Surfing The Web So You Don't Have To
On March 13th, unmanned robots have 10 hours to get from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. First robot there gets a million bucks from the U.S. Government. Official race site. The Raw Feed has provided several news links about it, including some entries surviving qualifying trials as well as a link to some entries.
DARPA is the same U.S. government defense agency that we can thank for the Internet, as well as Vietnam war-era mechanical elephants.
Has anybody tried this and had it work? Using the methods on that page, the folks there claim the following drive size increases, with no data loss:
Western Digital 200GB SATA
Yield after recovery: 510GB of space
IBM Deskstar 80GB EIDE
Yield after recovery: 150GB of space
Maxtor 40GB EIDE
Yield after recovery: 80GB
Seagate 20GB EIDE
Yield after recovery: 30GB
Unknown laptop 80GB HDD
Yield: 120GB
I’d be interested to see if this works, but damn, I don’t know if it’s worth the risk. Anybody tried it?
OK, DNS issues resolved, and now I’ve got my own server with root access, and things are running smooth (hopefully). I’m going to be manually putting in a few of the comments that were posted on the old site, but if you’re reading this, than the transfer worked.
Still need to work out a few bugs with my Dada install, as that never likes transferring properly, but otherwise, things are working dandy, and I love having root access 🙂
Update: Mailing list working again, writing up a goodbye letter to previous host as we speak. Regular blogging to continue as soon as I get a free few minutes and can clean my inbox out.
Update on 3/9: In case your curious as to the full reason why I left my previous host, here is a post on their forums. But so far, the site loads quicker and things run better. We’ll just have to see how things go. I’ve got my Dada mail installed and working right, but haven’t gotten the scheduler back up and running yet, so that’s on the to-do list for today (thanks to Bailey for helping me set that up).
Just a quick announcement. I’m going to be moving this site, as well as several others, to my new host and server this weekend. More than likely, I won’t be posting much at all until I made the move to the new server, hopefully on Sunday. I’ll keep you posted.
It’s 10-years old today. It started on Usenet, and has come to consume more e-mail traffic than regular mail. A good look at spam’s ugly history.
Another brilliant commentary from Barney:
Same-sex marriage? That’s so 2001. Okay, 2002.
I want to promote same-person marriage.
That’s right. I want to marry MYSELF. Me, myself and I — my goodness, it’s almost a menage a trois!
I love me, as all good, right-thinking people should. I’m my best friend. I’ve known me all my life, sometimes, ahem, in that personal way people only really get to know themselves.
I try to take good care of myself. (Not always succeeding, but I do try). And I forgive myself when I don’t. I try to be honest with myself, because I deserve it.
When I look in the mirror, I see a right handsome dude. Others can’t see in me what I see in myself. We have a special bond, and even look fondly on “Me and My Shadow,” especially when we’re strolling down the avenue. Like SNL’s Stuart Smalley said, “I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough and Doggone It, People Like Me” — so why shouldn’t I pay myself the ultimate compliment, and marry me? (If I’m good enough for myself, that is.)
So I think I’ll head to the county clerk’s office. If two people of the same sex can legally marry, why can’t I marry myself? I want to hear the preacher say, “I now pronounce you … you.”
Haven’t you ever just loved something you did, said or … performed, enough to say, “Boy, I sure love me right now!” Why not be able to profess that love to the whole world?
Now, isn’t that special? (No, not a ‘special right’ – a special ME!;-)
I’m sure this lady is going to unsubscribe from my mailing list for saying this, but I’m not mentioning her name, I just got a kick out of this. She e-mails me the following: “This might sound very bad, but do you send people who subscribed free porn?”
I told her I would — if she asked really nice.
She thought it was a funny joke, and she’s still on the list — last I checked.
OK, this site is starting to push the limit of what my shared host can do, and they’re requiring me to move to a dedicated server, starting at $150/month — which I can’t afford. And I was going to go with these guys, but in the week I last checked on them, most of their VPS accounts are gone. Lovely…
I’ve got an e-mail into the folks at Dinix (which is run by former execs at my current host) to see what they have to say, and I plan on tweaking the templates and turning off anything unnecessary for this site as soon as possible to lessen the CPU load on the server (it really doesn’t help that MovableType is a bit of a processor hog).
In the meantime, does anybody have a dedicated box just sitting somewhere that could host this site until I can afford a dedicated box? Or does somebody have a crap-load of money they’d like to donate? Hopefully I won’t have to take this site down, but if I can’t round up SOMETHING soon, then it might have to come down while I figure out something.
I’ll keep you posted.
Update on 3/4: Talked to my Web host, as well as the folks at the potential new host. The new host is going to get more VPS servers today, and will e-mail me when they get some.
But for the folks in the comments who were asking for raw stats, here were my Webalizer stats for last month:
Hits: 2368587
Files: 1368094
Pages: 65380
Visits: 22917
KB: 10988373
So my bandwidth isn’t excessively high, it’s my hits, claims my host. Yes, 2-mill is a good pile of hits, but most of that is little small graphics on each page, as well as external calls to various files. In other words, all things considered, it could be a lot worse. And a lot of folks were linking to my images directly, causing me to implement link protection (though it doesn’t work all that great sometimes). But every time an image gets blocked, it still sends a hit through to the logs, and a hit gets counted, despite the fact that only a minimal amount of HTTP headers is getting sent.
They said it wasn’t a particular script or anything that caused them to decide to move me, and they couldn’t really tell me the exact reason for the move, other than the hits issue. Regardless, I’m still planning on doing some tweaks to this template, hopefully speed things up a bit, make rebuilds and comments faster, etc… . I’ve already made PHP includes out of most of my stuff (there are very few MT include tags, if any, on this site, and I’m using MT tags as little as possible), and I’m using the MySQL-version of MT. I’m going to make fewer entries show up on the front page, as well as tweaking my archive options, and probably remove the random quote thingy for now. I’m probably going to tweak my front page a bit to cater towards the shorter entries I generally post, but we’ll have to see how that will work.
Hell, maybe I’ll just revert back to the default MT templates, and start using a kick-ass stylesheet, and maybe that will help things along.
But I will keep everybody here posted as to what’s going on.
Update again: I’ve redone the template, and removed a lot of the extra crap. No more stats bit, no more random quote, replaced or got rid of EVERY graphic file on the page, other than the logo, moved some stuff around, got rid of weekly archives, so things should go fine for now. I’ll update my helpdesk ticket to see if this will keep them at bay for a while until I can get things moved.
RSS feeds are great as a spam-free tool for publishers to distribute information. However, the biggest problem is that, unlike Web hits, statistics on who’s reading the feeds aren’t available. There’s no tracking features apparent in RSS.
A couple of firms are trying to change this:
A couple of marketing firms, IMN and RSSads, recently debuted what they claim to be trackable RSS feeds that go along with their services. How does it work? IMN president Kathleen Goodwin told ClickZ, “We’ve encoded all the links — usually with an RSS feed you get a subject of an article and a link. Every link provided is a unique trackable link. When you open up the feed we know it. Every time you refresh the feed we count it. And when you click to read a particular article we register that.” Apparently, RSSads take a different approach, by embedding a transparent GIF in the feed. It will be interesting to see customer reviews on how accurate or useful these statistics really are.
I can see this, if this works, as the major stumbling point for adoptions by other major media outlets, especially now that ads are appearing in RSS.
Have you seen BooBah? It’s a show that appears at 7:00 AM here on PBS, and if you thought the Teletubbies was a bad acid trip, wait until you’ve seen this show. I thought nothing could get more cosmic and out there than the TeleTubbies, but I was wrong.
Needless to say, my youngest daughter loves it. I don’t know what to think about it. I’ve yet to be able to sit down and watch a whole episode, let alone a few of them, to be able to make a decision about it, but I do know what I’ve seen freaks me out.
But I guess I’m not their target audience, so it’s doing its job. A quick search for the title on Google came up with an article slamming it, as well as a FAQ as to what the hell it is, as well as an interview with its creator.