In the evening my shared host provider sent me an email in which he explained that they though there was an DoS attack directed at my page and that they had to move me on an isolated server, after a quick email discussion and me telling them that it was in fact the digg front page what caused DoS like traffic they put me back on line.

There are few things I could have done to prevent the site from going down, the best probably being getting a root or managed server instead of an shared host but that’s not a quick solution and as I think this is probably an isolated case not really necessary. Now the support team of my hosting provider gave me this great tip on how to get rid of all that incoming digg traffic which was taking down my site with some short two lined addition to my .htaccess-file.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?digg\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

These to lines will drop incoming traffic from digg and show them a forbidden instead of forwarding them to my index.php where a lot of load is produced executing or accessing php files. Some people will assume the site remained done, some will be just confused why they’re forbidden to access the site, as I know digg some will shout censorship, and those who know what happened will just enter the URL in their address bar and access it this way as only traffic from digg is blocked. Anyway, I thought there is maybe a more elegant way, which I didn’t use because I did not know what Wikipedia’s policy would say about this and to be honest I’m just too lazy to dig it up. It is possible to to redirect incoming traffic from a specific source, in this case digg to a completely different URL and one that would suit quite well is the Wikipedia entry about the digg/slashdott/etc. effect.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?digg\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg_effect$1 [r=301,nc]

Well those two are what I could have done, but when I noticed what was happening most of the traffic has already had happened and at this point there was nothing I could do.

I think I was quite lucky that I installed the wp super cache add-on for Wordpress which cached pages, making static URL files being served instead of executing the PHP files every single time which reduced the load at least to some extend but it clearly wasn’t enough and the server struggled every time a new page has to be cached.

Is there anything else more I could have done? I love the idea of a Wordpress plug-in that puts those lines in my .htaccess every time a set number of visitors from digg or other social media sites tried to access the page, I don’t even know if this kind of automation is even possible though.

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Wikipedia e.v. was forced to stop the forward because Lutz Heilmann brought this to court and explained that the Wikipedia entry about him contained untruthful accusations of him dropping out of university and engaging in dubious affairs within the porn industry, which apparently wasn’t the case.

When it became public that a member of the Party “Die Linke” (lit. the left) which inherited a lot of Members of the PDS successor to former GDR ruling Party SED the press and the general public was crying out loud, wrote about the lack of understanding of democratic principles by former East German politicians and the their Party. For one, the Party, while controversial had nothing to do with this, and her Member made use of his right as a citizen to protect himself from false accusations.

notice on wikipedia.de (German)

Being able to question wrong accusations is of course in favour of every German citizen, but what I want to criticise is how the law handles such cases, the domain wikipedia.de isn’t hosting any content, and shouldn’t be target of such rulings. Wikipedia is part of Wikimedia a non-profit organisation in the United States and therefore not liable under German law which the judge acknowledged and within his right ruled that the forward should be suspenend.

German Internet related laws are increasingly outdated and incredibly web2.0 hostile and while classic journalists, the printed media and most of television is being protected by the freedom of the press, and freedom of speech laws by some extend, Internet forums, social networks and blogs are not. There is a large number of lawyers basically living on suing their way through the blogoshpere.

Lutz Heinemann luckily abandoned his lawsuit, but he was in his right to sue the German Wikipedia e.v. and the authors of the entry about him but not every case is resolved this quickly without any notable damage to the German Internet crowd. But I doubt anything will change, as everyone seems to be focused on bashing the “Die Linke” instead of finally proposing laws that will help to deal with the reality of the Internet of the 21st Century.

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His idea is as brilliant as it is simple, he just quartered a video of Rick Astley which is not “Never gonna give you up” (kudos to you Mr.doob), and uploaded each of them. He now wrote some little JavaScript for his page so he could start, restart and pause the videos together and removed their Youtube chrome. The result is amazing, four videos become one, four times the resolution, four times the size.

Now I doubt that we will see a lot of such, or similar videos following this idea, and I doubt google is really fond of it but I’ve to admit I’d love to see a 32×32 vid on a large screen, just for the sake of it, ha!

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Access to them is pretty easy but not very intuitive since everywhere inside GMail you only get forwarded to your inbox’ atom feed. It would be more convenient if could subscribe to tags right on the page of the specific tag. But well, It works so yeah, no need to complain I guess.

https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom

https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/<label>

Are the feed urls, just add them to your reader of choice.

Wait, no, there’s a catch. Your feed reader has to support access of authenticated feeds and now guess which popular feed reader does not support this feature. If you guessed Google Reader, than your right. Google’s own feed reader can’t handle the GMail feeds. Firefox’ dynamic bookmarks do however support it, not sure about the Sage add-on though.

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Preparation

For your first try you should get a picture with one spot that you want to be coloured, and with a not too complex outline. A simple blossom for example. It is very important that the picture is converted to PNG and that it isn’t JPG. Why? Because JPG won’t work with transparency which we’ll use for the effect. So if the picture is JPG you can use the GIMP itself to convert it. Just open it and save it as a PNG file, easy.

Let’s get started

Open the picture, or yet better a copy of it in the GIMP. Backups are priceless.

Go to the layer dialog and duplicate the layer containing the image. In case you can’t find it, it’s one of the small buttons at the bottom of the dialog. This new layer will be our grey part of the picture.

Go to: Colors –> Colorify, select white and press OK

You should now have a grey layer in front of you coloured one, you can probably can guess what’s our next step by now: Cutting the front layer, so the coloured behind it is visible. Turn the opacity to 90%, so it’s easier to see where the edges are but remember to turn it back to 100% once we’re done.

Cutting

We’re doing this in two steps, first one is using the path tool to get most of the layer cut roughly inside the objects form. Just click around the edges with the path tool, and use create a lot of nodes so you can already get a lot of the work done before we move to the next step. When you covered the outline and press <ENTER> to create a selection from the path, now press <DELETE>.

Now the last step. Select the erase tool, zoom in <+> and erase the grey layer on the edges, not outside of them and that’s it. Quite easy, wasn’t it?

Picture Wild Rosa gallica Romania by Bogdan

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#1 Wait for the release before praising it

It seems there is some kind of mass hypnosis going on, every single tech site seems to be exited about what Redmond will bring to live a few months from now, forgotten is the Vista disaster, forgotten all broken promises of the Past. The OS isn’t released, it’s not done and has never been used in productive Environments by the average user. You don’t know yet how users will react, if adaption will increase compared to Vista and if users forgot about all the bad publicity it brought with it.

#2 Independence

Companies choose Linux because they want to be independent of one supplier, no longer be forced to change the way the work depending on how their OS wants them to but to make your OS work the way you want. While home users probably never touch the source code of any application they use on their PC, this is something larger companies can effectively use to create their own slick application and operating system for their own needs. Windows 7 will bring some modularity, but you will still have to use Microsoft’s choice of components not your own. More and more public institutions, especially outside of the United States don’t want to depend on foreign controlled infrastructure any longer and are slowly but steadily making progress adapting Linux systems. The German foreign ministry and the French Gendarmerie are good, prominent examples of this.

#3 cost of transition

One of the killer arguments against the use of Linux has always been the cost of transition to Linux powered solutions from the ones from Redmond. You had to train your employees, buy new service contracts with Linux companies, maybe get some new hardware and so on. Nonetheless a lot of companies and even home users made the switch, got used to the new environment and build upon in. The cost of transition works both ways, reverting back to solutions from Redmond will cost a lot of money in form of licenses, re-development of your own applications, training employees etc and of course your loss of independence as mentioned in #2 which will lead to even more cost.

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CCTV on an old building (a)

What sounds like a bad joke, is soon becoming reality when Great Britain increased measures of surveillance in order to keep terrorists from planing and executing attacks the general populace under government control. A nationwide closed-circuit television network of approximately four million surveillance cameras is already in place and which equates one camera for every fourteenth person in the nation.

They newest plan as being discussed with major Internet service providers will lead to the installation of black boxes on phone and cable network nodes tapping every outgoing and incoming information, saving raw data and sending it to one, central database where everything can, and probably will, be scanned to ensure ‘national security’. People will no longer have to act suspicious to get the MI5 or the police to listen to your calls or to track your mobile phone. Didn’t I mention they also talk about tracking mobile phones just for the sake of it? No? Well, they do.

One nation under CCTV. It reminds me of Half-Life 2 (b)

I think it is astounding that while the British government talks openly about their plans and even the non-tinfoil-hat-wearing part of the population knows about it there doesn’t seem much of an opposition, at least none that I’ve heard of, there is close to none public discussion about it. Most people talking about it are probably the mostly American users of Slashdot, the British seem far more concerned about foreign investors buying into the Premier League.

(a) “CCTV Camera” by “I see modern Britain”, cc-by-2.0-license

(b) “One nation under CCTV” by Jordi Martorell, cc-by-nc-nd-2.0-license

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Features and fixes in version 1.13:

• Fixed bugs relating to link colour switching in the theme options menu
• Added an option to disable image hovers in the theme options menu
• Properly cleared entry div to fix floated blockquotes and other floated elements
• Added automatic author comment highlighting

You can grab the newest release on the theme’s website

For those who don’t know Vigilance let me tell you about this great theme.

Vigiliance is a theme for the Wordpress blog software and has been released under the GNU GPLv3, it focuses on readability, a elegant default colour scheme and a couple of features you could expect to find in in commercial premium themes like a dedicated options page in the design-section of you admin panel. Options range from an easy way to change colours, the looks and header images of the theme to easy ways to include code for Google Analytics or Google Adsense without having to install a plugin or alter files of the theme.

One recent design change on my blog you may have noticed was the inclusion of thumbnails, and larger intro images only being shown on the main page but not on the single post page itself. This is a feature I’ve been working on with good buddy Robert who basically did most of the initial work and helped me to replace my own sub par piece of code.

Before I provide you with the code, let me explain what it does and how it exactly used:

Wordpress gives you the option to use so called Custom Fields for ever page and every post of your blog, you can use these custom fields to define meta data like some special keys which you can grab via PHP to use in you theme or for plugins.

We added the following keys to use in your Vigilance theme:

• thumbnail: 140×140 pixels
• entryimg: 594×140 pixels
• caption

Both image keys are used in the same way, you put either “thumbnail” or “entryimg” in the key field in you custom fields tab and enter the url as the value in the text area next to it. You should resize images to the given sizes beforehand or they will be resized automatically which might distort their ratio.

Setting a caption, like adding copyright information, links or license information to one of these pictures is just as easy, just enter caption as the key and the text you want to be used as the caption as the value, html code can be used to set links.

Now get to the code, the most important part of it is added to the index.php of your Vigilance theme right below the <div class="entry clear"> line:

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<?php $img = get_post_meta($post->ID, "thumbnail", true); $caption = get_post_meta($post->ID, "caption", true); echo ($img == "") ? "" : '<div id="thumbnail-caption"><div id="postthumb"><a href="'.get_permalink().'" title="read more..."><img src="'.$img."\" /></a></div>$caption</div>"; ?>
<?php $img = get_post_meta($post->ID, "entryimg", true); $caption = get_post_meta($post->ID, "caption", true); echo ($img == "") ? "" : '<div id="entryimg"><a href="'.get_permalink().'" title="read more..."><img src="'.$img."\" /></a>$caption</div>"; ?>

The next and last step is to add style information to your used CSS file which can both be the original one or the one of the child theme:

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#postthumb {
float:left top;
margin:6px 8px 0px 0px;
overflow:hidden;
color:#999;
font-size: 0.7333em;
text-align: right;
}
 
#postthumb a {
text-decoration:none;
}
 
#postthumb img {
background:#ffffff;
border:solid 1px #ddd;
width:140px;
height:140px;
padding:2px;
}
 
#entryimg {
float:center;
overflow:hidden;
color:#999;
font-size: 0.7333em;
text-align: right;
font-style: italic;
}
 
#entryimg a {
text-decoration:none;
}
 
#entryimg img {
background:#ffffff;
border:solid 1px #ddd;
width:594px;
height:140px;
padding:2px;
}
 
#thumbnail-caption {
float:left;
text-align: left;
overflow:hidden;
color:#999;
font-size: 0.7333em;
font-style: italic;
}

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It depends on your point of view, if you’re the industry this stuff is like magical pixie dust, it makes you greediest dreams come true. And If you’re the customer? Well, then you should be angry because you get screwed, not that this would be something never happened before but this time they got away with it and news about DRM-free music isn’t something too many people will be happy about, or at least shouldn’t be.

DRM usually works like this. Let’s say you just bought a piece of music, online. This information is getting stored in your account data, and on the general DRM server. The DRM server keeps track of what you do and what you’re allowed to do with your music, like burning it on CD three times, putting it on five of your PCs and carry it around on one two of your portable music players. OK, fine you can live with that. At least that’s what they make you believe. Your music, isn’t actually your music, you just bought a license that allows you to play the music. This license has to be renewed every now and then so you can still listen to the music, if the license is revoked or gets invalid for whatever reason, you can’t play ‘your’ songs any more.

On of the reasons licenses may get invalid is because the company where you bought your music might decide to shut down their DRM server. Maybe because they switched to DRM free music, maybe because they went out of business or maybe because of the Thermonuclear Holocaust. Just imagine, you’re standing where the Trafalgar Square used to be, talking with you zombie friends and suddenly you music stops playing because Apple decided that survivors, zombies and mutants don’t need to listen to their music.

The only thing you can do to remain in control of your music is to not buy DRM-infected music in the first place, if you already bought some, they’ll become useless at some point when you’re LPs and CDs are still working. My conclusion, don’t buy DRM, period.

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I’ve never seen selling shrink-wrapped packages of free software as a workable idea.

An idea was born

In the late 90s and early years of this millennium there were a couple of Linux distributions like Mandrake (now Mandriva) that created the first Linux distribution primarily for home desktop users, while not much of anything worked back then they still had this idea of a business model. A business model that wasn’t producing much of a revenue but at least, they didn’t stop trying. The Linux Desktop was born back then, and people started to realise that there is the possibility that one day people might actually consider using Linux for non-server, or non-scientific tasks.

One who had this vision of a Desktop for everyone, a Linux for human beings was of course South African Entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth. In 2004 he formed canonical, a company to finance, promote and support Free Software and like we all know created Ubuntu Linux, a distribution with the goal to bring Linux to your home based on Debian.

The new kid on the block

So, there was another distro in the wild that no one would care about, so what made Ubuntu as popular as it is today, the most popular Linux distribution?

Marketing, and some good ideas. Using Debian and with it vast repositories of software was one of those good ideas Debian at this point was the  epitome of software freedom and Ubuntu inherited this brand along many of its users that liked the idea of a distribution centred around the desktop, me being one of them.

Selling the cow

But the most brilliant move that was made was shipping Ubuntu for free around the world, right at your doorstep. People didn’t have to download the ISO-images, they got a nice looking pair of CDs and they were completely sold to this idea of Linux for humans, for everyone and getting it for free.

What followed was an uproar in the geeky, techy parts of the Internet, people heard about this new kid on the block. Blogs, news sites and forums talked about it, and soon everyone knew about Ubuntu, a new brand was born.

This huge resonance was something that other desktop distribution could not reproduce, perceived as old and boring, without a millionaire behind the scenes paying for the shipping, and offering everything they offered for free. They just could not compete with that.

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