New IOP website is up. Building that took took most of my time for the past couple weeks but I’m proud of how it came out. Very nice code and a bunch of really cool, reusable PHP admin tools that almost no one gets to see.

I’ve been thinking about the web a lot lately, and I’ve come to the conclusion that this site is not doing what I want it to. That’s a big part of why there hasn’t been much posting lately. A lot of old ideas are bubbling up again, and I’m looking into ways of integrating more of my personal style of creating stuff with the tools I’ve learned to make. There are some long, half-finished essays I started during the past few weeks, hopefully I’ll get parts of them online before too long.

Clicking the iTunes Music Store song samples every 30 seconds gets old fast. So I slapped together a simple little AppleScript which tells iTunes to play the next sample track in the currently visible window every 30 seconds. Select something in the Music Store, launch this script-application and all the song samples will play automatically. It’s a nice way for the very busy (or very lazy) to hear a lot of potential new music without interrupting their work, sort of like having a personal shopper droid. Those with ridiculously short attention spans might be happy with just this.

iTunes Music Store Player*

* this is offered with no warranties, no licenses, no responsibility, no restrictions

An experiment: The sun setting over 14th St & First Avenue. Live QuckTime MPEG4 steam

I don’t think anyone’s connected yet, but you will probably need to switch your QuickTime transport setting to HTTP from UDP. For some reason I can’t get UDP packets through to the streaming computer.

Well, some people seemed to be able to see the stream. The live stream is down but the webcam page is working again.

I managed to get QuickTime Streaming Server (actually Darwin Streaming Server) and QuickTime Broadcaster running between my laptop and a slow old G3.

I’ll post notes at some point after I’ve had some more time to play with it and I’m sure everything works. The biggest challenges were skirting my own firewall and working around my ISP’s block on port 80. Otherwise it wasn’t too difficult, just somewhat poorly documented.

Several of my sites were getting their referer logs spammed by porn sites. A little snooping through the logs revealed that all the spam, 50-400 hits a day, was coming from a single machine:

 tom1.xcite.net (216.169.111.198)

Others have also noticed spam from this IP.

I thought about writing a letter to xcite.net, but after calling them (no one answered) and googling them, I decided it would be pointless. My solution was to use Apache’s Mod_Rewrite to redirect requests from that IP address. Instead of just denying access, I decided to forward their requests back to xcite’s servers. Here are the two lines I added to my root htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^216\.169\.111\.198$ 
RewriteRule /*$ http://www.xcite.net [R] 

That should end the problem without screwing anything else up. Not a perfect solution, but better than turning off the referer pages.

Update: According to my raw server logs, the spamming machine tried to hit my site again today at 3:20 and 10:30. Apparently everything worked and 122 accesses were redirected back to xcite.net.

Update 2: Apparently Charles at Little Green Footballs was also getting hit with a similar attack.

March 12, 2003:

I figured out and wrote a three-step workaround for serving Named Virtual Host sites with Rendezvous and Apache. I’m trying something new with this one and sending it around to see if someone besides me will publish it. Someone will.

Someone did.

Virtual Hosts, mod_rendezvous_apple, and Apache on Mac OS X
at O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter.

The Origin of Trogdor (Flash, loud, funny)

I’ve been seeing references to this thing popping up all over, and no, I can’t explain it…