Month: January 2006

Mulholland Drive

Mulholland Drive is a great film. If you haven’t watched it yet, just watch it.

Those lucky enough to be astounded and puzzled by the film have all came up with their own interpretation of the movie.

The most common interpretation is that either the first or the last part is a dream of the opposite part. I’d have to disagree with that for both parts are just too bizarre to be real. However, both parts are pseudo-opposite.

Just take the ‘119’ on the firetruck for instance that hasn’t been mirrored, but still reversed.

It keeps you thinking in any case.

PHP’s hidden treasures

I’ve complained a lot when I worked with PHP about PHP’s terribly inefficient design; I’ve complained about it, just because it was PHP. The things I missed most in PHP, it seems, were actually there all along!

Behold shared memory and yet more IPC.

One reason PHP really sucked was that you need to load small data from and to databases or files if you want to share it between page views. The whole concept of handling a request per page view is ridiculous too, IMO.

With those two libraries however, PHP pages could be way more efficient.

I wonder why the big PHP software haven’t used it. Lets hope it isn’t portability.

Beacon with eggs and …

Spam, again on this blog.

It seems those nasty spammers are now using actual people (or an automated browser) to post spam comments, subverting the protection wp-hashcash delivers.

Luckily it are only about two per day, which is very managable, but still annoying.

Like DRM and most other copyright protections, SPAM protection is inherently insecure, for the original openess required to allow a not-spammer to use them is, well, too open.

One interesting thing is that we can fight back now that they are using full javascript VM’s. Matching the spam-ip and letting it execute a rather ‘memory inefficient’ little program would certainly make me smile.

mail.w-nz.com

I’ve successfully installed vpopmail, qmail and courier today, after some hours of work on this server.
From now on you can send e-mail again to @w-nz.com adresses, which won’t end up in /dev/null. (like bas.westerbaan@~)

To the users of the server: if you want an email-address, mail me.

While testing my smtp server whether it would receive incoming email properly I was harshly confirmed by it being spam instead of my test mail entering my mailbox first:

Hello Spam!
It’s pretty funny to see spam junk in an ancient text-mode mailing program.

If anyone experiences problems with any application not mailing you any verification as it should, please email me. It could very possibly be that the qmail-send isn’t configured properly to allow unauthorized local mails.

Update: More good news, the amount of RAM on my virtual server has increased to 120MB! Which means that my server won’t be swapping instead of working all the time anymore.

Welcome to lighttpd

After a long afternoon I’ve got lighttpd to work with my current apache based layout.

This means I can choose whether to run apache or lighttpd.

Lighttpd is a webserver, like apache. The key advantage of lighttpd over apache is that lighttpd is very light on your server. It uses a lot less memory, which is very nice espacially when considering that my server only has got ~90mB of memory.

The drawback of lighttpd is that it is light and doesn’t support as much as apache does.

It doesn’t do .htaccess files. Everything needs to be configured in the lighttpd.conf, which doesn’t support everything, or at least not in the same way as apache does.

However, lighttpd is pretty easy to configure when you get the hang of it.

One particulair pain in the ass is getting old mod_rewrite using .htaccess to work, for instance the one used by wordpress of this blog.

I’ve added this in my lighttpd.conf:

$HTTP["host"] =~ "blog.w-nz.com" {
url.rewrite = ( "^/(page|archives|comments|search|feed)/" => "/index.php?error=404" )
}

One interesting thing to note is that the configuration file is nothing more than a script being executed for each request.