But spammers are at least trying to do something constructive for themselves. Sure, the damage they do to others far outweighs any possible economic benefit to themselves, but that's another matter. (That's why we have laws.)

There are worse people. Like the cretin in the Netherlands who just downloaded 20,000 copies of a 2.5MB file from a dormant blog here at mu.nu. That's why I enforce bandwidth quotas, by the way. I don't mind at all if someone like Ace or Rusty is using 200, 300, 400GB a month if that's going to real readers.

But when some idiot chews through 50GB in three hours - and the best explanation I can think of is referrer spam, the least effective marketing tool ever invented - I want CPanel to lock down that account.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:59 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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And that's once I managed to actually get it to run (I almost said "work", but I have no sign of that); for hours it was complaining that something else had locked yum and wouldn't run at all.

I tried running it using X over SSH - locally - and sshd was chewing up 40% of my CPU.

I swear that Fedora Core 4 didn't suck this bad.

Update: OKay, I'll give it some credit. If you wait the fifteen minutes or so it takes to start up, and put up with its wallowing GUI, it will actually let you browse packages and install them.

Just.

Very.

Slowly.

Update: God, this thing is just excruciating. It's using 177MB of memory now - resident. I tried the category view. Clicked on Applications, and then on Educational Software. Nothing happened for a couple of minutes (but the CPU was very busy). Then, nothing continued to happen, although now the application responded to mouse clicks.

Then I found out that in the category view, it divides packages into Mandatory, Default, and Optional. It defaults to Mandatory, and since there are no mandatory educational applications, it didn't show anything.

There's no indication that it's busy - other than the fact that it locks up.

There's no All tab.

I clicked on the Engineering and Scientific category a few minutes ago, and it's still frozen. Okay, so that bloody beagle-build-index thing is still running (620 minutes of CPU time now). Okay, so I'm running under VMWare with only 400MB of memory allocated. I expect it to be a little slow; that's part of the reason I set it up this way. I want performance problems in my code to be obvious so that I can catch them early.

I wish someone had taken the same approach for yumex, because it is pure, distilled suck.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:31 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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It's not the only thing that runs for ages after a fresh install, either.

Feh.

If I wanted Gentoo, I'd have downloaded Gentoo.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:15 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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There have to be a dozen superior open-source package managers already in existence, so what's the excuse?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:08 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Mostly it looks like a drive failure, but not always. The neatest one was when the drive was working but the keyboard locked up.

So I can either move to Antarctica, or start looking for a new notebook.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:32 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Justice Geoffrey Nettle said: "Surely that can't justify restraining them from saying something that said by anyone else would be legal? In the case of the newsletter, for example, Pastor Nalliah says many churches have closed down. What's wrong with saying that?"

Ms Mortimer replied: "The tribunal has found there is something wrong with saying it. Truth is not a defence, it's irrelevant to contravention of the act."

Fortunately, it appears that in this case what is fucked up is the legislation, and that the Court of Appeal has retained at least a modicum of sense. Even if plaintiff's counsel has not.

Justice Ashley said so many of the statements were entirely innocuous and asked how the pastors could legitimately be restrained from making them. Ms Mortimer replied: "Because the tribunal found that when they made them they made them in a way that contravened the act." She said the comments had to be seen in the overall context.

Solicitor-General Pamela Tate said the case did not come under the implied constitutional right to free speech because that right applied only to political and governmental matters.

* I'm allowed to say this because it is a political and governmental matter, because I don't live in the state of Victoria, and because I don't give a shit anyway.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:36 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Now blackseo.com turns conventional wisdom on its head.

Wonder if the FBI would be interested in these shitheads?

(I haven't visited that site and wouldn't advise it, but their spam conveniently lists all of their "services".)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:21 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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But I will say, if you're going to attack anyone over what they've written, it might be a good idea to read what they've written. You know? Basic courtesy. Also helps if you don't want to look like an idiot.

Also, threats? Comments or email. Not cool.

* Even the morons are smart morons.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:01 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Bastards.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:11 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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We've been getting flooded with trackback spam, 2500 per minute at peak periods. This seems to have been causing Apache to go nuts. Or seemed to be the cause, at least. I zapped all the trackback scripts last night after rebooting the server after the latest Apache episode, and went to bed.

And then Apache locked up again.

Long story short: We're moving to new servers. That will give me a chance to rebuild everything properly, which is rather hard on a busy production server that is the constant target of DDOS attacks, hacking attempts, spam floods, and every other noxious event known to the 'net.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:54 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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