Neues in der Kategorie Meta

Happy New Year to everybody!

I have a bit too much work to write many posts right now, but I have a lot of ideas. I hope that all of my remaining, old and new readers, will enjoy reading them.

I myself would enjoy to read a few more comments on my posts than last year.

I will have some final exams in the next three months. Which means that I will have to learn a lot. Which means that you, my dear readers, must excuse me for writing fewer posts than usual, and maybe they will be shorter and of less quality, during this time. Thank you.

Da es mal wieder sehr wenig zu schreiben und noch weniger Zeit dazu gibt, verhänge ich eine etwa zweiwöchige Blogpause.

Due to the lack of topics to write about and the massive lack of time to do so, there will be a blogging pause for about two weeks.

Dies ist ein zweisprachiger Artikel. Der deutsche Text befindet sich unterhalb des englischen.

One year of "Ein Templatesystem für Templatesysteme", but how to blog on it adequately? Above all, it is the third year that I am blogging now. So maybe I will just start giving a current state of my both blogs:

I have drawn quite a few comics (the older ones being german, but most of them can be easily translated by google translate):

• Entstehung des Universums
• Sichtweisen
• Der Supereisbrecher
• Oktoberfest
• Comic zur Bundestagswahl 2009
• Monitor is XGA
• One of the graphics in a rant about Mac OS X
• Katakana
• Ein moderner Tagesablauf
• One of the graphics in my thougths on the sit-in at the LMU Munich
• Ausziehen
• Armlängen
• A christmas card for 2009
• Comic for my chinese friends
  
• The finale of my project thesis
• Oooh ist der süß
• Neulich in der U-Bahn
• Flying Uxul and Sunset
• Time for the children
• Apocalypse
• Freedom
• Happy New Year
• Rationale
• Alpha Centauri
• Rest in my arms
• Index in Colonia
• Crackling
  

Obviously, my style has changed with the time, and currently I am thinking about starting a second, independent comic blog, but on the other hand, these are not that much, and they are not that good, and this blog's category "comics" serves the same purpose very well. So maybe I should aim to participate at another comic blog instead. We will see.

Not only the style of my comics has changed - all of my posts depict three years of evolution, including revisions, and lessons I have learned, like being more careful when expressing my opinion. The most famous posts till now seem to be:

• A detailed preview of my JNR game written in Common Lisp - will it ever be finished?
• I (don't) like Haskell - never criticize a programming language in public!
• Fünf gute Gründe für Atomkraft - Germany needs an irony detector

Though, my new blog could not continue the success of my old one. I can only guess about the reasons:

• No pingbacks nor trackbacks - I could not get them work in Movable Type, which is a pity. But on the other hand, they are blocked by most websites, due to the huge amount of spam.
• No SEO like WordPress.
• No time: I do not have as much time as I had in the past.
• No interesting topics - the main problem currently. As blogging is only a hobby to me, I do not have the time to increase the number of readers, and thus I do not have to write stuff that is just a repetition of what other people already wrote.
  

And the future? I can only guess. Probably, the number of English posts will increase, while the number of German posts will decrease,  because my circle of friends will change in that way, and vitally all German people I know know English.

Maybe the number of comics will increase as I currently feel enjoyment when drawing, and comics have an unique expressivenes. Maybe someday I will also be bold enough to post a poem again.

As soon as I am kiloblogger (which is yet to happen) I will probably review this post.

But due to the lack of time probably the overall number of posts will decrease - hopefully therefore, the quality will increase.

We will see.



Ein Jahr "Ein Templatesystem für Templatesysteme". Wie bebloggt man dies nun gebührend? Es ist außerdem mein drittes Blog-Jahr. Vielleicht erstmal den aktuellen Status meiner beiden Blogs:

Ich habe Comics gemalt:

• Entstehung des Universums
• Sichtweisen
• Der Supereisbrecher
• Oktoberfest
• Comic zur Bundestagswahl 2009
• Monitor is XGA
• Grafiken für einen Rant über Mac OS X
• Katakana
• Ein moderner Tagesablauf
• Eine der Grafiken in meinem Post zur Besetzung des Audimax
• Ausziehen
• Armlängen
• Eine Weihnachtskarte für 2009
• Comic für meine chinesischen Freunde
  
• The finale of my project thesis
• Oooh ist der süß
• Neulich in der U-Bahn
• Flying Uxul and Sunset
• Time for the children
• Apocalypse
• Freedom
• Happy New Year
• Rationale
• Alpha Centauri
• Rest in my arms
• Index in Colonia
• Crackling
  

Nun, mein Stil hat sich eindeutig geändert. Ich spiele momentan mit dem Gedanken, einen eigenständigen Comicblog zu starten, aber so viele Comics habe ich dann doch nicht, so gut sind sie dann doch nicht, und ich will eigentlich auch keinen Zwang erleben, Comics zu zeichnen. Und dieser Blog lässt sich hervorragend als Comicblog ansehen, einfach die Kategorie "Comics" nehmen. Vielleicht sollte ich also im Zweifelsfall eher anstreben, mich einem anderen Comicblog anzuschließen. Wird sich zeigen.

Nicht nur mein Comicstil hat sich weiterentwickelt. In meinen Blogeinträgen sieht man wohl auch drei Jahre Entwicklung. Ich habe in dieser Zeit meine Meinung oftmals revidiert, und ich mache inzwischen auch erheblich vorsichtigere Aussagen. Meine "berühmtesten" Blogeinträge scheinen bisher gewesen zu sein:

• A detailed preview of my JNR game written in Common Lisp - wird es jemals fertig?
• I (don't) like Haskell - kritisiere niemals eine Programmiersprache öffentlich!
• Fünf gute Gründe für Atomkraft - Deutschland braucht wirklich einen Ironiedetektor

Leider konnte mein neuer Blog nicht an die Erfolge des Alten anknüpfen, was die Besucherzahl und Bekanntheit angeht. Woran das liegt, weiß ich nicht, mögliche Gründe sind aber:

• Keine Pingbacks und Trackbacks - die funktionieren irgendwie nicht. Das finde ich sehr schade, andererseits werden die von vielen Blogs inzwischen geblockt, wegen dem vielen Spam.
• Keine SEO - anders als bei Wordpress.
• Keine Zeit - ich kann wesentlich weniger Zeit in den Blog investieren als früher.
• Keine interessanten Themen - das ist momentan mein Hauptproblem. Ich bin ein Hobbyblogger, und habe es nicht nötig meine Besucherzahlen in die Höhe schießen zu lassen. Deshalb halte ich mich von vielen aktuellen Themen einfach fern, weil ich sie nicht interessant genug finde, dass ich auch noch darüber schreibe, wenn schon fünfzig Andere das getan haben.
  

Und wie sieht die Zukunft aus? Nun, Prognosen abzugeben ist generell schwer. Vermutlich wird die Anzahl an englischen Posts erheblich zunehmen, weil sich mein Bekanntenkreis um sehr viele englischsprachige Menschen erweitern wird, und faktisch alle deutschsprachigen Personen die ich kenne auch englisch können.

Vielleicht wird die Anzahl der Comics zunehmen, zumindest momentan zeichne ich recht gerne, und Comics sind ein Medium das in manchen Fällen besser funktioniert als Textbeiträge. Vielleicht werde ich mich auch irgendwann mal wieder trauen ein Gedicht zu bloggen.

Wenn ich endlich Kiloblogger bin (das bin ich leider immernochnicht ganz), werde ich vielleicht nochmal darüber revidieren.

Wahrscheinlich wird die Anzahl der Posts insgesamt aber abnehmen. Ich habe einfach immer mehr zu tun, und immer weniger Zeit zu bloggen. Andererseits nimmt vielleicht die Qualität dann wieder zu.

Wir werden sehen.

Ok, it really pisses me off! For every IP range I block, another one appears. How many damn IP adresses do chinese providers possess? I mean it is not that I do not have anything better to do. Ok, from now on:

Zero tolerance against Spam!

Which means:

• This site is no longer accessible without a browser that supports gzip (which any reasonable browser should do) - this is because I assume that most spambots will not support it.
• If an IP is accessing my comment-cgi-script multiple times without any comment going through, then I will do a whois-query on it, and if multiple IPs from the same provider are spamming, I will probably block that provider, especially when it is from china (which appears to be the source of most spam-attacks apparently). The chinese government has a big firewall as far as I know - why can they not block spam, instead of just infringing their people's personal rights?
• If I see an IP from a server-provider doing nasty stuff (like accessing my comments page several thousand times), then I will contact this provider (in addition to blocking the IP). I already did this, and I will continue doing this - reasonable providers have a mail adress to alert abuses of their services, and I will use them, because I think it is the interest of me, these providers, and in the end the whole internet, to get rid of that pest!
  
• If this site was hosted in a country with a law reasonable for the internet, I would not doubt to publish my list of blocked IPs, so other people could profit from it. But this site is still hosted in Germany. I am pretty sure that the rights of  worried pensioners or sons of worried parents with their infected computers weight heavier than me being annoyed by their contribution to the botnet attacking me, and so, I would not be allowed to publish their IP adresses. A pity.
• Again, if you know somebody who cannot access this website, please tell me - I do not want to lock out any legit person, but mistakes happen!

Yay, 4 gigabyte upstream, 2 gigabyte downstream today. These spambots are a pest! I mean wtf? Most of their connections will not even pass the captcha-challenge. Sorry guys, I know there are a lot of idiots out there not maintaining their servers, and I have no problem with you pwning them, but please, make your bots intelligent enough to notice that somebody tries to block them and then leave him alone!

I am pretty sure it is possible for an expierienced cracker to invade my server, unfortunately, even though I am maintaining it, but it takes a bit more efforts than just getting on my nerves and imposing work on me! You will not get advertising space on my website!

I did not want to do this, but facing this amount of traffic, now I finally have banned a lot of IPs. I do not like IP bans. If you know of somebody I banned unjustly, please let me know.

And here a dedication to all of you spammers out there:

Again ... Too much work to do ... Presumably 2 weeks of non-blogging for me.

So far, I was too lazy to set up a proper central database, as MovableType has an SQLite3-Backend. However, I was told that newer MT-Versions will not support SQLite3 and Postgres anymore by default.

Furthermore, after the recent Spam-Attack, my cute little SQLite-Database became huge, and slow - this is simply not what SQLite3 is made for. So I decided to switch to MySQL, even though I like PostgreSQL more - I do not know how long I will stay with Movable Type, but as long as it works, it is probably better to use the Database that is officially supported, rather than anything else.

Migrating was a pain! I read that the default way of doing this is to create a Backup and restore it again.

At first I thought I could just dump all of the spam-comments (since it took a very long time to delete them) within this backup, and delete them when they are migrated to MySQL, as I was too lazy to read about the MT-Api for manipulating the database programmatically. After this resulted in a backup that was too large to restore, I split the Backup and tried to restore it then. Then I got the error message that the database schema of the backup is wrong and it was "highly recommended" not to restore it.

So well, I accepted that and proceeded with deleting spam comments. After having deleted most of them, I thought I should investigate further on this database schema issue, hence I created a backup and restored it into the new database. This time, the database schema was not the problem, but the XML-Parser could not read the Backup-File (which was in XML Format). I forgot to delete some of the spam comments, and one of them contained malformed characters.

WTF? I thought this was a Backup! Either make sure that you only save comments in a properly-encoded way, or at least put them into CDATA-Tags.

However, after also removing them, the migration worked.

I am really pissed! About 12000 Comments in my queue, long sequences of comments with a delay of about 5 seconds! Mostly just Spam!

I mean, who is supposed to read this? And what are they expecting? Every Blog-Hoster will have to do something against these Spam-Comments, so how can this be successfull in any way? Who the f**k is sending these comments, and who the f**k is stupid enough to fall for them such that they get profit?

I am currently going through the whole mess looking for serious comments. But I cannot promise that I will not accidentally delete some serious comments, too.

Additionally, I added a reCaptcha-Challenge against Spam now. I am really sorry about this, as I do not like captcha-challenges myself, but I do not have the time to go through the MovableType-API and write something better myself, and reCaptcha seems to be widely used and sufficient to block most of the Spam.
 
If there are any problems with commenting, feel free to send me an E-Mail so I can fix it.

Once again, I have much too much work to do, thus, for the next month, I will probably not write new posts, at least not many. I hope I will still have some readers afterwards.