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I’ve had 3 people from the Real Life (which is a very weird and disturbing place) telling me that I’m not updating my blog often enough in the last week. I’m not sure how much is supposed to be enough. I usually blog when I have some time and have something I’d really like to say. I’m completely fine with about 2 blog entries a month and perhaps more now and again when things get interesting. However, sometimes I like to cave a bit under pressure, so here’s a random blog entry for the bored:

• I heard the I-can-ride-my-bike-with-no-handlebars song for the first time on Friday. Listened to it 20 times over the weekend so far. Aparently everyone else knows it already. It’s an awesome little song about how power can corrupt (or at least, that’s my interpretation ).
• I played with Mac OSX again yesterday. It’s annoying. Recently Mark Shuttleworth said that Ubuntu will be more attractive than a Mac in two years. I think he seriously needs to take a look at a Mac again. I’ve installed plenty of add-ons and stuff to my Mac, and I just can’t make it match the usability and productivity of my Gnome desktop with Compiz on Ubuntu. In order to make Ubuntu really more attractive to the current Mac market, it will need to run the software that’s available for a Mac. I bought my Mac because I want to use the real nice video editing software that’s available for it.
• Still stuck in Jo’burg for work purposes. Tried to fix that but it failed. I’ll just have to try to get back home a bit harder. I guess I’ll be here for another 6 months max. At least my mother is visiting next weekend.
• Everything else is pretty much ok.

Some pictures from the real world (not sure where they’re originally from though):

Dear Corey

First of all, I think it’s common wisdom in the Ubuntu community that Ubuntu bug reports should rather be filed in Launchpad, and not be sent to someone’s inbox where they are hidden from the rest of the world.

Secondly, please enable comments on your blog. In the past, people have disabled comments to prevent spam. With the spam filtering software available these days in just about any blogging platform, this is hardly necessary any more. Write-only communication is considered bad manners in the on-line world.

For what it’s worth, I run Hardy on a fairly low-spec machine (Centrino 1.6ghz, 512MB RAM) and it performs fine. If you could create a Launchpad bug report with your exact hardware specifications, then the problem could possibly be traced down to a bug in some hardware drivers that may be causing the problem (I had a similar problem during the Feisty and Gutsy development cycles).

Update: I’ve striked the request for Cory to change the way his posts work. As one commenter said, it’s not really my place to dictate. I still do wisht that Advogato would either allow comments, or that people who post things to planets post from a platform that allows comments.

The biggest reason I switched from the previous blogging software I used to Wordpress, is the amount of spam I used to receive. I didn’t really know how well Wordpress dealt with spam, but I had to try something else, removing blog spam all the time became a tedious and repetitive job. So, I installed Wordpress, and enabled the Akismet plugin. It works great. It moves all known spam out of your way (you could review it if you really like, but I’ve never seen a false positive in my spam queue), and if it’s unsure, you can manually approve or deny the spam in the usual Wordpress moderation queue.

Since I enabled it, Akismet has caught 100 000 spam messages. Glad I didn’t have to filter that by hand

I’ve added the Akismet sidebar plugin as well, it displays the amount of spam messages caught. Thanks Akismet!

Shew, my post from yesterday got digged, and as a result, it made my hosting server very busy, which caused my account to be suspended. Sorry if you visited recently and got a hostgator-suspend-page!

I’ve dropped down to the default Wordpress theme, enabled page caching, turned off gzip compression for pages, and the server’s load average dropped from 6 .53to 1.30 in about a minute!

I’ll be moving this site to Tektonic, they have some real nice price plans and services. The rest of the less-cpu instensive stuff will stay here on Hostgator, they are cheap enough

At least my site will now run from a decent Ubuntu 6.06 box, and I can install whatever I want on it. Yay!