This iteration of Sector 42 is now officially defunct. Well, sort of. It will remain up for now to keep the google hits coming (do I get hits from google? eh, who knows), but the real meat and potatoes, so to speak, of Sector 42 now sits here:
All the old posts (save this one) are included there, including comments (at least, comments that survivded the great comment spam purge of a while back). Indeed, the whole archives is searchable now! Sweet.
The one caveat: The design for the new site is not finished yet. I'm essentially keeping the current design: simply translating the style information for this template over to the new system's template, but sprucing things up a bit in the process. However, right now it looks like ass. And for at least a week, I forsee it remaining in a mostly ass-like aesthetic state. So, you've been warned.
Anyway, have fun. And stay tuned to the new page for actual posts. I did like 7 yesterday just testing out the system and commenting about the most inane crap. But expect nigh-upon regular updating for the next little bit, until my recently-recovered blog enthusiasm wanes again... Ahh, I'm such a slacker.
OK, before I go to sleep (and it's not even 4 a.m.! Wow!), just wanted to point out a few more measures I've taken in my ongoing struggle against comment spam.
First, I renamed the CGI script that handles the comments. That is, the little program on my web server that handles comment posting. Presumably, if I change the name of that file, automated spamming tools might not figure out what's going on and pass my blog over.
Also, I've totally reset the comments portion of the database that stores all of Sector 42's data. Granted, there were a few legit comments, but out of the 2000+ comments posted here, probably only 100 of those were legit. And none of them were very deep. :)
So, that's all I'm doing as far as computer type activity for the next couple of days. Because... it's Christmas!! Woo!
Yeah, it appears my little anti-spam security hack didn't work. Several new spam messages have popped up on some of the more recent posts. As annoying as they are, I find them rather humorous. E.g.:
Great men can't be ruled. by free online poker
Or even more philosophical:
The blind willingness to sacrifice people to truth, however, has always been the danger of an ethics abstracted from life. by online poker
I'm personally waiting for:
Morality is thus the relation of actions to the autonomy of the will, that is, to a possible giving of universal law through its maxims. An action that can coexist with the autonomy of the will is permitted; one that does not accord with it is forbidden. A will whose maxims necessarily harmonize with the laws of autonomy is a holy, absolutely good will. The dependence upon the principle of autonomy of a will that is not absolutely good (moral necessitation) is obligation. This, accordingly, cannot be attributed to a holy being. The objective of an action from obligation is called duty. by online poker
Ahh, Kant. Er, yeah. I'm going to have to figure something out. I really dig comments on my posts, but this spam shit is killing me.
For the past few weeks, I've had comments completely disabled on this site because I was a little peeved about comment spam. I'm not talking idiotic jerks who flood comment sections just for the fuck of it. They usually take care of themselves with a quick IP ban. No, I'm talking the blog-comments-section equivalent of e-mail spammers. Morons who post advertisements for penis enlargement, online casinos, and teen-sex webcams.
As much as I love teen sex (ahem), spam is annoying and evil. I came up with a solution the other day, but I'm not entirely sure it's going to work. A lot of big online sites stop automated account signups and whatnot by requiring users to type in a word or passcode randomly generated and displayed as an image. This makes things harder for bots. I've tried something similar, but less sophisticated.
Basically, to post a comment, you type in your user info as normal. But before you go to type in the text of the comment, you write the word that appears in the little image. If you type it correctly, the Post button will be enabled and you can go to town.
I'm not sure this will work. If the bots just send data directly to the comment-posting script, then I'll have to do a little bit more hacking to get the comment-posting script to check that the security word is correct. But we'll see if that's necessary in the coming days.
An apology to my dear readers. I haven't posted in days. School's been rather busy (Summer Session is almost over!!), but I assure you, at some point today I'll post a cadre of neat-o links for your web perusal. Also, here in a few seconds, I'm going to post about something I just watched on Fox News.
In an effort to bring a little more 8-bit NES influence into the blog, I'm introducing a new set of "avatars" for my blog. This is a somewhat cheesy idea, but for some reason, I think it's very cool.
A bit of thanks: Paul/Grapefruit, Haggin's resident "unusual" guy last year, is into editing sprites from video games. Which is a weird hobby, but definitely cool in an old-skool sort of way. So he edited some Dr. Light sprites from NES Mega Man games. So now I have 8-bit Zach sprites! Woo! A glowing review on my blog and a bit o' free webspace to my man for such a kickass item!
I made a few edits to fit my specific avatar needs, but this is essentially the work of the esteemed Paul/Grapefruit. So, without further ado, I present the entire emotional spectrum of 8-bit Zach avatars:
Heh heh. Oh yeah.
Just noticed a rather sneaky little bug. The archive pages for March entries only list March (not April) as an available full-month archive page. Odd. My guess is that I just need to rebuild all the individual pages. But doing that on a monthly basis is kind of annoying. Perhaps I should replace myself with a small shell script to get that done...
Update: Rebuilding seemed to work. Good.
Posting that last thing from a WinXP box, I noticed that my page doesn't show up quite right in IE. Gaah. The title of each post is supposed to permalink to the actual entry's individual archive page, but the link is not supposed to change color on rollover. And on archive pages, the main header is is supposed to link back to the main page, but it is supposed to be white, as normal, and it shouldn't change color on rollover either. I'll have to fix that, eventually...
One last thing before I go to bed.
Curious, I just searched google for my name. Now, back in the day, during the height of the first iteration of this very blog, I was listed number one, the very pinnacle of "zach may"-search-relatedness. Now, I'm not even on the second page.
That's awful.
So, if you are reading this (and at this point, admittedly that's probably no one), and you have a blog or other website type thing, please please link me.
I must reclaim my throne.
There can be only one.
I'm awfully melodramatic for 5:41 a.m. :)
Ok, I've made some major progress getting this thing up and running. All the archive pages should be working now. I think I still need to iron out some bugs as far as the informational panels on the right side of this page and the individual archive pages, but for now it's not very important.
Anyway, it's about 5:30, I think I should get some sleep. School starts back Monday. Man, spring break was way to short.
Okay, as you can see, I've found the old template files for the blog. I still had some of the database information laying around in my CoE home directory. Had to wade through binary files in vi to find the chunk that actually represented the template. There may be some bugs hanging around though.
Also of note, archives are now working. I'm planning on fixing up the right-hand information panels. Moveable Type now offers archiving by category, so I'm going to play around with that. That way, you can read, say, just my elitist music rantings, or just my complaints about how terrible school is, etc., etc., ad infinitum.
Anyway, I'm pleased with the progress I've made so far. And quite happy about the new domain name and all. :)
Well, after the College of Engineering's computer people decided to put lame 10MB quotas on all the student accounts, Sector 42, the original Zach/Blog, was forced to shut down, since I had at least 30MB of content created by that point.
So, after a brief stint at LiveJournal, which is way too utterly emo/teeny-bopper for my tastes, I dropped some cash for a suitable domain name and hosting. So Sector 42 is reborn. I have a bit of debugging to do, and I have to hunt down the old template files I was using and recreate them here. But for all intents and purposes, the Second Age of Zach Blogging has begun. Wee.