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I was blocked from my own site today by Bad Behavior, for both loading pages and sending XML-RPC from MarsEdit. There is some self-help for this kind of problem, which I followed when I had a chance.

I didn’t see any of my IP addresses in my site’s spam logs, which meant something else was probably wrong.

It turns out there was an update to the Bad Behavior library, which now stands at version 2.0.11. It was updated December 6, 2007. And the description:

“Within the past two days users have found themselves blocked from their own sites while using recent versions of Bad Behavior. A third party blacklist which Bad Behavior queries recently began sending false positives for any IP address queried, causing everyone using Bad Behavior to be blocked. This issue is fixed in Bad Behavior 2.0.11.”

Once I downloaded and installed that library in the Drupal Bad Behavior module, I was able to access my site and use MarsEdit successfully again. Whew!

In reading the man page for the updated installer utility in Leopard, it looks like it offers the equivalent of “answer files” on Windows. This sounds like a big improvement, especially for systems administrators who want to automate the installation of packages on Mac OS X.

The “install choice change XML file” can be used to apply changes to the default option in an installer package. This uses the -applyChoiceChangesXML flag.

The installer can also show the defaults as well as the result after applying a choice changes XML file to them. Use the -showChoicesXML to find the choices and -showChoicesAfterApplyingChangesXML to see the outcome of choice changes, respectively.

For what it’s worth, the -dominfo and -query flags are also new and have functions that I don’t recognize from Tiger, comparing the two man pages.

Anyway, the install choices sound like a “win” — even just to get reliable, reproducible Radmind transcripts, if you’re into that sort of thing. Imagine creating an installer choice change file for a package you install/update all the time — the system software itself, and the Apple Xcode Developer Tools, both spring to mind. Whether you’re creating install choice change files for bulk installation or just automation of your build process, it sounds as if this new capability should be really helpful.

Cocoatron is a suite of Automator actions for “creating and automating complex XML Processing Pipelines.”

[Via Mark Liyanage.]