Entries posted in September 2010

I've heard, over the years, of people spending insane amounts of money on office chairs.

On the one hand I accept that you spend a lot of time sitting in chairs when you're working upon a computer. On the left I find the idea of spending £750+ on a chair a little insane.

For the past few years I've had a kneeling chair over time this has gotten pretty "squished" and "flat". (Specifically the part where my knees go.)

So I decided to get a new chair. What did I buy? a large rubber ball!

It's a little weird to walk into the room and see this green ball in front of the keyboard, but it's actually pretty great to sit on.

I'm gonna ignore all claims of "excercise" and "healthyness". Sure I find myself shifting around slightly to retain balance, but I'm not at all convinced that such small movements, even over the course of many days, will make any appreciable different to my muscles.

Anyway .. That is all I have to say today.

ObQuote: "Don't tell anyone we went to war over a woman. " - Mongol (2007)

Tags: chairs, misc | 4 comments

Like many people I use Apache's mod_proxy to proxy from *:80 to a bunch of servers running upon 127.0.0.1:XX.

(I've mentioned this too often; but in short I have a bunch of sites all running with thttpd under their own UID).

Why do I use apache soley as a reverse proxy, instead of pound, varnish, nginx, or lighttpd? After all it is pretty heavy-weight. Well the answer to that is that I have a bunch of mod_rewrite rules.

So I'm wondering, could I drop apache if I were to hack together a simple network proxy that would listen upon port 80, reading requests, and directing them to local servers? The answer to that is plainly "yes". There are many reverse-proxies around and writing them isn't hard.

So what would be the point? Imagine a reverse-proxy that understood mod_rewrite rules. That would rock.

In short we'd have to define three things:

• Matching vhost name.
• Destination to proxy to.
• (Optionally) the mod_rewrite rules

Given something like this:

LISTEN 1.2.3.4:80

host example.net or host www.example.net
{
   #redirect traffic here
   proxy_to 127.0.0.1 1011

   RewriteRule /about /cgi-bin/index.cgi
}

When the proxy received an incoming request to http://example.net/about it would actually send the request /cgi-bin/index.cgi to the host 127.0.0.1:1011.

That seems neither too complex nor too impossible.

The hard part would be emulating mod_rewrite 100%. Especially chained requests. I would be willing to write the trivial version, but I suspect the full emulation would be a job of diminishing returns. Am I right?

ObSubject: You crossed the line first, sir. - "The Dark Knight"

Tags: c, proxy, reverse proxy | 9 comments

I've just released a new Blog::Spam module to CPAN.

The Blog::Spam module is 99% of the code behind the blog & forum spam detection service.

On the whole I'm pleased with the way that development has gone, and although I'm going to keep tinkering it is essentially "complete".

Now I need to go back and fix bugs in chronicle, asql, and rinse.

ObSubject: "You are just an ordinary man in a cape!" - Batman Begins.

Tags: blogspam, cpan | No comments