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.

As a long-time Gentoo user, I notice that every time I try a new distribution for a short while (in this case Ubuntu), I find myself eventually with an urge to switch back. It never takes more than a month, really. It’s kind of strange, but I suppose I’ve become attached to Gentoo in some weird way. The short of it is that I started feeling the urge again today. (My desktop and server still run Gentoo, so they’re not even an issue. But then there’s my laptop.)

Don’t get me wrong. Ubuntu is a fine distribution, and everything I said in my previous post still stands. It just never quite feels quite right, however. The straw that broke the camel’s back in this case was that I went to install a particular game and the version in Ubuntu’s repositories was slightly old. I know the newer version will be available in just a few short months, but there’s something comforting about being able to access what I want almost immediately in Gentoo.

It’s looking increasingly likely that I’ll make the switch back to Gentoo in a day or two, but there will definitely be a few things I miss about Ubuntu. First, upgrades so far have been a breeze. There haven’t been that many, but they installed quickly and simply. I’ve never experienced a major upgrade, however, and I’m not sure I ever want to. One advantage of Gentoo in this respect is that the upgrades get spread out a bit instead of thrown all at you at once. You have time to explore each upgrade as it comes in, with whatever new features it happens to bring. With the Ubuntu way, thousands of packages will be upgraded, and I’ll have very little idea just what changed. The system may completely change under me with no transition. It’s an unsettling feeling.

Also, NetworkManager has been nice, but Gentoo’s networking isn’t completely awful, and actually works reasonably well at this point. I’ll also miss not having to configure a kernel. It’s not difficult, but there are a lot of options, many of which I have little need to see.

Other than that, there isn’t much I’ll miss about Ubuntu. When it comes down to it, both Ubuntu and Gentoo are Linux operating systems and the differences are less important than one might think. The one point that Gentoo has going for it is that I’ve never switched away because it didn’t feel right; only to try new things.

Maybe I’m wrong, but at least I won’t feel so unsettled.

I recently read a post from Steven Oliver mentioning his experience with Project Euler, which seems to be a collection of math and programming problems one can attempt to solve, with widely varying difficulty levels. I figured I’d give it a try.

Thus far, I’ve only worked through the first ten to avoid spending my entire day on a single thing, but the problems certainly seem interesting enough. I’ve been using Python as my language of choice so far, though one of them I did in a text editor with a calculator (the lowest common multiple of the numbers from 1 to 20). We’ll see how the difficulty progresses as I get down the list. My first instinct would have been to use C, but with C, you end up with more boilerplate code and don’t have as useful data structures (strings and lists, mainly) at your immediate disposal. So, Python it is, at least for now.

Something that sees a lot of neglect in the computer world is simple occasional cleaning of the interior. You know the horror stories. The ones where grandma’s computer needs fixing of some sort or perhaps an upgrade, and you go over to take care of it, only to open it up and find a one-inch thick layer of dust. I know it’s one of my favorite experiences.

I’ve done my part for routine computer maintenance, and used some compressed air (really not air, but some other particular gas or combination of gases) to clean out the air vents on my laptop. The result? Nothing short of a 15 degree Celsius drop in temperature at full load, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. Keeping computers clean, especially the moving parts, is an important part of computer maintenance, and I’d encourage everyone to take a moment out from their lives and give their boxes some much needed attention. They won’t thank you (yet), but your wallet just might at some point.

Up until recently, all three of my machines (a virtual server, a desktop, and a laptop) have all run Gentoo. With the release of Ubuntu Gutsy, however, I thought I’d give it a try on my laptop, to see how much it’d improved since I’d last used it. The major selling point was that I could use the alternative installer to fully encrypt the disk, which I had been doing under Gentoo. (The last thing I need if my laptop is stolen is for the thief to have easy access to my data.)

To sum it up briefly, I see no reason that the laptop will ever migrate back to Gentoo, unless Gentoo improves its desktop integration experience. Ubuntu’s been stable (with one caveat), the wireless network support has been great, and most of my major media playing concerns have been taken care of. In short, it’s an excellent desktop experience, and it saves me a bit of time going through the updates each morning. The large upgrade every 6 months will take a few minutes to go through and see what’s new (I still have that micromanagement bug). We’ll see how things go over the next few months, though.

I’m still not ready to transition my desktop. While it would probably work fine, I really rely on some of the applications it runs, and I’m not particularly interested in the downtime. That said, I can’t think of any real reasons to keep it running Gentoo, other than the reasons stated in my popular post on why I use Gentoo. So, I suppose I’ll transition it at some point, perhaps. But perhaps not.

My only major gripe about Ubuntu at the moment is that the desktop effects are rather unstable with my NVIDIA card. I can almost certainly make the thing freeze very quickly by using compositing effects. I hope the nouveau project successfully gets a good open-source driver for NVIDIA cards soon, because using the binary blob just leaves issues like this unsolved for the most part, which is a shame, because some of the effects are actually useful, and not just eye-candy.

In just a few years, Ubuntu’s gone from new kid on the block, to a coherent, simple-to-use desktop experience that the most technophobic person could use. I’d wholeheartedly recommend it over Windows to a new user.

I’ve released alpha 2 of my Custom Title MOD. This version fixes some missing code that wasn’t ever added to alpha 1 by mistake. Upgrade instructions for those of you who have already installed can be found at the phpBB forums.

It’s finally here! The very first alpha of the Custom Title MOD for phpBB 3.0.x. This is still an early release, and may have some serious bugs that do all kinds of horrible things to your forum. Then again, it works just fine on my test installation, but converting a diff into an installation script isn’t exactly foolproof.

In any case, test it out, and let me know if it works or not. If testing is favorable, we could see a beta, release candidate, or even a final release within the next couple of weeks. Though I probably won’t release the final 2.0.0 version until phpBB 3.0.0 goes gold.

By the way, there aren’t really any new features since 1.0.3. There is one major change, in that the permissions system of phpBB 3.0.x is utilized in order to control who can edit her title and who can’t.