flare posts

Some German bot(s) seemed to take interest in one of Cogneato's sites, Rockin Houston. The aging site is fairly inefficient with a lot of data, and the bot was causing high load on our DB server. I have implemented a PHP blocker for certain IPs, but I wanted something more broadly applicable. I made a rate limiting rule on Cloudflare that should block this type of behavior and prevent it from even hitting our server once the rule triggers.

I was reminded that one shouldn't proxy non-web servers through Cloudflare (at least on their free plan). Continue reading post "#3763"

I'm kind of excited that we moved the first site onto a new server setup at Cogneato. I had worked off and on on the setup for months before we finally went forward with it. It brings a new OS, new host, new software, and a number of other changes to our previous setup.

Just saw another satellite flare. This one was through clouds. It was bright f…

I believe I saw a satellite flare for the first time tonight. I saw a light moving across the sky about the brightness of a medium bright star, a little off of north to south. It suddenly started to get brighter and brighter, until it got well brighter than any star. It actually got a little halo around it, perhaps indicating some haze in the sky. For a moment, I started to think it was a slow moving meteoroid. But it began to fade at about the same rate it had brightened, until it went back to its normal medium star brightness. It then just continued on across the sky.

Sometimes I see sites with ASCII art hidden in comments in their source code. I've long admired the retro computer nerdiness of ASCII art. At times, I've wanted to add some to my site, but have been reluctant because of the extra bites it would add to page weight, the difficulty in making it look good, the lack of a subject I felt worth it, and the problems they can have with differing fonts and display widths. However, after adding an easter egg recently, I was more receptive to the idea when reminded about it by the source code of archive.org.

I spent some time this past weekend trying various different ASCII versions of my name. Some examples: