Present Perfect

Christmas.

I wish the spammers a better database server so they don't send me spam mail that reads:

Don't know where to get pills?
Warning: pg_connect() [function.pg-connect]: Unable to connect to PostgreSQL server: FATAL: sorry, too many cl

and I wish myself a new tooth to replace the one that just broke off yesterday morning when eating my Christmas cereal.

Christmas. I wish the spammers a better database server so they don't send me spam mail that reads: Don't know where to get pills? Warning: pg_connect() [function.pg-connect]: Unable to connect...

So yeah, my wordpress site got hacked and spammed. I took some time to update to 2.3

I still don't like how annoying web apps are to update in general, it always feels a lot more painful than it should be. At the top of the list of annoyances is figuring out what the version of WordPress is I'm installing. The tarball is latest.tar.gz, the readme.html says 2.3, and only after installing it do I know that it's 2.3.1

Maybe I'm too hung up on releases.

Anyway, apologies for the planet spamming. If you have any more suggestions for securing my wordpress install, let me know.

So yeah, my wordpress site got hacked and spammed. I took some time to update to 2.3 I still don't like how annoying web apps are to update in general,...

Is Skype's UI as horrible on Windows as it is on Linux ?

I am trying to do something as basic as saving the contents of my chat window. But ...

• I don't have a menu toolbar
• I don't have a right-click menu in the text window
• If I start clickdragging in the text window, then going down to the edge of the window, the text window doesn't scroll to the end of the text, like just about any other app I have
• Ctrl-A doesn't do anything
• There is no cursor, so doing shift-(cursor keys) doesn't do anything either

These are all the ways I know about other apps let you select text.

Am I missing something obvious, or is it just not possible to save my Skype chat history ?

Is Skype's UI as horrible on Windows as it is on Linux ? I am trying to do something as basic as saving the contents of my chat window. But...

Last week I cleaned up my key chain. The Real Life one.

I have this cool keychain with a circle and a twistable ring, and the circle has a rail on which you can slide three hangers, each with its own ring. It was a gift from a girlfriend after losing my previous cool keychain, which had a sort-of-almost-closed 8 loop, and a circle that slides over it, and a metal ball that locks into the circle keeping everything in place. But I digress.

Yesterday I realized that one of the three hangers has a ring of ten bicycle lock keys, all for bikes I was beyond hope hoping to get returned to me sometime soon. Since with our move last week I finally stopped actually owning a bike, I decided it was time to let go of the keys. Half the weight gone.

Then I noticed that I have door keys to five houses/appartments in the world. My old one here in Barcelona, my new one here in Barcelona, my parent's house in Gent, Kristien's place in Brussels, and our new apartment in Brussels. It made me wonder how the Brad Pitts of this world must have a huge key chain, what with all their desert island places and such.

Then again, they probably have a Keymaster in full-time employ, flying ahead of them and turning up the heating and letting them in.

I'll be happy to get rid of two sets of keys - my old Barcelona flat, which will now be inhabited by collague Alessandro, and Kristien's current place, which we will get rid of in February as we move into our brand new place.

In completely unrelated news, congratulations to David on his productive week, including the world's second live streaming of Dirac. I did the first one two months ago actually, when I was at the EBU Open Source conference and got distracted for an hour. Of course, full credit is still due to Dave, because I just wrote some python code to wrap up his hard work. And of course, I'm only the first one to have streamed in Dirac until the next blogger pops up and claims he did it first.

I should get that patch commited to Flumotion though.

Last week I cleaned up my key chain. The Real Life one. I have this cool keychain with a circle and a twistable ring, and the circle has a rail...

It's a slow Friday. I am looking for software that allows me to:

• measure average download speed and variation in it for HTTP url's
• save these measurements preferably in a central location, preferably using rrd
• get some decent graphs out of them
• be able to get an alert when there is an important "change" in these values
• easy to deploy on various hosts around the globe, so I can build a network of hosts reporting achieved download speeds to me
• work on downloads of 1-10 MB (not just a simple web page)
• Ideally, have an upper limit settable on how much bytes or time to download (so I can use it on live streams)

This seems so obvious to me that I'm sure this must exist already, but I only find half-matching solutions.

Am I doomed to write something like this myself into something like cacti, or is someone out there already using something like this ?

It's a slow Friday. I am looking for software that allows me to: measure average download speed and variation in it for HTTP url's save these measurements preferably in a...