How To Block Annoying Referrer Spammers?

April 1st, 2006

There's a very persistent (and very stupid) referrer spammer pummelling my blog and I'm getting sick of it - not least of all because at one point it actually managed to completely overwhelm the tiny little virtual server my blog runs on so that nothing else could access it. Given that I'm using WordPress with Apache, what's the easiest way to block it?

Java On Linux - Still A Disaster

April 1st, 2006

Someone really needs to sort this out once and for all. It's pretty simple to get Java installed so that you can run it - getting it installed so that the packaging system is satisfied that it's there involves various bits of voodoo and integrating it so that you can use applets in Firefox is still a pain. Can we just decide on a standard location for the plugin file so that it can be auto-installed, or maybe even just a standard config file that tells the JRE installer where the Firefox plugin directory is?

Of course, none of this would help me since Sun decided not to include the plugin with the AMD64 build of the JRE. Why the heck not?

Sigh.