CAN I BE OF ASSISTANCE?
Shut it!

Sunday, July 26

Anime

Brigadoon, Or, Marin And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Our heroine doesn't exactly have an easy time of it in this one.*  Though she does get a sweet set of wheels at one point.

Marin's voiced by Kaori, and I could swear that I've heard that ahaaa before, but not in any of the shows listed there.

Also, Lolo is a heckuvalot like Guu.

Highly recommended.

Warning: May** contain traces*** of comedy, tragedy, drama, giant robots, parallel dimensions, Tokyo Tower, giant lolis, mecha-turtles, crazed inventors, psychopathic killers, Richard Nixon, magical girl transformation sequences, Apollo 11, graphic violence, Shinto shrines, the end of the world as we know it, the Osaka World Expo, cat-rabbit-elves, warped daydreams, and full-frontal nudity.

*
** May?  Okay, okay, does.
*** Large traces.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:27 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 131 words, total size 2 kb.

Saturday, July 25

Art

What Happened To The Duchess In Browning's "My Last Duchess"?

She died of moider.

Robert Browning was one of the few writers I studied in high school English that I both respected and enjoyed.  Shakespeare too, though his plays are far better seen than read.  (The performance of King Lear we went to see got a standing ovation from a crowd of teenagers.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:44 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 63 words, total size 1 kb.

Friday, July 24

Life

Sigh Of Relief

For the first time in two weeks I'm not insane.

Trying desperately to fix the failed RAID array (ugh) then finalise the server migration before they turned the old servers off (just made it), shore up the defences of Munuvia against a rising sea of spam (new filter in place), and clean house and tear out some fairly impressive weeds before a maintenance inspection (almost made it, then at the last minute my vacuum cleaner died, leaving my floors looking less than spotless sad ).

Of course, I also accidentally corrupted some of the tables on the replica database at my day job yesterday, leading to a 3:30AM support call today and some hasty creative thinking on how to repair 100GB of scrambled data.  But I even solved that one, mostly.

This weekend, to celebrate, I plan to sleep for 36 hours.

Update: Yeah, right.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:57 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 147 words, total size 1 kb.

Thursday, July 23

Geek

There Is Such A Thing As Trying Too Hard

Dinged on possible crapbot match for 3.0
Dinged on viagra for 6.0
Dinged on  cialis for 3.0
Dinged on tramadol for 16.0
Dinged on phentermine for 168.0
Dinged on href= for 10.0
Dinged on http:// for 25.0
Dinged on .pl for 1.5
Dinged on /member for 28.5
Dinged on showuser for 15.0
Dinged on vegweb.com for 60.0
Dinged on skepticality.com for 7.5
Dinged on adipex for 47.5
Dinged on livinginperu for 100.0
Dinged on cel.agh.edu.pl for 25.0
Dinged on chatarea.com for 75.0
Dinged on imvu.com for 10.0
Dinged on knittingdaily.com for 31.5
Dinged on esb.ucp.pt for 4.5
Banned 66.189.125.209!
Score 637.0
And just minutes later, it gets topped by this one:
Dinged on viagra for 9.0
Dinged on  cialis for 18.0
Dinged on tramadol for 28.0
Dinged on phentermine for 132.0
Dinged on href= for 10.0
Dinged on http:// for 25.0
Dinged on .pl for 1.5
Dinged on /member for 15.0
Dinged on showuser for 10.5
Dinged on vegweb.com for 112.5
Dinged on skepticality.com for 2.5
Dinged on adipex for 27.5
Dinged on livinginperu for 125.0
Dinged on cel.agh.edu.pl for 25.0
Dinged on chatarea.com for 125.0
Dinged on imvu.com for 5.0
Dinged on  cialis  for 5.0
Dinged on knittingdaily.com for 13.5
Dinged on esb.ucp.pt for 18.0
Dinged on citynet.net for 25.0
Banned 67.60.248.137!
Score 733.0
Why is Skepticality (a popular skeptic's podcast) in my blacklist?  Because they've got spammers infesting their forum, unfortunately.  It's only worth 2.5 dings though, so just mentioning them (particularly if you're a registered user) won't affect your comment.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:13 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 259 words, total size 2 kb.

Tuesday, July 21

Geek

Smooth Sailing



top - 05:37:40 up 3 days, 21:27,  5 users,  load average: 1.20, 1.56, 2.06
Tasks: 784 total,   1 running, 782 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
Cpu(s):  8.4%us,  1.4%sy,  0.0%ni, 89.9%id,  0.1%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.1%si
Mem:  24625940k total, 22981992k used,  1643948k free,  1357892k buffers
Swap:  4192924k total,      416k used,  4192508k free, 16804204k cached

Peace and quiet and dual quad cores.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:38 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 60 words, total size 1 kb.

Geek

DNS Fleemishness Resoluted

Been having some odd DNS issues since migrating off the old DNS servers recently.  It's mostly worked, but detailed checks showed nameserver loops, lame resolvers, non-authoritative servers that should have been authoritative, and so on and on.

I run all my DNS servers on CPanel, which handles this for you rather nicely, so I couldn't work out why it had gotten itself into such a pickle.

Um.  Could it be because I set up the authoritative nameservers but didn't copy all the actual domain databases to them?

I'm amazed it worked at all.  Fortunately, CPanel has a nice DNS synchroniser, so the problem is now... resolved.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:03 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 109 words, total size 1 kb.

Geek

Die, Spammers, Die!

Dinged on href= for 10.2
Dinged on url= for 0.2
Dinged on http:// for 28.0
Dinged on .ru for 305
Dinged on .biz for 4
Banned 92.46.242.15!
Score 347.4
Yeah, take that, you post-Communist recidivist swinepigs!

The new munu spam filter is live.
Dinged on viagra for 15
Dinged on href= for 4.0
Dinged on http:// for 10.0
Dinged on /member for 20.0
Banned 200.141.184.141!
Score 49.0
One of the things it does is when it sees a sufficiently spammy spam, it just bans the IP address permanently.  So in the future we just need a single IP lookup and bye bye spammer.

If you manage to get your home PC infested by a botnet virus, then you get banned too.  It's tough love.
Dinged on viagra for 2
Dinged on  cialis for 3
Dinged on http:// for 3.0
Dinged on dysfunction for 1
Dinged on erectile for 1
Dinged on levitra for 15
Dinged on /member for 12.5
Banned 201.15.232.96!
Score 37.5
Yeesh.
Dinged on viagra for 4
Dinged on  cialis for 12
Dinged on tramadol for 39
Dinged on xanax for 12
Dinged on phentermine for 90
Dinged on href= for 10.0
Dinged on http:// for 25.0
Dinged on /member for 27.5
Banned 24.0.74.64!
Score 219.5
Pick a product and stick to it!

Ah, this will make some of my bloggers happy:
Dinged on possible crapbot match for 3.0
Dinged on probable crapbot match for 3.0
Dinged on mixed markup for 3.5
Dinged on href= for 0.2
Dinged on url= for 0.2
Dinged on link= for 0.2
Dinged on http:// for 2.0
Score 12.1

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:07 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 261 words, total size 2 kb.

Monday, July 20

Geek

Subverted By Technology

I was just setting up a new database table at the day job when I realised something: If Key the Metal Idol were set in 2009, it would last about fifteen minutes:  Key sets up Facebook & Twitter accounts.  Key gets 30,000 friends.  (Most of them spammers.)  The end.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:33 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 52 words, total size 1 kb.

Geek

New Spam Filter Ahoy

Not an unsuccessful weekend, even if my back garden looks like a bomb hit it...  Which I suppose is pretty much what happened.

I have a new spam filter ready to go for the Movable Type users, a trial version of hooking MT into Minx's own filters.  That will go live in the morning, and should quickly cut back on spam without me having to mess about with horrible ancient Perl code.  If it works well, I can even expose it as a web service for other blogging apps.  It is written as a web service, just an internal one for now.

And now, a quick level of Fate, then Manabi Straight* and bed.

* Action and fighting and things blowing up!  Albeit mostly inside Manabi's head...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:38 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 131 words, total size 1 kb.

Sunday, July 19

Cool

Congratulations, Rebecca & Sid

The latest episode of The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe:
This week's topics are:
Live Recording from TAM 7
News Items: Microbot Plummers, Archeological Dig, Sunspots Return, Blogs vs Journalists, Genie Sued
Science or Fiction
Live Questions
Rebecca's Wedding
Yep, live.

(Rebecca's site, skepchick.org, used to be hosted here at munu.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:23 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 53 words, total size 1 kb.

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