I made some changes to my RSS feeds, I split Photography and non Photography related stuff while still providing the old unified RSS feed. I will be posting more stuff that’s purely photography related and wanted to give people who do not share the interest a chance to easily ignore it.
All Entries 
, Non Photography Entries and Photography Entries
Six Apart has again made more changes to their licencing in response to recent community outrage. This time they seem to have gotten things better, I would be quite happy to buy a Unlimited Personal Edition from them for $99 this will allow me to run unlimited blogs with unlimited authors for non commercial use.
The licence will allow for unlimited free updates in the 3.x branch, support via their ticketing and so forth. Nice going.
moreover.com has RSS feeds that is based on searches through their big database of syndicated content, I have been reading their London News feed for ages but they have recently started introducing ads into their feeds. I do not have a problem with ads in RSS feeds but I think people need to think how they do it a bit more.
The moreover feeds insert the ad into the feed with a time stamp of the request time. So each time you load the feed you get a new news item for the ad. My RSS aggregator now has about 50 entries advertising travel to Ibiza. This is very annoying and I am forced to unsubscribe from this feed now, I wonder how long it is going to be before aggregators start supporting filtering duplicate entries or entries matching filter strings.
Been looking into my spam situation again and noticed most of my spam come in from my secondary MX rather than primary. I imagine the spammers know that things like RBL’s and so forth will only be deployed on the primary servers. So I enabled some RBL checking and a hand made list of regex matches against hostnames on the machine and found the following:
Total Mail Handled by MX: 1221
Total Mail Marked as Spam: 861
Scary.
With the recent release of FreeBSD 4.10 I decided to upgrade my machine this weekend since I was still running a RC of 4.9.
I got the source, build the world and upgraded all the jails, it went perfect since I could slowly do the jails one by one as they kept working on just fine on the old 4.9 kernel, all the usual things that break like ps and so forth worked just fine.
When it came to upgrading the main host, it started going bad from the word go. First my serial console got itself corrupted and I could not type anything at all to the server, this means I could not do the installworld in single user mode. I shut everything down that I could essentially keeping the machine in multi user mode with just sshd running. Did the installworld and installkernel and rebooted.
I hoped at this point that the serial port would reset and things would be fine, but it seems now that the serial port was actually producing garbage to the console and ended up preventing the bootloader from choosing the right harddrive for the bootup.
I power cycled the machine with my remote power management and that was it, dead, no response at all.
After getting hold of the ISP and gaining access to the co-location facility I discovered the BIOS battery died at some point and when I power cycled the machine it forgot its BIOS settings, including the fact that it has to turn back on once it gets power ๐
A quick replacement of the battery solved it and now its all fine again, I also turned off the motherboards console redirection relying on FreeBSD’s. This way future console corruption won’t prevent a bootup since the FreeBSD console stuff only kicks in after the bootloader.
Via Geek News Central I got a link to a very thorough side-by-side comparison of various blogging tools. If you are considering moving or even deciding for the first time on what tool to use then this will be very handy.
