Abode of Clarus

Well after much discusion I will be migrating my Live Journal account over to this space...

To my livejournal members viewing, I wish you a welcome. If you have any input on this web-page, let me know.

My apologies for not being active online in the last few days. I've been sick in bed since Thursday night. I'll tell you when I'm alive again.

I think what this site needs is a nice custom Logo. Something in the form of a banner say 500 x 250 px. Something fitting and to the point that blends in well with my pre-existing color scheme.

Any ideas? A picture of me flipping off the world might be a little hard to do.

ohh.. did I mention I have no artistic ability? And it's hard to get a photo to blend into pre-existing colors...

Rizrar/clarus is now the NUMBER TWO site result for the phrase, "I like little boys" when you search using MSN's engine!

I am not making this up.

See for yourself!

So the domain register transfer is finally complete. I switched from register.com's hosting to go-daddy. Let me say, I am much happier with godaddy's prices, service, and user interfaces. It was a little wierd trying to configure your original IP, but other than that, it's leaps and bounds better. So hopefully the downtime is over and we can go back to enjoying my lack of posts!

On another note, this weekend is Otakon in Baltimore, MD. I'll be taking a plethora of pictures and trying to refrain from passing out from exhaustion. If anyone is going, give me a call on my cell phone.

How stupid of me, I missed my One Year Anniversary of AOC:rizrar.com Officially the first post come out Sept. 1st under the title "First Post". But I think the entire month of September was a ramping up of traffic and content.

It's been a good first year!
We've added many comic links on the right --->
Started a google Addsense campaign.
And went through oodles of downtime and server moves.

New year resolutions? I'm going to try and create a collection page so that rizrar.com will contain all the posts including AOC and Rizrar clan's page. I also want to try and migrate to a Linux box too!

Any great memories you want to share in the comments? Even better yet... Are we doing a good job?

Yea, in case you didn't infer this from that last little rant, my laptop is kaput which means I have no means of internet access other than my 7-4 job. So don't expect me to be answering e-mails or chatting on AIM until I get her back. They estimate 7-10 business days or approx. Oct. 14th.

I made some back end upgrades to Rizrar.com last night. It was good to get into computer anything again. It wasn't anything too fancy, but I was able to set up a VNC server as well as a Java enabled version. That allows me to telnet into my computer at home, and view / control the desktop as if i were there. This will be great because I can start downloads while i'm here at work.

I also upgraded the back end of rizrar.com to Movable type 3.2. Looking back on it, it wasn't that bad, but the gain doesn't seem to have been worth the effort. After some simple glitch solving though, I guess it was a bit of a learning experience.

Site news:

As some of you may know, I have been cursing my head off trying to fix this spam problem that I have been having. My ultimate goal was to install a captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) that would randomly display images and you would have to answer correctly to be allowed to post (see ISSF), but I have been having massive troubles installing the correct perl libraries to be able to do that. So as a temporary place holder, I have just made it a non-random text character. It might be changing weekly to make it a little more random, but if you look at the bottom of the comment posting box there is another text box that will tell you what you need to enter to be able to post a comment. As of today, just place an uppercase E in the box before you click post.

However, there are a few problems, that I am working on as a day to day basis:

- Preview does not work. You cannot pass the spam test
- Improve 'look and feel' (text size, box placement)
- Script to change text frequently
- Ultimatly a true CAPTCHA

If you're good at perl and don't mind VNC'ing into my box for a while... I would love the help in trying to get this CAPTCHA plugin I have compiled (BOB... OHH PLEASE BOB... HELP ME FOR THE LOVE OF GOD... I CAN"T PROGRAM THIS CRAP ANYMORE... I NEED HELP!!!).

But, on a good note, the ammount of spam recieve by rizrar.com has gone from 10-15 / hour to 0 in the past night.

When I was down in Atlantic City last weekend, I was greeted when I got home, by a down server. I went through all of he origional problems, restart the computer, check the port forwarding, check the ip address... but when push came to shove, my NIC was dead, and worse yet, it was my on board built in 1gb NIC. So, after a failed trip to BBuy, Vadim came to the rescue with a handful of circuit boards.

"Yo.. one of these should work."

So what's the best way to test them? Why place them all in at once and see what happens.

I will be taking down Razia (rizrar's server) tonight or tomorrow (depending on if I can stop playing twilight princess) for a new OS install and hopefully some bug changes.

As some of you might have noticed, Rizrar.com has been going up and down over and over again for the past few days. I've been trying to install Ubuntu Linux on Razia (the web server that hosts rizrar.com) and have been running into problem after problem. I really wanted to have it all fixed by the time I left for my next trip to the UK, but it's looking like that is less and less possible. I keep reverting back to OS X so that I can keep some semblance of up-time and I won't leave without a web server up. Worst Case, maybe I'll just set up something static.

If anyone is an Apache guru, I could certainly use some help. I'm a noob when it comes to some of this stuff.

Well I lost one or two entries that I had posted this week, but that's no big deal. I don't think there was anything of real worth in them anyway. I spent all last night in front of the tiny tiny terminal screen setting everything up and copying the data over from Os X to Ubuntu Linux. If there is anything you find you're missing (broken links, different feel) just let me know. I'll be adding things here and there as time goes.

Well, I'll admit I've been trying to write a post for some time, and haven't had much time to sit down and write, photograph something of value. I think I owe it to a few people to at least give a 'safe arrival' / State of the Union speach.