Hugo’s blog

I received a number of invites to join NotchUp, a site similar to LinkedIn, but with one big difference: you, as a participant, set a price company should pay to talk to you about a professional opportunity. I joined to check what it was like and I invited a couple of people who might be interested in this. But about five minutes later, I realized that it doesn’t make any sense.

There are essentially two cases, if a company wants to talk to you:

1. This is a job that you would like to take: in this case, you really want to talk to them, and you don’t want them to wonder whether they want to spend some money just to get your email address; what you want is the job, not money for the interview.
2. This is a job that isn’t of interest to you: you’re not going to start moonlighting for a new company, Interviews With John Smith LLC, whose business model is to do interviews with companies you know you’re not interested in.

The main attraction is that they promise you a 10% cut on the money that your referees will make. So if you want to try to get rich by doing interviews, and make me rich by the same token, leave a comment below and I’ll send you an invite (it looks like the service is still invite-only).

For the past three weeks, our Mac mini, whose sole purpose in life is to run iTunes – to share music in the house – and Vine Server – because it’s headless –, had been crashing after less than 24 hours of being up. It would just stop responding to anything except to pings, and I would not be able to SSH nor VNC into it.

Nothing was showing up in the logs, and plugging in a monitor and a keyboard did not help getting more information. I didn’t remember doing any change to the system except applying the software upgrades from Apple.

As it’s a first generation one (as a matter of fact, bought on 22 January 2005, the day they were released), I wondered if it was time to invest into a new computer.

After running a full hardware test that turned up nothing abnormal, I decided to give it a last chance by reinstalling it. So I took my Panther CD (yes, remember, before Leopard, there was Tiger, and before Tiger, there was Leopard), and spent a couple of hours reinstalling the system from scratch.

The result is a much faster system, and it’s been up for almost 3 days now!

mini:~ hugo$ uptime
21:28 up 2 days, 22:42, 2 users, load averages: 0.07 0.02 0.01

So, just like Windows, OS X needs to be reinstalled, sometimes. But it’s not every few months, it’s about every 3 years.

I started writing music reviews in a new blog, as a way to fulfill my desire to discover new CDs and talk about them. I used to do this with Max, but now that we don’t meet regularly anymore, I’ve been missing it.

As I started doing this, I started playing with Amazon Associates, and discover their product preview link enhancer, which gives a nice little pop-up with Amazon info on a link to their site.

It shows up if you read a review and hover your mouse pointer over the shopping cart link of the album cover, and looks like this:

However, I noticed a huge slow down of my site as soon as I posted the 3 lines of JavaScript given by Amazon. Looking at what is happening with Firebug, a lot of bogus requests are done to my site, such as:

http://larve.net/2007/mublog/function%20(start,%20length)%20%7B%20%20%20%20start%20=%20start%20||%200;%20%20%20%20if%20(start%20%3C%200)%20{%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20start%20=%20this.length%20+%20start;%20%20%20%20}%20%20%20%20length%20=%20length%20||%20this.length%20-%20start;%20%20%20%20var%20newArray%20=%20[];%20%20%20%20for%20(var%20i%20=%200;%20i%20%3C%20length;%20i++)%20{%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20newArray[i]%20=%20this[start++];%20%20%20%20}%20%20%20%20return%20newArray;}

It looks like a typo somewhere. I wasn’t able to locate it, though. I looked around for hints, but couldn’t find anything. The issue is that each of those (and there are more than 10 on the front page) triggers WordPress processing, which takes quite a while and costs a lot of CPU cycles. It doesn’t look like an error on my end, since the instructions are pretty simple:

To put Product Previews on your site, paste the following link enhancer script at the end of pages on which you have image only or text only product links.

There’s little chance that I messed this up, so I ended up installing a work-around the hard way, by blocking all those requests with mod_rewrite:

# Blocking Amazon errors
RewriteRule ^(|.*/)function\ .*\( - [F,L]

That means that the pages are still causing bogus requests back to my server, but they are now processed in a much cheaper way and with a clear error.

I also contacted their customer support, hoping that they fix it soon.

Update: their customer support was not useful, but I figured out the root of the issue, thanks to the archive of the wp-hackers mailing list. It looks like Amazon’s Link Enhancer conflicts with ShareThis. Essentially, this is due to a JavaScript flaw, and Amazon’s code should be fixed. However, considering my first interaction with Amazon’s support and that this bug first showed up a year ago, I’m not too hopeful. As a work-around, I disabled ShareThis.