Spam Wave

News /

It already happened now and then that my blog was hit by spam. The mechanism seems to be brain dead: follow all available urls and scan the retreived document for forms; fill the input fields with stuff like “viagra”, “casino” etc. and submitt the form. So far it was at least annoying, but since comments and trackbacks need to be approved I could remove the spam with a single mouse click.
Today, however, I received about 240 trackback notification mails in about four hours. So, I took the opportunity, upgraded to the latest serendipity version and also modified all available articles to not allow comments and trackbacks anymore. Thats it, spammers!

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Debian work done lately

Linux /

Last week, I fixed my first RC bug: it was caused by the removal of libapr0, which rendered my subcommander package uninstallable. Since there was also a new upstream version available, I combined this with the upload. Since some weeks, my debian package overview looks messed up. All entries appear twice, and most of my (not yet so many 😉 ) packages are missing. It seems that this happened after the upload of libtest-unit-perl, the first package I co-maintain within a group. So, I spent some time today setting up a local qa.debian.org environment and tracking down what goes wrong. I have created a bug report with an attached patch which should fix the issue; I hope that it will be committed sometime soon so that the complete package overview is working again.

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AMD64 burning issue (solved)

Hardware /

Since I upgraded to the AMD64 architecture some months ago, I always had the problem that burning CDs did not work anymore. I used a command line like cdrecord -V gracetime=2 dev=3,0,0 speed=24 -dao -dummy driveropts=burnfree -eject -data test.iso but burning failed some seconds after the write started. Now, it seems that I found the solution: with kernel 2.6 and udev, it is not necessary to use the device numbers anymore. Instead, the device file can be used directly, like cdrecord -V gracetime=2 dev=/dev/cdrw speed=24 -dao -dummy driveropts=burnfree -eject -data test.iso This also seems to influence the way how cdrecord and the kernel interact, because the write process now does not abort anymore.

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California Business trip, day 9

News /

Meetings from morning to afternoon. Finished at about 4.30pm. We then went back to the hotel, starting to prepare our departure tomorrow. Then we went to a Mall nearby for Dinner. The plane starts at about 8.45 tomorrow, so we need to leave the hotel at about 6.00. Therefore I will end my California Business trip blog series now and go to bed 🙂

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