One of my favourite websites is APOD, Astronomy Picture of the Day. I’ve been visiting it daily almost since it started in 1993, back in the infancy of the web. Even after all these years, it remains one of my favourite sites, and on my list of sites I check daily (even on weekends). Every day, there’s a spectacular new astrophoto to look at, and an explanation with plenty of hyperlinks to follow. Some of the pictures I save and use as desktop backgrounds. This is one of the oldest continuously operating and most enduring non-commercial websites I’ve encountered, and I hope it sticks around for many more years.
Counting the days
The few people who surf their way here might notice a new block in the side bar, Counting the days. I set it up using the MTCountdown plugin by David Raynes. It’s a pretty cool plugin, and easy to use. Just seemed like it would be a neat thing to set up. It’ll be one of those things that changes every now and then when there’s something significant for me to count down to (or count up from).
This, along with the People Visited From and the weather blocks are done using cool MT plugins.
Interesting web server log entries
The last few days, I’ve been ‘tail -f’ing (no, it’s not what you think) the webserver logs just to see what kind of traffic the server gets. Most of it is internal, lots of spiders and web crawlers, and more than a few crack attempts. Then this morning I saw one I’d never seen before
211.21.44.211 - - [20/Oct/2003:08:31:32 -0400] "CONNECT 1.3.3.7:1337 HTTP/1.0" 200 9612 "-" "-"A Google search yielded many promising results including this very informative one.
netstat or ps didn’t reveal anything usual at the time. A lookup of the IP told me the IP address was part of a block registered to Cool Er Ke Ji Ltd in Taipei, Taiwan. A portscan of the offending machine didn’t reveal any open ports out of the ordinary.
Well, I’m pretty sure my server is still reasonably secure. A couple of mods to my server config should keep anybody from trying to use it as a proxy server. A lesson to sysadmins: Keep an eye on those logs.
Restructured blog
I’ve restructured the way my blog is organized to try to make blog rebuilds faster. One of the problems I was running into was that the MT plugins I was using in the side panel was causing the rebuild process to take sufficiently long enough that the server connection would time out before the rebuild process finished.
So, to get around this, thanks to some ideas I got at the MT support forum, I turned the side panel into a separate index page, and use PHP to include() the side panel into each page.
This way, the plugins only get processed once per rebuild instead of once per page per rebuild. Makes a really big difference when you have lots of blog entries. The downside is that all of my page extensions changed from .html to .php, breaking any search engine links. I’ll be leaving the .html around for a little while, but eventually they’ll be going away.
If you find anything that’s broken, let me know.
UPDATE: Figured out how to add a redirect in my server config so that anybody looking for the html version of my blog pages will be redirected to the php version.
Star Trek Apartment
Well, this is certainly interesting. My friend Rick sent me a couple of links to some guy who’s remodeled his apartment to look like Star Trek: TNG quarters. Complete with panels, transporter pad and brig. It actually looks surprisingly good, although the kitchen looks a little too dimly lit and too blue to be very functional. It does look cool though.
It is also up for sale at EBay. Now if only I could come up with $2M and get my wife to move to England…