Ramblings of Narc

Inspired by Jon Eveland‘s qqint, I’ve produced (from scratch) a personal version written in PHP and using an SQLite backend that anyone can set up and use themselves.

I started by putting up some slightly rambly QQSearch documentation that should explain what’s what, and why. Because the docs came first, they may be slightly out of date. They are also slightly ahead of the current state of development, as aliases have not yet been implemented (though it should be reasonably easy to do so).

You can use a demo of QQSearch with the really dangerous bits removed (i.e. no adding and deleting URL mappings).

If you like that, you can go ahead and:

• download QQSearch v. 0.1 as .tar.gz (about 100 KB), or
• download QQSearch v. 0.1 as .zip (about 300 KB)

Short instructions for use: download, extract to the htdocs folder of a PHP-enabled (version 5.1 minimum!) webserver, and browse to it.

If you need more help than that, feel free to contact me and I’ll do my best to get you sorted.

So, I must be the last person on the Internet to have heard of webmin — or, at least, the last person who administers a bunch of Linuxen to do so.

After installing it yesterday on Bast, I discovered, among other things, that webmin has a neat little interface to configure BIND. Since that was basically the one thing I hated having to manage on my own, I decided I’d give it a try — and boy, did it ever work nicely. I’ve managed to transfer the narc.ro zone from the shitty MS server to a nice, neat little BIND9-managed zone on bast.

On top of that, I’ve finally segregated *.narc.ro and *.internal.narc.ro, which makes the DNS a lot cleaner.

In other recent news, however, I did a stupid (this is where the “oopsies” part of the title comes in): I had to change Themis’s IP from 192.168.0.1 to .100 (well, I didn’t have to, I was just lazy), and… I forgot to change the port forward for the DNS. Which ended up breaking my e-mail deliveries, as well as most of everything else related to narc.ro, I’m sure. Luckily, since I also had a reason to change that forward, I caught it relatively quickly (yeah, it only took a couple of days, heh).

So if you were wondering why you couldn’t reach narc.ro, or why your RSS reader was having trouble getting updates, now you know. Aren’t ya glad?

Here’s a neat question for you: what do you think the most traded media on the Internet is?

Is it:

1. Feature-length movies?
2. Music?
3. TV Series?
4. Video Games?
5. None of the above?

As it turns out, the answer is (e) None of the above. “The Internet is for porn” is not just a catchy show-tune. Note that I’m not referring to the most bandwidth consumed, the honor of which goes to spam — I’m referring to actual, user-shared, P2P trafficked media.

So if that’s true, then we can start to look at the RIAA/MPAA’s claims that “The Internet/downloads are destroying the [music/movie] industry”. By this statement, it should be impossible to make any money selling porn on the Internet, right?

…Yeah, and if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell ya. I don’t believe I’ve mentioned this before here on the blog, but I work with porn every day as part of my regular job, and let me tell you: the only time the signups stop is when someone does something stupid to break them. Otherwise, they just keep coming.

So if free porn didn’t kill the pornography industry, what makes the *AA think that free music/movies are going to kill their respective industries? Perhaps they’re hiding some feelings of inadequacy?