Vidar Hokstad

I love throwing out code

Thu, 14 May 2009 22:27:11 +0200

... it usually means putting something cleaner and smaller back in. I'm much happier when I've cut code from an app than when I've added it - adding code is easy; removing code is like a game of Jenga, trying to see how much I can remove without making everything tumbling down (not that I aim to go to the brink, mind you).

Just started thinking about that because I just ripped out lots of CSS (thanks to Blueprint) and a good chunk of code from my blog - hopefully it looks nicer at least. I've also replaced my homegrown comment system with Disqus. I've kept the old comment system for now. If (when) I decide Disqus works well enough I'll migrate the old comments and tear that out too.

If you come across something that is broken (this was a quick and dirty spur of the moment thing, sans unit tests...) please let me know.

Trackback / comment spammers still at it...

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:21:18 +0100

It is more than a little bit depressing that after a two year hiatus, I still see hundreds of hits a day to my old Movable Type comment and trackback URL's (that helpfully only returns 404's now). The question is of course how soon someone picks up on my new comment box, though I hope that these assholes don't waste too much time manually adjusting their bots.

If they do, it's of course CAPTCHA time.

The countdown begins...

UPDATE:

Turns out that including the string "trackback" and/or "comment" in a post makes it attract comment spamming bots like honey... After I enabled comments I've had one attempt at posting comment spam to all my other post combined, and about 15 to this post. One or two of those might have been pranks, given the content, but most of them are clearly not, including a couple meaningless ones that didn't include a link - popping them into Google showed they exact same strings have been posted all over the place, possibly testing a comment spam bot.

The perils of shared testing and live sites...

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:30:49 +0100

Note to self: Don't take down Apache because you brazenly decide a Ruby webserver will do when your Subversion repository is accessed via an Apache webdav handler.

My blog, version 2

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:30:44 +0100

I started and ended my first blog back in 2005. What caused the demise of my blog later that year was the workload I ended up with as we started preparing to launch Edgeio during evenings and weekends while I was still at Yahoo.

It's time to give it a go again, though I'm still extremely busy... Nothing like some pressure.

As last time I expect I'll end up writing a mix of everything on my mind ranging from random sites I like (though the Stumbleupon feed on the right hand side will take most of that) to politics, technology and of course extreme geekery (I have a lot of notes on a hobby project to bootstrap a compiler - expect lengthy posts with copious amount of Ruby and x86 assembler at some point...)

I also expect to make the occasional post about the company I work at, a great London web development agency called Aardvark Media, as well as any startups I meddle with - currently SpatialQ, where I'm on the board, and Skoach (where I'm only providing occasional advice)