Category Archives: Discourse.net

Probably too busy to post today, except to note for the record that FBI Outdoes Itself With “SafeSneaker” Plan was of course a feeble April Fools item.

Some time between an hour ago and 23 hours from now, the blog will be moving (again) to a less congested server (cheerfully called “harpo”) within the megacluster operated by dreamhost.com. That means the blog should (at least for a while) be behaving better. Please comment here if you notice anything weirder than usual.

And if comments are not working, please e-mail me.

Update: In light of the first comment, I'd better explain: this is the result I got when I ran discourse.net through dnscoop.com. For some reason it thinks that discourse.net is actually the apparently valuable (why?) seorefugee.com.

Saturday night, February 25th, at about 11:15PM PST (i.e. Sunday morning here on the East coast), this blog and everything else hosted at Dreamhost will go dark as Dreamhost is shutting down everything in its building.

With luck, it should be back up again by 4AM PST (7am Sunday over here). It seems that someone discovered of some super-dangerous wiring flaw in the building that hosts the servers and they need to fix it.

Apologies for any troubles you have viewing the site and especially commenting today. In addition to a ton of spam, it seems that one of the other sites on the shared server I happen to be on — a site with the enticing name of “moneychump” — has got 1062 diggs and counting for a posting entitled 52 money hacks – one for each week!. (Please don't click on it.) The flood of hits has driven server load up to a peak of over 105, and even with throttling of that site is hovering in the teens. My experience is that this blog is ok so long as the total server load is under five or so.

There are days when I think it would be nice to have my own managed server hosted somewhere. Then I look at the price tag…

For the past couple of days this blog has been under increasingly severe attack by sp**mers. Some are for notorious prescription drugs. Other are to garbage name sites (presumably in the hopes of creating a high search rank for later sale?) Still others are to hacked locations on message boards at institutions whose pages have been hacked.

I have wasted a lot of time deleting this stuff, and now am being driven to closing comments in the items that they most frequently target. I hope I can keep comments open — especially as one or two threads are quite active and interesting right now.

But there's a limit to how much whack-a-mole I can play here.