The Democratic National Convention! Honestly, I haven’t witnessed this much verbal fellatio since… hmm, I can’t think of a comparable example. I actually think Gore is right, to be honest. I think we’ve got the beginnings of the end with global warming if we don’t do something drastic and do it now. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I need to see everyone in Hollywood kowtow in abject subservience to him. It was both nauseating and laughable and I really have to wonder how the whole thing came off to the red states. Do they broadcast the Oscars in red states?

Oh. Right. I live in a red state. Well that’s disheartening.

Just remember the remarkable words of Melissa Etheridge: we don’t live in red or blue states, we live in green states. Praise Gaea.

Were I to purchase a named sweater of the Hurricanes, a serious contender would have to be Kevyn Adams. A perennial fourth liner, Kevyn exhibits work ethic and tenaciousness on defense. He centered one of the two penalty kill lines last season that stymied the best powerplay lines in the league. An alternate captain, he was also a great ambassador for the game. (Picture is from a couple of years ago at the Skate with the Canes event. Kevyn was on skates, I’m not that damned short.)

Kevyn ends his 5-year stint as a Hurricane today in trade for a young defenseman from Phoenix. A trade had to happen given the Hurricanes played a 5-man defensive unit in the previous game with injuries to Wesley and newcomer Tim Gleason. And, frankly, Kevyn hasn’t seen the ice time he used to. Laviolette has his choice of penalty killers this season, with stalwarts Brind’Amour and Williams anchoring one and several ad hoc lines featuring Craig Adams, Chad Larose, Trevor Letowski and Eric Belanger, Kevyn hasn’t played the role he had in the past. Add to that the limited opportunities for grinding it out by the fourth line this year, and you see a diminished role. Hopefully he’ll see more play time in Phoenix.

Thanks for everything Kevyn, including the picture.

Things were just going too smoothly. I thought my SK2 plugin was doing dandy, catching everything it was supposed to. And it was, though my average daily take has been hovering about 5 or 10 now. What should have been obvious was that I actually haven’t received any comments recently. I finally discovered why: there was a domain blacklist that had a domain of, simply, “2006″. Due to the way the plugin handles domain blacklist denials, any attempted comment on any post that happened to be posted in the year 2006 would get denied. That’s what we refer to in the software industry as a “head slapper.” Well, that’s the most censored possibility of many.

I’ll have to redesign some things. mod_security should be able to squirrel me out of this, as it allows you to check particular fields within query strings, so I should be able to look at just the URL and actual comment text instead of the entire argument list.

The worst part of this is that the only way I found out was following a referral back to a forum post where some poor fellow mentioned that he was unable to post a comment. “Horseshit,” said I and decided to post a test comment. I got denied. Head slap. Sorry ava11 and whoever else.

Just FYI, I’ve been diagnosed with viral meningitis. That’s why no posts. Back ASAP.

You may have noticed that I’ve been “closed for business”, so to speak, the past couple of days. Let me explain and beseech the community to help me get to the bottom of this.

The day before yesterday I found my hosting account had been suspended due to me using too many server resources. Upon pleading and promising to research what happened I got my account unsuspended and I pulled up my logs. What I noticed was… odd. I initially thought it was some kind of DoS attack, but it really didn’t look like it. I saw someone visit a page — unfortunately my logs are currently gone — then start requesting all of my monthly archive pages at a fast rate, re-requesting them when they didn’t get the data fast enough. Apache was returning a 200 success code at them, but apparently they weren’t getting their data fast enough as the kept re-requesting. That was when the account was suspended.

Yesterday at about the same time my account was suspended again. The pattern was about the same. Someone — from General Electric, apparently — visited me from Google. The requests were perfectly innocuous. About 12 seconds following the final ordinary request, the same IP initiated a flurry of requests for all of my monthly archives again. What occurred to me this time was that all of these archives were only linked via <link rel="archives" ...> tags in the header of the page. So, something was fetching/prefetching all of those links programatically at a high rate of speed.

I’ve heard of Google prefetching under certain circumstances, but only for <link rel="prefetch" ...> or <link rel="next" ...> tags. This makes me think that someone is trying to one-up Google and accelerate browsing even more, but they’re doing it in a particularly hamfisted way. I’ve seen a couple of add-ons for IE6 — Browster and something called KybIE GetEmAll — that will prefetch pages for you but I have yet to catch them pulling the links from this type of link.

That’s where you come in. Do you know of an Internet Explorer add-on or some wacky version of IE6 that performs prefetching to speed up access? If so, please post in the comments about your experiences so I can investigate. I’ve since removed those (useless) link tags from my header, so I think I’ll be okay. I’ve also removed some features — you’ll no longer get “welcomed back” to the site and have an indication of how many and which posts and comments are new — and I’m trying a static caching plugin to boot to try to reduce my overall burden on the server.

However, this is literally my last chance. My hosting provider has assured me that if I get suspended again because of this behavior, I’m gone. And I don’t have the desire or the cash to pay for a more robust hosting solution. Those of you that may recommend other hosting solutions — and I would love to hear your suggestions, believe me — please bear in mind that my requirements are 1G storage, at least 10G of traffic to allow for growth, multiple MySQL databases and a cost that’s not too much more than $5 a month… if it ain’t got all that I ain’t interested.

Thanks for your assistance and patience.

Addition: If Else has a wonderful writeup on the perils of prefetching. Well worth the read.