Don't Back Down

Over the last few weeks, I've had the distinct (dis)pleasure of working on not one, not two, but three NAS (networked attached storage) devices. One of these is my own Infrant ReadyNAS NV+, one is a similar device from a client and the third is a smaller device, a ReadyNAS Duo, for another client.

While there were certainly a variety of issues to be had, in the end the problems all arose from one factor: The firmware hadn't been updated since installation of the devices. And when I say issues, I really just mean that what we were trying to do was made much easier once the firmware was installed. It's not like the devices stopped working or anything.

Read "To Update (Firmware) or Not to Update" »

If you're like most people, your blog has an RSS feed. Chances are, you don't even know what RSS stands for, but you likely have one (if you're wondering, it most often stands for really simple syndication, but that isn't important).

Unfortunately, you may have more than one, which means if you want to know how many subscribers you have to your feed, you have a problem. At best, you have to add up each of the subscriber counts and get a total. At worst, you have potential eyeballs who want to see your latest and greatest, but they're looking at outdated content. Isn't it time you fixed this?

Read "Pick a Feed and Stick to It" »

Movable Type version 3.2, released in April of 2007, included a plugin known as SpamLookup. This plugin was able to submit comments to a lookup service (hence the name of the plugin) to one of a number of blacklist services, which in turn would determine if the IP address used for the comment submission is suspicious, allowing you to better judge if you had encountered a spam comment.

However, way back in May of 2007, Six Apart released a guide on updating your spam filters for the plugin. Without the change, your comment-posting process will be horribly slow, because the process has to timeout before it will continue. Also, the default for the other service probably isn't the best (though that isn't mentioned). Want to know more? Read on!

Read "Update Your Movable Type Spam Filters (Please)" »

Maybe I'm just getting old. If I am, I hope that it doesn't involve the need to signal that I'm going to turn a mile down the road - and then come to a complete stop before starting up again to actually make the turn.

I'll admit that it's been a while since I've lived anywhere other than the South (approaching twenty years now), and when I did it was - gasp - California. But the people in North and South Carolina are really bad at turning.

Read "All the Slow-Turners are in the South" »