A couple of months ago BlogsNow stopped accepting pings.
Pings are these little messages basicallly saying “hello Service XYZ here is weblog ABC, I have new content”.
The mother of all these ping servers is weblogs.com. Just got sold to Verisign.
I started to ignore pings, since they were mostly spam.
That did not stop them: Right now I am getting half a million pings a a day at BlogsNow. I would guess that 99.9 % of them are spam. Maybe I have a look one day and then use them to build a blacklist …
BlogsNow had a little hickup. An old index issue finally prevented one of it’s main tables to accept new entries. The easiest remedy was to delete the last four million weblogs that had been added.
They will come back, I am sure.
My dear friend Andrew deserves his american citizenship. Only a true american can go to Europe and have the results of it on one page.
Seriously: As always gorgeous pictures.
this will save allot of time and frustration
You probably could build another Cheops pyramid in the time that this will save in the next year globally.
this is or rather could be the biggest thing that got started this year. This could be hug, If the g-peeps don’t mess this up like they do/did the video launch.
They have the funding to put wifi in place wherever they want.
They bought enough dark fibre to make their own back bone.
The rest?
History.
Like having a free gPhone. Connects via wifi and the net.
Just ’cause. It it cheap and simple enough for them to do.
And so much more.
Yesterday I had to move a site that I wrote from LA to Paris. From redhat to debian. Overall not a bad experience. Debian is different but seems neither worse nor better than Redhat or Suse from what I can tell. apt-get is your friend. Why they felt that apache is a better name than httpd beats me.
Complex things go well and simple ones have surprises:
Changing the timezone back from Paris to LA I first ran tzselect.
That gave me the correct value. But then I had read on the web to change /etc/default/rcS. Which does not make sense to me: UTC is UTC is UTC. That’s what it’s there for. I then found /etc/timezone. I thought that would be it. Rebooted and, well, ssh
hash has changed. Interesting side effect. But still we were on the wrong time. Then I found that /etc/localtime was still (soft) linked to /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Paris. After changing this to /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Los_Angeles the date command gave me thee ‘right’ time. But apache/php still reported mod times of files in the old style. A second reboot fixed also that.
//wordpress/xmlrpc.php
putting a machine in the internet, and it does not take long until you get a request like the one above. There is a hole in WordPress, and apparently there are robots out there trying to find those.
Update or move it to a name that is less predictable.
Andreas
vanity googling
Took me exactly seven years to get there.