A Post? What?!

Well, it’s been far too long since I’ve posted here. I just changed the theme here, and enabled some snow, for the fun of it.

Things have been kind of slow for me in life, but I’m doing well. I’ve had friends over the past few days which has been quite fun. This Christmas I’m getting an Arduino Mega 2560, and I might publish the fun things I end up doing with that here.

I hope everyone has a great winter break, and hopefully you’ll get to see some snow (in person)!

Well Here We Are Again

Lots has happened for OKS since I last wrote. The things that have happened have been good and bad, but where we are at now is a place I am content with.

Comcast began blocking port 25 TCP, and that was very greedy of them. They want my family to, during this economic downturn, pay more for that, and that just ain’t happening.  However, those nice people at Google gave me a good deal, and now I am using Google Apps for mail at no charge. Aren’t they nice?

On brighter news, the OKS Minecraft server has become a beautiful place. It isn’t exactly stock, but people like it. The latest and coolest addition is the Dynamic Map. The Dynamic Map lets you see what is on the server right now. As the world updates, the Dynamic Map does as well. Hence the name, Dynamic. Right now, an Amazon EC2 instance is hard at work preparing a new static map render, and when it completes, the link will be shown here on this page.

UPDATE: The render that was taking place is long since done, and it is available at http://ec2.theoks.tk/mczoomable_new/.

Thanks, and have fun!

A post? They have those on blogs?

I load the front page of my blog nearly every day. I just can’t seem to create a post that has enough value that it’s worth posting at all. However, now I will.

That aside, I have been looking at CloudFlare, and I’ve implemented it in some areas. WordPress is locked to a domain, so this blog isn’t behind CloudFlare. Most sections of theoks.net can be viewed behind CloudFlare by replacing theoks.net with theoks.tk.

What CloudFlare does for you is that it caches static resources like CSS, Javascript, and images, closer to you, resulting in faster load of images and styles. Especially on the image board, and the zoomable Minecraft map render this can be advantageous.

I have also added Google’s +1 button to post pages, as well as the home page, and moved the Tweet button with it to below the post content.

In related news I got into Google+, which is pretty exciting. You may ask me for an invite, but I cannot guarantee that you will be allowed to join.

Security warnings

It seems that every time I go on this blog, there’s some kind of security warning. “This website’s certificate is not trusted.” Yet, Darren insists that he knows the president of CaCert and that it’s CaCert’s fault for making crappy certificates.

Oh well, I hope this website isn’t phishing for my personal information.

And hopefully this security dilemma is solved before anything bad happens.

Thank you Akismet, redoux.

Hey everyone, this is Deathgleaner speaking. Kudos to the people behind AKISMET for creating the world’s best spam-fighting tool. I use it on my blog and it does a great job of catching spam comments from advertisers and low-lifes, and it still lets good comments through. My blog would probably be a hate box if not for Akismet.

Akismet has netted about 150 spam comments. It’s scary that spam comments out-rival normal ones.

Thanks again,
Deathgleaner

Spam, spam, spam

Spam is always a problem. It’s a problem for everyone. Blocking it is also a problem. You can lots of the time have false positives. Which gets annoying. Also when your anti-spam doesn’t block enough. Or when it gets in your way. Maybe it doesn’t even work with your specific software.

I have spam problems too. SpamAssassin is the most well known open source mail-based anti-spam solution. The developers behind SpamAssassin need your help. They need you to submit “ham” and “spam” mail in order to teach SpamAssassin to recognize new spammer techniques.

Check the project out at this wiki page.