Unruly Rambling - blogging category

Social Networking Casserole

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:41:00 GMT

So this blog has been basically dead for a couple years. I was average at adding new content when I wore the hat of a software developer. I used it as a place to collect my thoughts and archive interesting tidbits about what I was doing for future reference(by me or others via google). If you plug in "Spring Hibernate" without quotes into google you will still find my write ups ranking in a page or two. Since then, I've moved into managing the folks that do the things I used to write about. Part of me thinks this is a standard path for many but I see other "coders", as managers like to call them, that I have great respect for still plugging away in their IDE of choice. From time to time, I sit back and wonder if the path I've taken is the right one. Their are many perks to each path but how do you know which one is right? Unfortunately I don't think this kind of decision is black and white. I'm pretty sure that I fall into a pseudo gray gradient somewhere between light and darkness. Wow, that's pretty deep for me. I'll assume that came from being on PTO, sitting in front the 80's music channel(And we danced by The Hooters is currently playing), and just having downed my 5th cup a joe since 8am. Enough with this unruly rambling, I'll move on to the topic I wanted to write about today. I may be gone for another two years after this post :)

What added value do you all get from the cornucopia of social networking avenues? A week or two ago I joined facebook and twitter. I don't have many buds yet, but I find both very interesting. The problem is that I don't know why. I've been a linkedin person for several years collecting acquaintances. I've added every tom, dick, and harry that I've worked with over the years. I've also added friends of friends, user group people that I recognize, and many others that I probably wouldn't even talk to if I saw them at the mall. This collection seems to have as much intrinsic value as the rounded edged baseball cards from years past. Maybe they solve a problem I have stumbled on to yet, maybe they are just a way for people to feel better about themselves since they have 499 friends. I don't really know but it's quite interesting to me. Hit me with your best shot(it just started playing) in the comments of this entry. I'd love to hear why I'm wrong.

Here is my one(or 2 or 3) liner on each app.

LinkedIn - A recruiters dream. Maybe it's useful if you are looking for a job.
Facebook - Myspace for adults. A more professional place to promote your electronic personality.
Twitter - Addicting way to keep tabs on what interesting people around you are up to. Not sure I'll continue updating but I'm loving the iPhone app.

Gotta run, Air Supply just came on and the channel must be turned NOW!!!!!

Curtail Comment Spam with Pebble CAPTCHA functionality

Sat, 14 Jan 2006 15:33:14 GMT

Over the past month or so, comment spam on my blog has gotten many times worse than in the past. I have been receiving somewhere between 75-200 comment spam messages per week. Because of this, I was forced to enable comment moderation a while back. Unfortunately this isn't a perfect solution since I still must pour through all the rubbish and manually remove them. Thanks to Glenn Smith, I can reduce the number of message's I must look at by using the CAPTCHA functionality he created. Hopefully Simon incorporates this into the next revision of Pebble.

Pebble including Wiki Features! Rock On Simon!!

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 01:36:37 GMT

I agree with Eric's assement of the Blog/Wiki/Forum landscape. While I see the three quite similar I think the Blog/Wiki marriage is a closer fit. Forum's are more of one stop shop for a particular topic. Blog's are kind of a spider web of information from site to site where wiki's are within the same site. To me that makes the most sense. I remember someone saying that Blogs are like usenet with only the people you want to hear from. I guess that means goodbye Trolls.

One application that a few of my friends use is SnipSnap. SnipSnap is a good implementation of what Eric described. It seems Simon is driving Pebble towards that feature set as well. Even though I like the idea of SnipSnap, I much prefer the Pebble interface. With my latest Pebble 1.8 upgrade, I removed my main site and now redirect to my blog. If I want to add any full pages I just use Pebble's static page feature. Here is an example of that. With Wiki capabilities being added, I'll likely drop my JSPWiki installation as well. Im sure migrating all that content will be a pain. Maybe I could help out the cause and come up with a way to automate the migration.

Shotty uptime for the past week

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 13:17:17 GMT

For the past week, I've noticed that my site was going down every couple hours and I'd have to restart JBoss in order to get it to come back. Being in busy mode all week, I didn't have time to figure out why. Yesterday, I spent 10 minutes digging around in my logs to find out that some asshat(borrowed from Hani) was hitting my server every couple milliseconds requesting my blog as an attempt to infect me with tons of referral spam. My poor server was crashing with out of memory errors at a record pace and it was getting worse and worse by the minute. His calls were coming in from 2 distinct IP Addresses (217.23.176.2 , 217.23.177.249), both of which originate in Russia. To get around this, I configured iptables to DROP packets from these addresses. All is fine since. The thing that concerns me is that this is quite the reactive approach and could start again at any moment. Thanks to the free service provided by SiteUptime, I get a text message sent to my cell phone when my site goes down. This will help a bit. What I'd like to do is write some sort of script to learn what ip addresses might be doing this, add their ip on the fly and restart iptables. If this becomes a problem, I'll look into this more.

So the moral of the story is that if you are pathetic enough to inject referral spam, I hope you die a long painful death in the dungeons of hell. In the meantime, I will ignore you with the help of iptables.

Yahoo 360 - Swiss Army Knife of the Internet

Sat, 02 Apr 2005 15:54:49 GMT

I was recently invited to join Yahoo 360, a beta portal by Yahoo that seems to be all things to all people. This beast is a combination of blogging, flickr, linkedin, and PIM functionality all rolled together. I'm not sure how much I will use it but it's an interesting concept nevertheless.

If anyone is interested, I have a few invites to offer.

I rank 6th.....

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 14:45:35 GMT

on Google when searching for the string "unruly". Not sure this means much but it is interesting nevertheless.