Okay. So JournalPress isn't yet finished but every migration has to be taken in steps, and as an incentive to get me to hurry the fuck along I'm officially declaring this my final post here at the sk.log version of void-star.net. All future posts (and, actually, yesterday's as well) will now go via β.

Change is always painful, so those of you who read this via RSS may wish to point to the new feed instead (though it will be "temporary" until the full migration). Those of you who read this via LJ, IJ or JF won't be getting any direct cross-posts for a while, but will instead be receiving updates via Twitter posts (you know, that crap y'all ignore). Comments may, of course, still go on the respective journal entries. And for those of you who just land here randomly, or still live in 2001 and access this site via static links (yeah, I'm looking at you)… well, you'll be seeing an awful lot of this same post. But that's nothing new, right?

The actual full site migration is still scheduled for some time in the new year (and yes, all you Ulfrun detractors, it'll even have a new layout, and I'm sure you're all breathless in anticipation), so in the meantime you'll just have to deal with the mess.

Which is actually a pretty relevant metaphor for life, really.

Hey, maybe I can put up a long, ranty splash page about what I'm doing instead of just leaving this message up. With a progress bar! That's cool nowadays, right? I'm so hipnhappenin!

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Stolen from severedscythe. Because memes are cool.

1. Go to your bookshelf and take the 6 in from the left.
2. Post the title of the book in your subject bar.
3. Go to page 136, the 3rd paragraph, 3rd sentence and post it here.

Since it didn't specify which shelf on which bookshelf…

Occasionally, the business of discovering the knowledge of the ancients is better pursued under cover of darkness than with a lantern proudly outstretched to dispel the shadows of ignorance.

Fun fax I learnt yesterday; vs.hive does not work on IIS. Well. There you go.

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Check it out! I've got my first fanlisting.

Well, okay. It's actually not a fanlisting for me, per se; it's for vs.hive, and it's run by the lovely echo.

I'm still totally buzzing over the fact that someone actually thought something I did was good enough to open a fanlisting for, so excuse me while I go squee in the corner for a while.

In other news, void-star.net β is up. It's the "second phase" testing platform for the WordPress transition here at v-s.net.

At the moment, the plan is to continue to develop JournalPress locally. β is for "live testing", as well as for slowly migrating my posting habits, so I can get used to WordPress' feature-set (I'm typing this at β, for example, and will manually cross-post it later). β also interfaces with my iPhone, so I'll start to get a bunch of "look what I found on the road" type posts.

When JournalPress has reached a release state (probably sometime in early 2009), I'll archive the sk.log version of void-star.net, stick up the new WP version and get started on work on the post security plug-in. I figure all that should keep me busy into the new year.

Awesome.

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Sometimes, people out there ask me a question about void-star.net, and I have to give them the following answer; "The CMS made me do it."

Hi there, my name's Dee and – at the time of writing, at least – I'm one of the last blogs on Earth that doesn't use WordPress.

It's not my fault, honestly. When I started this site – way back in 2001 when it was called synthetickiss.com – WordPress did not exist. Hell, b2 didn't either. PHP, at that time, was a fairly new language and it'd only just started creeping hand-in-hand with its platonic life partner, MySQL, into the web sphere. I knew about the language because it was what Scot had picked to write the revision of grep with, and I figured that if a language was good enough for Scot then it must be A++ awesome.

At the time, the idea of using a database-driven engine for a blog was kind of novel. Most everyone at the time used Blogger, which was a very different beast than today. Essentially, you'd give the service your FTP details, and it would push out flat-text files for your posts and archive. Crazes of SSI and PHP includes came around and went, all attempting to add flexibility into what was essentially an inflexible system. The only other system available at the time was a Perl CGI script that I swear was called Greymatter but references to which I can no longer find on the Intrawebs. There was no PHP/MySQL solution.

So, in the latter half of 2001, I decided to write one.

It was called sk.log; the "sk" in honour of the acronym for my site at the time. I'd originally intended to release it publicly – and even did, for a while – but the development of b2 started shortly after I was mired in my own script, and rocketed to healthy popularity.

I stuck with sk.log for the next seven years. Despite its flaws – and there were many – and despite its complete and utter lack of anything even resembling an admin panel, I'd written it and, as such, it was idiosyncratically mine.

A while ago, I made a list. Kinda of like New Year's Resolutions, I guess, except it was, like, September. The list contained two things:

1. Join a gym.
2. Migrate v-s.net to WordPress.

I looked at my list for all of about a day, before chucking the whole thing into the "too hard" basket. Except… I did end up joining a gym. And I've been going, on average, five times a week for the last three weeks.

So that just leaves on thing left to do…

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Wow, okay.

Some of you may be aware that a while ago I decided it would be fun to register a domain called Azeroth .ME. It's a WPMU site, specifically created to host my own WarGirl blog so I could write long, tedious posts about World of Warcraft without it upsetting some of my friends who have some (understandable) issues with the game and really don't want to hear about it.

Plus, I just like the idea of MU.

Anyway, about two or three days ago I started to get my first splog signups. This is not unexpected; they hit MU installs pretty hard, and I know this from past experience. No fear, says I, and I went off to impliment the usual round of things I do when things start getting spammy.

That was about 9:30am this morning, after a few days of manually deleting the blogs got old.

Noon rolls around and I'm still trying to stop the flood. Nothing is working, and I mean nothing. Step one, Project Honepot. No dice, which, okay, maybe the IPs just aren't in their database yet.

All the signups are coming from .info domains, and after some Googling, I find out that theoretically you should be able to block those by adding /.*.info/ into the Banned Email Domains list. Still no luck. I'm starting to get a bit… concerned.

I went through no less than two different CAPTCHA plug-ins, with no luck. Grr. Dee angry!

Step back, try and think laterally.

It's time to do the nasty, and start messing about in MU's code. I don't like doing this in WordPress – since all my hard work will get blown away on the next update – but I'm kinda desperate here, so…

I locate is_email_address_unsafe() in wpmu-functions.php; this is the place the Banned Email Domains list is actually implimented, and I throw in the simplest, nastiest, anti-.info domain hack I can think of:

Yuck. But, I test it out and lo and behold, it does actually prevent me from registering at the site with a fake .info email address. Oh. Kay. Good work, I think.

Go off to brush my teeth, come back.

More splogs.

And here's where I start to get a bit… distressed (well, moreso). Because Something Isn't Right Here. This is a function I know is being called and it's still failing to stop these registrations. That's… not good. Not good at all.

So I poke around in the code a bit more, and add my anti-.info snippet in a whole bunch of other locations, just to see. And, for good measure, I rename wp-signup.php.

That was a while ago, and so far, so good. I've received two new user notifications but they haven't had any information included and no actual new users or blogs have appeared, which is good, and I can still register manually myself, so that's good too. My non-existant wp-signup.php page is getting hammered, so the sploggers are still trying, but for the moment it looks like they're beaten.

But it was way, way, way too hard. The CAPTCHA and the regexp on the email validation should've caught them. The fact that neither did… Jesus, it kinda indicates that there's some back-door user registration process and that's a real worry. The last MU update was supposed to be a security patch, but it looks like whatever they tried, it didn't work.

Hrm.

And, in related news, lol.

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

(But watch out, citizens, because in 2012…)

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So. I'm here to confess a secret. This is just between you and me, mind, so don't go spreading it around, okay? The secret is…

The secret is the fact that I kinda maybe sorta… have always liked the gym.

There, I said it.

It comes, I think, from high school PE. I loathed PE with a passion; we spent 90% of the time playing excruciating team sports which were nothing but an exercise (hah!) in humiliation and an effective way of turning less athletic persons like myself off the idea of physical activity for life. The other time was split between gymnastics (whoever thought that was a good idea needs to be expelled from the education system), barn dancing lessons (okay, if a bit "WTF?"), walking/running around the block (fun) and occasionally – if we were very, very lucky – walking down to the local gym. It only happened a handful of times; we'd get there, do about half an hour of BoxFit, then another half an hour of just mucking about on the equipment. I used to wonder why we didn't get to do that every class; it was self-directed, non-competitive, and no-one got "left behind". You could walk on a treadmill next to your friend who was running and it wasn't a big deal.

Alas, we were lucky if we got one week of gym visits a year. The trials of an under-funded public school, and all that.

Thing is, despite liking the idea intellectually, I've never actually been a member of a gym. We live within walking distance of one,¹ and recently, as part of ~Mat [h]'s health-kick, he joined up. Meanwhile, my parents started going to a different gym in Woden – one that recognises the members of the local gym on weekends and public holidays – and work changed its "healthy living" rebate.

So, the other week, I caved in and joined the local. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday last week saw me on a rotation of bike, weights, rowing machine and – when I was feeling adventurous – cross-trainer. If I can do five minutes on the latter it's a Good Day.²

One week down. I've got a three month membership, and if I recall correctly it takes something like that length of time to properly change a behaviour or adopt a new routine. So we'll see.

At randomredux's urging, I went out an "obtained" Fallout 3 on Friday night. I was always a big fan of 1 and 2 (especially 2, which as far as I know was about the first mainstream game containing same-sex marriage), and I tend to like Bethesda's stuff as a general rule, but I was avoiding it since Lich King is coming out so soon. But randomredux convinced me (I wasn't a hard sell), so…

Gameplay wise, F3 "feels" like Oblivion, in that the concepts around the HUD, menus and dialogue are similar. Visually it looks more… well, Silent Hill than anything. The world seems a little smaller than Oblivion, which I think in this case is a plus; Oblivion's open world I thought was a little too big, especially since I wasn't really keen on the mythos of the world and ended up getting bored with dungeon after dungeon after cave after dungeon.

In the Wasterland, at least, F3 mostly manages to avoid this by having most of its locations above ground. On the other hand, I have been finding it a bit light on side-quests; there are a lot of cool, abandoned locations but they seem to be almost exclusively populated by Raiders or (in DC itself) Super Mutants. I was especially disappointed when I decided to single-handedly take back the Capitol to find nothing really there. I mean, shit, it's the Capitol! I'm trying to re-take it! I killed every living thing in there and nada; no quest, no "good work for restoring the seat of our government", nothing. Same with clearing out the Mall.

This is how I normally play these games, see; I don't follow the plot, I set out on my own and see what I can get done. And I resent it when the plot disallows me my freedom. I'm not to the point with F3 that I'm ready to give up, but… but I get the feeling the game is forcing me into its storyline (which is… okay, I guess; better than Oblivion's, at any rate) rather than letting me get out and save the world on my own.

But more than that, I think my main complaint with F3 is that it's trying too hard to be twitchy. The V.A.T.S. is an interesting way of trying to make the game – which, let's face it, is an RPG – actually accessible to RPG players while still retaining its otherwise FPS-esque combat system. I dislike the idea of trying to put twitch into RPGs in general, so I'm a little lukewarm with the implimentation but I suppose I'm used to it coming off the back of Bethesda's other stuff. And, well, I cheat through these games something chronic, so it's kind of a moot point. Still, I feel there's a lot of F3 that's going to frustrate the "traditional", non-cheating RPG player.

The two things I really don't like in the are the lock-picking and computer hacking minigames. I didn't like this system when it cropped up in Oblivion, either, but at least there it was a bit easier to learn how and when to push up the tumblers. F3's seems a lot more like blind motherfucking luck (as there's no real visual feedback), same with the hacking puzzle. As far as I can tell, your actual Skill rating only affects what difficulty of lock you can attempt; it's still up to you, the player, to actually do the picking.

Here's a tip, Bethesda: If I have 100 in my Lockpicking skill, I don't want to be fucking about with broken bobby pins. I'm the fucking lock master, for godssakes! Either have a skill-based system or don't, this hybrid "ZOMG JUST LIKE REAL [insert-action-here]!" shit is getting on my nerves.

So. Ultimately I think I'd rate F3 somewhere above Oblivion and below Morrowind. It's been about a zillion years since I've played the prequels, so I'm not going to give it a rating versus those, especially since the gameplay is so radically different. But I like the world, even while I wish the story was a bit more expansive than just the main plot (though the obligatory not-evil evil-race guy, Fawkes, upped my squee factor exponentially). Bonus points: Ron Perlman, Liam Neeson and Malcolm McDowell. Cons: From what I gather, the game isn't open-ended (that is, once it's over, it's over), which is kinda a bummer. The whole "Chinese invasion" thing also feels a bit… awkward nowadays, considering, so I'm just going to give Bethesda the benefit of the doubt and assume they inherited it from previous canon.

Still probably the best RPG I've played in, well, a hell of a long time.

1. Ironically, the same place we used to occasionally visit in high school, albiet refurbished with new ownership, a new name and a new entry door. ^
2. For those of you who haven't seen them, they essentially simulate no-impact running; think of what you might imagine running on the moon is like, and that's close. Except a hell of a lot harder than you'd expect. ^

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Still not dead!

Just busy. Main thing: vs.hive has bumped its release number up to 1.2.1.

This is a very small bugfix based on something that popped up a zillion years ago at CodeGrrl and which I've had in my todo pile ever since. I've also added a "random site" link to the webring functionality (all of one line of code), as requested by Sue (again, about a million years ago).

I probably need to refine the bugfix code a little but… it should work. I think. For now.

In other news… not much. I finally capitulated to peer pressure and joined the local gym. I'm back on the WoW and (for the sanity of randomredux, mostly) have created a new journal in which to bitch about it. Work is very busy, and I'm updating Twitter a lot more than my more meaty blog, so if you're all dying to know what I'm up to, stalk me there.

One day you'll get another real blog post, but alas today is not that day.

Dee out.

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

Another one of those wonderfully sporadic and completely boring multi-topic blog updates? Don't mind if I do!

Mail Migration

I'm super-happy with the migration of void-star.net's email to Google Hosted Apps. The POP3 access is great for my laptop, the IMAP is perfect for my iPhone, the spam filters are beautiful for the catch-all address and the mailing lists work better than that bloody perl system that comes with CPanel ever did. In short, it's sweet. I'm not sold on the benefits of the other aspects of Apps (the Docs, Sites et cetera), but the mail is worth it. Even if it does mean Google is archiving all your stuff. Not like it wasn't doing that anyway.

Anyway, if anyone wants a (free) @void-star.net or @furced.net email address, give me a username and an existing email address (to mail your password to), and I'll set you up.

Material Goods

Season's changing, which makes me want to buy clothes. But… from where. I don't shop in stores much any more, but my usual online haunts are failing me. So, readers, where do you shop online?

I also bumped my hand against the back of my chair the other day and accidentally threw my Death Note mug across the room. I have a really bad track record with anime-themed mugs. Upshot: I need a new one. Anyone have any recommendations for something cool?

Plus I need to re-dye my hair and whinge at ~Mat [h] until he buys me some new RAM. Nothing new there.

SharePoint

After my SharePoint training a couple of weeks ago, I went through a fit of insanity and installed WSS 3.0 on my computer at home. For those of you who've never heard of it (which is probably most of you), WSS and it's "big (un-free) brother" MOSS make up Microsoft's CMS system. I guess it's sort of like WordPress on steroids, if WordPress was hideously ugly, aimed at the corporate market and tightly-coupled into Microsoft Office.

I installed it partly as a training exercise, and partly because I thought it's EDMS features would be cool for working on Urban Nordica in that hazy distant future where I get the time and energy to get back to writing. Alas, this was not the be the case. The system is up and working fine locally, but there's some r-tarded going on with its Alternate Access Mappings (Micro-speak for vhosts) and it keeps trying to resolve the external URL to the internal one. Which works great on my local LAN, and not so awesomely from everywhere else in the world. No idea what's going on there.

Oh, and my Office 12's WSS integration support appears to be broken for no reason at all. I ♥ Vista so much, srsly.

World of Warcraft

Shamefully, I started playing WoW again. Mostly at first because I noticed they'd finally released a Hawkstrider PvP mount. Seriously, I'd been saving my tokens up for one of those ever since BC came out and just when I spend them all… So a dozen or so games of WSG later (fuck but I hate WSG), I now have my Black Battlecock. It's awesome. Then I figured that I nearly had enough Honor for a new set of shoulders, and—

Goddamnit! Now I remember why I quit this stupid game!

Seriously, though, I recently heard WoW described (by one of the guys responsible for Warhammer Online, I believe) as a piece of "flawed genius". Which is really pretty well true. There are things I adore in WoW and things I loathe. Unfortunately, all the loves things are mechanically trivial (the art direction, lore and way the devs are constantly upgrading the UI based on player wants), while all the things I loathe have to do with the actual gameplay. And yeah, I'm starting to look forward to Wrath of the Lich King, but it doesn't look like it will be addressing any of the game's systemic flaws. The new quests and new zones will keep me entranced for a while, but as soon as I hit 80 I'm going to quit again. Because I don't grind, and in WoW there's really no point in endgame if you don't. And that's always been my problem with WoW, because I want to love it, but I never feel like I can actually achieve anything worthwhile. I calculate the amount of time it would take to get decent gear or a cool mount or whatever and it just ends up at, "Fuck that shit, I could be writing/drawing/playing other games/gardening/doing housework/sleeping/going to work/cutting my toenails." And the frustration of never achieving a state of satisfaction kills any enjoyment I might have otherwise found in the stuff I have done. Plus I kinda hate group content. Yeah, I know.

Still, we'll always have Diablo III…

Work

HP Service Manager 7 is a hulking pile of fail. Srsly.

Obligitory Crap Art

Finally, some art. This is all Zenntheartof: Smallville, because that's what I've been doodling most of lately. I need to learn not to draw right in the inside margin of my notebook, too.

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