free software

It's clear that dashes (-) are better than underscores (_) for search engine optimization. So people have looked for ways to make MediaWiki use -. Wikihow is one of the few MediaWiki sites that behaves this way, but unfortunately even they don't seem to be running an extension for this. I tried my luck at changing the MediaWiki core (Title.php) but I'll leave this for now.

Sometimes wifi connections only allow connections to a limited range of ports. In Israel connections to ports over 1024 were seriously throttled. So I put the SSH server of one machine on port 22. When going through /var/log/auth last week I found many bots trying to enter with standard names. So I installed fail2ban, today I'm checking and everything is working fine. For your own safety you can set up IP addresses that can always come through. Merely putting sshd on a non-standard port seems to be a more adequate way to keep bots out.

Today we reached the milestone of 1000 articles at Hitchwiki.org!  It took less than 3 years to get there.  Already before I found the then called "Hitchhiker's guide to Hitchhiking" I was sure that a wiki for hitchhikers was a good idea.  So I'm very happy that I moved the project to Wikia.com in December 2005. At some point I had been thinking to move it to hitchhikers.couchsurfing.com, but fortunately MrTweek was around.

We left Amsterdam last Friday, after 15:00 or so.  It took 50 minutes or so to leave Amsterdam at the liftershalte (which is also the longest wait of this trip!). We arrived at Julien's front door in Hamburg right in time for dinner. The third ride was great, a Danish managing director of 7 companies was happy to take us from the parking spot close to Osnabrueck.