Alden Bates' Weblog

Yup, this weblog is one year old.

El mucho excitement.

Level: Operation Overlord 2004
Type: Assault
Download Size: 13.1 MB
Rating: 9/10
Downloaded from: Unreal Tournament Files (File Front)

Description: A recreation of the Normandy landing during WWII

Continue reading "UT Review: Operation Overlord 2004"

TSV #71 arrived in my mailbox yesterday. As well as reviews of the first series of New Who, there's an interesting article in which the writer relates the reactions of NZ schoolchildren on being shown pictures of the previous Doctors and the episode "Rose". Sadly, the only Doctor they recognised as Doctor Who was Tom Baker, though some of the guesses they took at the others (William Hartnell as Winston Churchill?!) were hilarious.

I was also interested, despite not having read any of the books recently, to read WHO-F-O, an article on the BBC book The Indestructible Man. That particular book borrows heavily from the Gerry Anderson series UFO, Captain Scarlet and Thunderbirds, and the article lists the references to Anderson's series in that book. It also has a handy "Who's Who" of actors who've been in both Doctor Who and any of Anderson's series.

There's also lots of other cool stuff in there as well, of course - a more comprehensive list will be up on the NZDWFC site soon.

Subject: Mr 66.159.239.140 (porsche.elinuxservers.com), using the User agent "Snoopy v1.0", hitting ~5 times a day with trackback attempts. Now blocked in .htaccess.

Likely identity: using Network Solutions, I checked some of the domains he'd been spamming. They all had the following registration info:

Name: Maximilian Berkovich
Organization: Rasta Community
Street1: Ann Karelina street 123
City: DeepTown
Postal Code: 34543534
Country: Ethiopia
Phone: +21.4353XXXX
Email: admin@smokaz.com

Googling turned up no further information, and unfortunately there's not enough there to make a fake-or-not decision. Like Net::TrackBack, Snoopy v1.0 looks to be legitimate software twisted for evil use.

I took the liberty of emailing elinuxserver.com's admin address, but haven't had a response yet...

I had to fix two more problems that the MT 3.2 upgrade caused:

1. MTBlacklist no longer seemed to be working with 3.2, so I unloaded it and loaded on the supplied copy of SpamLookup. MTBlacklist's final score was 4380 spams blocked - I'm sure this would have been in the tens of thousands had I not been blocking at the .htaccess level. Hopefully SpamLookup will be as proficient.

2. I was using something along the lines of <MTEntryTitle dirify="1"> to generate the filename for individual entries. Unfortunately with 3.2 the dirify argument (which turns the title into a filename) seems to have stopped regarding '-' as a legal character for filenames, so (for instance) my entry formerly filenamed "stargate_sg-1.html" became "stargate_sg1.html" instead. Am now using the entry_basename as the filename instead, having corrected the entry_basenames for the existing entries to match their current filenames.

*cough* All go now. :P

If a page has a <link rel="next"> tag, FireFox 1.0.6 will prefetch the "next" page on the assumption the user is likely to go there next. In other words, it's treated in the same way as the <link rel="prefetch">.

This is actually in the Link Prefetching FAQ, as I found while googling for more info. I already knew about the "prefetch" link tag, but not the "next" one.

That's all very interesting, since it means if we include "next" tags on chapters in stories when we revamp Teaspoon, FireFox browsers will prefetch the next chapter. On the one hand, it means the next chapter will load faster for the readers, on the other it means if they don't like chapter 1, FireFox will cache chapter 2 unnecessarily. If we switch to static pages, that might not be an issue.

• MT 3.2 seems to have solved my problem with new entries showing entry #1 as the next link.
• Since the R4 run of Justice League: Starcrossed was frelled, I ordered the R1 version from Amazon - this turned out to be in the original movie format and have both widescreen and full screen versions. Much better than the R4 Justice League DVDs.
• As a side note to the whole Hotel experience, I saw the other week that Geri Halliwell's latest album has come out here, but I didn't buy it, because it had the same copy protection on it. Sorry, but I'm not paying $30 for a CD which may or may not work.
• Yahoo fixed the login issues with Yahoo mail not long after I complained about it. Both Briefcase issues are still there.
• LiveJournal still doesn't have trackback support, 8 months later.

Level: Horsell Common
Type: Vehicle CTF
Download Size: 7.55 MB
Rating: 7/10
Downloaded from: Unreal Tournament Files (File Front)

Description: The site of the landing of a Martian invasion.

Continue reading "UT Review: Horsell Common"

So far, I'm liking it. Once my browser realised it had to reload the stylesheet, the CMS looked very nice. They've put a link to the trackback management page on the main menu finally, and done some very nice stuff... The multiple catagories dropdown is a lot easier to use. It also looks like they've added some new anti-spam measures and the MTSpamLookup plugin comes with it (I haven't touched the plugins directory yet because I wanna evaluate the new version first). Hopefully everyone upgrading MT will install it. We'll see how the anti-spam features go, anyway.

The plugins aren't listed on the main menu any more though, which is a bummer (and for some reason MTBlacklist is no longer giving me a link to configure it (not supported? Plugin protocols changed?)). If you look in the "extras" directory, there's a plugin for Open-ID, which is best explained by the linked site.

Also it took about an hour for me to FTP all the files up to the server and put them into the right directories. That's still a really painful way to update, despite the touted easiest upgrade ever. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong?

A while back I volunteered to help in the technical side of running A Teaspoon and an Open Mind, a Doctor Who fanfiction site. The site's currently using the eFiction CMS, though Barbarella (the other technical admin) and I will be writing a new CMS as eFiction is not great. Bugs fixed so far:

1. Disappearing Help text
Most of the text on the help page disappeared. The problem turned out to be because the text had < symbols in it, and when the help text was edited in the eFiction settings, either the browser or eFiction would cut the text off at that point. The solution was to double escape the tag to &amp;lt;

2. Broken Mac posting
A user posting from a Mac said that their paragraph breaks were being lost and their stories appearing on the site as one huge lump of text. This was likely to be because the Apple line uses a different byte to signify the end of line, so the solution was simply to convert the end-of-lines to Unix format.

The last item is less a bug than an annoyance. PHP likes appending huge session IDs to the links on the site, so you end up with a hugely long URL with a PHPSESSID thing on the end of it. This causes many problems, including messing up the site's indexing in search engines - because the spiders get a different PHPSESSID each time, they keep indexing the same page over and over. The solution to the ID problem is three lines of code which go in the .htaccess file. Excellent.

That may still not fix the site's indexing in Google because Google is apparently wary of parameters called "sid", and eFiction uses "sid=#####" to select the story to display. It also uses exactly the same title on every single page (the site's name and slogan) which I'm sure doesn't help either.