The last few weeks we have seen a number of distributed denial of service (ddos) aimed a dslreports.com. An attack would be from an hour to 48 hours. Over two weeks the attacker experimented with larger and different methods.

nac.net kindly provided me with a graph that exhibit one attack from their perspective.

At 13:00 the excess traffic started, over 600mbit more than normal. It continued and reached a peak of 1.1 gigabit over normal 7am the next morning, when it quickly ceased.




From our perspective, the attack looked like this. The graph above is the high spike at the first thursday on this graph, reading from the right.

Help! I lost a week of my productive hours to Ubuntu. First it starts with downloading LiveCD and booting it, then it becomes "I'll just try it in a partition" and finally you are chasing down minor tweak after minor tweak to get it almost, but never perfectly, "just right".

This morning I noticed a strange phenomena. Every hour or less, one of a bunch of random IPs shows up at the site, loads a random forum page, then does a site search for "Female Impotence", then vanishes.

Verizon could use this westell wirespeed modem as a rain guage for my zip code. Rain began at 14:07.

Looking through server logs just has to be done regularly. After ignoring mine for some time, I did my regular audit recently and found some unpleasant surprises.

I'm working on recreating and reloading our 'reverse index' that is used for site search. This reverse indexes 19 million forum posts and a few other smaller collections of text, generating one (weighted) record per unique "word" per object.

Back in May I had an "idea" for a new site and got sucked into looking at available domain names. If you want your new domain name to actually MEAN something you are stuck buying it from a domain name bank of some kind.

story continues..

Today's example of YACJL (Yet Another Cool JavaScript Library) is "as you type": form validation. Finally! a way to make sure your customers enter stuff exactly the way you want them to!

But wait.

This is part of our site "feedback" form.


This is some feedback we got:


Things that make you go .. hmm ..

The "Reviews" tab has been improved (I think), as well as showing an interesting stat on the relative frequency of good/indifferent/bad reviews per week. It also allows easy selection of reviews by entry of a single company name, and gives the same stats.

The "speed test stats" page has been improved to show just ISP name (not domain name), clicking on that name fetches the speed records for all known (to us) associated domains. Other minor format changes have been made as well. (You can still enter a single domain name to get a results graph).

I cleaned up the review format a little and added a button to make it a little more obvious how you can edit YOUR review.

I've not had much luck with efforts to add some commonly seen widgets to the forums here. The first was the Digg This/Number of Diggs widget.

I get dozens of these type emails per month. Until recently most of them are very short and generic.

The image below is the usual spam post that is captured by our forum spam filters. It came from a comcast IP, almost surely a rooted box.

I checked news.google.com to see the media reaction to the (bad) google Q2 financial results and found the story was not aggregated on any of the normal pages. It is clearly the top finance story of the late evening.

Life is like a box of chocolates, one never knows what page on the site one is motivated to fiddle around with next..

•Reviews page now has a wait spinner when you press the GO button to select different reviews. It also has a review search box.•Find Nearby reviews has the site-wide pager gadget, and some format improvements.•Any review page in the header under the 'six month rating' gets open-able and collapse-able sections for rating trend, and speed tests, plus some format improvements.

The addition this week of a new speed test designed to work without any browser plugins has proved popular with over 3000 tests run in just a few days. Over one third of users had iPhones and one quarter are iPhones on EDGE.

I got around to learning how style sheets can be destroyed and attached on the fly, so now the site builds and caches style sheets as it needs them (including color graduations, using ImageMagick if necessary). It was a lot of work to do something conceptually very simple: maintain one CSS template that can be re-used for any color combination, colors being the only thing that changes from theme to theme.

Before "web 2.0" sites used to order things, very boringly, by descending popularity.

"Web 2.0" ushered in "tag clouds", wikipedia definition, which look something like this:


How very rich and important the data looks when displayed that way! These web 2.0 guys must really be onto something.