mauter.com

Congress is about to vote on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). If passed, this bill will allow the United States government to censor the Internet. Many sites on the Internet are protesting on January 18 and we’re joining them.

I’m upgrading our mac mini (the machine this blog is on) from Debian 5 to Debian 6.  Hopefully it comes back.

brian@minimac:~$ uptime 13:16:58 up 100 days,  1:11,  1 user,  load average: 0.70, 0.64, 0.36

See you on the other side.  :)

UPDATE:  We’re back!  That was easy.  I love Debian.

Okay, I forgot (okay, well, I was putting it off) to set up redirects for links pointing to stuff on the old website to stuff on our new site.  This meant that your RSS reader never saw any updates for us since December 29.  Now those old RSS feed URLs should permanently redirect you to the new RSS feeds.  Similarly, Google’s index still contains old links and I’m sending those visitors to a landing page.  Soon I should have that landing page automatically do a search here for the same content the user searched for originally.  It’s not perfect, but it’s just about the only thing I think I can do.

Hi!  Welcome to the new mauter.com.  Brian finally caved and switched to WordPress instead of his custom-written Java code.  The old code served us well, but it’s time to move on.  We hope to load all of our old pictures and news items into this site.  Stay tuned!

I like SPAM. It’s great with eggs on camping trips. However, I hate spam. For the last year or so, we’ve been targetted by someone with comment spam on our website. Originally it was links to very disturbing websites, but I stopped that with some nifty regular expressions. Then came the Viagra and Cialis ads. More regexs. Lately, it’s been more amiable it seems. They’ve been about prayers and novenas or stuff like “this is a really nice site”. It’s just junk that I can’t easily filter out with a regex. I’m sure it has been the same jerk all along. If I denied him the ability to post ads, he’s still going to punish me with junk. What a loser. Anyway, most of the bad comments were being sent to old pictures that are really popular. I’m convinced my beach picture has so many hits purely because of the loser spammer. As I sit here, I see requests for that picture hitting the logs. I have decided to shut off comments to pictures that are older than 30 days. If the spammer decides to try something else, then I have a few more options. I’m really trying to avoid making folks log in because it would be a big hassle just to leave a silly comment. I’d like to invite the loser to a camping trip so he could find out what good spam is.