"If you understood everything I said, you'd be me" - Miles Davis
"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees" - George W. Bush
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell
"Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government." - Lenny Bruce
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!" - Homer Simpson
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we" - George W. Bush
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Utility Fog Blog has moved to UtilityFog.info/Blog

So update your bookmarks, subscribe to the new feeds, fax the cat, twitter the neighbors, because there ain't nothing new happening here, and whenever I get around to it, it'll be GONE.

  Utility Fog Blog is Moving

After long procrastination, I've finally set up a host for my own domain, so Utility Fog Blog will be moving to a new home. There will be no further posts made to this site, and sooner or later it will disappear altogether.

Reasons:

  • More Storage. Sooner or later I was going to run out of room.
  • Shorter, Cooler URL. No more yadda-slash-cgi-bin-slash-yadda-slash-blosxom.cgi nonsense.
  • Probably Cheaper
  • Indexable by Search Engines. Google has problems with the "~" in my old URL. Now Google can index individual posts, not just a month's worth.
  • Better Syndication. The "~" problem extends to RSS and Atom feeds too. No more duplication of posts.
  • Cleanup. Moving a site to a new host is an excellent excuse/opportunity to get rid of all the unneeded and unwanted files that have built up over the years.

How did I overcome the technical problems? It was pretty simple: I cancelled that hosting account and set up a new one with another company. Getting everything to work still took some work, but nothing like the death march before.

The New - UtilityFog.Info:

Note: Everything should work fine, but I'm still tinkering and whittling down the ToDo list, so there might be hiccups.



  My Head Hurts

Why the lack of posts? Well it seems that I've racked up 24+ man-hours, dozens of Google searches, multiple dozens of web-pages, 20 bookmarks, 10 Firefox tabs open at a time, deep study of the Apache server reference pages for Mod_Write, RewriteRule, and htaccess, baffled muttering , more Apache research, and uncounted attempts to upload and test a configuration of my new web site that will do what I want.

And all for naught. The problem kicked my mental ass. I could disable one of the security measures the hosting company set up, but that would be like cheating, and it might piss them off too. So I've sent a support-ticket off to the Help Desk. I know they can help me, an Apache Server can be configured to do just about anything you want, like turn squirrels into pocket watches. But the question is, will they? The support gods can be fickle, and may decide that my quest falls outside of their sacred purview.

So here's hoping for a happy answer.



  Twitter

Utility Fog Blog on Twitter

Twitter RSS Feed



  Test Post
Valid, but now the comment doesn't show in feeds.

  Test Post
Ok, that kind of worked, but the feed didn't validate. Try another tweak. Tweak another try

  Test Post
And again

  Test Post
Lets try this again.

  Test Post
Let us see if we can add a "comments" link to the RSS feed without disrupting the space-time continuum.

  Milestone
Utility Fog Blog has passed 250,000 hits. I attribute this more to persistence than popularity.

  Testing, 1 2 3
UFog Blog has upgraded to run under Blosxom 2.1.2. Now I need to see if the RSS feeds work.

  Maintenance
Comments will be down for a bit while I upgrade Pollxn.

Update: That took all of 2 minutes. My new branch version of Pollxn from Víctor A. Rodríguez (Bit-Man) includes a Captcha feature that I hope will stymie the comment-spammers.



  I'd Better Get Funnier

Utility Fog Blog is the #1 result for the Google search for "funny blog entries"



  MultiFoggingMedia
Let's see what my YouTube embedded player looks like:
Pretty swank.

  I'm Naughty
R blog rating

"This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

  • pissed (2x)
  • kill (1x)"
What's My Blog Rated?
Via The Slog

  Slightly Freaking Out
Last Sunday I noticed that my free hit-counter from Webstat wasn't working. It turns out that Webstat's free accounts are limited to less than 20,000 hits a month. Which is fine, they are doing this for free, and they've worked great until now. So I got another free hit-counter that doesn't have a limit. And now that it's been running since Sunday a few things have become very apparent: UFog Blog is getting 800-900 hits a day (and may be climbing), and 99% of the hits are coming by way of Google Image Search. This, kids, is why you should always put something in the alt field of the img tag.

Some of my highest ranking Google Image Searches:

(periods added to search terms to avoid muddying the waters)

But one statistic pops the party balloon: 90% of my visitors spend 5 seconds or less at the Ufog Blog. Ah well-fame is fleeting.

  I'm Crafty
I've added IP-address logging capability to my Pollxn comments-engine. The next step is to add IP-blocking of comment spammers.

  Tinker, Adjust, Fiddle, Repeat
I think I've managed to get the Internet Explorer and Firefox rendering of Utility Fog Blog to look pretty much the same on both Windows and Linux. It certainly helps to set Firefox so that it doesn't override the way the page wants to be displayed.

  Woohoo
Sometime in the last hour Utility Fog Blog passed the 100,000 hit mark.

  Big Wind Bad
Why was Utility Fog down since sometime Friday (12/15/2006)? Well, it seems that the Pacific Northwest had some weather problems . Thursday night there was just a teensy bit of torrential rain followed by record winds early Friday morning. The result was your basic minor apocalypse, minus the cats and dogs living together and any appearance of giant marshmallow men. Over a million people were without power (and heat), traffic has been a nightmare due to dark signals and downed trees and gasoline has become scarse because of so many powerless stations. And somewhere in the middle of all this something bad must have happened to my ISP, hence no blog (or email).

  Testing
test picture
Short Url
test picture
Long Url
Test

  The Web Knows
A little Internet research turns up 2 explanations for comment spam that contains invalid links or even no links at all:

1: Some comment systems record the IP address of the commenter and use a sort of "karma" system to combat spam. Leaving a lot of linkless comments could give an IP address enough good "karma" to then deposit spam.

2: Spam with bogus "number" links (like "www.865425.com") could be trackable "scouts". The spam-robot deposits a comment and then checks back later to see if the spam is still there. The numbers let the robot keep track of where and when the spam was deposited. If the scout spam has survived then the real spam will be left.

PS. I'm making invisible links on the bottom of the blog to any e-mail addresses I find on sites that spam me. The idea is that email-address harvesting web-robots will find the links and then start spamming the spammers.

  My New Hobby
More happenings on the Comment Spam front:

1: Friday I got my first batch of Chinese spam. They think big in China-these buggers had around 100 links apiece. Only 3 spams though, so it was hardly a major onslaught.

2: Sunday seems to be THE day for spam. I had nothing all week, but just like last Sunday, here they come again. Today's spams are puzzlers. They have links, unlike last week's, but the links are to non-existent addresses like "www.561383.com".

  Comment Spam Redux
If you left a comment yesterday (July 31) I'm afraid it got deleted in my latest round of mass deletion of comment spam.

Now riddle me this: Why would someone (or something) leave comment spam that doesn't have any links? Or any commercial reference at all, just "random" words?

  Out, Damn Spam
Utility Fog Blog got slammed with over 250 comment spams yesterday. Adding a few words and an internet address to my homebrew blacklist seems to have stemmed the tide.

  FireFox Fun
I installed the Java Runtime Environment plugin successfully- Yea me-I'm such a small-time hacker stud. Now if I could only figure out why Firefox bounces between having one and two rows of bookmark toolbars. Oh well, it's not like it's a life threatening problem.

  Aha!
How to subscribe to a YouTube user's RSS feed with Bloglines:

YouTube says a user's feed follows the form:
feed://www.youtube.com/rss/user/username/videos.rss
Unfortunately, Bloglines finds no valid feed at this address.

But the template
http://youtube.com/rss/user/username/videos.rss
works just fine.

  Testing
Nothing to see here, officer.


  Blush
bookofjoe calls Utility Fog Blog "One spectacular website". He's on the blogroll now for sure. His site isn't too shabby either.

  Click At Your Own Risk
This page crashes my Firefox version# 1.5.0.2 browser running on Linux.. I saw this before with Mozilla (with another page) but not for some time. The browser crashes with Greasemonkey, Adblocker, Javascript, and Autocopy disabled. Other similar Wunderground pages, like the one for the state of Virginia and Danville, Virginia don't crash Firefox. FF 1.5.0.2 on Windows XP doesn't crash.

Update: It just stopped. Another one of life's mysteries.

  Success
Utility Fog's comment system now rejects the chuckleheads who have been spamming me with crappy prescription drug ads. It only took a half-hour, even with my almost nonexistent Perl skills, so it will be easy to revamp if the problem reoccurs