the yard, and rolled in it.. knows that it being buried doesn’t mean shit. If your dog rolls in it, they’re gonna smell so bad as to make you gag. Thanks selfish cat owner. There have been plenty of times where a cat has gone in my yard and it’s been bad enough for me to smell as well.

Maybe we can get an ordinance passed here too, where if you cat comes onto my property… time for target practice. Nail ’em with some kind of tracking dot so I can follow them to their home and leave their shit on their owner’s porch. Or drag the owner over to clean up after their little ball of fur. We’ll see how they like it then.

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Testing from phone…
If you can see this, then I successfully setup hblogger which allows me to blog directly from my new treo 650 phone. Damn but technology is cool.

Tried putting up a shot of the dog from the phone’s ca. too.

hmm… so need to work on pics

-Mike

[Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]

Posted in: Uncategorized by Miguelito /
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Anyone that knows me, knows that I love Sci-Fi. Unfortunately, there haven’t been very many good sci-fi TV shows lately.. or at least ones that are allowed to continue… Firefly was great.. and Fox, the network that was founded on giving shows a chance to build an audience (X-Files and Simpsons just to name 2) killed it before it even got going. Heck, there’s very little _new_ TV that I watch at all.. I’m content most of the time to play back old Simpsons episodes or toss in a DVD instead of watching any of the crap that dominates the air these days. I mean sheesh… “reality” tv? Bah! Shows like “The OC?” Ewww…

On the sci-fi front, there’s Stargate SG-1/Atlantis, but I didn’t have Showtime when it started so I’m way off on the story and can’t just jump in. Will probably starting buying the DVD sets soon.

Babylon 5 was probably the last *really* good sci-fi show in a long time. Great writing, good acting (past season 1.. but most show’s season 1 has the actors getting used to the characters) and decent effects.

There’ve been the Star Trek shows of course.. but they’re just entertaining, not really great anymore. Though Enterprise has just started to ramp up… now that it’s been cancelled, of course.

Enter the new Battlestar Galactica… damn fine show. Sure, there are purists out there that just refuse to even give the show a chance, thinking the 70’s original is the One True BG(TM). There were similar nay-sayers back when Trek’s The Next Generation was getting started too. Hell, I grew up on the 70’s BG, even bought the DVD set with the box shaped like a Cylon head… but that’s due more to nostalgia and the kitsch factor more then anything else. Of course, the original had 2 strikes against it… far less technology for effects, and low budgets. But I remember getting tired of the constant reuse of the same few effects sequences.. and I was but a little pup then.

Even though some just hate it, I’ve been totally sucked into the new series. The mini-series was great, and so far, the writing has been excellent as the first season has taken off. I looked at the imdb entry for Ron Moore who is the main person responsible for developing the new series.. and I can see why I like the writing. The list of episodes he wrote for ST:DS9, the ST movies.. and even ST:Voyager are practically a perfect match for my favorite episodes of those series. I still haven’t seen concrete info on the net that the show’s been renewed for a 2nd season.. but unless there are cost issues, they’d be stupid not to do it. The show is the top (or #2 just behind Stargate) in ratings for SciFi in both the US and UK. Even with all the people in the US that downloaded the eps off the net since they aired in the UK first.

I just hope the writing stays solid. The first series episode, 33, was just phenominal if you ask me. They’ve kept enough of the original universe intact, but made some changes, all of which, I think work pretty well. Of course the effects are about a thousand times better too.

Here’s to seeing how they play out the story if they’re given a few seasons vs the short run the original had back in the 70’s.

Oh, and for a non-sci-fi show.. I’ve actually gotten pretty hooked on House MD. Another Fox show. Sure, it’s another medical drama, but I think the stories are more interesting there where we get to follow them trying to figure out what’s wrong with a single (or small group of) patient(s) instead of the show being a soap opera about the characters with some medical bits woven in.

*Update:* Sweet.. and it’s official, SciFi has for a 2nd season. No mention of air dates yet.

Posted in: Misc by Miguelito /
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So, after a 300 day uptime, I figured it was time to upgrade my server to the 2.6 kernel tree. Simple build, simple reboot… I thought. Turns out my motherboard ate it. It wouldn’t boot back up.. just hung after detecting the ide drives.

I tried removing disks, removing every single card (in case there was a bad card effecting the board), no go. Luckily I still had my old gaming box which was very similar (dual athlon) and had an identical case so I was able to move the hdd cages right over and boot up on that hardware for now.

Guess my plans for a new server, opteron based of course 🙂 are being moved up a bit sooner then I had planned.

*Update:* So I’m thinking something with a load-out like so for a nice.. really high-end server that’ll last me awhile. 🙂

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Wow, December already. I guess it’s time to really start thinking about gifts to get for family and friends.

Seems like just yesterday we were having family BBQs at my house.

Posted in: Misc by Miguelito /
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Jumped into IRC with the local linux user’s group I know (KPLUG if you care… #kernel-panic on freenode if you really care). One of the regulars was in there, and goes by the nick ThunderChicken. The nickname made me think of the classic Superchicken cartoon, and specifically it’s theme song.

I mentioned in the chatroom that I now had the song stuck in my head, with “thunder” in place of “super” of course… and of the 3 or so people active in the room at the time, none had any clue what I was talking about.

Now I remember catching episodes of that cartoon fairly often on Saturday mornings.. was on the same show that featured other greats like George of the Jungle. I had to show the webpages to the guys in the channel before they had any clue, and most of them had never seen it, nor heard of it before.

sigh

Posted in: Misc by Miguelito /
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