Amie and I are headed down to Key Largo for a few days of R&R. We're bringing the Hobie Cat, which should be quite fun, exploring Florida Bay. The weather looks to be pretty decent over the next few days, so we'll probably spend all our daylight hours on the water.

I thought it was bad enough when I started getting 400+ spam emails every single day delivered to my primary inbox. Long ago I began trying to deal with this with a handful of simple regular expressions, but quickly decided that such an approach required too large of a continuous investment of time. Researching the alternatives, I finally moved on to Spamassassin, and though not a perfect solution, have managed to get it tuned to where I don't usually get more than 1 false-positive a month, and a reasonable amount of false-negatives. Having recently upgraded to version 3.0, it appears things have gotten even better.

Now there's a new annoyance beginning, spam comments on KernelTrap. As of yet there haven't been that many (no more than one or two a week), but I suspect it's only a matter of time. Eventually someone will write a custom tool that can automatically post spam to Drupal-powered websites. Inspired by my experience with Spamassassin, I decided to write my own spam filter in PHP using Bayesian Logic. It turned out being quite simple, only taking a few hours last weekend to get something moderately function.

I'll be offline again for a little while. Another hurricane. It's again predicted to make landfull a bit north of me, but they're never really sure. My computer is going back into plastic bags for now.

I spent the weekend down in Miami volunteering with the ODN. Though not Buddhist or especially religious myself, I got involved to help out with H.H. the Dalai Lama's recent visit. A very fascinating and inspiring three days.

I'll be offline for a few days, more or less. Most of Florida is under a hurricane watch, and I've been busy battening down the hatches. Looks like boards are going over the windows today, and the computers are being shut down and stored away in plastic. Being just north of Ft. Lauderdale, I'm a bit south of the predicted landfall. The KernelTrap server itself is on the West coast though, in California, so it'll be fine.

It seems that we're getting our fair share this year. Another big one headed right this direction. Still trying to decide if we want to jump in the car and get away. But where? It's 18 hours to the nearest somewhere out of the possible path. And that's the middle of nowhere.

My personal feeling is that it's smarter to stay were you know. All indications are that this one will hit ground north of us. But how much faith do I really have in the ability to predict weather? Such fun.

United for Peach and Justice led a march of somewhere around 400,000 protesters in NYC today. I read that Bush Dick Colon and the rest of the body parts assembled upwards of 20,000 police and feds for protection. Almost as if they're scared to be among the general populace. Perhaps afraid that their lies, deceit and hatred will catch up with them? Should make for an interesting Republican National Convention.

A long time since I've managed to update this website. Fortunately Amit has been able to post a few stories in my absence, and there's been some activity in the forums. I've been ill, using my spare time to rest and recuperate. Still not fully recovered, I'm starting to catch up on the various kernel development mailing lists, and hope to start posting to the site again with relative regularity.

In what should for the most part go unnoticed, KernelTrap has been updated to Drupal 4.4.1. The only change that will likely bring comment is the removal of the "Remember me" button upon login. While a nice feature, it was causing other annoying problems due to the way it was implemented, such as when leaving comments to take a reader to a completely different story. I'll have to address the login issue another day.

Woke up this morning, following my normal routine. Got to the KernelTrap potion of the routine, and found that the webpage wouldn't load. The server returned pings, I could log in via ssh, httpd processes were running, but my browser wouldn't connect. I restarted the apache server, but same problem.

The logs made it clear: I'd had 9 hours of downtime. Awful!

As to the problem at hand, I finally resolved it all by upgrading http and ssl to the latest versions, aware that both had DoS type bugs in the versions I was using. While at it, I finally upgraded from the 2.4.21 kernel that I'd installed when I first sent the server to California a year ago, to the current stable 2.4.25.

This website is undergoing an upgrade today to Drupal 4.4. Some things are likely to break, and I'll be working to fix them. If you notice anything wrong, please leave a comment here to let me know -- don't assume that I'm aware of it, no matter how obvious it may be.

For the most part, the noticeable changes should be minimal. In upgrading the theme, I had to make a few changes - let me know if these cause any display problems on your browser. In the long run, the upgrade will offer more power to the site, so it's worth a little pain. Unfortunately the 'All' link is temporarily disabled -- I hope to re-enable it soon.

I'm back in town, resubscribing to kernel development mailing lists and starting to make time to read them and catch up. Hopefully I'll be able to start posting regular stories again within the next day or two. This weekend has been spent at a Folk Festival, helping my girlfriend with her booth where she's selling handmade soy candles and incense. Also stopped by her 'day job', Atlantic Coast Kayak, and test paddled one of the sleek new models... Love at first sight.

I will be out of town and away from my computer through January 15'th, 2004. During this time, I will be unable to maintain KernelTrap. Fortunately, several readers have volunteered to help moderate these pages in my absense, helping to ensure that new content continues to be posted. If you wish to help out as well, go to the front page and follow the directions toward the top describing how you can submit news stories.