At 0400 on Wednesday (yesterday), my home partition suddenly disappeared. I didn't have a clue what had happened, but the problem persisted on reboot.

Now, Enki has two hard drives - one contains /home, and one contains my backups. I was able to mount the backup drive manually, but the one containing /home appeared to be unresponsive.

So I took out what I assumed to be the defective drive. I then connected it to a different computer and was instantly smelling magic smoke.

It has been apparent for at least half a year, but reCAPTCHA is now widely being broken by spambots on this site. I have had to clean up over a hundred spam messages from the last week alone. For now, I have simply blocked commenters from entering their homepage, and handed out a number of IP blocks.

This day marks the third anniversary of my blog.

This is my first post with the new, custom-created article content type. There is very little to outwardly distinguish it from the blog content type provided by Drupal's blog.module, except that the latter does not have a link to "Arancaytar's blog" below each entry (which is superfluous seeing as I am the only author on this site, and my blog is equivalent to the front page).

Half a year has passed since the last theme change, so tradition dictates I pick a new one again. Actually, this time I wanted to change because Agregado lacks fluid-width support. Seeing your website on a 2000px monitor, all alone in a narrow vertical beam in the center, really makes you question your web skills.

I'm trying to get my Drupal blog to submit every update to my Twitter account. Let's see if it works - I've definitely seen this in action among some Drupalers, so it shouldn't require any tweaking like the Drivel/Taxonomy thing did.

... update, some hours later... well, the Twitter part was easy; it was, predictably, the Drivel/Twitter part that was such horror.

Whoops, a bit of a bug in my code. Let's test it now...

Update: Apparently, not only do I not know how to use str_replace, I'm also clueless about escaping characters in regular expressions.

I just deleted about a dozen posts that had been clearly written while ReCAPTCHA was enabled on my site. I don't know how they got past, but I'm happy to say that none of them fulfilled their function: The spammers either used HTML instead of BBCode, or attempted to fill a non-existant Website field in their contact data (which I had removed because it was only every used for this purpose). No links survived.

So Dintiradan just alerted me to the fact that for an unspecified time not more than four months, the CAPTCHA I've had on my site has had a guaranteed 100% spam-blocking rate.

The reason, unfortunately, was not that it was a particularly good CAPTCHA. It was just impossible to solve.

With the first bout of visitors after the Drupal 6 upgrade, I see that I did several things badly:

• Not allowing you to enter your name (optional now)
• Making you preview and submit your comment, and entering the Captcha twice (Previewing is now optional, and the site will not ask you to enter a Captcha more than once per session.)
• Crashing the page when saving the comment, thanks to an apparently buggy port of the Akismet module (Akismet disabled).

Fixed that. I hope that improves your experience of commenting vastly.