You Too Can Protect Our Country

August 18, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I was on the bus yesterday and noticed that Bryman College now offers as one of its programs 'Homeland Security Specialist'. I'm pretty sure that says something important and scary about this country.

Would you like to aid in the protection of our country? Due to recent terrorist events, there is an increased demand for trained safety and security employees throughout the nation. The Homeland Security Specialist program will provide you with a solid foundation in planning, implementing, and managing security operations for an organization.

Yikes.

Biking Mulholland Drive

August 14, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I took a bike ride today, and I think I about died at five or six different points. Every once in a while it's good to take a ride that absolutely just knocks you down a peg, just to keep an honest opinion of your riding abilities. This ride was one of those for me.

Basically Kathy's back in Michigan until the 26th. Normally I ride to church with her, but this week I was on my own to figure out how to get myself there. The problem: I go to Bel Air Presbyterian, which just happens to be on the entire other side of town, and on top of a mountain. It's not too far away, though, so I figured I could probably make it on the bike. — Continue Reading...

One Less Day of Classes?

August 14, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I realized today that one week before classes start back at USC, it might be good to check in on my schedule and make sure no classes I'm signed up in have been cancelled or otherwise changed to make them not fit my schedule. It doesn't seem that's the case for any of them, but it looks like my one Monday/Wednesday/Friday class (Latin III) is now a Monday/Wednesday. If that truely is the case that's perfect, since it was my only thing on Fridays. Still no professor listed for that one, though.

I realized today that I have no clue what my PIN number is to get into the USC apps for seeing balance due, registered classes, etc. For four years it was my birthdate (the default, which they gave you an option to change and I never did), then one day it popped up a "you have to change this now" box, and I changed it. I don't think I've used it since. The way they give to get it reset is via faxing a request to the Registration office. I guess I'll do that tomorrow.

Another Step Against the Spammers

August 13, 2005 by Eric Richardson

So the spam killer hit a little snag today when the comment spammers started making the request for the blog post and the comment come from different IP addresses, and the initial request not come with a referer. So I'm still blocking lots of referer spam, which is nice, but some comment spam came back.

Then I realized that all of the IPs I was seeing were actually open proxies. So I started looking them up on DSBL, and they were there.

Normally I'm all for anonymous proxies, but in this case I hate comment spam more than I care about people having to hide from the government to browse this blog, So I added a DSBL IP check to my blocking mechanism. I have it in the same PerlPostReadRequestHandler still, but you could block based on IP even earlier, so I might break it out and do it there. Now I just need to start grabbing the DSBL zone to secondary so that I can have a local lookup.

Oops

August 13, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I just realized that in my Apache upgrades the other day I broke mod_php4. It took me this long to notice because I only use php on the frontpage of ericrichardson.com. And, well, I never see that page. I should read my website more often.

In order to get mod_rewrite to do proxying, I had to grab the apache source package and compile mod_proxy into the binary. I guess that broke something the stock php4 module depends on, 'cause it segfaults on me now. I guess I need to build that from the source package now too. Ugh.