I had the opportunity to do some quick WordPress plugin hacking tonight for Jim Whimpey. As a “payment” of sorts, he gave me a coupon code for the site he was working on: Panedia Desktop Wallpaper.
Being an Aussie company, obviously, most of their wallpapers are from Australia. Boy do they have some absolutely beautiful scenery down under. Check out the two I selected for my machines:
For my desktop, I got a huge 3200 x 1200 pixel version of Brisbane’s beautiful night skyline:
And for my MacBook Pro, I got a beautiful 1680 x 1050 pixel copy of the Robe Coastline:
Stunning wallpapers. Totally worth $25/year to constantly get new beautiful scenes in this kind of quality. I also love the interface that auto-picks the best format for your OS and resolution. Very well done.
In the last couple of hours, I’ve gotten over 4,000 bounced emails where someone is apparently spamming the shit out of the internet with an @doesnthaveone.com email address that doesn’t exist.
Since doesnthaveone.com redirects here, I thought I would post a message for anyone who may angrily type in the URL… It’s not me, I swear. I get lots of emails sent to random @doesnthaveone.com addresses, it’s a random address people make up. I’m not the one sending you this apparently random spam, I swear.
It appears all this spam has originated from a single IP belonging to a Puerto Rican ISP / Hosting provider. I have notified them through their registered abuse address and hope to see the flood stop soon.
I’ve spent the past two days or so managing my email migration from DreamHost to Google Apps for Domains.
Over the weekend, DreamHost had some scheduled maintenance. Not only were their main page, panel, and all webmail down for an extended period, but they were moving the cluster I’m hosted on… for the second time. This is soon after a typo killed their entire network by firewalling out the entirety of the internet.
Of course this downtime would have to come as soon as I’m ready to send one of the half dozen emails I’ll actually send this year. All in all, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I think DreamHost offers good service, for the price they charge, but sometimes ‘good’ just isn’t ‘good’ enough.
I moved my blog to SliceHost previously, and email was the last link in the chain. While I’ll still use them for massive bandwidth and storage, there’s no chance I’ll be putting anything mission critical on their network again - it’s just not worth it.
I was stuck re-compiling Apache today to enable support for mod_proxy so I could pass requests through our existing webserver seamlessly to our new PHP5-sporting webserver. Of course I decided to make some other “optimizations” along the way with our Apache configuration, so I ended up breaking everything.
Recompiling Apache threaded of course required that I recompile PHP so it had thread support, and recompiling PHP meant I had to re-tackle the problem of Oracle support in PHP which has always been quite shady anyway.
To make a long story short, one of the things I needed to know was which parameters to pass into each ./configure command. PHP’s handy-dandy phpinfo(); page shows you the configure command used, but I didn’t know off hand how to find out which parameters Apache had been built with.
After poking around in the Apache root directory, I found my answer. Apparently the Apache configure command saves a pretty format of itself every time it’s compiled. On our box at work, I found it in <server_root>/build/config.nice - I presume it’s in a similar location for everyone.
For anyone wondering, yes, I did get mod_proxy up and running, and everything works like a charm. I’ll probably toss together another quick entry tomorrow about our specific use case, since I had to piece together all the information I found from dozens of different sites, none of which seemed to have the whole picture.
In the mean time, happy compiling!
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Screenshots
I threw together some screenshots and comments on Flickr while I was quickly giving IE 8 a run through tonight, if anyone’s interested.
IE 8 Beta 1 gallery