The other day JR reminded me of a RSS news aggregation software that I had used before: tt-rss. The recent UI changes to Google Reader kind of suck: too much wasted space and a scrollbar that is near unusable.
The only thing that would keep me from moving on was a good Android client, that was easily solved with a quick search on Android Market.
Then, I ran into a roadblock. I set up tt-rss and it continued to stall when I used it. Apache error logs showed that it got "client denied by server configuration" errors consistently. I went through all the configuration settings for the directory and nothing was wrong. I checked filesystem directory ownerships and everything was what it was supposed to be. I was perplexed until I stumbled on a posting that complained that mod_evasive was denying connections because they were coming in so fast (tt-rss makes a lot of background calls to their backend.php script) -- and looked like a DOS attack.
After disabling mod_evasive, tt-rss started working brilliantly. tt-rss is a nice little RSS reader and the Android client works great. Thanks Google for changing the UI on Google Reader.