Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

As mentioned last time, my trouble with Apache didn’t end with mod_rewrite rules on my blog. I have Apache installed on my home PC (firewalled off) and have been receiving warning messages from it in emails caused by a logrotate cronjob which runs every week. The same warning appears when the server is restarted, and while it is not critical, it is something I wanted to understand and avoid. Also, in case this post is too short or not varied enough (and because I have an unhelpful backlog of little comments I’d like to blog), I will include below a little trick for getting MySQL to produce a set of results where each row contains the name of a table and MAX(foo) for some field foo in that table. (Unfortunately the MySQL trick doesn’t enumerate the tables for you and the length of the query’s SQL scales linearly with the number of rows, but it is slightly nicer than running several queries which each produce one row, then parsing and combining the results).

It was during my recent quality audit of my blog posts that I noticed in the “Entry Body” of my post about 1984, a series of links to a site called frostwire.com, 77 of them to be precise, each with a slightly different pharmaceutically themed query string. I couldn’t remember ever choosing to visit this site, or wanting to give people 77 different links to it, nor did I even know what for example dexfenfluramine was, let alone want to encourage people to buy some. If I had, in a moment of madness, decided that visitors to my blog did want these links, then I had gone about it the wrong way, because they were not visible on the post itself. This is because the links were all contained within a <u> tag with a display:none rule. I decided then that this text had been inserted into my post by a spammer.