Month: April 2005

Update: They’ve fixed the crawler to stop reporting a referrer, so my logs are now wonderfully clean again. Thanks guys.

It appears I’ve been syndicated on IrishBlogs.ie. What brought this to my attention was the number of hits I got yesterday and today with that site as the referrer. No-one actually asked me about this, which I thought was a bit odd. Strictly I think they’re probably on solid enough ground in that they’re just quoting excerpts and they’re giving proper attribution, but an email would have been nice. I’m not bothered by it as such, just surprised. To be honest I’m not sure why a wider audience would want to read the stuff I churn out here, but if someone disagrees I won’t stand in their way.

Unfortunately it doesn’t appear as if anyone does disagree. On closer inspection of those referrer logs I found that the requests were all coming from a single IP address. It turns out the bot that harvests my atom feed twice an hour is sending a bogus referrer header to spam my logs. Since many people publish their logs it can be a valuable but dubious advertising method to put your site’s address in referrer headers. I’ve also seen this done innocently by well-meaning bot writers who don’t know any better, so we might hold off on the flames until I can contact them about fixing it.

Stephen’s recent phone outage appears to have left me no effective way of congratulating him on his graduation, so I’m doing it ineffectively instead. So let me be the first (okay, second) to offer Stephen my most enthusiastic contrafibularities. In honour of this occasion, all "your ma" jokes will now be "your MA" jokes, and will be directed at Stephen.

I will never know for sure when I regained network connectivity on this machine for one outright bizzarre reason. All the time I was checking if I could communicate with other machines on the network by pinging my router. I continuously got 100% packet loss, so I rebooted into Windows, searched around a bit more for new information, asked questions of helpful people online.

Eventually I was able to see the network (identified by its ESSID and the MAC address of the router) but I still couldn’t ping the router. I turned on DHCP and was assigned an IP address, so I was certainly communicating wit the router. Still no response to ping.

The next reboot stalled at the point of trying to synchronise the system clock with an online time server. It had been simply failing instantly at this point and skipping that step, which made me think that maybe it was timing out a name-server lookup instead of just finding no network interfaces. So I tried pinging the router again. 100% packet loss ensued. There was no reason for me to even sonsider pinging the modem instead. If I couldn’t reach the router I couldn’t reach the modem. Nothing I know about networking could possibly have led me to believe that pinging the modem would do any good. So I pinged the modem. And got an instant response.

So, um, when was I able to do this? Who knows. Probably some time after switching the network card drivers from the ones supplied by Linksys to the ones supplied by HP/Compaq for a different card with the same chipset. That’s when the power light came on on the card; it’s when I picked up the ESSID and router MAC address. I still wasn’t able to ping the router at that stage so I thought it still wasn’t working, but then again I’m posting this without being able to ping the router so what does that tell you?

The bottom line is that it works. Now I can get down to sorting out my sound card again. And installing all of my Firefox and Thunderbird extensions. And getting my bookmarks back in order.

After all of that I might tell you about the (potentially) absolutely cool (and by cool, I mean totally sweet) news that I’m too excited about to be able to coherently write about.

I got around to installing Ubuntu this afternoon. I’d been hoping to try it out for a while and my weeks off college seemed to give me enough time to fix anything that went wrong. Yes, I gave myself two weeks to install an OS. I’m now taking bets on whether I’ll need it.

Cock-up the first: I made sure all of my data (years of emails, gigabytes of juggling videos, other miscellany) onto the data partition I created when I got the new hard disk a few months back. During installation I wiped every partition on hard disk one besides the Windows one, leaving the data all safe on hard disk two. Except for some reason that is completely beyond my comprehension I was completely wrong about what disk contained what data. I’ve had a 120 gigabyte disk with no data on it for the last few months; the data partition was at the end of the first disk. Fiddledee-dee.

Cock-up the second: Actually this one isn’t so much a cock-up as an annoyance. Much like having a pencil jabbed in your eye is annoying. I have a Linksys wireless network card, with a Broadcom chipset. The only thing you need to know about this is that Broadcom hates Linux in general and everyone who uses it in particular. So I have to use some very cryptic and obscure methods to get it to work; I won’t detail them here. What I will detail is how frustrated I feel right now. Details of how frustrated I feel: Uuuuaaaaarrrggghhh! Uuunnnngggghhh!!?!

To be fair, shitty network cards and Dell’s even shittier sound card aside, Ubuntu’s install is very easy, and it looks just stunning. I’m pretty sure I’ll like it once I get it working. For the moment I’m back on Windows.

My constant whining has once again payed off. DIT Netsoc has now got an Atom feed, so there’s one less site I have to keep up with manually. Syndication and aggregation are taking over the Web. Anyone not on the bandwagon should start thinking about jumping on before it stops being cool and starts being mundane.

I apologise for the crappiness of this graph; this was my first use of Open Office Calc. I just wanted to give you an impression of the ammount of traffic this post drew on April 19^th (Tuesday). The graph is of daily hits from search engines in the last month, and that spike is when Dirk Benedict got elected, as is my understanding. Most of the searches were for variations of "how is a new pope chosen".

Yesterday I finished my 18^th year of full time education. I’m pretty sure I still don’t know enough so the current plan is to stick at least another three years on there. Exams start in 19 days, so study starts in 18. Plans for the next two and a half weeks, the following four months, and most of the rest of my life are somewhat hazy and incomplete. Suggestions to the usual address…

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish and Mostly Harmless are going to be broadcast as the Quandary and Quintessential Phases of the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio show. Obviously the BBC has the full story.

The trailer for the two phases is in Real Audio streaming format. If you’d like to download a copy to keep, you’ll need a copy of mplayer. Then do this:

mplayer -dumpstream rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/hitchhikers_trail2.rm
mplayer -ao pcm stream.dump

That’ll leave you with a raw wav file called audiodump.wav, with which you can do what you like (except distribute it, of course; I can’t be seen to encourage that). When the shows are broadcast you’ll be able to rip them in the same way. They stay on the BBC site for a week. Sometime during that week you should download the *.rm file and open it in a text editor. Copy the rtsp:// URL from that file and use it in the same place as the similar URL in the commands above. The steps are the same from then on.

I’ve been itching to link to Skeptico for a few weeks now. I couldn’t let it slide for another week or you would all miss out on the astounding discovery of a Chicago underpass bearing the likeness of Keith Richards. He is favoured by God. Maybe that’s why Keith can’t be killed by conventional weapons.

Google’s UK map service includes Ireland, which will no doubt do wonders for American geography education. Oh, who am I kidding? They don’t learn about other countries in geography class. Anyway, I just wanted to remark that I’m pretty sure there was another town just there last time I checked.

Proudly continuing my new hobby of bashing cool free services.