ryan kennedy’s blog

Attention spam-assholes of the world. My blog will no longer be a dumping ground for you to build your page rank on various search engines. I’ve turned on comment moderation. Sure, I still get all of your spam…but now it ends up in my list awaiting moderation. That means you get ZERO credit for anything you submit to my site.

To my friends (what few of you who actually read this): if you post a comment it won’t show up immediately. I’ll get to it shortly.

To my nemesis: if you post a comment, it won’t show up…ever. Worse, WordPress has this handy comment manager that allows me to flag your shit as spam. My hope is that this does/will influence some algorithm in WordPress to aid in automatic flushing/flagging of your crap.

This solution does burden me with having to proactively monitor comments, but I was doing that anyway. At least now your crap won’t invade my space. You were warned that you’d be going away. Goodbye. I have no lovely parting gifts for you…just some wisdom:

“Never go in against a Sicilian, when death is on the line.” -Vizzini

I finally took some time to upgrade WordPress to 1.5. It wasn’t totally painless (I had an issue with the permalink page repeatedly blowing up my .htaccess file), but it seems to be running good now. I’ll have to keep an eye on the feeds to make sure those are working also. If you notice anything misbehaving, please let me know.

I’ve changed the format of the permalinks and category links. It would appear all of the old permalinks still work, but if you happen to notice anything broken, let me know (just drop a comment here, I’ll see it).

Didn’t I make myself abundantly clear? I told you to get that shit out of my face. No more using my blog for your own, private gain. Evidently Hash Cash alone wasn’t enough to make you go away. You’ve got some skills in working around mass-consumption solutions.

I guess I didn’t give you enough credit. I’ll have to take you slightly more seriously. But rest assured…you WILL be going away.

I see you have the ring. And I see that your shwartz is as big as mine. But can you…handle it?

-Dark Helmet

I’m tired of you. Tired of your cheap-ass self using my blog for your advantage. Thinking my blog gets enough traffic or links to get you higher relevance on Google.

I’m especially tired of constantly removing your graffiti from my posts. So tonight it stops. I’m giving you a strong dose of Hash Cash and the count of 5 to get lost.

Your days are over comment spammers. Go away and never come back.

Well, after battling a keyboard issue I finally got insomniac back up. I had to revert back to the old kernel, but at least it’s all running. I think the kernel I installed wasn’t properly setting up the ethernet card. The console showed that ssh and everything else was starting, but when I ran ifconfig it didn’t show eth0.

My other hosting box (insomniac.dyndns.org) is presently taking a nap. Let this be a lesson to you, don’t do kernel upgrades from 150 miles away. I swear I’ve done this before and have told myself (more than once) to never do it again. I guess I’m a slow learner.

Anyway, this means the honeymoon photos are offline until I get back home Wednesday night. Maybe I’ll take the time then to finally move those off of insomniac and onto unclehulka.com.

If you’ve been trying to check out anything on my other server (insomniac.dyndns.org) you may have noticed it’s been intermittent yesterday and today. The storms on the west coast are wreaking havoc on my already fragile DSL line. insomniac is hosted out of my den, explaining why it’s been intermittent.

At this time, I think the only remaining items hosted on insomniac are the honeymoon pictures. My plan is to get those off of insomniac shortly and put them on unclehulka.com since they, obviously, have much better uptime than my DSL line. In the meantime, sorry.

You should now be seeing this new WordPress blog. I moved all the content and set up JavaScript redirects from the old blog locations to the new blog locations. My personal blog is now here. The Health and Fitness blog is no longer a seperate blog, it has been folded into this one. The Honeymoon Blog has also moved to a new home.

So the last things I should have to do with WordPress include putting together my own template and setting up categories and categorizing the existing posts.

I’ve migrated the health blog into my personal blog. So everything should be fetched out of Blogger now. All that remains is to move the honeymoon and then set up redirects for the old blog URLs and everything will be functional and running under WordPress.

I still have to modify my template because Lars says my blog looks exactly like Ken’s blog (actually my blog looks like every other WordPress blog using the default template). Once that’s done, I’m free to start doing the real work on the new site.

I’m looking to move off of 2 things: Blogger and hosting at my house.

As a possible replacement for Blogger, I’m looking at WordPress. Ken is starting to use it and I read the feature list on it. It sounds nice, so I’ll give it a go. Fortunately for me, one of the available features is that it can import from Blogger, meaning this blog can hopefully remain intact (mostly).

As for hosting at my house, I think I’m done with that experiment. My DSL is proving flaky and at over $100/month just not worth it. So I figure I’ll drop to one of Speakeasy’s lower cost configurations and take the money I save and put it into a hosting provider. Ken is using DreamHost. They’ve got some attractive packages and according to Ken they’ve got nice WordPress support. With my Linux box freed up from hosting duties at home, I can repurpose it to be my dedicated DVR.

After much waiting, the server is finally upgraded. Goodbye AMD 350, hello Athlon 900. In the process I also picked up some much needed hard disk space. I also took the opportunity to switch to a “Sarge”-based Debian install. Sarge is nice because it has a lot of newer software packages that Woody doesn’t (python2.3 and scponly, for instance). It’s a little annoying that Debian seems so far behind the curve in keeping packages up to date on the stable branch, but then again I’ve never had a machine running “stable” crash on me.

So what am I going to do with all the new horsepower and disk space? I’ll tell you:

• Play with Python. Lots and lots of Python. I’m currently messing with mod_python. It’s a lot of fun, everyone should check it out.
• Set up my music repository. After many failed attempts, I think I’ve finally got the necessary pieces to make this happen. In the past I’ve usually been short on disk space to pull this off.
• Host a domain. Eventually I’ll come up with my clever and catchy domain name and host it on this box.
• Whatever else I want. It’s a UNIX box and it’s mine, so I can really do just about anything I put my mind and effort to.