Terminally Incoherent

I’m currently being hit by some sort of Zombie swarm averaging 20-30 posts a day. They are all coming from different IP’s and trickle in at different times. There are maybe 5-6 different patterns that repeat over and over again, simply with different keywords. Here are some of the most common ones:

Markus…

It was quite useful reading, found some interesting details about this topic. Thanks…

love me…

I Googled for something completely different, but found your page…and have to say thanks. nice read….

wiki wiki…

Interesting post. I came across this blog by accident, but it was a good accident. I have now bookmarked your blog for future use. Best wishes. Adrianne Curry….

Do you recognize these? Most of them don’t even have any significant spam payload in them. I’m guessing half of this stuff is just a training barrage trying to sneak past the filters.

What worries me is that somehow most of their posts clear my CAPTCHA without any problems. So far, 99% gets killed by AKISMET but in the last few days 3 or 4 comments slipped through. They got stuck in the moderation queue though, and I was able to classify them as spam.

Still this is a little disconcerting. So I’m trying out a new thing: a plugin called Bad Behavior. It is supposed o automatically profile and block known spambot activity. Let’s see how that pans out.

If you experience any issues posting comments, please shoot me a short email. My contact info is on the Contact Me page.

Over the next 2-3 weeks posting here will likely be scarce. I’m planning to invest most of my free time into finishing up my thesis work, so that I can hopefully defend it before the semester ends. So if you notice a sudden drop in post frequency it is not because I abandoned this blog - it’s just because I’m temporarily busy doing some other high-priority stuff out there in the world.

This morning I decided to upgrade my wordpress version to 2.0.5. The whole thing went smoothly, but several of the plugins which require you to actually edit some of the Wordpress files broke. I think I fixed all of them, but if you notice any glitches, please let me know.

Also, my stylesheet was reset to the default version. I restored most of the custom styles that I added over time, but if something looks weird please post a comment in this post and I’ll fix it ASAP.

My blog tends to be a little bit slow at times. The reason for this is twofold:

1. I’m hosted on a shared box, along with a dozen other websites. We all share resources, and thus sometimes we can experience slowdowns. Especially if someone on my box gets slashdotted, digged, farked, borinboinged or etc.. We all suffer then. Although my host handled my site being digged wonderfully. I had a 100% uptime during the heaviest barrage so I was quite happy.
2. I’m using wordpress, which means that every page load = DB query + php parse + javascript magic.

There is not much I can do about #1. That is other than paying for dedicated host, which is not something I’m willing to do right now. But I can definitely cut down on the DB queries, and dynamic content to shave off few seconds per page load via caching.

Enter WP-Cache plugin - the latest and greatest in Wordpress optimization. I set the cache to expire after 20 minutes for now. The default setting is an hour, but I was a little worried that the static content might get a little stale and etc… I might increase it later.

Anyways, if you notice any weird things going on with the blog, let me know. I’m mainly worried about stuff like the feeds not updating in a timely manner, and people’s comments not showing up immediately after posting. If you notice that, shoot me an email, or leave a comment in this post and I will see what can I do about this.

I already noticed small speedup on subsequent loads of the main page so this might work out really nicely.

Dreamhost, my hosting company, is having networking issues once again. I think they have some sort of monthly downtime quota they need to meet or something. I swear - I have yet to see a month without them suffering from some sort of catastrophic meltdown…

If I was running a business off of this site, I would be royally pissed off by now. But since I use this space to post jokes, pictures of Space Marines and incoherent rants I’m willing to put up with occasional regular downtimes. I guess you get what you pay for, and Dreamhost is actually very affordable (read cheap).

I apologize for extremely sluggish load times today, and moments when the site is totally inaccessible. This stuff should sort itself out within a day or two (either that or I will be moving to another host). Sorry for the inconvenience.