Loving Ubuntu 7.10

When my sister asked me to help her with a web site in April, I took the opportunity to expand my professional skills by developing it in LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and pHp. I'd dabbled with Cygwin when I knew shell scripting was best suited to the task at hand, but that was the extent of my open source skills.

So I took a laptop that was past its prime -- the network card only worked intermittently, and the graphics capability meager -- and installed Ubuntu Feisty on it. It's worked pretty well, and I've been able to muddle through the learning curve to get the project underway.

I'm an update-aholic, so when Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" was released, I was edgy and feisty (lol) to get it. There were several kinks: first attempt failed because duh! I ran out of battery power. Second attempt: my network card went on vacation again. Sigh.

I tried the Live CD, then got back on track with the Alternate version. Luckily plenty of other computers around to allow for sneaker-netting.

The Apache upgrade was another hiccup: I had to re-configure pHp and chmod permissions.

I brought it into work and one of my IT guys wrestled with the wireless NIC to get that on our office network. I never could get that done under Feisty. But now I can easily roam, connecting to my home or office network without intervention whenever I'm in range.

But I confess: I love Ubuntu 7.10 for the eye candy. Transparent terminal. Clearlooks, Darklooks depending on mood. Transparent panels top and bottom. I'm a sucker for transparency, it seems.

Jobster gets blocked

We're having performance issues on RHW lately, and one finding is that Jobster is scraping our jobs. No surprise there. They do attribute us, but I never liked their model of just scraping instead of asking for a feed.

We're seeing this in our error logs:

DateTime={ts '2007-10-22 14:47:22'}, Template=/BrowseAds/index.cfm, RemoteAddress=12.129.9.203, HTTPReferer=, Diagnostics=The request has exceeded the allowable time limit Tag: CFSTOREDPROC
The error occurred on line 223., QueryString=SN=103&M=100&RP=datedesc&D=summary&R=1, Cookie=, Browser=Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; +http://www.jobster.com/indexing.html)\

But the link their robot reports, http://www.jobster.com/indexing.html, is 404. For shame.

So, quick ARIN lookup on the remote IP 12.129.9.203 gives this:

AT&T WorldNet Services ATT (NET-12-0-0-0-1)
12.0.0.0 - 12.255.255.255
CERFnet ATTENS-SEA1-1 (NET-12-129-0-0-1)
12.129.0.0 - 12.129.63.255
Jobster, Inc. ATTENS-011426-005621 (NET-12-129-9-192-1)
12.129.9.192 - 12.129.9.223

So I'm blocking them at the firewall, until they decide to play nice.

In the press

It's kinda weird when non-technical people refer to me as a "geek guru" but I guess in small pond like Poughkeepsie that works.

As a company, we almost never get press in local dailies because we compete with their classified revenue so directly. They hate us.

Here we are in a local business weekly, and that adversarial relationship is explained:

Radio the the Web and Back

Monster.com Spam

Ha seems Monster.com (or at least, someone who works for them) got caught spamming, and then buried themselves deeper by trying to deny it. I saw this on the first page of Digg.com tonight:

http://www.mneylon.com/blog/archives/2007/10/01/monsters-irish-office-think-spamming-is-acceptable/

PurplePages search box

Hey, now see that awesome PurplePages search box on the right of this page! Just added it there for testing but it looks good so I'll keep it. :D

Add a PurplePages.com search box to your site :D