I found out the source of all the spam by looking at my referrer logs: all the new hits on my site were coming from http://r10.net/dmoz-ve-diger-dizinler/663993-kisa-sureli-dofollow-paylasimlari.html. In case the link gets taken down, here‘s a link to the content of the frontpage (PDF).

Anyway, I deleted all the spam comments and disabled commenting on the site for a little while. Commenting is back up now, but I’ll be keeping a close eye on things. It pisses me off that people are making money off of causing me work.

The person who posted the initial links to my site, inviting other to spam it, was “Serdal_Altundal”.

The full press release is available here:

http://www.davidlagrand.com/index.php/media/archives/46/david_lagrand_discloses_finances_and_pledges_to_never_become_a_lobbyist

Jay Gabler from the Twin Cities Daily Planet wrote a piece about Busted Magazine, referencing and linking to my initial “expose” about the magazine and its ownership, and a later article in which I call the guy who runs it, Dan Oakley, a dick.

It makes me happy that more and more people are finding my website and my writing useful.

Edit June 9, 2010: I’m not sure how or why I forgot to link to the Twin Cities Daily Planet article earlier, but here it is:

http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/blog/jay-gabler/busted-magazine-20-pages-twin-cities-mug-shots-just-1

Edit June 13, 2010: Mentioned in the Dallas Observer. See http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2010/06/now_that_dallas_got_busted_its.php

If you’re installing Virtualmin GPL on the ami-3c56b255 Centos5 instance, you’ll find that running the regular install.sh script doesn’t work. It’ll give an error something like this:

FATAL - Fatal Error Occurred: Something went wrong during installation: 0
FATAL - Cannot continue installation.
FATAL - Attempting to remove virtualmin repository configuration, so the installation can be
FATAL - re-attempted after any problems have been resolved.
FATAL - Removing temporary directory and files.
FATAL - If you are unsure of what went wrong, you may wish to review the log
FATAL - in /root/virtualmin-install.log

Anyway, all you need to do to fix it is to install the openssl-devel package: yum install openssl-devel

The Virtualmin GPL install will work just fine after that.

Let me know what you think, or if you know the source for one of the images I wasn’t able to find a source for.

Here’s how I found the problem and how I fixed it.

We first knew something was up when Firefox started displaying this warning when trying to access the site:

Using Google’s Webmaster tools to find out which pages were infected, I traced the problem to OpenX (instead of ExpressionEngine or other software) using the Web Developer plugin for Firefox. Here’s what worked for me:

Here are a couple tools I’ve found that make it a little bit easier to see what types of comments a user tends to make. These should help moderators and other interested individuals in figuring out who’s constructively contributing to reddit.

Reddit Score Card
Gives average comment karma per word of a user’s last 25 comments

AreYouATroll
Test to see if you’re a troll or not. (Alright, that part’s not accurate, but the percentage up/downvotes are useful.)

Reddit Comment Finder
This is a simple reddit comment finder script. It’s useful, but it doesn’t have many features, although it’s written in just 5KB of python, so it’s easily extensible.

Know of any other good reddit tools? Post them in the comments - I’ll add them to this list once I test them out.

I bought another monitor today, and found that it was actually quite easy to set up with KDE and Kubuntu (Karmic Koala). I have an ATI Radeon HD 4830, and I use the proprietary drivers.

Anyways, here’s what worked: instead of doing it KDE or Ubuntu-style, I set the monitors up with ATI’s AMD Catalyst Control Center. If you have the fglrx drivers installed, then you probably already have it: run it with

from the command line.

You’ll get something like this:

Anyway, make sure your screens aren’t clones of each other in the Display Manager part. That’ll let you enable xinerama under Display Options. Apply the settings, restart your computer, and you should have two fully-functioning, non-cloned monitors!

My xorg.conf is below, just for reference:

I particularly like the search function. It’s actually quite useful.