Too Much Time on Our Hands

August 29, 2005

Well, we all know what happens when a group of people have too much time on their hands. Silly things start to happen. The Lance is one example. Here is another. During PT last week we all participated in the Lancer Olympics. The games pitted first and second flight against each other in events such as the tug of war, wheel-barrow races (you read that right) and various kinds of relays. I am sorry to say that my flight, second flight, was shut out. It seems that first flight has more strength, agility and speed than we do. I must admit that it was a good work-out and we all had fun.

The pictures that I am attaching speak for themselves. Most of them are from the olympics though a few are from the ceremony in which I was granted the "honor" of bearing the Bravo Company Lance.

Oh, about that Lance . . .

I left it unattended in the office last week. It was taken away from me for a few days when it was picked up by a fellow warrant officer. I got it back last week with a stern warning to never again leave it unattended. I was also told that I would not, as planned, be passing the Lance to another junior warrant officer that week but would, as a punishment, be carrying it for another two weeks. Hoo ah.

Drupal Bad Behaviour and killing spam

August 27, 2005

A couple of days ago I mused here about using server errors to kill spam/trackback bots. It seems I was not the first to think about this and David Angier has done work on porting Bad Behavior from Word Press to Drupal. I'd like to have some more configuration control but I'll likely figure it out shortly.

Update: The Drupal Bad Behavior module works wonderfully. Comments and trackbacks are on and are being filtered and real comments are untouched. There is no menu item for administering the settings. I added the following as the third menu item:

$items[] = array('path' => 'admin/settings', 'title' => t('bad behavior'), 'callback' => 'badbehavior_settings', 'access' => user_access('administer bad behavior'));

Update too: My earlier update seems to be unnecessary. It was likely a caching issue that prevented the menu from appearing. So far more than 800 spams have been prevented and there have been no false positives detected. A few folks have had the same problem I did which is that you have to install badbehavior.module in the bad-behavior directory in the modules directory or it won't find the include files it needs.

Oops!

August 27, 2005

On the list of things not to do: don't accidently run "rm -fr directory/ *" when you mean "rm -fr directory/*". The effect is not the same.

Trackback and comment spam handler

August 26, 2005

For a while now trackback and comment spams have been absent from this site. The process, though, is too manual. With a little luck I'll soon get around to patching the Drupal comment and trackback modules to return 404 errors to comments and trackbacks that contain improper contents. I'd be happier doing this at the Apache level, but without the ability for Apache modules to work based on the content of POST requests it won't work.

Forcing the correct domain name

August 26, 2005

Nothing new here but a quick note to document how I prefer to handle forcing browsers to see the a website using the preferred domain name. In the virtual server setup place the directives to have the virtual host respond to all the names (i.e. www.example.com, example.com, foobar.example.com). Then use the rewrite engine to change the url to be the preferred URL:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com        [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^/(.*)      http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R]

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