I’m semi-quiet lately. A cold last week kicked my butt for pretty much the entire week. That’s always fun.
I’m also working on some changes to this blog. It’s been a long time since that’s happened. Hopefully I’ll have it out of dev and running by the end of the month.
As a result I won’t be posting to much during this time.
I’ve been pretty quiet lately, but I’ve got a sequel to a very popular blog post coming in the near future… stay tuned 
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This and other sites of mine will experience a few outages this weekend as the servers move to a new temporary data center.
Update: Server is snug in it’s new home. Will be moving again to a permanent new data center.
Just made a few tweaks/upgrades that should improve performance around here. Let me know if anything is acting strange or broken. Every so often I tend to do these, most are very minor.
As of yesterday SafePasswd.com is now suggesting passwords over SSL for better security. Seems like a good idea right?
In other news, there is now a SafePasswd.com blog. The focus is quite simple. Bring better security to the masses.
Check it out, add the feed to your favorite rss reader, bookmark it.
I keep regular backups of everything on this server just in case something happens. Recently I switched to a more automated and secure (PGP encrypted) solution for this blog due to it’s fast-paced nature. Just the critical stuff (database, media, templates). I choose PGP (implemented using GPG) since it’s easy, and I only have to store the public key on the server, making it safer than most alternatives.
I’m strongly considering moving it all eventually over to Amazon’s S3 storage. At $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used and $0.20 per GB of data transferred it would be very affordable to keep backups in an even more secure fashion. I’d still use my own encryption on top of theirs for extra security. For things like media, I could even see myself hosting it solely at Amazon. It just seems like that may be a more practical and scalable approach.
Unfortunately until either FTTH or DOCSIS 3.0 comes to town, it doesn’t look like Amazon’s S3 will be practical for home backup purposes. This server has a beefy connection to a few large pipes to the internet (Level3, Global Crossing, and Cogent last I checked). They provides high speed connectivity so a backup would take only a few seconds. At home with a cable modem on a DOCSIS 1.1 network (such as Comcast) the bandwidth is just to slim to allow enough upload capacity. Comcast still only allows 384kbps up. Even the top plans in select areas don’t top 1Mbps. Of course these are Comcast’s numbers (the actual performance is often less). In areas that they currently serve, Verizon FiOS (FTTH) is available at 15 Mbps/2 Mbps. Much better suited for such purposes (though more would be welcome). As strange as it may seem pricing is quite competitive, giving cable a run for it’s money. Perhaps one day DOCSIS 3.0 will appear, though that seems to be a while away. Perhaps one day all homes will have 100Mbps full duplex connections with low latency.
The only real way to get around this limitation is to perhaps use rsync to perform backups. Initial backups would still suck, but after that it wouldn’t be too bad. Though that wouldn’t work with services such as Amazon’s S3, which are token based. There is an rsync-like clone, but it’s still not the real thing. Perhaps Google’s upcoming GDrive will be cool enough to allow the use of rsync over SSH (I could dream) in addition to WebDAV (which is what I expect to see). Last I checked rsync doesn’t support WebDAV because WebDAV is done over HTTP. If I understand it right, RFC 3229 would add Delta encoding support to HTTP, making something like rsync over WebDAV possible since it uses delta encoding.
I’ve got a couple of larger (more research/data) style blog posts in the works here. I’m hoping to post them shortly, once I get a chance to finish them. I’ve got to get a new schedule for posting around here. It’s happening more in bursts than I like.
It seems to be happening more and more. I get emails sent either through my contact page or emailed directly to me that are extremely misguided. Often to the point where you question if they would give you their credit card number, social security number, or proof of a sacrificed first born if you just replied and asked for it. We aren’t talking about spam, but questions that really have no purpose being directed towards me, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why someone would pick me.
I’ve tried with the “emails about _____ will be ignored” warnings on the contact page, but they were ignored, so to make the page cleaner I just removed it. Apparently people who do this are so misdirected, that didn’t help 
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Among the more memorable ones:
There are others, but not quite as memorable. 9/10 that fall into the above categories are just ignored and deleted with no reply. After all, why even get them started. Some people do get worse than me, so I really can’t complain too much.
A few months ago I was getting some serious spam, but since I rewrote the system to include several anti-spam defenses, that’s been remedied. That of course doesn’t solve this.
It doesn’t bother me to much (it’s not like it’s flooding my email), but just one of those silly things you have to deal with. I understand the Firefox related questions on occasion, or things related to work I’ve done. But much of it is so off target it’s funny.
I do wonder if there is a better way to handle it.
Over the past few days I’ve made about a dozen small changes to this blog, including code cleanup, slight layout tweaks, optimization, etc. I also managed to cut page size and requests down a little bit, which is always welcome.
Every once in a while it’s necessary to stop developing and just cleanup after yourself. Overall, while most of the changes should be pretty transparent it resolves some of the rough edges that have been around for way too long.
I just made some changes around here, cleaning up some of the older code. Most notable changes:
Some other, more obscure changes were also made. Let me know if there is trouble.