At the NWA Tech Fest, attending the Cloud track presentations. Most of them are Microsoft-centric, focusing on their Office 365 and Azure product lines, which is disappointingly homogeneous, but still of interest.

The Azure platform's definitely got some power behind it, which I'm hoping will become available to me at my day job soon. Our current cloud solution is woefully underpowered for our needs, and it's starting to negatively impact our performance.

inally added a form to more easily post blog entries, so hopefully that'll be incentive for me to post more often.

Having worked mostly in node.js lately it's taken me a while to get my PHP legs back, but so far I've converted the site entirely from mysql_real_escape_string to PDO, added a handy blog management page, and fixed up the site's CSS and HTML here and there.

I'll be continuing development as much as I can, and posting as I go. In addition, I intend to blog about the other technologies I've been learning and using lately, including node.js, CouchDB, redis, ExpressJS, Jade, Stylus, and maybe a bit of general JavaScript & jQuery.

Making a few tweaks to the HTML, mostly updates to HTML5. Still posting blog entries with manual mysql inserts for the moment, but I think I'll be making a helpful form my next priority.

Whew! Made a lot of progress with what little free time I've had over the past month. So far I've got the comments system working, implemented pagination of the blog listings, filled in some brief descriptions over in my Projects list, fleshed out my resume a bit more, and added a few other little goodies here and there.

The parts I'm most proud of are hCard and hResume support in the resume, and when you leave me a comment I'll get a DM on Twitter notifying me of it right away =D

Still need to implement actual blog posting/editing, but MySQL Query Browser works fine for now.

I suppose it's been a while since I've done anything with this site, but I think it's time I give it another go. I've completely redesigned it from scratch, and will be rewriting all the code from the ground up, starting with the blog system. I'm re-using the existing database system, though I've moved it from my old host, 1and1, to Dreamhost.

Old links probably won't work for a little while, but I'll be working to fix that as soon as possible.

A fairly big update to the script, I've added several new features:

• Notifications via libnotify


• Download History


• Reprioritization via move, up, and down commands


• Added the ability to add multiple urls at once


• Added the ability to skip a download via CTRL+C (moves it to end of queue)


• -f option for custom queue.txt at command line


• -c option for custom .dqcfg at command line

Get the updated script here: Download Queue v0.2

If some of the new code seems a little hack-ish just remember, I'm still learning.

Next on the agenda:

've not yet implemented anything in the way of blocking spambots on this site, and recently I got my first taste of comment spam. Luckily it was only one bot and a few comments, which were easily deleted, but after taking a look at my access logs I've noticed that the bot's still there, and has been trying to post to various pages for several days.

In all instances the bot had the same IP, so I toyed with the idea of having my comment posting function check the IP against a database table of known bad IPs, but that seemed a bit overkill for one bad bot. It also wouldn't do much for stolen bandwidth, CPU usage, etc. So I decided to ban the IP entirely in my .htaccess file:

# Block spammers by IP
Order Allow,Deny
Deny from 195.225.177.136
Allow from all

Now if I get a few more bad apples I can just toss their IP in as well. If it gets too large I'll work up an alternative.

• September 2007 (3)
• April 2007 (4)