Category Archives: Techie Stuff

Mollom++ (my review after a week)

Posted by cshields on September 30, 2008 None comments

Spam on my blog site had gotten pretty bad in the last month. Drupal's spam module wasn't enough to keep it out, and spammers have gotten smart enough to figure out how to do math on the comment forms.

Enter Mollom, which just released to the public not too long ago. Mollom is a third-party blog/website spam filter. This means when someone posts a comment, your site contacts Mollom with that comment for its approval or rejection. Now, they are not the first group to come up with a service like this and won't be the last. The reason I picked up on it is because I've known Dries Buytaert and got to work with him a bit while at the OSL (he is one of the Mollom founders, also the founder of Drupal which I use for this site). So you can say my choice was due to personal trust, not because of any specific feature one over another.

My site is on the very low-end scale of comments. By that I mean that I get maybe one legit comment a week, moreso when I actually post stuff ;) After one week with Mollom I've already noticed a big difference. I haven't seen a single spam slip through, and legit comments are making it fine. In the administration panel you can see a report of spam and ham:

Mollom offers plugins for Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, and Radiant, along with API libraries for most of the popular web languages. Their service is a freemium model, offering free coverage for up to 100 legitimate posts a day (unlimited spam rejections). For more than that you can purchase a subscription. I think this is very generous compared to other freemium models out there in the web2.0 sphere these days, and is plenty enough for most blog and community sites. If you're in need of better spam handling for your site, give them a shot. (I'm not paid to say this, I'm just happy with the service and since it is new I feel there needs to be a bit of review)

Blog comments..

Posted by cshields on August 28, 2008 None comments

Seems like the spammers are getting around Drupal's filters and captchas, so I'm disabling comments for a while until I can figure out a way to filter them. *sigh*

PS – For those of you who are not millionaires and are afraid that Obama might be raising your taxes, visit obamataxcut.com to see how you fare with his plan vs. McCain's.

Cheers!

Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus on mac OSX

Posted by cshields on August 9, 2008 None comments

Found a good deal on an external 750gig Maxtor drive today and picked it up to mount to the iMac (firewire). First of all, if you are about to do something similar, just pass on the Maxtors and buy something else. Will save yourself a lot of trouble.

However, if you already bought it and are in the same boat as I was here is a fix:

The drive would not show up in finder but it would be in Disk Utility. I could not format or repartition the drive no matter what angle I tried, and always got a response of “could not unmount disk”. The short fix to this is you have to manually find out where it is mounted and unmount it via the console before you can then repartition (GUID) and reformat (Mac OS) the drive. A quick googling found that everyone has this problem, and Maxtor just seems to be a company who can't simply put out a simple external drive but they have to throw a lot of extra crap into the mix.

Try doing the format via disk utility and get your error. Then open up a terminal, get to root by 'sudo su -' and then run dmesg. Look for an error like such:

0 [Level 3] [ReadUID 0] [Facility com.apple.system.fs] [DevNode /dev/disk2s1] [MountPt /Volumes/Untitled 3] [Path /Volumes/Untitled 3/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/7C3E0BE7-2F06-4CC2-B368-59D0E0604211/indexState] [FSLogMsgID 1667112663] [FSLogMsgOrder Last]

In my case, it was mounted in /Volumes/Untitled\ 3 but was hidden there.

Force the unmount:

umount -f /Volumes/Untitled\ 3

Then go back to Disk Utility and repartition; reformat.

I put this out there in hopes that google will help someone else find this answer quicker than I was able to.

Cheers!

Zombie meme

Posted by cshields on June 16, 2008 None comments

Saw the zombie meme on Kees' blog.. This is one I'll jump in on.

You are in a mall when zombies attack. You have:
1. One weapon
2. One song blasting on the speakers
3. One famous person to fight along side you.

1. AWP. You can find me camping behind the counter of Auntie Anne's
2. Rob Zombie – Dragula (remixed.. it'll be just like the movies)
3. Dick Chaney, he's got a mean head shot. And even when he misses it will be a sure hit.

Last Week..

Posted by cshields on May 27, 2008 None comments

Last week I was in Poughkeepsie, New York at a meeting of large-scale IBM cluster customers. I would have posted updates through the week but the internet connection there was horrid.

The meeting was good, I picked up a couple of ideas and methods that other sites use to manage their systems, made some good contacts, and ate some great food at the Culinary Institute of America.

A couple of highlights were getting to tour IBM's 300mm chip fabrication facility (where a lot of next-gen game consoles are getting their processors nowadays). Had to wear a bunny suit since it was a clean room facility. It was a bit disturbing that the bunny suit was more protective than what I had to wear in the surgery room for Nicole's c-sections. One guy offered his iphone to take a pic of the group, and the lady who took the picture must have pushed the button instead of the “take picture” icon on the screen, and so we didn't get a picture in the end. que sera, sera. The facility was amazing, robots moving everywhere and insane automation.

We also visited the data center where they are assembling and testing the new RoadRunner supercomputer cluster before it is sent to Los Alamos National Labs. This cluster will be the first Petaflop computing cluster, comprised of tens of thousands of processors. The size of this cluster was mind-boggling. I did a rough count on their floor plan and there were around 250 racks full of systems. In comparison, the system I work on, BigRed, is 20 racks and clocks in at about 40 teraflops. This makes RoadRunner 25x more powerful and about 12x larger in physical size. I got a headache just trying to comprehend managing this beast.

Back now, swimming through a pile of email from the holiday weekend.