Brandon's Blog

10/27/2007 #

Micro

Reading Reuters today caused me to stumble upon this site, which I can’t say I was impressed with.  The maximum interest rate on these micro-loans is 3%.  One would assume there is considerable overhead associated with managing the distribution of the funds to all the various investors, plus the return required by the lending institution just for covering overhead.

3% is a nice, conservative estimate of long-run inflation, so why not just “donate the inflation” to the charitable lender, as well?  They can still charge interest to the borrower, which would permit increased loans in the future.  Plus, this creates a sense of financial responsibility and a free-market atmosphere, which seems like the point of all this anyway.

This would cut out all the overhead and still create the end-result a micro-philanthropist is probably wanting.

10/27/2007 #

Football

There’s really nothing better than OU being on a bye the week our Katy Tigers are on FSN-Southwest.

10/26/2007 #

Comments are Working

I think I know what’s wrong with the comments system, and it’s fixed.  Sort of.  I mean, it works, but the internals have that classic “this problematic line in Brandon’s custom Cluster code has been commented out” look.

10/24/2007 #

Sigma Again and Again and Again

I am quite excited.  We most definitely now have sigma-mud out on Google Code.  Here’s a link to the project.

As it says on the project website, you can do an anonymous subversion checkout with:

svn co http://sigma-mud.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ sigma-mud

Please join the project (anyone who is interested, even as a beta tester), and I will do whatever I need to do as owner to get anybody involved read-write subversion access.

Google is awesome enough to provide a means (albeit not so simple) to migrate my existing revision history into the Google subversion server, so we’re actually on revision 48 right now.

Thinking ahead, we’ll probably move all the existing Python code into a server/ subfolder, and then put a designer folder at the root level of the repository.

W00t.

10/24/2007 #

New Template: Double Meh

I ripped out this template very quickly last night, since the other one was incredibly stupid from a CSS standpoint.  It also had obvious HTML errors in some of the forms, once I looked into the inner workings.

Theming in Textpattern is a nightmare, because it doesn’t really exist.  You just copy-paste a bunch of stuff into a bunch of places and hope it works.  There’s no wonderful, coherent way to backup your old stuff without duplicating all the objects in the database.

Anyway, this is pretty plain but I like it better than the complicated one.  Maybe I’ll just stick with it for a while.

Joey is up and, as far as I can tell and remember, 100% functional.  Hopefully, I’ll have an e-mail in my work account today from VIA to answer my inquiry about ordering a new cooling fan for the CPU.  The bearings in this one are yelling, “I’m about to fail” 24 hours a day right now.  I feel like I owe the poor guy some TLC after a minor security breach and a complete reformat.

10/24/2007 #

jQuery

Is jQuery good?  It might be used for my Content Management System project…

10/24/2007 #

... And Again and Again and Again

I had a thought: Verizon doesn’t appear to block high-numbered ports, so I may be able to open a port and run the MUD server from home.  We could run it straight from the SVN trunk, updating the server code once a week or so.

I remember when Meta and I were trying to get CircleMUD going on a shoestring with nothing more than a dream and a prayer.  Having some resources makes this stuff a lot more fun and easy.

10/23/2007 #

That Pesky Password for www-data

Having a home server has been an educational experience.  And, between Debian’s sensible defaults and my own research and experience, I feel like I run a safe shop.

Last weekend I got portscanned on joey.  The scanner found my SSH port and started running a dictionary attack.  (Amazing what a real operating system’s logs will tell you!)  The scanner managed to login as an extremely unprivileged user (www-data, the user account under which Apache2 runs on Debian).  They were logged in for exactly 7 seconds.

The Apache2 user can barely even view files without asking permission, so the threat was less than nil.  However, I felt like refreshing the system just to make sure.

I have also now disabled SSH logins from external sources, which pretty much nips that issue in the bud.  But, I could re-open it without any concern.  I learned my lesson about passwords and exactly how many nefarious characters are really operating around the web.

I managed to get all essential services up and running last night, aside from forgetting to get the Dynamic DNS client running (which effectively makes the server inaccessible from the outside).  I need to tweak Samba (Windows-compatible file server) to have a shared directory again, but all in all things were done very quickly.

It’s not hard to administer a server like this, but I’m beginning to respect the need for constant vigilence on a much higher level.

10/20/2007 #

Em, and Why I Love the W3C

Interesting Read

10/18/2007 #

Tea Review, Dahling

I am probably nearing the point of having tried almost every variety of Bigelow tea.

I would have to say, if I could get a room air freshener or candle that smelled like Constant Comment brewing, I would buy a bunch of them.  However, the tea (with copious amounts of sweetener) actually drank more like black coffee.  It gives you that little grimace when you finish a sip.  Not great.  Perhaps the orange zest tasted bitter.

It takes a lot of sweetener to get the Green Tea with Peach tasting right, but when it does it pretty much rocks the house.  I would assume it is hard for the tea engineers to get peach flavor (all natural, I gather) correct, but they nailed it.  Kudos to them.

Spiced Chai is kind of the workhorse of the family.  Needs less sweetener, takes milk (even low-fat) very well, and has a pleasant warming quality.  Definitely a blockbuster, but get it in a combo pack because it can get tired after a while.

Lemon Lift is a good entertaining tea.  It’s good on ice, and it doesn’t offend.  Many of these others are a bit avant garde for the uninitiated or non-impassioned.  I would also say that it accepts sweetener at conventional Nestea levels.  Very predictable.

More to come.  I need to add a blog category for “Pretentious.”