Git Browser
I've now written a basic Git browser into this site which matches the Subversion browser in it's (limited) feature set. After moving most of my development to Git, I felt it made sense to give equal access to public repositories of both.
Many thanks to Michael Trier for the GitPython module that made this possible.
On another note, I think it's about time I added some pagination to this blog, seeming as I don't show any more than the 5 most recent entries...
Courier New Sucks
Through much hair-pulling and frustration experienced today trying to make my pastebin display correctly everywhere, I've come to the conclusion that "Courier New" is an utterly useless font, and that Firefox is bad at coping with this.
Pastebin spam
I guess it was inevitable - the bots crawling over the Internet submitting "Search Engine Optimisation" (a.k.a. spam-for-profit) found their way here and started putting crap on the pastebin. I initially wrote the pastebin in a very simple way, with no spam protection. After all, what's the point of spamming on a pastebin, which doesn't hyperlink anything?
Unfortunately, that doesn't rule out the bots which dump their cargo in anything that remotely looks like a form. Luckily, there are a few simple methods that help block this sort of spam, based on the idea of creating a field that looks appealing to a bot, but that a real user should never use. The field got a value? Ignore the request - it's a bot.
This is by no means bulletproof, however the effectiveness (reasonable) compared to the inconvenience to users (none) makes it a worthwhile measure. Statistically speaking - and by this I mean "off the top of my head, based on other people's experience" - most form spam of this kind is from relatively stupid bots which will be fooled by this countermeasure. There is no way that a targeted bot would be hampered, but that just goes back to my previous point of pastebin spamming being a pointless exercise.
And here's a useful site detailing lots of methods of fighting e-mail and website spam (and also my source for the particular fix I'm using): http://fuckthespam.com/?info
The curse of Firefox extensions
Today is my first day of Firefox usage after a three-week break - a break which taught me something about the performance trap that Firefox extensions can be, and how they can sometimes make life subtly worse instead of better.
Welcome!
Welcome to the newest incarnation of CodeScape.net!
This is a complete platform change for my site, from the pretty good CodeIgniter PHP web framework to the quite simply amazing Django Python framework. The three most important features of my old site - the blog, heirarchical document tree and pastebin - have all been redesigned and rewritten for the new platform.
Feel free to take a look around, and let me know what you think in the comments!