I got an email the other day…

…that said bandwidth on this site was about to be exceeded. I have no illusions about this blog — it’s not designed to draw in masses of readers, just those who already know me. I’ll occasionally send out a notice that some new pictures are up, and maybe a few other people will stumble on the site looking for information on diskectomies. But it’s pretty much a project that helps me experiment with web stuff.

So this email was a surprise. A few months ago I’d gotten hit with comment spam, but was able to knock that out with WordPress Hashcash, an elegant script that eliminated comment spam immediately. I’d experimented with authentication images, but the spammers were somehow able to work around it. Hascash, though, took care of it invisibly and effectively, and I’ll get an email every month saying how many spam posts were made. Kind of like the bills a hospital sends, even though insurance already picked them up. Makes me say a big Thank You out loud.

But then the bandwidth messages started coming, and after looking at the logs, I learned a new phrase: “referer spam.” Online poker and prescription meds were hitting me every couple of minutes. Their goal is to get a link embedded in as many databases as they can, increasing their rankings in search engines. Because of Hashcash, they weren’t making it into the database (CJD Spam Nuke keeps track of that), but were still showing up in the logs, meaning they were eating up my bandwidth.

I locked out block.alestra.mx — they’ve done nothing to secure their servers for a very long time, and were far and away the largest single source of referrer spam.

But IP Deny wasn’t quite enough. These guys were sending from IPs all over the world, sometimes only one or two hits before they went to the next one. Working with .htaccess was the next step, but I’m not confident ( or knowledgeable) enough to tinker at that level.

This took care of it. Installation is easy (though I had a little trouble with permissions), and the list of banned referrers easy to edit. Best of all: The messages bounce back to the referring URL. Heh. (I don’t have any way to prove it’s happening, but the images in my head are enough.)

Hashcash. Referer bouncer.

Problem solved.

Fishing. Gardening.

Back from the annual two-week fishing trip last week. If we didn’t catch-and-release, we’d have eaten very well every day.

This week I’ve been catching up with the garden. The rudbeckia in the Death Zone didn’t do well. Only a few remnants left. However, seeds from last year keep popping up throughout the front flowerbed.

Planted this week:

Lantana: I’ve been told they’ll grow in concrete, which isn’t much different from the soil in one of the backyard beds. When we first moved here, I thought it really was poorly troweled cement. But after a couple of years of turning it over and adding soil conditioner, gutter gunk, and garden cuttings, it’s beginning to look like something resembling dirt.

Verbena: For the Death Zone. Often used in xeriscaping. So far, little has survived the DZ except Cosmos, and even they struggled.

Weigela Alexandra: In the space previously occupied by Euonymus Manhattan. They had been there before we moved in, and by late summer each year were consumed by scale. I spent a couple of days hacking them down and pulling out the stumps, but for a year the area’s been vacant. Weigela may be the answer. Low maintenance, resistant to disease, and with foliage that will look good against the brick of the house.

Every gardener has a philosophy, whether it’s stated or not. Mine is simple: Plants should be placed so they need as little care as possible. I like pulling weeds and doing minor maintenance like deadheading and pruning out dead branches, but I prefer plants to be in their natural shapes and in environments that I don’t have to interfere with. That’s why it’s taken a while to make decisions and get things in the ground. So far I’m happy with the decisions that have been made, and there haven’t been any dramatic disasters. The Death Zone continues to mock all efforts, but if weeds can grow there, something will defeat it.

Pictures coming soon . . .

Moral and Intellectual Freedom

Isaac Sharpless, Quaker
Haverford College Commencement
June 20, 1888:
“I suggest that you preach truth and do righteousness as you have been taught, whereinsoever that teaching may commend itself to your consciences and your judgments. For your consciences and your judgments we have not sought to bind; and see you to it that no other institution, no political party, no social circle, no religious organization, no pet ambitions put such chains on you as would tempt you to sacrifice one iota of the moral freedom of your consciences or the intellectual freedom of your judgments.”

Long ago…

Been cleaning out some old files to clear up space on the hard drive. (The iPod is great, but eats up gigs.) Ran across this from my time as a grad student in English. It’s a little outdated, and will be meaningless to most people, except for those still toting grad-school cynicism and bitterness.

Summer begins

The semester’s over at last. Turned in grades last night — nothing left but graduation Saturday morning.

So now it’s time for . . .

Doom 3.

Normally I’m not one for bloody violence, and I resisted picking up the new Doom because the screen shots were really disturbing, especially the giant spiders and the floating heads. Eek. But then the demo came in the mail, and I found myself laughing out loud at the game’s creepy audacity. In some ways it’s the same Doom it’s always been — get from Point A to Point B and kill everything in the way — but with Surround Sound and nightmare quality graphics it’s far more immersive. I won’t be playing just before going to sleep.

Another cycle begins

Though they’ve been blooming for a while, today it feels like it really counts. In the 70s yesterday, the grass is more green than brown. Redbuds and bradford pears are blooming, and the tulip trees’ and hackberries’ buds are obvious.

The sound of lawnmowers is heard throughout the land.

Only five more weeks until the semester’s over — this is both good news and bad news. Still a lot to get done, but in five weeks, no matter what happens, it’s done. One of the best things about teaching is that things actually get finished. We get to start all over again the next semester, hoping to finally get it right.

Thinking about something else

Been listening to Neko Case’s “The Tigers Have Spoken” lately. It’s too short, but it’ll keep me until her new CD is released. Spent a little while wandering around iTunes (skeptical at first, but now a convert), and stumbled across Rosie Flores. More here.

A dream

The night before last I had a dream about my mother. She died in May, twelve years after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. My father had taken care of her all that time, determined to keep her from a nursing home. There’s a story there, but I’m not quite ready to tell it.

My father and I were with her at the end, and with the help of hospice were able to help ease her passing.

In the dream she had returned. We both knew she had passed away, but we were sitting at a table in a kitchen, making chocolate chip cookies, talking about nothing. She was in a dark blue suit, dressed as if for church, her now dark hair perfectly arranged. We sat and talked, pinching dough and laying it out on cookie sheets, talking about the children she had taken care of, now adults. She flashed the same crooked, restrained smile I’d grown up with, explaining that she thought it was “silly” that they sent her Mother’s Day cards, thanking her for doing what she’d done so many years ago. I said they were right, that she was their mom, too, and the fact that they believed it made it true.

In the dream this all felt perfectly normal — nothing strange about her coming back to make cookies, and it felt as if our random conversation picked up where it had left off years ago.

But in waking life it’s more complicated. Now it’s easier to remember the way she looked before she became ill, to remember her voice, her expressions and gestures. It feels like part of her really has returned, but I feel the loss even more.

Never the same river twice

Since this site has always been primarily a learning project, it’s gone through yet another redesign, this time with the very easy to install WordPress blogging software. The installation to a linux server was seamless, including automatically setting the correct permissions.

Then, I tweaked some templates from Alex King’s site. “Violin” is slightly modified from Hadley Wickham’s “Buddha”; “Sea” is from Paul Hoch’s “One Road”; and “Home” right now is only marginally different than Chris M’s “Simple Sky,” though I’m working on some changes. Jonathan Foucher’s “Style Sheet Chooser” lets users choose the css they prefer.

So here’s the newest incarnation of the site. It’ll be interesting to see what it evolves into this time.