I better post this while I’m thinking about it. The last couple of weeks have been way too busy. After a slow December, business really picked up in January and based on the number of new proposals we’ve been cranking out, it hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down yet. Anyway, what’s happened in the last couple of weeks that’s worth telling you about? Hmmm…

I sent a mod_virgule patch to Raph a week or so ago that fixes the duplicate article problem which has been plaguing Advogato. Don’t know if he applied it or not but I’ve been using it on robots.net for a while and haven’t had any dupicate posts.

It actually snowed here in Dallas about a week ago. Real snow like we haven’t had in years. Unfortunately, it was typical Texas weather – 60F one day, heavy snow and 30F the next, and back in the 60s again after that. So most of the snow was gone within 48 hours. But I managed to shoot a few nice photos of it before it melted.

In the never-ending fight to block spam, I’ve finally found a suitable replacement for ORBS. After the demise of ORBS, a whole pile of ORBS clones sprang up and I’ve tried a lot of them. Most had tiny databases, bad data, got too many false positives, or were otherwise unsatisfactory. ORDB, however, has turned out to be the best of the bunch; as good or better than the original. Now, if I could just figure out how to pronounce the name! In addition to ORDB, we’re using SPEWS, the Spamhaus Block List, and our own private block list. We usually block 500-600 spams per day with the current setup (about 90%).