January 2006 - Jayson's Blog

In the drummer world, Buddy Rich is generally considered to be the best of all time (with Peart and Bonham running a very close second and third respectively).  The sheer amount of noise he could produce with a minimal kit (smaller kits being standard amongst jazz drummers) was staggering.  Here’s an amazing video of him in action.  Unbelievable.

Sidenote:  A little background on Jayson as it relates to music.  My father played drums to pay the bills throughout high school and college, and later went on to play drums for the Navy when he got drafted.  That being said, as soon as I was old enough to realize what drums were, he sat me down behind a kit and taught me how to play (around age 7).  I would later switch from drums to bass (age 12), and then gave up bass for visual arts around age 15 which turned out to be a huge mistake as I had minimal talent in the visual arts arena…I was a much better musician (but I absolutely abhorred practicing which is what ultimately lead to me stopping).  I’ve been playing various pieces of hand percussion (mainly djembe and congas, with my next major purchase being a set of tablas) in my free time ever since I decided not to attend art school. 

I don’t have many regrets, but giving up formal music training is definitely one of them.  Interestingly enough, it wouldn’t be drums that I would go back to if given a chance, I much prefer bass.  It’s also worth mentioning that while I definitely appreciate a good guitar riff, I never had any interest in playing guitar (what kid from my generation didn’t want to be the next Bon Jovi in elementary school?); I always knew I wanted to play bass.  Even more interesting (IMO) is that I suffer the same malady as Brian Wilson does (no, not the drug addiction):  I have severe stage fright when it comes to performing for an audience, yet I have no fear of public speaking.  Weird eh?

Rob has been busy posting some videos about Community Server over on the new video blog on CS.org.  If you’re new to CS, it’s definitely going to be worth keeping an eye on (RSS subscription is here) as in the coming weeks some really cool content will be posted mainly targeting the wealth of new features being packed into the next release of CS.  Heck, it should even be a good resource for even the seasoned CS folks…if I had to list all of the new features off the top of my head I’d be hard pressed to do it in a single sitting.

Also, the CS documentation has been completely overhauled (finally) and is starting to bear some semblance to [gasp] real documentation!  It’s still in beta (hence some of the placeholders and whatnot), but should be complete by the time CS RTM’s, which is still on target for February 17th.  You can thank this guy for spearheading the bulk of the technical writing behind it; fantastic job!

And finally, Telligent held its first (and hopefully not the last) CSModule Developer Contest over the course of this previous weekend; each CS dev had an ~72 hour window to write the “coolest” CSModule they could that takes advantage of the new CSEvents/TextParts portions of CS2.0.  I simply ran out of time and couldn’t get mine submitted, but apparently great developers think alike as it was going to be virtually identical to this CSModule, which (probably) got the idea from Trillian (that’s where I borrowed the idea).  There are some great modules in the download, and I know for a fact that most of them were written in < 4 hours…so it’s very telling just how powerful and simple the CSModule framework really is.  Great stuff guys!

I know I’m a few days late in posting this (was supposed to have this up last Friday), but in short the ReverseDOS anti-spam filter I installed recently works absolutely brilliantly.  Trackbacks have been enabled for a week, and aside from a few rogue spams that I didn’t have filters set up for (i.e. the links to block weren’t in the RDOS.config file), I am 99% spam free.  Having a quick look at my IIS logs, I can see that RDOS blocked ~2500 would be spams in a 7 day period, and I’ve had no complaints from anyone submitting genuine requests about not being able to get through. 

There was one spam that trickled through in spite of having a filter set up to block it, but it turns out it’s related to this post over at Mike Campbell’s blog; the spammer was simply overloading my server with concurrent bots (which is also configurable via the RDOS.config file)…apparently this has only happened once, so I’m leaving the default of 6 concurrent requests as is unless it happens again. 

For the first time in over a year, my blog is effectively spam free, with little or no effort needed on my part other than installing RDOS, and adding any spammer URL’s that make it past the default configuration.  Of all the anti-spam tools I’ve seen out in the wild, this is the easiest to install/configure, and is highly effective.  A must have in any bloggers toolbelt.

Sushant has been leaving some pretty good comments on my blog as of late, so I figured I’d give him a proper introduction on my site (plus his site runs on Community Server which is always a plus :-) ).  Check out his site here.  A nice mix of tech blended in with quite a bit of humor (plus he finally got a domain name I can remember).  Keep up the good work Sushant!