I’m in the process of doing some migration among my servers, and I’m not being very careful to keep everything on aexoden.com intact. Some of it actually won’t be revived after the transition. I’ll manually fix things up as I notice they’re broken. Until then, I’ll at least try to keep the Custom Title MOD downloads available, since that’s pretty much the only thing external users seem to access anyway.
As a programmer and Linux user who is also a sports fan (rare combination, I know), I very often make efforts to analyze sports scores in various ways. I previously ran a site here that provided an implementation of “adjusted scoring margin”, which I originally read about on some professional sports site, but the actual ratings were for subscribers only. More recently, I’m interested in expanding my use of linear programming and statistical sampling to analyze playoff scenarios and playoff percentages.
One barrier to working on this is good access to score data for the various sports. There are a few good resources, like Massey Ratings, that can help to facilitate this, but some of the data is outdated and doesn’t necessarily have all the information I want. For my previous site, I wrote a script that parsed results from various live sources on the web, but I think we can do better than that.
To that end, I’ve launched a new project I’ve (tentatively) named the Penultimate Reality Sports Data Project, which aims to provide free and open access to sports score data for as many sports as possible and as many years as possible. The only thing real content I’ve put so far is an older draft of the specification for the data format that I originally wrote a couple of years ago. (I temporarily shelved the project after that.) That said, I’ve come to want to relaunch it, and if anyone out there is interested in helping in any way, please get in contact with me. Otherwise, I’ll press on alone and hope somebody finds my work useful. I at the very least hope to get a new draft of the specification online by this time next week. We shall see.
For those of you who primarily want to read about programming and Linux… well, uh, sorry. Maybe next post. This is my personal blog, after all.
UPDATE: I had some time to kill, so I went ahead and revised the specification. The changes weren’t incredibly substantial, but I am now actively seeking comments. Whether or not I get any is another question altogether.
Playing with this 133Mhz laptop has made it abundantly clear just how much faster computers are today than they were even 5-10 years ago. We use applications today that no one would have even bothered with back then. And as much fun as it is to wait 10 minutes for Firefox to start, I can’t help but think I have better things to do with my time.
Maybe I should dig out my old 286 and play around with that. Only downside is that I can’t install Linux on it. Besides, I think it needs a new motherboard, and finding a replacement might be a bit difficult nowadays.
I’m currently the owner of an old Thinkpad 760ED, a very old laptop. For comparison purposes, it has a 133Mhz Pentium processor and 48 megabytes of RAM. It’s certainly not high-powered, but might be good for something. I have no idea what.
Long story short, a couple of years ago, I managed to install Gentoo on the thing, and it ran fine (for some definition of fine–it was difficult to compile anything, as I had set it up using another computer to compile binary packages). A couple of days ago, I decided to revive it and install Debian on it, since that would be marginally more effective. (It’s run Debian before.) Unfortunately, the Debian install CD was refusing to recognize the hard drive and CD-ROM drive.
Eventually, I discovered that I had to manually modprobe the ide-generic module. My, that’s inconvenient. In any case, Debian’s happily installing now (over the blisteringly fast 115.2k serial link, no less). There are plenty of other quirks about using this laptop, but I should probably save them for some sort of book on the horrors of buying IBM. At least I got the thing for free.
Lately, I’ve been playing around with Debian sid in a virtual machine (VirtualBox is now my virtual machine of choice) for reasons that are entirely beyond me. That said, it looks like it could be potentially useful as a desktop system. I only worry about what kind of breakage I might experience. It’d be nice to get some feedback on perhaps some best practices for maintaining a sid-based system. But I guess you might want some background first…
I’ve become increasingly bored with maintaining my Gentoo machines. This culminated with me reinstalling Ubuntu on my laptop a few weeks ago, At this point, I don’t even notice except that I am no longer repeatedly compiling packages every day. The biggest thing I’ve noticed is that package versions are sometimes a little outdated (which is to be expected, given Ubuntu’s six month update cycle). This led me to examine what versions of packages are in the sid repository of Debian. As it turns out, it’s quite updated, with new versions of packages appearing very quickly. It’s led me to believe it might be all right for a desktop system.
My desktop system is rapidly becoming obsolete, and it slowly feels slower and slower as time goes on. (It’s using an AMD Athlon XP 1600+ which was originally purchased in late 2002.) Keeping the copy of Gentoo I have running on it up to date is increasingly becoming a dull procedure, and given my penchant for micromanagement… In any case, I’m slowly coming around to consider installing Debian on it, though I don’t know if I want to risk breaking it. After all, it isn’t broken, and I intend on replacing it within the next year. Maybe I just play around too much…
I could always just install Linux from Scratch. That’d be great for a laugh.
(By the way, if any of you happen to be looking for shared web hosting, consider buying from me at www.calindora.com. Why, you ask? I got tired of seeing hosting companies (probably dishonestly?) offering 600GB or 34TB or whatever amounts of disk space they’re claiming to offer these days. I feel bad for anyone who actually intends to try to use all that space.)
In a strange turn of events, I found the motivation to get this done. The MOD is now fully-updated for phpBB 3.0.0 (assuming I didn’t make a glaring error, that is). Since there were no major problems with the alpha releases, I have gone ahead and moved on to beta status. This period will likely last a few weeks as I attempt to shake out any lingering bugs.
You can, as always, find this latest release at the Custom Title MOD web site. Please test this version and let me know if you have any problems, concerns, or suggestions. And if you find it useful, please consider donating. Thanks.
After playing around with that script I linked earlier, (mostly repairing the damage that it had endured from being blindly posted to a blog), I’ve managed to integrate it into my AWStats system. As a result, the rampant spam bot activity in my stats has more or less disappeared. I can’t be entirely sure that the script hasn’t filtered out a few genuine users, but even so, it makes me feel like those stats are useful again.
Whether or not the stats in themselves are useful is another question altogether. If nothing else, they help the webmaster measure growth and see what pages are popular and which aren’t. It’s how I know that there’s some interest in the phpBB3 version of the Custom Title MOD, despite my not receiving a single comment about it. In any case, it’ll be exciting to be able to actually follow the stats with some semblance of realism now.
One way of measuring traffic at a web site is log analysis software such as AWStats. These sorts of packages read the server logs and generate a variety of tables or graphs allowing a webmaster or server administrator to analyze their traffic and measure growth (or decline). One thing that really hampers such efforts is the wide proliferation of spam bots.
A sizable percentage of my traffic here at Penultimate Reality comes from spam bots. So far as I can tell, I’m essentially being hit by a couple of different kinds of bots. The first is so-called “referer spam”. These bots access a web page, and tell the web server they were referred there from some (usually terrible) spam advertising site. The motives are unclear, as the only person who will ever see these links is me. I suppose they either hope I’ll click on them or that some webmasters publish their stats and thus expose these links to the public. Either way, it seems somewhat dubious. That said, this kind of spam doesn’t affect me a whole lot, though it does show up.
The second (and most prevalent) is “comment spam”. These spam bots troll the internet, looking for blogs, forums, and anything else that allows comments looking to post their spam. (This description attributes far more intelligence to them than they actually have. I imagine they’re actually more specialized to one particular piece of software, but who knows. I haven’t used one.) They either attempt to post spam comments (and as you can see in the right sidebar, I block many thousands of them) or they attempt to use the trackback feature of blogging software. These bots have made my AWStats statistics next-to-useless, because such a large portion of my traffic comes form these bots. The most prolific of them have accessed various URLs hundreds of times this month.
As far as solutions, I’m not entirely sure what to do. One solution is to simply run Google Analytics. These bots rarely execute the JavaScript associated with an external tracker like this, and as such tend not to show up. That said, I prefer a local solution (for whatever reason), and it’d be nice to filter them out of AWStats somehow. I found an interesting script that purports to help solve this problem, but I haven’t actually figured out how the script works, and my perl-fu is decidedly weak at the moment. Even then, I’d have to integrate it somehow into the automated logging and statistics generation.
Are there any solutions I haven’t found or thought of, or is a service like Google Analytics just the best way to go at this point?
I’m a few days late on this, but I’d like to be the 738,535th person to congratulate the phpBB Group on the long-awaited release of their fantastic forum software, phpBB 3.0.0. It’s been an incredibly long nearly six-year road, with a number of bumps along the way. I’ve been following the development of phpBB since late 2001, and the one thing I can tell you is that pretty much everything that could go wrong did go wrong. (A little hyperbole never hurts.)
Even so, the changing team persevered, and here, as an early Christmas (or whatever December-ish holiday you choose to celebrate) present, we find ourselves with the gold version of an excellent piece of software. I’m still not an incredible fan of flat-style messaging, and phpBB certainly has areas where it could improve. Nonetheless, it’s exciting to see all the hard work finally come to fruition.
As both a (pretty much former) MOD developer and a user, my greatest hope is that with this release, the team is able to put the problems of the past behind them, and work towards far more frequent releases. Even I would find myself hard-pressed to continue to support their efforts if the next release is phpBB4 sometime in 2013. (Those of us in the know will recall that what became phpBB 3.0.0 was originally slated to be phpBB 2.2.0, an incremental improvement to phpBB2 itself. My, how things change, with phpBB3 in effect becoming nearly as much of a rewrite as phpBB2 was.)
If you’re looking for good, free forum software, I suggest you download it today. If phpBB’s not your cup of tea, there are plenty of other solutions, and you’ll find an ample list over at Wikipedia.
In a semi-related note, it’s becoming less and less likely that I’m going to find the motivation to work on my Custom Title MOD. As I’ve said before, it’s simply not a feature I’m currently using on any of my sites. It’s possible that could change in the future, but until then, I’d fully support any other developer who wants to update my alpha version for 3.0.0 and maintain and support it. Or write it from scratch, if you want. If the feature’s in demand enough, I’m sure it’ll pop up somehow. (I still have hope that certain features in phpBB 3.2 will make such a MOD completely unnecessary. We shall see.)
One thing that comes back to haunt me almost every time I start a new project is my rampant indecision. When working on a new web site, I find myself bouncing around several possible languages and frameworks. One minute I’m settled on getting to know Ruby on Rails, and the next I feel that the best solution would be a more traditional PHP-based site with phpBB as a backend. Shortly, I’ll discover that the phpBB backend feels too constraining and decide I should write the entire thing myself. This naturally leads me to discover that I have to write a lot of basic code like template, database, session, and authentication handling. After deciding that’s ridiculous, I resolve to use Django, only to discover that it doesn’t provide a very full-featured authentication and authorization system, so I find myself back to PHP and phpBB. The cycle continues.
The same problem seems to plague me regardless of what I’m writing. If it’s a regular GUI application, I’ll find myself unable to decide among several languages and frameworks. Should I use Python and wxPython? Or maybe use wxWidgets directly in C++ or even GTK+ using pure C. It’s frustrating, to be sure.
Once I have an established code base, it’s a lot easier to add features or fix bugs as necessary, but sometimes getting that code base started is the most difficult part of the journey. It’s one of my strongest weaknesses, and I hope I can work on improving that in the future. What kind of things have you done to avoid this kind of problem? Pick a language and framework and stick to it, working around its problems as you come to them? Rolling a die and picking one at random? It’s an interesting problem that I haven’t found a solution to just yet.
Maybe I’m just unusually indecisive.