Paul’s Journal

Bah, Humbug!

I just deleted 120 new blog spams on Christmas night. This is horrible. Can’t the Spam Bots give the world one day to relax?

I would hate to use picture verification to block the bots, as these have horrible usability implications. I think a better alternative is to ask simple math questions, like 2+2=?. I am not sure if these user verifications are the best, as the spam bots will keep getting smarter. It is just
another arms race.

I have been thinking of plugging my blog comments into SpamAssassin or another bayes type checker. These all see mostly targeted at E-Mail, but I assume with some small scripting magic, they could filter my blog comments.

Baring those Evil Spammers, I wish everyone a Happy Holiday Season Outside of New Richland Minnesota I am having an awesome time visiting with my entire familiy. This evening we had upwards of 25 people in the house, with laughter and smiles all around. Everything is perfect, except for the temperature outside, which is a brisk -10 �F or -23 �C for my non-fahrenheit viewers.

Good thing I use SSH. huh?

Wednesday Morning, Fly to Portland.

Wednesday Afternoon, take shuttle to Corvallis.

Thursday, Interview at OSL.

Thursday Night, take shuttle back to Portland.

Friday Morning, Fly to Louisville.

Hang out with my Uncles.

Saturday, Link up with Family, who drove 2123.94 miles from Spokane.


And that is only the first half of the trip. I think I will post the rest of it later. If I don’t make another post before the 25th, to you, the random internet reader, that I might not even know, I wish a Happy Christmas.

apr_memcache is a new client API for memcached.

Short Example:

    apr_memcache_t *memcache;
    apr_memcache_server_t *server;
    char* value = "hello world";
    int len;
    ....
    apr_memcache_create(p, 10, 0, &memcache);
    apr_memcache_server_create(p, "mcache.example.com", 11211, 0, 1, 1, 60, &server);
    apr_memcache_add_server(memcache, server);
    ....
    apr_memcache_set(memcache, "foo", value, strlen(value), until, 0);
    apr_memcache_getp(memcache, p, "foo", &value, &len, NULL);
    printf("result: '%s' len: %d\n", value, len);

The source code is in subversion. I am planning to add it as an SSLSessionCache backend. Ian is already using it in his mod_ip_bw.


Completely changing pace, the football game on saturday was awesome. Oh, dead week is starting. Hurrah.

Here is a scanned part of my notes from that day in class

Added two big features to mod_svn_view recently:


mod_authz_svn support! mod_svn_view can now use the same Path Based Authorization files as many mod_dav_svn users use.

This eliminates the need to duplicate access control. You can se one file to control both mod_dav_svn users, and all access from mod_svn_view. I don’t believe any of the alternatives like WebSVN, ViewCVS or Chora support this.



New Themes System. I want to make it extremely easy for end users to customize mod_svn_view, so now its even easier to create and manage themes.
Here is the new filesystem layout:

themes/
    blueview/
        style.css
        images/
            file.png
            dir.png
            parent.png

This is Configured in Apache using two Directives:

mod_svn_view will translate any svn-view urls that start with /*theme*/ to the active theme directory. For example,
a request for ‘/svn-view/*theme*/style.css’ will be translated to ‘/test/sv/themes/blueview/style.css’.

This allows one XSL file to be used for every CSS or image based theme. This eliminates the need for administrators to copy the CSS or image files into their DocumentRoot, as mod_svn_view handles all of the URL translation itself.



I am starting to get very happy with mod_svn_view. There are now only 3 things left on my list to fix before an initial public offering:

• Cleanup of Time/Date Display. I am not sure if I want to use the ‘20 Days Ago’ type string that ViewCVS has made common, or a more traditional ‘MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM’ format. The current one looks like ‘2004-03-18T18:37:48.276683Z’. This is a show stopper for a public release.
• Finish Blame Support. I am about 50% done writing my Server Side Blame code. As with the Authz support, the other alternatives do not support this.
• Pretty Icons. I am still looking for a good set of Icons that I can include in an initial release of mod_svn_view. I want the default/first theme to be really good. Just look at how many ViewCVS installations use the default theme. I want mine to look nice, and have the best features compared to any Web Based Viewer of Subversion Repos.

I will try to get up a demo server later this week so the world can examine the progress.




Edit: Trying to fix the formating of a >code< block insdie a >list<. Stupid BBCode.

Edit #2: Explain the file translation stuff better.