Category Archives: Blogging

Meta topic when writing about blogging, ranting, posting, blah blah

Blogging, Open Source

Excuse my french

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I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry but out of no particular reason that I understand, my WordPress installation has started to speak French to me! At least all controls/popup-texts in the text editor are no longer in English! I don’t know any french, but luckily I know most of these things already without actually having to read the labels. Like this “insert link” example:

Insert link in french

(Update: I guess I could mention that this is a plain Debian Unstable installation, and most of the thing is still in English. It is just parts of the UI that went French.)

Blogging, Open Source

Reality Check October 2007

Right now there’s darkness outside my window. It is in the middle of the night and this is my prime hacking time, when the rest of the family are all sound asleep.

The three first days of nursing Rex full time has been gentle, as he’s been his very happy himself and we’ve had some great weather allowing walks outdoors and visits to the nearby playgrounds etc. Also, Rex’s two naps per day (totaling at around 3-4 hours) does allow for some personal time as well, so I manage to read my mails and even do occasional commits during the days.

Things will get rougher when the days go darker, colder and wetter. Or when Rex is getting more cranky and similar. But I’m optimistic.

Keeping up with IRC like I can when I’m sitting in front of my computer all day at work isn’t really possible and the no commuting will prevent me from keeping up with the podcasts I used to listen to, but those are no biggies to overcome. I quite like not having to go anywhere particular in the morning and thus not have to “travel” home again in the later afternoon.

Instead, I’ve fixed bugs and worked in several patches to curl and c-ares and I’ve even been able to submit blog posts at a decent pace.

Blogging, IT Politics

Preparing for China

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I’m going to China for a week in October. I have a few things I feel I better figure out while I’m there, including:

  1. Exactly how evil is the internet censorship and filtering for ordinary tourists such as me. A laptop and some network tools should be enough to tell, as the hotel boasts free internet access…
  2. Time zone stuff. China has a single time zone for the entire country, which by itself is fascinating for such a huge area. And when looking at a time zoneChinese Sign for monkey map, you can see that the country picked a time zone that is the equivalent of western Australia, which seems to be a lot of sense for the east coast of China. So, the western parts of China are terribly off. The question is: do the people ignore the time and follow the light, or do they obey the time and spend parts of the lives in more darkness than what they otherwise would? If you go north/south at the eastern and western edges of China, you’ll end up in time zones that are five hours apart!
  3. Chinese typing is with glyphs; some tens of thousands of different ones. In a Chinese dictionary, like a Chinese to English one, how do they sort the Chinese words? I mean, glyphs just have got to be very hard to sort in a logical manner?! Or how do they find the words?
Blogging, Network

Form Submit Honeypot by Mistake

During the summer 2001, me and my wife toured Vietnam and we had a great time. For that occasion I set up a little online diary that would allow us to post entries while on the road, to allow our families and friends back home to be able to keep up with what we were doing.Boats in Vietnam

Fast forward to present day: the diary “submit new entry” form is still left on my site, and while it no longer works (it hasn’t worked for many years) – it is still one of the most visited pages on my site! It seems the automated spam bots find it and submit crap to it… the crap doesn’t end up anywhere to be seen nor is it even stored on the server, but it clearly identifies evil machines! Isn’t that a honeypot as good as any?!

So far during September 2007, no less than 309 unique IP addresses have issued a POST on that page..

Blogging

Blogging blogging

I’ve been “blogging” more or less for ages already (my first post on Advogato was in May 2000) but I thought it was about time I installed a proper blog software so that I could post my rants easier and possibly somewhat more often than what I’ve done in the past…

Ok, so this is a WordPress default install on Debian unstable and it was a fairly easy install once I found the “.deb” install procedure linked from WordPress’ site