Messages

Modern Tales is now making hi-res versions of comics available in Comic Book Reader format, and one of the first batch of releases is one of my short Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan stories, Headsmen.
You can find it at my downloadables page, which also links to pages where you can get Comic Book Reader software - I was responsible for the Qcomicbook recommendation for Linux/KDE, because I'd already been using it for a little while and liked it.
There are several other downloadable comics on the site. I still find it ironic that Modern Tales is doing this - their original business model was based on subscriptions to webcomics, and now they're giving huge downloadables away for free. But I'm not complaining. I'm really happy with how Headsmen turned out.

So give Headsmen, or any other of the available collections, a try. There's some really good stuff there. Download it now, read it at leisure. Just like reading a real book except without the dust and the stink and the curry stains.

Although I don't publish the web stats from my CMS, it's been getting rather badly hit by referrer spammers, to the point where the statistics are no longer reliable. I want these, these, these...  creatures out of my statistics. I've been looking around and found one good article suggesting some ways to deal with this scourge. I could implement the apache directives-based one (I think - those can go into .htaccess, right?) but I thought I might as well ask around.

What else can be done to eliminate this problem, how much is already being done without me knowing it (obviously, these referrer spams I'm getting could be the tip of an iceberg of referrer spam that's already being filtered out server-wide), and what would people recommend? Do other Xepherites even have this problem at all?

I like (well, not like but appreciate) what DeviantARt does, which is put up a big notice at the top of each page saying "this server is in read-only mode for maintenance".
Anyway, I can cope with any approach as long as I get a heads-up so I can communicate to my readers and point them to a mirror for the duration.

Arright. I got the first attempted comment spams in, and they've all gone to the Junk folder, so no rebuilds were done. Good.
I'm also getting search box spam, and lots of it. These have never bothered me much except that I found the idea of people spamming search boxes puzzling. It's probably just a case of the bots spamming anything that has a form field, compounded by the fact that some bright sparks have in the past thought it would be a nifty idea to publish their search terms on their blogs.

If any of these cause noticeable performance hits, let me know and I'll look for ways to deal with it.

Hey, no problem... I'd actually worked around it by renaming the file, so comments were working by the time you read my message.

(My advice: Turn the redirect back on. As an anti-spam measure, it's still somewhat effective, even if it only weeds out the very lazy/clueless abusers. As long as people who want to enable comments on MT know that this redirect is in place. Then again, I don't know how many other Xepher users still use Movable Type at all.)

Xepher, did you do something clever to the server so that files named mt-comments.cgi would always redirect to the Xepher.net front page?

And I was, and I joined Xepher in chat because....
... the upgrade went very smoothly, right unto the point where I wanted to rebuild the output files and post something. That led only to 500 errors and general misery. Xepher and I spent 2 hours scrambling madly to fix this problem.
Movable Type's resource consumption is insane. The sort of CPU and memory use you'd expect from a professional image processing program, not a Perl app that reads and writes to a database and outputs text.  It would hit the limits Xepher imposed on processes running on his server, and hit them fast and hard. Fastcgi was not the answer here, for two reasons: 1) though it keeps the number of MT processes limited to one, that one process would have been enough to hit the limits; and 2) it didn't work.

What did work? Switching from Berkely DB to SQLite reduced overhead a lot, and I think changing the Category templates so the output files didn't come out so big also helped. These needed to be changed anyway, because my category archives are too big to be useful.The resource consumption is still huge, but it doesn't cause the processes to die.

Right now, I have a fresh install of Movable Type that works about as well as the last one, but I still don't have comments working. They are activated, but the comment forms send users to the Xepher.net front page and comments don't show up on the site. I'll try to fix that, probably by switching most of the site back to Movable Type's default templates. Updating Movable Type doesn't reset the templates anymore, but this time, I actually rather wanted that - to start the design from scratch.

I hope this information helps people upgrading MT in the future. I took up a lot of Xepher's time with this upgrade, so I might as well make it beneficial to others. If you were just starting with installing blog software, I'd advise you not to start out with Movable Type, which has longstanding problems that the company making it doesn't seem to be able to fix.  

Like I said above, though, I'm used to it, and I want to be able to support the seven other people who post on the blog as authors. So I'm sticking with it for another few years.

By the way, I think to enable fastcgi, you need to make an association in .htaccess. I don't seem to have any local .htaccess files yet. Should I make one, or would you prefer to alter the global .htaccess to include

Code Select Expand

fcgi': AddHandler fastcgi-script fcgiFor now, I'm proceeding without, because renaming my files and changing my file extentions accordingly is likely to be an easy task, but a tedious one.

I think I'll have a shot at it tonight. I'll re-read the installation instructions and back everything up so I can restore the whole thing fully if it goes wrong. Any crisis that doesn't involve the whole server going down, I should be able to deal with.

All right! I'm sort of torn between doing it as soon as possible, preferably before the new ROCR storyline debuts on the 18th, so the new bloggers get a lively publishing environment in which people can comment, and waiting until I'm absolutely clearheaded so I can go through the procedure correctly, and also remember to do things like back up my blog content and my templates. It'll probably be soon. At which times are you available in case of a panic?

In SuSE 10.0, all my devices work as plug and play except my new optical mouse, which acts strangely. I ought to spend some time figuring that one out as it is a bit of a nuisance. The scanner worked without additional configuration. As for drives, all my external drives automount when I plug them in. Well, I have to hit a confirmation dialogue, but that's fine by me. Since the latest reinstall, automounting drives actually works better than it does on my studio's Windows machine, which sometimes fails to recognise the portable drive. Since my last upgrade, CDs also eject when I hit the eject button on the front, unless something's using them (and in some cases, as when I'm ripping a CD, even when something is using them).

I'm quite happy with Xine as a media player, though it's a bit crash-prone when playing DVDs. However, as documented in another thread, media playback in an SuSE installation out of the box is badly crippled, and I had to recompile and reinstall a lot of software to get it to work properly, including playing DVDs at all. This was a big waste of time and is a major weakness in SuSE.

I've decided I don't like MPlayer as a media player. However, it's been very useful to me as a DVD ripping tool, thanks to Xepher's help. Xine's my thing, though to a large extent that's a result of SuSE's builtin Xine/Kaffeine bias.

I've been looking into upgrading my Movable Type installation. If you were around two years ago, you'll know why this idea fills me with dread: the new installation didn't stay up long enough under the onslaught of comment spam for me to have time to figure out what I'd been doing wrong that made the spam filters not work. It brought the entire Xepher.net server down with it.

Still, we're two years further now; a lot of work has been done at Movable Type to improve spam filter performance and integrate the anti-spam material with the core of the software, so it should now come with good spam prevention out of the box. Also, it now works with FastCGI, which should reduce the overhead - and it was the overhead during the spam attack that made the server crash, not the spam itself.

What I'd get out of an upgrade would be:
1) A more generous license. Actually, I have that now, because I downloaded a new version of MT to my home machine and accepted the new license. Since then, I've been adding new users to the blog.
2) Comments. I do believe that not having comments enabled is bad for a weblog, and it's especially bad now that I want to get into some more serious, substantial debate about a number of issues, from the political to the artistic and back, again. Comments can only work with functional anti-spam measures
3) Hopefully, faster performance.
4) A number of nifty features that may or may not turn out to be useful. I'd like to be able to tag blog posts for easier findability of the many, many old posts, for example.

There are other blog platforms I can use, including the CMS used for the comics, but I want to stick with Movable Type because I know it well enough to help other users of the blog, and because when I don't know the answer, there's a community of people who do. This is very different from my comics CMS where if I don't know what to do, only one other person does.

So my big question is, do we have FastCGI enabled so I can get those alleged performance benefits? And the bigger question is, do you reckon it's safe to carry out the upgrade:)

Well I haven't been able to make lsdvd work. I have had some success dealing with a little problem that was causing the ripping process to output white noise on some DVDs (but strangely, never on all tracks of a DVD. I think DVD authors are a bit sloppy...).
The problem was that MPlayer sometimes picked the DTS audio channel to rip, depending, I presume, on what the DVD defaults to. The 4500-line MPlayer help wasn't exactly useful in explaining to me how to make it pick another channel (I'm sure that the information is there, but not in a form that I could find or parse correctly). This tips and tricks file told me the correct option to pick ( -aid [number]), and by trial and error I found that the number that should go in there is in MPlayer's output.

audio stream: 0 format: ac3 (5.1) language: en aid: 128.
audio stream: 1 format: ac3 (stereo) language: en aid: 129.
audio stream: 2 format: dts (5.1/6.1) language: en aid: 138.

The last number in the line is what you need; in this case, 129.

So that goes into the revised script as a variable as well. To do it properly, I would have the script take input from the user, and use the default if the user didn't specify a channel. But I'm too lazy to do that...

Another little problem is that something, presumably a hardware driver or some intermediate layer, crashes if MPlayer is invoked too often. Seems like only a session restart will solve it, which is a drag. I expect that that's just some quirk of my configuration though, so no worries about trying to solve that! I don't have to have everything today, after all.

Forget about Hitler for the time being, unless you want to do something with the Beer Hall Putch. Focus on Hyperinflation and the rise of the Weimar Republic for the time being. Lovely little period that, though the decadent fun doesn't really start until well into the second half of the decade (As a point of reference, Der Blaue Engel was released in 1930).

I have, yeah. Can't quite recall what it output at the time, though. I was focusing more on the dvd2ogg script.
Your original version didn't quite do the trick - it still output a single large file. No worries, this was an opportunity for me to study bash scripting a bit. I ripped out your [until] construct and replaced it with a [for] loop, with its loop-ending number hardcoded into the script for now, so I have to edit the script for each new DVD. I'll polish it up eventually. The incrementig variable provides the chapter number and the title string for the oggs. Right now, it's not clever, but as long as I know which title the songs are on, I can work with it.

The problem, though, is that knowing where to find the songs so far involves quite a bit of guesswork. Playing the concert helps, but is time-consuming, and shouldn't be necessary in any case. But one DVD I've looked at had 36 titles with up to 9 chapters each. So I do want to run lsdvd. But I can install libdvdread until I'm blue in the face, it still returns

checking for dvdread/ifo_read.h... no
configure2: error: Header files for dvdread not found

I know where that header file is. I have a vague idea that I can either offer a command line option to tell ./configure where it is, or tweak ./configure itself to tell it where to find it. But the configure script for lsdvd is a huge unwieldy beast, and the help is a bit terse. Using ---includedir= doesn't seem to help. Am I even on the right track with this?