Jason Cosper

Blog

  • I ♥ SendTab

    Because I use multiple computers over the course of my day, I am seriously losing my shit over how awesome SendTab is…

    Now, instead of sending myself reminder emails to check out a site — which I do sort of a lot — I can hit a button and the page will be waiting for me in whatever browser I decide to fire it off to. It’s like living in the future!

    All I need at this point is an iOS Twitter client with SendTab support and I’ll be a totally happy nerd. They’ve got an API, so I guess it’s only a matter of time, right?

  • Something Bold, Something New

    In the little bit of spare time I’ve had over the past week, I’ve been helping Sarah set up a new site. It’s called Something Bold — and it’s totally awesome!

    Now I’m not just saying that because Sarah’s my wife and I’m trying to be a supportive husband. I actually love the shit out of the blog because she’s being unflinching about the realities of doing a wedding on a limited budget without making it look cheap. And since she’s basing the first week or two of posts on how we pulled our wedding off for under $12,000, I’m interested to watch her postmortem unfold.

    So check it out, add it to your feed reader, follow it on Twitter and like it on Facebook — especially if you’re planning on getting hitched any time soon.  You’ll be glad you did!

  • What Would Kubrick Do?

    I posted this above my desk today to serve as a sort of simple reminder.

    I’m not quite sure what it’ll encourage me to do (outside of perhaps using more Futura) but I’m sure it’ll get the creative juices flowing a bit more.

  • Oh My God — It’s Full Of Rainbows!

    Double Rainbow + 2001 = Instant win. [via]

  • Switching Things Up

    Yesterday, I quietly switched this site over from its old Apache server to the much more lightweight combination of nginx + XCache.  As someone who has worked with Apache servers for roughly 14 years now, the thought of moving my personal site to a server environment that I didn’t know how to troubleshoot in great detail was terrifying.  But you start becoming irrelevant the second you allow yourself to stop learning new things.  So I took a play from the Ol’ Jack Burton playbook and said “what the hell?“.

    Surprisingly, it’s still chugging along without any complaints.  Most of the thanks for that goes to DreamHost‘s default nginx config and easy to follow tutorial tho.

    All I really needed to do to get it going was:

    • Select the server from the Private Server configuration menu in the DreamHost web panel.
    • Wait for a configuration update to run on the server.
    • Flush my local DNS cache.
    • Check the HTTP headers to verify I was seeing the right server.
    • Comment out a few conflicting mod_rewrite rules from .htaccess.
    • Copy and paste new rules into my personal site config file.

    And while that might seem like that list had a bunch of stuff in it, I can honestly say that it took no more than 30 minutes to make those changes.

    The only weird thing that has happened so far is that it had a weird memory spike last night — but that dropped off this morning for no discernible reason.  Since everything has been level after that, I guess I’ll have to keep an eye on my graphs and make sure it’s not a nightly thing…

    P.S. Since I’ve never been one to leave “good enough” alone, I’m going to keep making tweaks (and maybe start piling on a few more active sites) to see what nginx can do. Expect more nerdy updates on this eventually.

  • Bands I Want To See In 2010

    While my list is a little shorter than in years past, I’d be perfectly happy if I got to see all (or at least most) of these bands sometime in the next 365 days.

    • The Hold Steady
    • LCD Soundsystem
    • The xx
    • Tokyo Police Club
    • The Pixies
    • Eels

    Who’s on your “must see” list this year?

  • Left 4 Dead: NES Edition

    The only thing that makes me happier than knowing that this exists is knowing that it should be available for download in January of 2010. Anyone have any suggestions for good NES emulators for Linux?

  • Crowds Have Terrible Taste

    I totally missed this video when it made the rounds months ago — but after watching it, I think Christopher R. Weingarten is my new hero. Well, maybe not my hero. But at least he’s my favorite music critic now.

    If topics like crowdsourcing and its effects on criticism interest you at all, the video above is totally worth ten minutes of your time.

  • Karmic Koala

    An (apparently) unnecessary reinstall of Ubuntu 9.10 allowed me to clean up my netbook a bit. Fortunately, the fresh install was a snap. All I had to do was copy the few files I wanted to keep into my Dropbox, wait for it to update and reinstall from my USB keychain drive with impunity.

    While it’s still no OS X — sorry Linux nerds — I’m really enjoying the interface refinements and bits of polish. I can’t wait to see what improvements 10.04 will bring.

    P.S. The totally awesome wallpaper is from kozyndan. If you like it, go downolad it.

  • Rekismet

    After examining a customer’s 150,000+ row wp_comments table at work yesterday, I realized that they’d managed to let WordPress approve a massive amount of spam.  Since there was no way I was going back thru all of that by hand, I knew that I had to come up with something clever.

    Fortunately, running your already approved comments thru Akismet is pretty easy.  Well, that might be a bit disingenuous. It’s easy for the geeky types that are comfortable with the MySQL command line and raw queries.  So if you manage to fall into that category, feel free to give this a go…

    1. Fire up your favorite MySQL management tool and feed the following command to your WordPress database:
      update wp_comments set comment_approved=’0′ where comment_approved=’1′;
      This tells WordPress to take any comment already flagged as “approved” and set it to “pending”.
    2. Visit “Comments” in your WordPress dashboard.  You should notice that you’ve got a bunch of comments under “Pending”.
    3. So long as you have Akismet installed, you should have a button marked “Check for Spam”.  Click it.
    4. This step is going to require some patience.  You’ll need to wait while Akismet does its thing.  This means chilling out while watching your browser’s “loading” animation spin for a little bit.
      1. If you have a lot of comments — and we’re talking about thousands — you might run into your server’s PHP execution timeout. You’ll know this has happened when you see either a 404 or aren’t redirected back to the “Comments” page.  Don’t panic.
      2. If you run into a timeout, simply press “Back” in your browser and click “Check for Spam” again.  When the number of comments listed under “Pending” stops decreasing, you’re really close to being done!
    5. Go back to the MySQL management tool you used in step one and give it one last command:
      update wp_comments set comment_approved=’1′ where comment_approved=’0′;
      This takes the “pending” comments and sets them back to “approved”.
    6. Congratulations!  Your comments are now much tidier and you’ve helped stamp out the spammers who’ve gotten past your defenses.  Since your copy of Akismet has just done a bunch of heavy lifting, you might want to consider giving it a bit of a rest by implementing something like Hashcash as your first line of defense. When it comes to fighting spam, they’re a great combination.

    If I can hack together a way to work around the PHP execution timeout issue, I’ll do my best to make this into a simple to use plugin.  Since I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, I’d prefer it if the lazyweb could beat me to getting that done.  Any takers?