I’m actually watching a sporting event on TV right now … well, slightly time shifted, as it’s recording on the the TiVo.
I’m watching (as you might have guessed) the Tour de France.
I’m honestly not following most the technical details, but it’s kind of interesting.
Unfortunately, the detached perspective of watching on TV makes it hard to judge the significance of various aspects … like speed, climbs, head winds, etc.
Still, kind of interesting. I’ll keep watching for a while.
You may have heard a variation of this at some point …
A lazy programmer is not necessarily a good programmer … but a good programmer is a lazy programmer.
I fully subscribe to that statement … good programmers are always looking for ways to make their jobs easier. Either by automating some repetitive function or making some functionality easier to change in the future.
Recently I had to do some re-branding on one of my eclipse based applications. One thing that I had to do was update the splash screen that was displayed in the Eclipse RCP to display different text.
We had the basic graphic and all we needed was to have our designer update the text that was displayed on the bottom. I sent the graphic over and the new text and the designer sent it back to me.
The problem was, I got the text wrong. I knew I was going to have to go back to the designer and ask her to redo the graphic. Luckily she’s a very nice person and never had a problem with this.
For anyone who runs a mailing list and has gotten pummeled recently with a rash of subscription attempts, they may be coming from mailbait.info.
A while ago I blogged on how to block mailbait, but it appears they have changed their host.
Their new host is ‘themailbait.bitbucket.org’.
I suggest you update your web server configuration to block any referrer that references the word ‘mailbait’ in the URL.
Here’s my new httpd.conf entry to block mailbait…
SetEnvIf Referer mailbait mailbait Deny from env=mailbait
Well, I did it. I rode a metric century (100 km / 62 miles) for the 2013 Chicago Tour de Cure!
That’s the longest distance I’ve ever ridden in a single ride.
I also raised $5,291 for the ADA. That made me a Champion on a Mission. A big thank you to everyone who sponsored me.
I’m super proud of myself for both achievements!
I was quite worried about the weather. The forecast was for rain, but thankfully the meteorologists were as accurate as usual, and the weather was perfect. Sunny, warm, but a bit cool at the start. Perfect riding weather.
I rode with my friends Marty & Steve. Due to allergies, lack of sleep, and the remnants of a bad cough, Steve wasn’t able to finish. Steve did do 45 miles which, under the circumstances, was pretty darn good. Marty and I finished the ride with few problems.
Below is a map and statistics of the ride from Strava…
As part of my fundraising effort for the Tour de Cure, I registered the domain “ridewithdavid.com”. I wanted an easy to remember domain that I could use as a portal to the fundraising page that the ADA provided.
So I created a basic web page that would redirect the visitor to my fundraising page after a few seconds pause.
I designed the page with some graphical elements and got it to a point that I thought it looked good.
The problem was, while the page looked fine on a normal desktop or tablet browser, it looked horrible on a mobile phone browser.
Here’s a screen shot of the page that is displayed on a desktop or tablet browser … notice the two graphical elements on the sides?
If you run a wordpress blog, you really should be aware that there is a global attack on wordpress blogs going on.
It’s coming from a bot net and is an attempt to find blogs that have their admin account enabled with easy to guess passwords.
I noticed the attack a couple of months ago when, while watching my web server log scrolling by, I noticed a significant number of attempts to use the wp-login.php script from random IP addresses.
A bit of research turned up information on the global attack.
Obviously I wanted to do something about it to protect my server.