Once in a while, the good guys win. I got pinged this morning (and the pings are still way, way down from what they were before I renamed scripts):

A new TrackBack ping has been sent to your weblog, on the entry 6459 (The
Big Lie Continues).

IP Address: 209.123.8.127
Title: airlines
Weblog: british

Excerpt:
british

It takes you to a page that just links to airlines.

I forwarded the notification email to the web host at prohosting.com with a hope that this was in violation of their terms of service. I just got the following email from them:

This account has been removed from our servers for violating our Acceptable Use Policy. Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention.

I’m sure that the cretin will quickly find another host, but at least any time spent spamming us with that URL is now wasted.

Since renaming my scripts, I have gotten zero, count ’em, zero spams on either comments or trackback. It won’t last forever, but it’s a nice breather. And I hope that they’re wasting a lot of time on the honeypots.

[Update on Saturday morning]

OK, got one ping spam overnight. But it’s still a huge improvement.

[Late afternoon update]

Still one and counting. I should have done this a long time ago. Even if I have to do it weekly, it would be a vast improvement over the time I spend dealing with these cretins now.

[Sunday morning update]

Oh, well. I knew it was too good to last. I got nine pr0n spams overnight. All from one domain, though. It’s still a lot better than it was. Hopefully, I can at least keep it down to a dull roar.

I’ll be getting back in late tonight. Home for four days, then back here, and off to Vegas for the conference.

See you later.

I know comments are fubar. I’m working on it and should have it fixed in a few minutes. Don’t take the message personally, unless you really are a scum-of-the-earth spammer. You know, if the shoe fits, yada yada yada…

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, seems to be fixed now. Let the calumny and trolling recommence! (errr…just kidding)

I know comments are fubar. I’m working on it and should have it fixed in a few minutes. Don’t take the message personally, unless you really are a scum-of-the-earth spammer. You know, if the shoe fits, yada yada yada…

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, seems to be fixed now. Let the calumny and trolling recommence! (errr…just kidding)

I know comments are fubar. I’m working on it and should have it fixed in a few minutes. Don’t take the message personally, unless you really are a scum-of-the-earth spammer. You know, if the shoe fits, yada yada yada…

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, seems to be fixed now. Let the calumny and trolling recommence! (errr…just kidding)

I woke up yesterday morning to over three hundred trackback spams. These are a real pain in the ass, because when they come in a flood like that from a single spammer (in this case it was pr0n), it’s hard to search through them to find the random ones from others, which needs to be done to clean them all out.

Joe Katzman has been having similar problems, on a much larger scale. I’ve been thinking about shutting down trackback as well, but before I do, I think I’ll try this idea, via Annoying Old Guy in Joe’s comments section.

It looks interesting, and if everyone did it, it would make life much more difficult for these supreme scum of the earth. As I type these words I just got two series of half a dozen or so from mortgage lenders. Who knows how many they would have hit me with if I hadn’t been at the computer and could cut them off at the pass? I just wish I could cut them off at the nuts.

So I installed a new Fedora Core 5 on my laptop, and was trying to build the drivers for the wireless. Step one was to do an upgrade of the OS.

In the midst of doing this, I was attempting to listen to a podcast from Firefox. I don’t know whether this happened as a result of the upgrade, or of the podcast, but at some point, Firefox crashed, taking down all running instances of it. And it wouldn’t reload. When I click on the icon, I get a little tab in the taskbar saying “Starting web browser” which hangs on for a few seconds, then disappears.

I completed the upgrade, and rebooted. But Firefox still won’t load. I removed it with yum, and then reinstalled it. Firefox still won’t load.

Does anyone know what’s going on, and how to fix?

[Update on Wednesday morning]

OK, I removed Firefox, removed the folder containing its settings and reinstalled. All is well now. Except I had to resurrect my settings from scratch.

I got into LA late morning, but I’ve been busy all day. Maybe I’ll check in later, if the wireless works in the room.

I’ve been running cables and speaker wire for the move of the television from the living room to the new family room created by opening up the kitchen walls. And packing. I’m back to CA in the morning, for the week. Wall patching will have to happen next weekend.

Oh, and I’ve added a couple new sites to the space blogroll, Michael Belfiore and Jeff Foust’s Personal Spaceflight blog.