Terminally Incoherent

Quick note for those of you who use Gmail and rely on the comment subscription thingymajig to follow the discussions around here. There seems to be some weird bottleneck when relaying emails to gmail accounts, which seems to be affecting the comment subscription system. If you haven’t received any comment notifications today blame Dreamhogs. I was wondering why my email is being so quiet today. There was not a single notification message in my inbox today.

I sent Dreamhost an email, but they are pretty much like:

I don’t have a clue how long will this persist. I’m hoping it will get cleared by tomorrow, but who knows. I’ll keep you updated. If you are not using Gmail, you will probably be unaffected by this. If you are not on Gmail and you are not getting any notifications, let me know, and I’ll go and yell at Dremroast some more.

If you noticed general slowness and or occasional outages in the last few hours I apologize. I was busy eating a late lunch at work, which included a salad that contained lethal dose of garlic. Seriously, I could totally slay a vampire with my breath right now. That is if we are talking about a universe in which vampires are vulnerable to garlic. So White Wolf’s World of Darkness is definitely out. Were vamps in Buffy affected by garlic? I don’t remember. Anyway, assuming that vampires hurt by garlic, my blood would probably be lethal to them. The salad, despite being a tad too garlicky was not that bad.

So while I was doing that, the server started acting all kinds of wonky. When ssh’d over and ran top, I noticed that the average server load was waaay over 200. Now, depending on your number of CPU’s and cores per CPU maximum acceptable server load may vary. But on modest hardware with 1 or 2 CPU’s you really don’t want to see that number being above 10. If your server load is a two digit number, it usually means you are having a bad day.

Server load over 200 means that this machine was pretty much dead (and possibly on fire). It went down few seconds later. Since the reboot, the load dropped down to much more acceptable 20. Two digit system load seems to be a norm around here.

I guess you get what you pay for. Thanks Dreamhost! I really appreciate that you are overselling the shit out of your resources.

Anyway, if you guys have suggestions for good hosting companies please post them in the comments. I need:

1. LAMP - cause fuck windows, and fuck IIS and fuck ASP
2. Full shell access (cause I’m not gonna fuck around with web panels)
3. Cron jobs, and similar goodies.
4. Decent amount of space, and no silly database quotas
5. Not too expensive

And I do realize that decent hosts who do not oversell won’t give me the as much space and bandwidth as dreamhost. I’m just looking for something roughly comparable. I’m actually thinking about trying virtual hosting so that I can reboot my own machine and have root access. Anyone has a good host who offers this kind of services?

Lately I started getting lots of odd one liner comments that usually look somewhat like this:

Great post! I really enjoyed it!

There are many variations, but the message is always the same - a generic praise that does not contain any references to actual content of the post. Some of these have URL’s attached to them, and some others don’t. Most of them end up in the moderation queue or Akismet spam box.

I do realize that some people might just want to tell me I did a great job, but have nothing else to add. Still, 99.9% of these posts get deleted whether or not they contain a spammy URL.

I do this for several reasons:

1. Even if the post does not contain a URL, it doesn’t mean it’s not a probe to cheat the first time poster moderation rule (when you post here for the first time, your post is held for moderation - after that, it’s up to Akismet and BadBehavior to keep you out). These things are likely to be followed by regular spam once the email in the email field gets white listed
2. Even if it’s not spam, the value of such comment is very low. It does not contribute anything to the ongoing discussion. It’s generic - almost like a trackbac, but these at least let me know who links to this post and let me visit the blogs of people who read me. I found lots of cool blogs via trackbacks, or by looking at who links to me on technorati
3. If you think about it, the only people who would genuinely post a generic message like this would usually not be regular readers. Most probably they would be random visitors who stumbled upon a post via Google. So chances are that if I mistakenly delete their post, taking it for a bot spam, they won’t get upset because they were never planning on coming back to this site anyway.

Of course this is not to say that I don’t appreciate kind words from random visitors. I do appreciate them very much, but at times it’s better to err on the side of caution. So if you posted one of those generic “Good job!” or “Nice Post” comments and it got deleted, I apologize. I don’t delete them automatically - I usually look at each one individually to see if it maybe it is less generic and off topic than I initially suspected. Unfortunately, most are not.

Do you get these types of comments on your blog? Do you think these are bots, malicious people or just some poor lost souls who leave super-genetic comments?

I’ve been getting hit by hot linking pretty hard lately. If the site has been slow and unresponsive lately, it might have been because of that. Apparently someone has been using some of the images hosted here in their post signature on some very active forums resulting in almost an unintentional mini DDOS. Thanks fuckers. My bandwidth is still fine, and I don’t owe any overcharges. In fact, this didn’t even put a big dent in my bandwidth allowance. But it does put a strain on the server for absolutely no reason.

Quick run through the logs revealed that images from my site were used on at least 5 or 6 different forums, and at least 3 Myspace profiles and several live journals. I would just want to ask, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU PEOPLE THINKING? Are you retarded? Did you just get internet yesterday? I mean, what the fuck?

Think about it - you are hotlinking to a picture that sits on a server maintained by some dude you don’t even know. What stops me from swapping the file you just linked with say tubgirl, lemonparty, goatse or perhaps some nasty mashup of the three? I mean, other than common decency. If I was a real jackass, it would take me two clicks of a mouse to put a really, really vile, disgusting images in your signature or on your myspace profile.

Oh, and if I’m extra nasty I might just shoot an abuse complaint to myspace staff and say you are posting vile pr0n. Which you technically would be if I swapped around some images. From what I heard they delete accounts first, and ask questions second. Same goes for LJ.

So you really are putting your good name, and the integrity of your account on a given forum or social network in someone else’s hands. This is not a good position to put yourself into. One day you will piss off a guy that is a much bigger dick than I am, and you might likely get banned or loose your account on a given network.

The ironic thing is that I really don’t have any original images on this site. What you people are linking to are usually cropped, resized low quality copies of original work that can be fund elsewhere. But I guess anyone lazy enough to hotlink, is to lazy to click on a link and go to the source. Sigh…

Because of this I decided to disable hotlinking from outside domains. I’m using the following .htaccess file i my uploads directory:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?terminally-incoherent\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !bloglines\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://babel.altavista.com/.*(www\.)?terminally-incoherent\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://[^./]*\.talkr\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|png)$ - [F]

What this means is that you can still access images directly, and and that google, bloglines and some other services will still have access. You will still be able to see the images embedded in RSS feed from within your online reader as before. Everyone else will get a nice 403 Forbidden error. I could silently redirect hotlinked images to use Coral Cache, but you know what - I don’t care anymore. Fuck it. Stupid people can deal with broken image tags. Smart people already coralized it or uploaded it somewhere else. This way I loose minimal amount of bandwidth, and spend as little time possible responding to your request.

Btw, if you are using an online RSS reader that is not on my list please let me know what it is in the comments and I’ll add it to the exception list.

Also, if you do feel the need to link directly to an image hosted here you will now need to use ImgRed. How does it work? It’s simple - simply slap http://imgred.com/ in front of the image URL. That’s all you need to do - the image will get cashed on ImgRed servers which takes a load of my page, and still lets you share the image without the hassle of uploading it to another service. You can also use Coral Cache as mentioned before. Both work equally well.

You notice that neither of the caching mechanisms are on my exception list. They don’t have to be. They were designed to work around this. So use them.

I added comments and trackbacks to the /dev/random via Heloscan.

I love the idea of Tumblr, and it’s bookmarklet makes is it really easy for me to rapidly post all kins of random shit that I find on the internet. I really like that it caches the images so my image posts remain relevant even after the original gets taken down, or the host implements some anti-hot-linking measure. But the lack of comments always bothered me.

Haloscan is not perfect, but it is a decent solution here. Comments are hosted on their servers, and their management panel offers me some control over who can post and what gets posted. They have spam reporting, IP bans and etc. Unfortunately it requires javascript so my lynx and elinks readers might not be able to post there. But then again, I don’t think that viewing a page that consists mostly of funny images and vids in a text browser is such a great idea to begin with.

So, this is the best I can do for now. Enjoy!