Alan's Ramblings

I'm part of a local Samba band, and now summer is here (hah!) we are in the thick of our gig season. We rely on performance fees collected over the summer to keep us going over the winter months. Yesterday we played at St Swithun's Community Centre in Wakefield. The weather was pretty poor, but at one point we had a group of 8-10 year old majorettes dancing round and round us as we played, which was kinda nice.

Today we played at Tameside Canal Festival at Portland Basin in Ashton. This event happens each year and is in aid of Willow Wood Hospice which cares for terminally ill people in the area. Just as we ended our first set it started to rain, so we played the second set inside the marquee. Danny who dances with us on occasion was there, and he got all the kids (and a few adults!) up and dancing round the marquee in a huge conga. To top it off, a bagpiper in full highland regalia who was also playing at the festival came in and started jamming with us on our last number. Mixing Samba and bagpipes is not entirely unknown - there is a band called MacUmba who specialise in Brazilian/Scottish fusion. I thought we played pretty damn well, and when we finished to cheers of 'More! More! Encore!" it topped off what was a really enjoyable gig. As soon as we finished James and I had to dash off to get him to his swimming test, so I'll find out if we managed to attract any new members at the next practice on Tuesday.

Posted by alan at 10:29 PM | Permalink

• bugmenot provides a pool of pre-registered usernames and passwords to commonly accessed websites. If you are feeling altruistic you can add your own for others to use.
• spamgourmet provides disposable email addresses - the first 3 emails sent to the disposable address are forwarded to your real email address, subsequent ones are discarded.
• mailinator provides another source of disposable email addresses, but with this site you don't even have to register first, you just make up an address and then go to the website to view the mails.

Posted by alan at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I took these photos a few weeks ago - we'd taken the kids to Lyme Park, a stately home near where we live, for an evening stroll and I took these on the way back from the Cage (a medieval hunting lodge in the grounds) to the house itself.

View across from the Cage to Kinder Downfall. Kinder is an extremely popular walking destination, the top is a flat plateau that is entirely covered in peat bog, so most people stick to the edges!	A tree on Cage Hill silhouetted against the setting sun. How artistic ;-)	The house itself. Originally Elizabethan, but heavily altered over the centuries. The house appeared as ‘Pemberley’ in the BBC’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice.

Posted by alan at 09:57 PM | Permalink

I've had 60 comments since I started this site, so I was more than a little surprised to see 200 comment notification emails in my inbox this evening - yes, you guessed it, I'd been blogspammed. Quite a few of my friends don't allow comments on their blogs for this very reason, but I'm loathe to be forced to do the same. I've had a few in the past, but tonight was something else - they all arrived within a ten minute period, they were spread across nearly all the entries on my blog and they came from a range of different IP addresses. At a guess I'd say that I'd been attacked by a swarm of zombie machines.

First thing was to take the website down to stop any more arriving and clean up the mess - MovableType really sucks at this, you have to go through each entry individually to remove them. I did think of exporting the blog content, removing the spam and reimporting it, but I suspect all the entry numbers would change, so any links that people have to the site would break. Half an hour and a case of incipient RSI later I was clean.

I've already deployed one of the more common countermeasures by renaming my comment script, plus my site runs under mod_perl so the URLs aren't the normal ones anway, but whatever hit my site was clever enough to figure out the correct URL for the comment submission script despite this.

I've now added a few more slightly more subtle countermeasures (no I'm not going to tell you what they are :-) and I'll see what happens. If I get hit again I'll have to seriously consider turning off comments, which would be a shame, but my tolerance just won't extend to deleting a series of spam tsunamis.

Posted by alan at 09:30 PM | Permalink

This blog is currently picked up by the PlanetSun aggregator, but I've requested that it be removed - the three people who have read my blog via PlanetSun should therefore bookmark me now! :-)

Nearly all the stuff on PlanetSun is related to Sun Microsystems, however this blog definitely isn't, it's mainly concerned with the Peak District where I live and the minutiae of my life, so I feel it looks out of place on PlanetSun. I know some people who have split their posts into two blogs, one personal and one job-related, but for me that kind of defeats the purpose of a blog (plus I'm too lazy to bother). In my case there's also not much stuff that is work-related that I can post - for the first half of the Solaris 10 release I was on the release staff, and couldn't talk about work stuff for confidentiality reasons, and I'm currently working on the project to release Solaris as Open Source, and I can't talk about that either - so I'm a little thin on work-related content.

To all you Sun bloggers out there, keep up the good work, and remember the guiding principles!

Posted by alan at 09:32 AM | Permalink