Log

I've released Templum v0.4.0

Templum is an extremely lightweight, simple yet powerful and fast templating engine for PHP. It re-uses the power of PHP itself for rendering templates, but provides additional features making it easier to write templating code. Rendering templates using Templum is very fast; it approximates native PHP rendering speed for include() statements.

This release features:

• Some small bug fixes
• Documentation updates
• The ability to include other templates in a template

Download instructions here.

There's a web-crawler out there called VoilaBot, which is hammering my site with needless crawls and which appears to ignore robots.txt files completely. Apparently it's a crawler for a french portal/search engine. If you need to block this bot from your site, there are two things you can do:

Firewall

If you've got a firewall on your box, you can deny access to the two IP ranges 81.52.143.0 / 24 and 193.252.149.0 / 24. That'll get them off your back permanently. For Linux machines with iptables firewall, the following will do the trick:

iptables -A INPUT --source 193.252.149.0/24 -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT --source 81.52.143.0/24 -j DROP

htaccess

If you don't want to firewall the bot, you can deny them access to your website by putting a .htaccess file in your web root directory with the following contents:

order allow,deny
deny from 81.52.143.
deny from 193.252.149.

Don't trust VoilaBot to honour your robots.txt file; it won't.

My personal website, Subversion, the projects website and most of the other stuff is finally back online. It disappeared somewhere in April, after another harddisk crash. This time, three of my machines decided to go belly-up all at the same time. All three were in different locations, spread across the country.

The worst thing was that I use those three servers as online backups for eachother. Imagine my surprise when all three went down with defective harddisks at the same time. After that, I couldn't really bring myself to restoring everything, so I put the harddisks in a cupboard somewhere and decided to go without a website and asorted other junk for a while. But, I've managed to recover almost all of my stuff from one harddisk or another, and now most of it is back online.

Let's hope it stays that way for a while.

I've added some photos I made to my homepage.

The Zoltar machine (hosting electricmonk.nl and a host of other domains and stuff) has been down for about two weeks. Everything appears to work again now. The CPU fan was dead and then I made a stupid mistake with the network configuration so Zoltar couldn't be reached when he was racked back in. That in combination with various logistics problems caused the long downtime. My apologies to everybody who was affected by it.

I just finished writing an article for my blog. It took me most of the evening. Researching, writing, proof-reading, rewriting, linking to articles, etc. I click save, and only one-third of the article shows up in WordPress. The rest? Gone. Hours of my hard work? Gone. Careful proof-reading, rewriting, analysis, unbiasing, rereading? Gone.

THANK YOU WORDPRESS, YOU PIECE OF SHIT SOFTWARE!

I'm guessing it's wordpress' auto-save functionality. This isn't the first time this has happened (it happened about six times so far, always with articles that I spent the most time on), but it will be the last. This will be the last article I ever write using WordPress. I hate the product, and from now on, I will use every means at my disposal to discredit it as a useful piece of software.

WordPress sucks, and you shouldn't use it! Spread the word people!!

I'm starting a conversion of my blog to MvBlog tomorrow.

Well, the big day is finally here. I revamped my homepage.

Well, the blog is back online. And it only took me a year and 5 months! I'm now running under WordPress. I'd be using MvBlog, but it's not as mature as I need yet. WordPress offers lots of plugins such as Wiki-style editing and syntax color highlighting; two things I absolutely need.

Converting all my old blog entries was quite a challenge. I wrote a little script which read from the old database, converted some stuff and then wrote them back into the wordpress database. For some reason though, the inserted entries would not list. It took me almost 15 minutes to figure out that I had written post_status = 'published' instead of post_status = 'publish'. Whoops! Then I couldn't get source code from my old log to display properly in the WordPress log, so I had to write some more converters that mangled the old BBCode I used to use in my old blog before converting it to WordPress.

Ah well, it's up and running now, and I hope I'll find some time to actually write articles for this thing.

Update: Wow! WordPress' editor really really SUCKS! It's basically impossible to get quotes in there right. It doesn't allow me to use my remote editor (Vim), unless I'm on the code tab. It keeps removing spaces, empty lines I insert, tags it doesn't know, etc. This is one bad piece of shit. I'll probably get used to it though.

Nobody'll probably get a chance to read this because not before long my connection will undoubtedly be dead again, but for the moment things seem to working again. I hope, I pray, I beg for my connection to actually keep working, but I'm not holding my breath.

Anyway, everything will soon be moved over to my new server which is hosted behind a real internet connection.

You'll probably not notice it, but I updated my homepage. Every page now has an index (except the Home page) and I rewrote some parts of the most import page on this site. The Links page is gone; it was outdated and I was lazy.