Month: April 2011

nginx as a reverse-proxy to Apache+Sinatra

I was recently developing a Sinatra app that wanted to host from home — setting it up Heroku would have meant migrating from SQLite to Postgres, and I’m lazy. The problem was that I already happened to have an Apache server at home to serve some other content, specifically some calendars through the WebDAV module.

The solution I used was simple: instead of having Apache listening on port 80, I set up nginx to listen to port 80 and redirect to either Apache (set to listen on port 8080 instead) or Sinatra (port 9393) depending on the URL.

 

Nginx configuration was dead simple (after a few tries). The gist of it being these few lines:

location / {
    proxy_pass   http://127.0.0.1:8080/;
}
location /reorg {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:9393;
}

The configuration in its entirety is available here.

 

After setting up this solution, I realized Apache’s mod_proxy would have done the trick without the need for nginx. And that mod_rack (Phusion Passenger) could probably have eliminated the need for running a specific ruby process for Sinatra at all. Live and learn!

Large-scale, automated whimsy — A journey into blog spam

As you may have noticed if you write a blog, however modest it might be (such as yours truly), you’ll receive spam comments. A lot. Things like that:

spam 1

 

Spam like this is usually obvious. Thankfully, some spammers go out of their ways to create engaging messages to fool your filters, both automated (like Akismet, who dutifully collected all the ones exposed in this post) and human. I’ve been collecting the best of breed (I know, I live a very sheltered life), such as…

 

The Ones Sucking Up

magnificent

Aaaah, the day-to-day of spam. “Magnificent”, nothing less!

 

fame

“Famous”! Money! Girls! Bling! Bring it on!

 

trains

 

“Amazing”, yay! Although I hope you realized you are trying to advertise train horns on a tech blog. Train horns.

 

The Confused Identities

dave-sabine

Why thank you, Sabine — I mean Dave. Hmm, wait.

 

The Sarcastic

colors

The colors on this post are amazing? Are you on drugs?

 

great risk

 

Ah, yes. Writing about SICP almost got me killed by M.I.T.’s own Secret Service. As a matter of fact, I’m hiding in Kazakhstan right now.

(On a serious note, I emailed Hal Abelson about a typo in the online version of SICP and received a very nice answer by him personally the very next day — hats off to you, sir!)

 

The Keyword Bingo

keywordbingoGotta unlock ’em all!

 

The Compliment That Wasn’t

notcompliment

This starts well… Grow, trendy, extremely amazing, attractive… Yeah, classical spam. But at closer look, this is actually a poorly translated troll insinuating that my post is unworthy. Darn!

 

The Cringe-Worthy

incite

It is very telling whether you consider “incite full” or the concept of high-waist shorts to be the worst part of this spam. I can’t really pick, they’re both frightening.

 

The Big-In-Japan

A slight variation on plain sucking up is doing so in different languages.

arabic

russian

portuguese

Google translating that last one gives:

Hello interesting post, I liked a lot, maybe we could become blog palls:) lol!
Aside from the jokes call me Navid and look like you publish on the Internet although the theme of my room … this is very different.
I study the pages on poker free bonus without risking your cash … …
Greatly enjoyed what I saw written on this second visit
I shall return:)
Ps: I have a bad Portuguese

Thumbs up for the politeness and the disclaimer at the end. That’s top quality spam. Not so much to say for the reading skills though, because I don’t remember discussing online poker strategies together with ncurses.

 

The Philosopher

philosopher

Wow! That turns out to be an (unsourced) citation of the late John Enoch Powell, a conservative English MP who’s also quoted as saying “reading one’s diary is like returning to one’s own vomit”, which may or may not be a more appropriate metaphor for blogs. And spam. Oh well.

 

The Prescient

pussy

Apart from the fact that they fscked up the URL bbtag — HOW DO THEY KNOW ABOUT MY SECRET PASSION!?

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pity the lolcatpity the lolcat, by tizzie on flickr

 

What were your best ones?