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mauter.com Protests SOPA/PIPA

Brian — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:41:57 +0000

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQI6r_kc3ZE

Bye For Now

Brian — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 18:17:44 +0000

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.

Growing Pains

Brian — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 04:41:33 +0000

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.

New year, new website!

Brian — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 21:26:49 +0000

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!

Spam

Brian — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 20:48:39 +0000

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.

Downtime

Brian — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 06:00:00 +0000

Sorry mauter.com was down last weekend. I know our viewership was really hurt. Anyway, we now have wireless Internet access in our home. As a result, the mauter.com server had to be reconfigured. Since it was an old version of RedHat that was no longer supported, I reformatted the thing and installed Fedora Core 2. Not everything is 100% functional yet. For instance, the bandwidth graphs and web usage logs are not correct yet. Complaints? Send them to /dev/null.

New and weird

Brian — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 06:00:00 +0000

Howdy. Between a new keyboard, new bedroom furniture, tons of weeds in the yard and us installing some gently used shelving in the garage, we’ve been busy. Did you know we’re listed as “More Resources for Painting-Interior Paint Colors”? We are. Just scroll down to almost the end of the page. Also, apparently Brian is a member of the “Dysfunctional Tendencies” volleyball team in the USA Volleyball Association’s Garden Empire Region. Weird huh?

Bandwidth Usage

Brian — Tue, 20 Jan 2004 06:00:00 +0000

We haven’t had an update in quite a while. We’re still here. I’ve got a few more plans for enhancements to the website. Expect them soon. I want to make picture navigation easier and I hope to allow everyone to rate our pictures much like www.hotornot.com. Hopefully it won’t be nearly as tacky. Anyway the big news for today is that you can check out our bandwidth usage within the last day. Open Source software rocks.

New site features!

Brian — Tue, 16 Dec 2003 06:00:00 +0000

Two new features are available on the website. As you can see on the left of the homepage, there’s a new list that shows links to the last five pictures added to the website. This should help our board of directors keep up with what’s new on the site. Also, mauter.com is proud to announce a new type of feature to the site. Users may upload pictures to our photo album! The editors want a first look at anything uploaded and pictures can only be 1MB or smaller in filesize, but your pictures will show up in a new section called uploads. Let’s see what you all do with this. Alex, pictures of certain body parts will never be allowed. Don’t ask.

Broken Search Engine

Brian — Sun, 02 Nov 2003 06:00:00 +0000

The search engine I was evaluating worked for a while. I noticed that when I tried to reindex the website, the index was broken. Although it was probably a pilot error, I removed it from the website. I’m working on a new project at home to build my own search engine with the help of some sweet projects at Apache Jakarta: Lucene, HttpClient and CyberNeko HTML Parser. For all of you programmers who balk at Java, I have one thing to say to you: you’re missing out.

Board of Directors

Brian — Mon, 27 Oct 2003 06:00:00 +0000

Apparently, mauter.com has a board of directors. They like the site overall, but some significant changes will be happening around here soon. The programmers had to put an emergency fix in ASAP to handle the replay attack with the comments posting function. It’s now fixed. We hope to add a feature story section where one of us will blab on about something for more than just a news blurb. We’re currently thinking about topics like “Bedroom 3 Networking Closet Implementation Plan”, “Just Install Your Own Blinds” and “Meet the Board of Directors”. None of them are set in stone, but it’s just things we’re considering. That’s all for now.

Search Engine

Brian — Fri, 05 Sep 2003 06:00:00 +0000

Well, I added a search engine to the website. I don’t know how much use it will get on mauter.com, but I’ve been thinking about putting a new search engine on the website I have at work. This is sort of an evaluation. But hey, it’s free! I’m using the excellent Java Search Engine. It’s really fast and pretty darn accurate. Let me know if you like it.

New site features

Brian — Mon, 30 Jun 2003 06:00:00 +0000

It seems we’re posting these news blurbs monthly. Weird. We’re not trying, I promise. Anyway, we have a slightly new look to the site with hopefully an easier way to access the main pages. Also because we’re already using Java Servlet Filters, we added a compression filter that will hopefully send pages to you faster. (Think of how zipping a file before you send it to a friend is faster because it’s smaller. This is the same principle.)