Tagged as: General

I've created a new web design for my tutorial pages and migrated them to use it.

See the new tutorial pages.

Also, I've created a new tutorial on how to fight off the "dumb submitter" spam bots.

And finally, I made an icon for cuvou.com. It's the icon in the corner of the tutorial pages, and the favicon.ico has been updated to be that instead of the pink GNOME foot that it previously was.

Out of a fit of boredom, I created a new web design for Cuvou.com, codenamed "Storm" (because of the lightning and rain effects in the background images). Since this is now the third web design that Cuvou.com has seen, I'll eventually be putting up a place to archive all the previous web designs. It will probably go under the "Creativity" column in the navigation bar.

Edit: Actually, I have all the old designs online and just fixed them so they link back and forth to each other. Start at the very first design.

I've just made my Internet much faster... by resetting my Linksys router to factory defaults.

For some quick history, I had Comcast cable internet when I lived in Michigan, and now I have AT&T DSL (only because the local cable companies don't have lines in this apartment complex).

So, I noticed a problem when my VirtualBox virtual machines were having Internet issues. The virtual machines were Windows 2000 and Vista Home Premium, and neither of them could surf the web because they weren't able to resolve domain names.

VirtualBox creates a virtual NAT for the guest operating systems that allows them to use the host's Internet connection. The NAT has a 10.x.x.x IP range and automatically assigns an IP address to the virtual machine. This all was working just fine, but no Internet still. The results of "ipconfig" in the guests showed that my DNS suffix was "hsd1.mi.comcast.net" -- my old DNS server in Michigan.

I knew that my Linksys router was caching this information but didn't think it really mattered. Linksys was giving my Linux PC this DNS suffix as well, and Linux was passing it on to my virtual machines. The router had no interface on it to clear the cache.

At any rate, I narrowed it down that the virtual machines could not resolve domain names -- they could connect directly to Internet IP addresses, though. I tried a couple ways of "fixing" their DNS server information to no avail, and decided to reset the router to its factory defaults (to clear its cache). After a reset, I rebooted into Windows to configure it.

Linksys routers, by default, give out IPs in the 192.168.1.x range. My DSL modem also gives out IPs in this range. The only way to connect to the modem through the router is to change the router's IP range, so I've been setting it to 10.10.1.x. After setting up the router and putting in AT&T's DNS servers (which are required, or else the modem won't allow the router to reach the internet), I rebooted to Linux and started a virtual machine to see what changed.

Well, Windows 2000 still couldn't resolve domain names. I got an idea about installing a DNS server on my Linux box and telling the virtual machine to use it as its DNS -- this didn't work, because VirtualBox gives out 10.x.x.x IP addresses, which the host OS also got from Linksys. So, Windows 2000 wasn't able to route upward to the host's IP because of this. So, I instead set its DNS servers to be that of AT&T's -- the same as my router's settings. Now, the Internet worked within the virtual machine. It worked really well, too. DNS resolving time was almost nonexistant.

Realizing that Windows 2000's direct use of AT&T's DNS servers was the cause, and realizing that with the factory reset on Linksys that it had lost Comcast's DNS cache information, I tried browsing the web from my PC too. It was much faster now.

I had noticed a while back that my DSL was only slow while resolving domain names, but that once it actually connected to the server, the pages downloaded fast. I didn't make the connection between that slowness and Linksys's caching of Comcast's DNS server though. But now everything is so much faster. :)

There's a retarded new breed of forum spam bot crawling the web lately. Unlike the spam bots that try to stuff posts full of links to virus-ridden websites, these bots just seem to register and say things like "Nice site! Where'd you get it?"

The RiveScript.com YaBB forum has gotten at least two of these low-hanging spam bots recently. I modified the YaBB source to try and stop these things from being able to register by employing some of the same techniques that keep Cuvou.com safe from "dumb submitter bots" and we'll see if that helps...

Remind me to write a big long article about spam bots and how to fight them. I have some pretty good techniques that seem to work quite effectively but I currently don't have the motivation to write about them at this point in time.

Update: I've written an article about stopping dumb submitter bots: Trapping "Dumb Submitter Bots".

I've come up with a new design for my software pages. The 4 pages under the Software heading on the navigation bar use the new page style so far. I'll work on the other ones later.

Basically, I went with a tab approach. Instead of having EVERYTHING be all on a single page, they're divided up into tabs. JavaScript tabs, so clicking from tab to tab is instantaneous. Users without JavaScript will just get a normal hyperlink to a new page where their selected tab is visible.

Also they're getting their own 400x90 pixel logos. So I think the pages are a little more fun now. :)

Alright, after more than a week of downtime, cuvou.com is back up. It's (temporarily?) being hosted by Lunarpages, a web hosting company based out of California somewhere... so at least I know the server time will match my local time here.

That's all the updates for tonight. Hopefully I wasn't penalized too much by Google for disappearing for a week. I'm pretty sure they need 404s for longer than that before they remove me from the index. ;)

Finally, I'll discuss further my trip to Los Angeles.

Back in April I was chatting with Matt Austin, an online friend I met about 5 years ago through the hobby of chatterbot programming. He's working as a software developer at Fonality and threw out this random idea of, "why don't you move out to LA and work for Fonality?" So I was like, sure I'll check it out. If anything it'd add some more options for where I could go in the near future. Immediately the director of engineering starts chatting with me about it.

I didn't realize until I chatted with Matt some more that the director of engineering is none other than Samy, the guy who wrote the Samy is my hero worm that swept across the MySpace network a few years ago. It was pretty cool to find out that this is who I've been talking to. It was like knowing a celebrity.

Anyway, a couple weekends later Fonality flew me down to Los Angeles to check out the company, the area, and for the semi-formal interview. I hung out with Samy and Matt and their other roommate in their apartment while I was down there. The weather though kinda sucked, it was in the 50s and 60s or something that weekend... exactly the same as the weather in Michigan at the time.

At any rate, I'm going for it. I start on June 2^nd as a software developer for Fonality, so the week before then is the "moving to Los Angeles" week. That's gonna be a load of fun, getting to drive through the desert and the mountains and everything. Also, since I left Liquid Web, I'm back to hosting my websites off my home Linux box again. So unless I get a new web host, my sites will be going down like a cheerleader at homecoming when I unplug my computer and won't be back up until I get settled in at LA and get Internet access there.

If anyone cares, I released my Cuvou::Traffic module for download. The module is released under the I don't give a damn license, if you find it useful then good, but YMMV.

It's on the libcuvou page.

Here's another update about my content management system. I've added something called "page comments", which works just like blog comments but they can be used anywhere else where needed. Having said that, I've put my Guestbook page back up, and it directly uses this "page comments" module. Also, Photo Albums support commenting on the pictures. :)

I finally declare my blog software as having been completed. There will likely be some bug fixes still, but most of the features I wanted to add to the blog software have been implemented. Specifically, today I made numerous additions:

• I get e-mailed when new comments are added to the blog. As this particular blog is pushing 10 posts, soon the older posts will go onto a second page and it would be hard to keep up with comments on old entries if not for e-mail.
• I added an RSS feed for the blog. It's at /rss.cgi on this domain name. There's a feed button on the left navigation bar underneath the "Powered by Redhat" button.
• Time stamps on the "post an entry" page are written out as full, editable-and-JavaScript-updateable dates and times instead of Unix time. The timestamps are converted to and from Unix time when needed.
• Labels such as "1 comment/n comments" are moved to the configuration so they're easily changeable.
• The headings on the blog entries in the "multiview" mode aren't H2's anymore, but now are divs that take their styles from the web design's style sheets.
• There are probably other changes I forgot about already.

I've been trying with a high priority to get my blog software completed lately because I plan on starting a new site, which will be mainly a web blog, where I'll write about interesting things. And by "interesting things" that will probably involve a lot of technical topics, but explained in a simplified way... for example I want to write some articles that explain how file shredding works and why it's difficult to permanently delete data, and explain how that all works using diagrams and stuff.

I still have yet to discuss further my trip to Los Angeles this weekend. That will come in a later post.