whats the plot

it's been a while since i last posted... i guess microblogging (twitter, brightkite, etc) have sort of gotten the majority of my posts, and i've neglected the blog.

the main reason i like the blog is it's interesting to look back and see what i was writing about n years ago.  it just serves as a good documentation.  twitter/brightkite do the job as well (esp with uploading pictures to brightkite on the go and tagging location), but the blog allows me to be less concise.

so yeah, perhaps i will resume the posts shortly (tm).

so i went through and tried to back-tag all the posts on the site... more difficult than it sounds, especially since i was at a loss as to how to tag some of the things (especially in a consistent manner). i am not showing a tag cloud yet, but maybe soon (tm).

i've also added links to my twitter and flickr in the sidebar. i guess i should start looking into some wordpress plugins at some point in the near future for some of the stuff in the sidebar.

*update* - tried showing a tag cloud, but i don't really like it... things i don't care about surfacing get surfaced because they end up being "bucket" categories and things i do care about don't :p

i like the tagging so i can have, for example, snippets as the tag for all the posts that have code snippets in them, and pictures as the tags for all posts that have pictures in them, and so on... but i guess kind of like del.icio.us, if i think about the correctness and consistency of my tags too much, it starts to bother me :p

continuing the trend from yesterday and posting more about annoying things (tm), my friend pointed out that in the awstats report for one of my sites, i had a very abnormal number of reported bandwidth downloads for one of the days (~3tb, when i usually average under 50gb per day for that particular server). of course this is unrealistic (and, in fact, impossible, because the box is on a 10mbps connection, which would mean no more than ~108gb/day...).

so i did some investigation...

[ahmedre@cafesalam a]$ ls -alh download*21
-rw-r--r-- 1 ahmedre ahmedre 36M Jan 22 11:29 download-access_log.01.06.2008_21

i opened this file and noticed that a particular ip was repeated a huge number of times in this file, mainly with 200 and 206 return codes.

[ahmedre@cafesalam a]$ wc -l download*21
158618 download-access_log.01.06.2008_21
[ahmedre@cafesalam a]$ grep -c 68.173.172.149 download*21
152514
[ahmedre@cafesalam ~]$ echo 152514/158618 | bc -l
.96151760834205449570

amazing... turns out that when i swapped servers, i forgot to re-enable mod_limitipconn in the apache configuration. the thing is, this isn't the primary download server, it's just one of the mirrors that the download rotates to (so it's easy to figure out, but you have to have some computer knowledge to get to it, because the webpage currently doesn't link directly to the files, but instead to a php script that figures out which server to get the file from (and it so happens that both servers usually have all the files, but that's a different story)).

so what i don't understand is, if you have somewhat of an understanding of computers, why would you go about initiating 152,000 requests within one hour (from some place in new york, i should add...)? how can you possibly expect to download that much at a time? i have nothing against people using download managers, i use them all the time, but at least be respectable about it - download no more than a handful of files at once... for what it's worth, the ua string was: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.00; Windows 98)." i tried to see if this was some sort of download manager, but i am not sure... but it sort of has to be either a download manager or a script to hit that many files in an hour...

this really bothers me... not to mention that on the primary site, the error log reaches gbs in size due to all these 403 requests because of people with download managers constantly trying to leach a huge number of files at a time... i need to find lighttpd/apache modules that do progressive blocking to people who hit the site an exorbitant number of times...

maybe out of sheer boredom, or too many nerdy thoughts always going through my head, or just to find a good use for the domain, i've started a humorous (so claim those who read it) blog about youth and the problems they face in looking to get married (basically some of my theories about the whole marriage process).

you can check it out here.

update - i closed it down

keeping the seo statements from the previous post in mind, audio.islamicnetwork.com has become http://quranicaudio.com/ -- it is now running on lighttpd (rather than apache - by the way, so far, i really like lighty masha'Allah) and al7amdulillah, so far, things look good.

quranicaudio.com is one of the web's largest (if not the largest) collection of cd quality downloadable quran mp3s (and some oggs). check it out!

the site can now be accessed at whatstheplot.com. going to slowly phase out piousity insha'Allah (piousity.net 301 redirects to whatstheplot.com, so there should be no broken links). anyone have a good idea for a new secondary title? the old one was "the latest plot at piousity.net," but that doesn't really apply anymore...

i need to find another good theme for this site or make a new one for it at some point...

greets...
i've just moved the site to dreamhost. i have been using shieldhost for a while now because it is rather cheap. but recently, i've been irked with some of the things they've done (i had another domain hosted there too which i was pretty sure was set to auto bill my credit card every quarter, but then they stopped billing me and stopped the service, claiming that i didn't pay... well yeah, you don't charge me, i don't pay...), and sometimes, i just couldn't access it...

so i decided to jump ship to dreamhost. i've had dreamhost since the middle of this year actually, i just haven't been using it. i got in on the "777" deal (one full year of service plus domain name was like under $10, and i think after that its like $8/mo) a while back for one of my domains, but even several months later when that site finally went up, i didn't host it at dreamhost. so i figured that i might as well give dreamhost a shot since i have it.

so far, my impression is that they're awesome... especially compared to shieldhost. the nice thing is they let you host multiple sites on the same account, so even at $8 a month, it comes out to the same that i was paying with shieldhost roughly for the several hosting accounts i had on there.

anyway... more later.

i upgraded the blog to wp1.5. and, as a result, my old theme needs to be ported over.. but i think i am just going to stick to the default for now since it looks really slick... that is all.

hellos ladies and gentlemens, the websites is back ups. indeeds. that is all.

peace. made a bunch of updates and changes, both internally and externally. most notably:

1. removed the pictures and audio for now.
2. one can no longer comment on entries that are more than one week old.
3. added the weblog categories on the side bar.
4. minor cosmetic changes to the side bar.
5. now using the iG syntax highlighter for syntax highlighting code.

more updates later.