As beltzner laments, comment spam is making the feared transition from annoyance to full-fledged scourge.
In response, I just added the CloseComments plugin to bitchcake’s MT installation, after discovering that all the comments that went in more than 14 days after the post were spam. By happy happenstance, the converse is also true: spam comments come in uniformly to posts that are more than two weeks old, likely due to the orbital rate of various search engine crawlers.
After that, I worked around the MySQL 3 limitation on multi-table delete to remove the pre-existing comment-turds, and now I have a shiny diary again.
I don’t have much to add beyond what Hoye mentioned, but yes, this is pretty disturbing. I’m guessing that Canada’s position on next year’s press freedom ranking won’t be quite so high. Not that the Citizen’s/Southam’s press-freedom record is all that fantastic itself, but I guess this is worse.
Coop has been exhorting me to marinate with miso, and recommended, especially, this recipe. That does look good, indeed, but I’ve had very little sake luck of late (both LCBOs that I went to were out of it, against all expectations). So I figured, sure, that recipe was finely honed by Wolfgang Puck and Nobu Matsuhisa, but how hard could it be to make miso and booze tasty? I decided to throw caution to the wind and marry my nice red-brown miso with a bottle of Dragon Stout that I just happened to have lying around. We’ll see how it is when I pull the flounder out on Friday (that is not a euphemism for anything, beltzner) but it sure smelled like a winner.
That didn’t resolve tonight’s dinner issues, though, so I brined some chicken breasts with lemon zest and pepper, and then pan-fried them to what I consider to be within the bounds of perfection. Since I’d had such fantastic luck with the technique during Sunday’s impromptu “steak au poivre pour quatre”, I figured I’d try my hand at a reduction sauce to finish up, and it turned out pretty darned well itself. A little heavy on the lemon — the sauce was “bright” in that “do not look into laser with remaining eye” sense — but otherwise a fine piece of work. As a bonus, deglazing is a great way to make the cleanup a lot easier.
Tyla made a very nice salad.
I wonder if I’d like any of Jamie’s music. I bet iTMS can’t help me very much with this problem, but maybe I’ll poke around tomorrow and see if they have any relevant samples.
We finally got around to spending some quality time with the eyetoy that Jacob gave us for Christmas. A little TV-watching, a small group of friends, some booze: a perfect setup.
I think our favourite games so far are the rocket rumble and kung foo. Emily’s been on her “last game before she goes home” for about ten games now, and counting.
If you own a PS2, I highly recommend it as a party game. I’m not sure if it’d be as much fun solo, but with three or more, it’s an utter riot.
(If there’s anything cuter than Tyla playing the boxing game, I don’t know what it is.)
We are an international company, and so there are occasionally elements of slang that cause confusion for our co-workers for whom English is not a mother tongue. Permit me to demonstrate:
16:37 <bzzz> phik: all the bits are already committed 16:37 <phik> bzzz: roger, thank you 16:41 * bzzz just found roger’s description in dictionary: “if a man rogers someone, he has sex with them” 16:41 <phik> hmm, well, yes, that is one definition, when used as a verb 16:43 <bzzz> aha. one more: “used for saying that you have received and understood a radio message” 16:43 <phik> there you go!
I’ve been thinking about switching the mail system on bitchcake to use maildir instead of mbox format, mainly so that I can use a version of webmail that doesn’t take six months to open my wife’s old inbox. This page makes it sound like a man of even my meagre talents could handle it, and probably without losing anyone’s mail!
Should I be resisting this urge?
I’ve been working on Lustre recovery for quite some time. Probably a year and a half, I guess, and there was some good work done in there. Not all of the work was good, mind you, but I’m not totally ashamed of what I accomplished. After a few false-starts at the process, though, responsibility for that subsystem — some people would consider it an aspect because it cuts across so many otherwise well-layered subsystems, I suppose — has passed on to one of my co-workers. He’d assisted me a fair bit in the past, and I think he’ll do a fine job. Which means I won’t have to, at least as far as recovery is concerned, so I’m pretty psyched.
Instead, I have taken over responsibility for a few other Lustrey things. Don’t worry, I”m not hurting for things to do.
The first piece — I think this is in chronological order by date of assignment, but if it’s not…\/\/hatever — is the design and development of at least two tools to assist in the configuration, management and monitoring of Lustre installations (one text and one graphical). Right now it’s more of a manual (and therefore error-prone) process than it really should be, and it requires that the administrator know far more about our configuration internals than is ultimately desireable. Some of our larger clients have written their own layers of shell scripts and whatnot atop our tools and their own monitoring software, but we’re looking for something a little more general and a little more polished. (With no offense intended to the authors of those tools!)
So far, I’ve got the framework for the text-based utility limping along, loading configuration information, and poking tentatively at the few nodes in my dogfood cluster.
In addition to that, I’m also leading the charge on some new training programmes, including material for students and trainers, actually delivering that curriculum (at least in the near term), and helping schedule/plan/fill on-site and “open” training sessions. Beth and I are in the middle of a massive rewrite of our presentation materials this week, and I hope to have that done and polished nicely in time for my first class (tentatively scheduled for Feb 2-3). I’ll be delivering this course at least a few times, and possibly many more, before we hand it off to a full-time training-delivery type, so the materials had better be good enough to stand in front of for 16 hours without making me want to cry. Likely to be a lot of travel involved, it looks like.
Of course, I’m also still managing parts of our QA work, so I have to scurry around every day and think of new ways for Coop to make me look good.
Looks like we’re on track to make Apple customers kinda sad when they type ls. (Actually, there’s some excellent work underway to improve that dramatically for the next release after Lustre 1.0.x, which I would like to think was in some way inspired by my previous work in this area. I don’t actually think I contributed a lot to the rocking LVB work that Peter and Phil and Zach are doing, but I would like to.)
Mike Hoye is having a bad computer day, for which I have great sympathy. I’m sure he’ll tell us all about it. (I’m mildly inspired to set up something to protect other people from this sort of bad computer day. Wonder if I’ll find the time)
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Zach is having a wonderful time with some drivers he’s trying to integrate into something or other:
< zab> I would have first identified this code as satire
I almost feel guilty; I had a pretty decent day, myself, though the gym would have been better if I’d eaten more of a breakfast beforehand.
If I’ve promised some computer-administration task to you in the last little while (likely configuring Movable Type, the way my scribbled post-its look), now would be a good time to remind me. I have a vague feeling of enormous backlog, and can’t remember which favours are yet undone. Humour me; I have a bad movie.