At work, I sometimes need Windows for legacy programs, or for not messing up the layout of protected Word documents. For all these little things, VirtualBox (non OSE for me) works like a charm. Since my switch from Ubuntu to openSUSE, however, I was unable to use the virtual windows disk (vdi file) I created under Ubuntu: right after booting up Windows, I would get a glimpse of a BSOD (blue screen), and Windows would reboot (not even leaving me time to study the BSOD). Booting into safe mode wouldn’t help.
Not wanting to create yet another virtual disk, I set out on an epic quest: a veritable search-and-destroy-the-cause mission. What finally fixed the whole thing, was setting the IDE Controller Type (Settings - General - Advanced) to PIX3 instead of PIX4. Apparently, the default setings are different between different distro’s.
Like all of us - I think - I really hate comment spammers. I really hate unruly bots, actually. I really do. If you start keeping stats of visitors on your site, you’ll quickly spot bots crawling all over your site, searching for all sorts of ways to epxloit your website. They look for email addresses, they try to submit spam comments, they try to find ways to enter your database, they do everything but help you. They are leeches. They stink. I really don’t like them…
Luckily, there are different ways to handle bots as well. If you’re using a .htacces file, for example, you can add a snippet to block the vermin based on their IP address. An idea I liked even better is to redirect the bots to a site that tries to reeducate the bots. You never know.
In stead of redirecting the bots to a governement site where they can take a seat and follow a hands-on course on cyber crimes, another good idea is to send the little bastards to a spam trap page. Gives me visions of all bots in the world swimming around in a pool of interlinked spam pages, never able to get out by them selves. Heaven…
So that’s what I do know, I redirect the bots to a spam trap. Typing in the IP’s in the required format for the .htaccess file, however, can be a PITA. Therefore, I wrote a little script to generate the .htaccess snippet based on a list of IP’s in their normal format. The .htaccess format itself comes from Am I Famous Now. Insert the URL where you want to send the bots to or leave the one I use, insert the IP’s of the bots and push the button:
Copy paste the snippet into your .htaccess file, and you’re all set. (WATCH OUT: if you don’t know what you’re doing, messing with .htaccess can wreck your site in a second. Don’t blame me. I told you.) This works fine, ofcourse, when you can easily keep track of the bots. When you have huge traffic on your site, you probably have a huge number of bots visiting it as well. In that case, you’re probably better of with a lean and mean, fully automated and integrated bot trapping/blocking device like this or this
Pentax has recently issued a new firmware update (1.03) for their current top DSLR, the K20D. Linux users might be suprised to see that only Windows and Mac users are supposed to download the firmware, as there’s only a download link for those two. A closer look to the accompanying text, however, shows that the Mac download is actually an ordinary zip file. I have yet to see a Linux distro that doesn’t support extraction of zip-files, and this particular zip-file extracts to the bin-file you need to update the camera. Even under Linux (or BSD or…)
