I've been working on learning some Qt 4 and while perusing their site, ran across PowerComics. If you download the content and run the software (no install, it runs off the link), you can quickly design your own comics. It's certainly a rough version (it crashed on me before I could touch up the first panel), but it's a lot of fun. This literally took about 3 minutes to put together.
I love laying the smack down on people that try to get away with dirty little evil things online. Today's example: someone selling our software on eBay, and hotlinking our front page flash demo and images from our site. Basically, they're using our servers and bandwidth to illegally sell copies of our software.
So I dug down a bit in Apache and implemented a few rules to fix things up. I used to just issue a 403 Forbidden HTTP error when they did this, but I just disabled that rule in favor of today's new one.
What we do is rewrite requests for any images or flash files coming from eBay to a special image/flash file that helps educate you on the evils of software piracy. Arrrr 
To test things out, I also implemented it on this site before doing it live. Here's an example of a normal image, and then a hotlinked image:
The code for those images is:
<img src="/images/HDProBox.jpg" alt="Home Designer Pro Box" /> <img src="http://www.chiefarchitect.com/HDProBox.jpg" alt="Home Designer Pro Box" />
How do you do it? With Apache, it's pretty simple. In your conf/httpd.conf, add:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/warning.jpg$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\\.)?bogomip.net/.*
RewriteRule .*\\.(jpg|gif|png)$ http://chiefarchitect.com/warning.jpg
Swap out bogomip.net and chiefarchitect.com as needed. You must have mod_rewrite active for this to work.
Today is Tera B's birthday. I sent her an email, I hope it gets through. We haven't emailed each other in quite a while. It didn't bounce, though.
Happy birthday, Tera!
I came in to the office early today, just after 7am, to make sure things go smooth. We have three training courses being taught in our conference rooms. That means lots of people we don't know coming up here to learn how to use our software. We got set up late yesterday, and I just wanted to be around in case there were any last minute issues, but there weren't.
So despite the roughness of yesterday, things seem to be going pretty well today.
It started when I got up at 5am to a server alarm, some jackhole in China decided to make 200+ simultaneous HTTP requests and chug down my monitoring daemon. So I thought I'd be nice and just ban him (all requests originated from a single IP), but then I was busy sending out several hundred 403 Forbidden messages, so I dropped down to the firewall and told it to drop all packets that had anything to do with his network. Things are running late, jobs that were finished are having to be redone because someone decided to make changes at the last minute (I have a 3pm deadline for a database that I just got an email about it changing!). So yeah, today sucks.
PS Dave finished up the HVAC work: $194 in parts and over $600 in labor. It's like having your car worked on.
I just stopped by Carnival's website to check on our cruise, it looks like they bumped us up to a balcony suite! We'll be cruising the Mediterranean in style now. (48 days to go!)
Many years ago, LucasArts released Force Commander, which came with some cool remixes of the original Star Wars music. They are still free for downloading on LucasArts' site, but you have to dig around pretty hard. I'm posting copies here to make that easier:
Imperial March Leviathan Mix
Redemption at Abridon
Imperial March Rage Mix
Apple Nazis are annoying, but nothing upsets me more than uninformed Apple Nazis.
Case in point: iPhone Skins. Apple is upset that "their look" is being used to skin other PDAs and such. If they copied the images, well then that's not okay. But if they just have the look and feel with their own imitation, there's nothing legally wrong with that. Besides, what's novel about using an envelope icon to represent email, or a gear to represent settings?
And WTF is up with the iPhone? It seems to me that Apple believes that, due to the success of their iPod, they own the letter 'i'. Sorry Apple, Cisco beat you to it. Perhaps they'll sell the name to you, though.
The part that gets me the most is right here, though (from the above article):
The issue marks a distinct change in tone for many bloggers and journalists, who just last week praised Apple for its "revolutionary" and "game-changing" phone despite being unable to conduct a proper hands-on test of the product.
Nowhere else will you see so many people making so much noise about something they know nothing about than Apple fans about new Apple products. They're lauding the revolutionary technology and they haven't even touched one? Holy freaking cow.
Well, our Bosch tankless water heater is up and running, and man is it nice. The water is as hot as we want it for as long as we want it. Dave didn't have time to finish everything today, but he'll be able to finish quickly tomorrow, just a couple of small things and the humidifier to hook up and we'll be done.
Well, Dave is supposed to be coming today to get my HVAC work done, and install our tankless waterheater. Since he was originally coming early last week, then Thursday, I have my doubts (he gets a ton of emergency calls). But I do hope he'll be out today, so I can get going on my downstairs projects.
I've recently read the first three Deathstalker books by Simon R. Green. I have to say, so far I've really enjoyed them. I currently have to turn to some other book, because the next two Deathstalker novels are not in my possession yet. The three after those two are, however, but I can't go reading them out of order.
I've read several of Green's other novels as well, and he's a decent writer (even if his proofreaders suck—I keep finding typos in his books).
They're a nice SciFi series if you need something to read, fairly lengthy but sometimes a bit repetitive. Nothing big, but from time to time I read a couple of pages that seem to say the same thing over and over.
I had an APC UPS go tango uniform on me, complaining about the battery temperature. When it happened, I checked out the unit and everything seemed fine physically. The server room was about 65F, and the entire UPS (2U rackmount system) was cold. I figure either it was a freak software thing or the sensor itself is borked. So it went into bypass mode. Now it's an expensive surge protector.
Anyway, I came in to the office today to fix it, and had to shut down about 10 network servers before I could switch off the UPS and turn it back on. It came back up just fine, no longer in bypass mode, sensors are all showing nominal values. WTF.
My dad and uncle are off to fetch the car we bought last week. They left early today for Southern California. I probably could have gone, but I'm still waiting to get my HVAC guy out to do about $800 worth of work to my downstairs before I can go on with my finishing plans.
Well, that and I had to work today.
Richard Bartle told me that David Tennant will be leaving Dr. Who soon so he doesn't get typecast. I wonder who will be The Doctor #11?
Bummer, I really like him as The Doctor, too.
I totally didn't recognize him, but the current Dr. Who (David Tennant), was also Barty Crouch Jr. in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. For some reason, this has me completely freaked out.