B10[mg]

Many people know I dislike anything Google related. For everything, there's usually a better alternative. Google Search? Yahoo and Clusty! Picasa? Flickr! Gmail ? Mutt! Reader? Bloglines!

And the list goes on...

One thing I hate to admit though, is that Google Maps by far is superior to Yahoo Maps

Today I was looking at upcoming.org (another Yahoo product I don't care about ;-) and noticed an event (ApacheCon) in Amsterdam.

Now, I know where the Piet Heinkade in Amsterdam is, yet I wanted to see if Yahoo Maps finally improved a little. Unfortunately, Yahoo Maps would direct me to Brazil...

Of course Google Maps showed me the right country, the right city and right street.

Yahoo, please get better maps and better search filtering ;-)

yahoo, google, maps

Freshmeat announced a new PHP class today (well, it's version 0.2 so it's not that new actually).

Anyways, a class named Form Spam Bot Blocker simply has to be cool so I gave it a shot. See if it is really good. Unfortunately (and completely predicted), it's not that good.

A few lines of Perl code were enough to fool the example shipped with the class.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize::Sleepy;

my $mech = new WWW::Mechanize::Sleepy->new(sleep => 5);
$mech->get('http://...../example.php');
$mech->form_number(1);
$mech->submit;

print $mech->content;

And the results:

This was a VALID submission. Your message is: some text

I have to admit that slowing down the input could prevent the dumbest bots out there, yet I believe most spam bots have no problems waiting a few seconds before posting.

php, comment spam, prevention, protection

Today I've launched a new Flickr service, called Invitr.

Invitr allows you to send photos marked only for friends/family or private to anyone with an email address. If you have a Flickr account, you might want to give it a try someday.

Anyways, here's a screenshot (or as BOK likes to call it, a screamshot)

invitr, flickr, api

A year (and a day) ago, I got married for the first time (yeah, got married twice, to the same woman! (two different countries)). This happened in Indonesia. Can't believe already a year (and a day) has passed. I guess time just flies.

Anyways, here's a pic to remember this event by!

Up to June 6th, my second wedding day !

Yesterday, like many times before, my server was unreachable. I suspected it crashed due some faulty hardware (like before) and that a simple fsck (with some forced mounting) would do the trick. Nevertheless, I got bored with this behavior and decided to get myself a new hard drive.

After buying a smacking 250GB (do the even get smaller nowadays?) disk, I found out the old disk was completely screwed up. /etc/ was no longer, and thus booting would become a little tricky.

Many hours passed in which I've learned all the beauty of different IDE cables (turned out I was using an old one and of course that was stupid with a drive bigger than 137 (?) GB), the beauty of not having a CD player attached to it and only one floppy disk, while four are needed. Finally, after way too many hours, I managed to get FreeBSD 6.2 installed (see, BOK, eventually I get up to date ;-)

God bless FreeBSD for storing the most important config files in /usr/local/etc/, rather than the disappeared /etc/! I was also rather pleased to find 99% of my /home/ directory accessible.

So, a lot of cursing, scanning the net, messing with my servboard and installing half CPAN again (I even got Plagger running again, so yeah, half CPAN (thanks Tatsuhiko!)). I'm finally back in the game (except for this insane blog and Apache2 not liking my precious and devious settings all the way)!

freebsd, hdd failure