Category: tech

Talk about software, hardware, electronics, and a myriad of other sex-repellent topics.

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the opposite of downhill


Entry today is heavy with the stuff that drives away readership, but so it goes. Rode my bike to work today for the first time in a long while. The ride in was great: iPod on, weather still morning-cool, and mostly downhill; the ride home was awful: hot as hell, no water, and the opposite of downhill.

The power of suggestion is massive, we all know that. For me though, the power of suggestion from those I respect is even moreso. For instance, while in Florida, my longtime buddy Kyle and I discussed new music, as we’ve been musical partners going waaaay back. He ended up mentioning the new Destroyer album, which had been sitting, relatively unplayed since my first impression, on my iPod for weeks. He hadn’t actually heard the album himself, but a mutual friend had compared it to Bowie (quite a germane comparison, by the way) and just hearing Kyle’s interests piqued got my itching to spin the album again and reevaluate it. I put it on as I went to sleep that night, despite Sharaun’s permanently lodged complaint about headphones in bed (I’m supposed to be “paying attention” to her as we fall asleep). Anyway, I’ve got to admit – either I’ve been lemming’d into a fondness for the album, or I misjudged it to begin with. This album is good, and getting better the more I hear it.

Folks, it was just a month and a half ago that I blogged about the incredible increase in comment spam this site was seeing. That’s six weeks ago, for the months-to-weeks conversion challenged. Six weeks, and my comment spam count is now sitting above 70,000. Doing a little arithmetic, that means I got 40,000+ pieces of spam comments in that time – amortize that as if they were coming in at a regular rate and you end up with a figure of ~6,000 spams per week, or ~1,000 per day (rough math). That’s insane… right? I guess when your blog has been around for nearly three years (w00t!) and you’ve got a butt-ton of entries you’re just a spam-comment honeypot and it’s to be expected. Thank God for Akismet.

Speaking of Akismet – I’ve long dreamed of adapting the Akismet API for use with my spam-ravaged Coppermine photo gallery. And, after an hour or so of tinkering – I actually did modify Coppermine to work with Akismet, using Bret Kuhns’ PHP4 library. Right now, the hack is incredibly rough – but basically doesn’t allow comments which are suspected as spam by the Akismet screening. The “disallowance” is a horridly ungraceful Coppermine “die” error, but it works for now. The only guidance I give the Akismet server at this point is the comment author and text, which is just scratching the surface of spam-evaluating criterion which may be passed. Also, I did not bother to modify the Coppermine database to enable tagging comments as spam, nor did I implement a way to submit false positives back to Akismet for training. Since both of these things are essential functionality for “conscientious” Akismet usage, I feel like I should work more to make this thing better. Eventually, I’d like to make it into a full-fledged Coppermine plugin – but for now it’s a complete hack (I even waxed about my grand intentions on the Coppermine boards).

The proof is in the pudding though, and I’ll have to monitor things for a week to see if the hack actually stops spam (although I don’t see how it won’t). The things I do for fun…

Oh, and a message to all the hecklers – yesterday’s post-accompanying picture of Keaton was chosen specifically for its… beauty. I’ll have you all know she is still, and will always, = cute.

Goodnight.

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major player in the cowboy scene


Summer’s here, and our social calendar is filling up appropriately. The weather here has taken a turn for the hot, as it always does ’bout this time of year. Air conditioning has to be one of humankind’s greatest achievements – right up there with flush toilets, beer, and the space shuttle. This entry started out as a “one liners” entry, but a few of them developed into more complete thoughts. So, here are some mostly one, and occasionally many more than one, liners for your enjoyment.

Saw a terrible car accident Thursday morning right in front of work. I arrived on the scene just after it’d happened and no rescue vehicles had yet arrived, but it was clear to me that the driver of one of the vehicles had either been badly injured or killed. Seeing something like that makes me immediately think of my family, and makes my stomach all queasy. Eerily enough, just as I eased through the intersection the song on the Sunset Rubdown LP said, “There are things that have to die, so other things can stay alive.” Creepy.

Why do you think humans, males in particular, get so excited over more exotic methods of cooking meat? You know what I mean? How males love a good pig-burying, or are willing to wake up at 5am to put a pork shoulder on the smoker. Must be some kind of distant connection we feel with our kill-to-survive ancestors.

I keep getting all these spam mails urging me to join a site called BlackSingles.com. Do I pull off blackness that convincingly?

Driving to work the other day and watching the sprinklers water public, or city-maintained, grass. Were you the pilfering type, you’d never have to buy a lawnmower-ruined sprinklerhead at home depot. Just head to the public park and fill your pockets.

I wonder a lot about, should there be a world-altering event that left only a few alive, what modern technologies and items I could recreate from my working understanding of them. Which of humankind’s greatest inventions and innovations do I have a good enough grasp on that I could actually re-invent or re-innovate them? Even with the help of other survivors, if the population was vastly depleted – I’m willing to bet that some technologies and items would be lost forever.

Remember when I talked about reading that article about how men get dumber as fathers, while women get smarter? I think this is based on the same research, but it’s a lot less negative to us dads.

My first Father’s Day was nice, not a lot of fanfare, but nice. In celebration, I uploaded week fifteen’s pictures to the ongoing set in Keaton’s gallery. Check them out and try not to smile to yourself at how dang cute she is.

I love my iPod, can’t hardly think how I used to get along without it. But, some things it does do piss me off:

  • Sometimes it gets freaked out when 1st powered on and playing the initial tune, inserting music-less gaps in playback during what sounds like hard drive spinup or processing time.
  • Sometimes it refuses to turn off via holding down the play/pause button, instead only responds to a hard reset.
  • Sometimes it indicates it’s playing a song, yet the progress indicator does not move and no song is actually played. Pressing play/pause, switching songs, or even jogging to the middle of the track all fail to “revive” this “false playback,” and only a hard reset remedies the issue.
  • Sometimes it takes up to ~20sec to display artwork once a song is played, especially if the thing has just powered on and it’s the first song you’re listening to.
  • Occasionally it skips tracks altogether when in “shuffle songs” mode. A track will flash up as the next shuffled song to be played, and then quickly give way to the next track in the shuffle without ever playing. Maybe there’s an algorithm that enforces a minimum gap between shuffled tracks, and if a song takes too long to seek on the physical disk – it’s skipped and the shuffle marches on? Maybe, but it’s still annoying. Particularly when the song that you’re teased with is a good one.
  • Pressing play/pause after the thing’s been idle only “wakes” it up – you have to press it twice to actually get a song to play.

I found this photo-narrative of a trip into North Korea to be really interesting, maybe you will too.

Setup a TiVo season pass to record the recent VH1 documentary series, “The Drug Years.” Chronicling the history of drugs and their use in the US, the series is extremely interesting. After watching the segment on the cocaine heyday of the late ’70s, I told Sharaun how it almost made me want to run a couple bumps. Turns out that was a mistake, and I spent the next ten minutes explaining how I didn’t really want to try coke.

Drugs have always been enticing to me. Ever since my middle school years, when I adopted musicians three generations my senior as my idols, I became bound and determined to emulate them and try marijuana. Later in life, after I’d satisfied my curiosity and given up recreational toking, I became interested in the more academic aspects of drug use: How drugs have impacted human cultural and spiritual development, how they were used by people throughout history, etc. Reading about shamans using entheogens to experience spiritual nirvana, and the ability to experience concepts like “ego death” almost make me want go out and have my own psychedelic personality-melting experience.

You can do it, you know. There are several highly-potent natural and laboratory-synthesized psychedelic substances sold online by legitimate purveyors. You can hitup so-called “research chemical” shops and purchase any number of yet-to-be strictly controlled designer drugs. At your fingertips are powerful psychedelics like the multitude of phenethylamine variants or 5-meO-AMT/DMT. All of which, and much more, can shipped to your doorstep with nothing but a web browser and a credit card. If you’re not into synthetics, you can go with something natural that has a long history of human use by surfing on to any decent online headshop to purchase a vial of salvia extract or other entheogenic plant-derivative. Point is, there are a number of ways one could experiment with psychedelic mind-altering substances and stay within the law.

Well… the letter of the law, at least… if you don’t count that pesky Federal Analog Act. Actually, I better stop writing about this before I start placing orders and soliciting “sitters.”

Lotta content, if you skipped some – go back, it’s all gold. Goodnight.

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whoofin’ on cheeba


Hey friends. No blog yesterday, had a packed night with some old friends – a long-needed reunion of sorts. Now it’s Wednesday night, and I worked from home again today while Sharaun taught a guest art lesson to her old class. It was good being with Keaton again, and, despite having to tend to her baby-type needs, I was able to get a tone of workish junk done. Was gonna mow, decided against it, and that pretty much sums up the day.

I wonder if CNN knows how much humor I derive from their webpage sometimes. It can’t be intentional on their part, but I’ll be danged if some of the stuff they write isn’t hilarious. Take for instance this quote from their lead article sometime Wednesday morning:

A couple of Massachusetts construction workers picked up some bathroom cabinetry and discovered some illegal extras with their purchases. One contractor found ganja ‘bricks,’ and a plumber found a stash of cocaine.

Ganja bricks?

OK, who gave “the man” the weed-slang dictionary? What’s next, Fox News reports on the chronic found at Lowes? MSNBC runs a headline about the sticky-icky-icky discovered at Ace Hardware? It’s cool though, because CNN will probably run a follow-up about how the Home Depot doja was seeds ‘n stems shwag anyway; just weak shake – not hydro, buddah, or nugs.

If you’ve been reading this page for a while, you’ll know that I have a fascination with religion – more specifically with some of the amazing things humans will believe when it comes to religion. Without getting into my religious notions, I just wanted to share this awesomely concise “illustrated history of Scientology” with you. A series of animated GIFs which originated from the ‘net-famous “you’re the man now dog” site, it tells the story of Scientology from Xenu to today in a slideshow of cartoons. Well worth the time if you’re unfamiliar with the “religion” and what they believe, and likely won’t be up long since Scientology employs a stable of notoriously oppressive lawyers who make it their life’s work to remove any content from the world which might portray their sacred beliefs in a negative light. So, check it out, and get a god chuckle. This stuff is better than magic glasses and reformed Egyptian: An Illustrated History of Scientology.

Sorry for the short entry, got all creative feeling and made a new index page again – I never did like that “on the plains” one with the growing trees all that much, I think this one is much nicer. Thought about actually taking my 96 Tears page of the index links, like I did a while back with my music pages, since it’s such a terribly designed page (but, I’ll admit, it’s a neato window into my premillenial HTML skillz). But, it’s still there…

Goodnight folks.

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oh how i’d miss the porn


Lasik tomorrow. Ben asked me if I was nervous about putting my eyes nuder the knife/laser. My immediate answer was “no,” as I’m actually not that nervous about it. Perhaps naive considering it’s elective surgery and has inherent risks – but my confidence has been so bolstered by the successes of my friends who’ve undergone the procedure, and the success rate overall. The only time I do get a tad “concerned” is when I think of it in terms of putting my vision on the line – more specifically, when I think that the worst possible result could be permanent blindness. I know this is incredibly rare (one out of millions, according to the stats), but boy… would that blow. As small a concern as it is, I have caught myself shutting my eyes tight for brief moments over the past week, in an attempt to get an idea what it might be like to be sightless for good. I know it’s a bad point of comparison, as I can simply open my lids and have the world once again revealed to me – but it does provide a bit of realism to the thought. At least, if I go blind, I’ll still have music. But porn, people… oh how I’d miss the porn.

Funny how things can change so much from day-to-day. It was just yesterday I wrote about being frustrated at work, and then this morning I went in and reopened stale tasks with a new vigor. Maybe writing about it was my own form of catharsis or something. Whatever happened, I just went in this morning and grabbed the reigns again. The afternoon was largely made up of meeting with various folks to inform them of the new direction I’m pursuing – all of which went well. For the moment, at least, I feel like I’m back in the game and contributing again. I guess it really could be as simple as being a work-only manic-depressive…

Let’s do a quick-bits roundup: Sharaun talked to her mom today, I guess all the ladies she works with now have a picture of our daughter being chased by a bear as their Windows desktop wallpapers. This makes me happy. Have successfully ripped and tagged over ~14GB (~4000 files) of Beatles bootlegs with my best-use-of-wasted-time Godfather script. I’m now on the home stretch, having nearly all my discs completely digitalized. It’s taken a couple years, but it was worth (or will be) worth it. Been working my “best albums of 2006, so far” list (a new “thing” I’ve been wanting to do here), and it’s coming along nicely. Aiming for sometime in June (y’know, to kinda reinforce the whole halfway thing). OK, done with that stuff.

I know I’ve written about edgewoodhospital.com before, but it’s inspired at least another paragraph. Let me first reiterate how much I love the site. Not only is it a timepiece for several generations, it’s gained quite a following of regulars who are digging up old pictures and posting them. These snapshots of parties past at Edgewood elicit the best comments from the site’s readers. People recognize people, recognize events, relive and share memories… I only wish I had some pictures like that from all the stuff we did as kids. We didn’t have an Edgewood where we’d go drink Budweiser and smoke Marlboros, but we did have several other “hangouts” where we could safely indulge in the excesses of youth while remaining relatively free from “the man.” Our main ones were: the pits, Skyview, the tracks, Barton extension, Hoo-Hoo, and BP. We had some good times at all those places, even spent the night at one of ’em a couple times – camped out in our cars, too stoned to want to leave. I wish I could make a site enshrining our teenage haunts, something along the lines of edgewoodhospital.com where folks could create accounts, upload old pictures of of kids being kids at those sacred places… comment on photos and carry on conversations. I would do it, but I have doubts I’d be able to properly publicize it – and it’d stagnate. But it sure would be fun to work on…

Any old cronies from the Rock read this? Anyone down? Leave me a comment if so.

And, before I go, just so Sharaun doesn’t read this and give me grief for talking about porn where anyone and their brother can go read it – I wouldn’t really miss the porn. I’d miss the internet, but the loss of porn would be an easy tradeoff. OK? Summary: Dave = not into porn as much as the tongue-in-cheek title may insinuate (it’s comedy, remember).

Goodnight.

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back for more


Lazy Saturday spent on the couch trying to catch the iPod repeating a song on random; gray and rainy Sunday with a trip to church in the morning and not much more than a banana and some peanut butter to liven up the afternoon. I didn’t have big plans for the weekend, but it’s not like there was a lack of things I could’ve been doing. There’s so much to do around the house. I could’ve fixed the one sprinkler in the backyard that still doesn’t pop high enough; I could’ve fixed the pocket door in our master bathroom, which has been off its track now for probably a year; could’ve replaced the filter in the air conditioner intake thing; could’ve used the blower to clean the cobwebs off the ceiling of our front porch; maybe pulled the plethora of weeds rooted in my backyard. But no, I did none of those things, instead I sat around surfing the web, holding the baby, and listening to music. I did, however, manage to upload a new series of pictures to Keaton’s gallery, so you should go check those out now.

Speaking of Keaton, I’m happy to say that she’s “officially” sleeping through the nights now. The few long ones she had before were encouraging, but since it wasn’t consistent we weren’t quite ready to say it was real. Now, though, she goes down for between 8 and 9hrs each night – sleeping right through to morning. Now, this isn’t that much of a change for me, being as I wasn’t the one waking every 3hrs to stick my teat in her mouth – but I know Sharaun appreciates it. I keep telling Sharaun that if and when we have another baby, we’re gonna be lucky if he or she is half as good as Keaton is. We’ve had it so “easy” with this little one: she’s not fussy, she’s playful and cute, and she’s sleeping all night before 3mos. Keep it up Keaton, I’m fully expecting a valedictorian cheerleader who shuns sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Fingers crossed…

Tech content ahead, readers beware.

After all my surmising and postulating last week about what the cause of my website slowdown was, I think I’m comfortable now saying that I’ve ID’d it and addressed it. Over the weekend I continued to see solid performance from my blog and gallery pages, and my loadtimes on the backend were vastly improved. So what, you may ask, was the issue after all – and what did I do to fix it? I promise this won’t be another long webmaster entry, just bear with me.

The culprit? The Omni Explorer bot. A nasty, dirty, incredibly aggressive bot which was crawling my webapges with such frequency and voracity that it managed to gobble up gigs upon gigs of my bandwidth. I zero’d in on the Omni bot through my usage statistics, noticing it was the number one requester of my site over the past few months. Keying in a simple Google search brought up several folks ranting about the bot, and it’s unquenchable thirst for data. Eventually, I landed on the webpage of the bot’s company, where a goofy-looking apology about its aggressiveness is posted along with instructions on how to block it from indexing a site. In the end, I went with a stricter method of blocking than the Omni Explorer page recommended, as I’d read elsewhere that the thing had been caught ignoring the file they suggest using as a block.

I changed my .htaccess file, uploaded it, and the results were both immediate and amazing. My site sprang to life, responding to requests in a timely manner and looking spry again. And, so far, things have remained that way. So that’s it, the story of how I resurrected my site by denying the raping, ravaging Omni Explorer crawler/bot.

And, before I leave the topic of blogging, I wanted to mention that I added a live spam-comment counter to the sidebar. It shows how many comments the my Akisment spam blocker has currently shot down since it was installed. Check it now, and refresh the page when you’re done reading this entry to get an idea of frequency. Stuff like this is fun for me…

Nerdy stuff over, for those who skipped it.

Before I go, I wanted to pass along a link to what I thought was a great idea: an invitation for folks to list their most “visceral” song moments, right down to the whens and whys of it. I did something similar once, although I think my theme was more “songs that give me chills;” but, it still fits. And what do you know, Teenage Fanclub’s The Concept shows up on both my list and the one linked above. Honestly, it doesn’t surprise me that much – I knew there was something magic about that song the 1st time I heard it… still gives me chills to this day. I actually thought it might be fun to go back and revisit that entry, adding additional information along the lines of what’s on the goodhodgkins.com list (along with the actual song). Maybe sometime this week…

Goodnight, I have nothing more for you.

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stressed


Happy Friday friends, boring entry for non-techies ahead… I’m afraid. Before you read it, I’d like to say that after writing it – I made some simple changes to my access files, and I’ve been having stellar results thus far. Keep your fingers crossed, maybe I have a working blog again.

If you’re reading this right now, consider yourself one of the lucky few who got through to what’s becoming an ever hard-to-reach sounds familiar. I apologize for the server problems folks, I assure you they are not of my making – in fact I’ve been have trouble finding something to pin the blame on. Right now, I’ve chatted several times with my hosting service’s tech support – and been assured that the server I’m on is functioning just fine – so the problem either lies with my pages themselves, or with the amount of traffic I’m sustaining (and thus asking the server to fulfill). Armed with this, I pored over the server usage logs to see just what might be the culprit.

Suspect #1 is blog comment spam, which has grown to a staggering amount (~3k pieces per day). All this comment spam activity is scripted and targeted at the same piece of PHP code, meaning it’s making numerous simultaneous database requests all day long. Since none of the spam makes it to the main page, I’m happy – but there’s no way to stop the database traffic without turning off commenting altogether, or implementing a login scheme – neither of which are attractive to actual commenters. Suspect #2 is the Coppermine application I use to power my image galleries, as the slowdown coincided somewhat with its introduction. I’ve often wondered if its code is super inefficient or sloppy, but the only way to test is to shut the galleries down for a month and watch the results – undesirable Suspect #3 is my own star-power. That’s right, I may just be too popular for my current hardware. I know, hard to believe – right? Let’s examine the evidence:

Below you’ll see my monthly bandwidth usage statistics from October of last year through February this year. You’ll notice that I was fairly solid around ~1-1.5GB of monthly transfer for an entire year there, up until October 2005 where you’ll start noticing some significant growth through February this year. In February, I hit 4GB transfer on the month – that’s a substantial difference from my ~1GB past year.

Now let’s take a look at March and April of this year. After a fairly smooth rise to the 4GBs of February, something happens and site usage freakin’ takes off over the past two months. Doubling over the course of March to a whopping 8GB and then increasing another gig in April to 9GB.

You think it’s a coincidence that Keaton was born on February 27th? That entry certainly generated some increased interest in the blog, and perhaps even bumped up my regular readership to some degree… But what are people looking at? Digging deeper below, they’re looking primarily at this very page. Viewed ~20,000 times in the month of April. However, some percentage of that, maybe 10%, is me writing and refreshing; and my blog-specific stats program clocked “unique” visitors at ~9,000, meaning half of those 20,000 hits were repeat customers. That’s impressive to me, especially since it doesn’t count web spiders and other forms of bots or indexers (which, incidentally, made up about 12% of April’s 8GB of transfer). The data below also shows that my image gallery is the clear runner-up to sounds familiar, being viewed 9,000+ times on the month.

Yeah, so what?, you may ask. 10GB monthly and 20,000 hits is peanuts, really. Especially when my hosting package allows me 250GB on the month. So why am I so bogged down at less than 10% of my allotment? I still have no idea, and I’m actively pursuing it with my host. As soon as I can find some relief, I’ll make the changes – I’m even willing to spend more money monthly if it comes down to it. As of now, I’ve taken some aggressive steps to block some greedy bots and spiders from aggressively crawling my domain – hopefully it’ll give some relief. Thanks for sticking with me through the crapiness… I appreciate your patience.

Before I close the topic, however, some random stats I enjoyed:

  • 83% of you come to my blog via a bookmark, while 13% arrived via a search engine.
  • Of you 13% who arrived via search engine, most of you came from a Google image search for “spider bites.” The next biggest chunk of you were searching on the term “crumbelievable.”
  • If you were referred to my blog, it was likely from myspace.com. Although I don’t understand this, and can’t find a link from myspace to me, that site accounts for 27% of my non-spam referral traffic.
  • In April, 13% of pharaohweb.com’s 9,828 unique visitors bookmarked a page (that’s 1,324 people).
  • 23 people visited my pages from a WebTV console. They still make those?
  • 80% of you are here and gone in 30sec, only 8% stick around as long as 2min. On the other hand, 212 of you were here for more than an hour. 30sec… what the eff is that?

I had big plans to write something here at the end with a little more meat, but I don’t have it in me. Until Monday, I aced another week. Love you.

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run #83


Sometimes I sit and wonder about all the fancy, high-tech, top-secret experiments that are likely being carried out all over the world at any given moment.

Somewhere at MIT, students are hurtling particles down long accelerator arms toward a measurable collision; somewhere in Germany, chemists are synthesizing new proteins and seeing how they interact with other substances; somewhere in China, nuclear scientists in white lab coats might be working on a new form of nuclear power – unstable now but with hopes of making it viable. All over the globe, humankind is pushing the boundaries of knowledge – doing experiments to watch and study the results. Yes, all across the Earth things which have never been done or observed before are being done – all just to satisfy a curiosity… to see what happens. Without this kind of experimentation and curiosity, we’d never have come as far as we have. Without Rutherford firing particles at gold foil, Mendel’s selective breeding, or Otto’s combustion engine – humans would be a long way from where we are now.

When I sit and think about it, all the groundbreaking experiments going on, all the potential discoveries and curiosities being satisfied – my mind takes a darker turn. One day, while waiting to “see what happens” as the outcome of one of those experiments – something may go wrong. What if the results of a new experiment are unexpected? Run #83 of a series of 10,000 tests making up a battery of experiments, for example. Run #83 creates an explosion big enough to destroy the entire Earth. Just think of it, a team of scientists casually watching their experiment run through its paces… noting results as the computer captures loads of data… sipping coffee and discussing physics – when up comes test #83. One minute detail in thousands of parameters is tweaked ever-so slightly and bang… the end of everything. Yeah, I think about that from time to time. A massive wave of destruction starting from a physics lab at a Brazilian university and overtaking the universe – all because some grad students were experimenting with gravity in an attempt to study black holes. A flash of light and life as we know it ends, billions of years of evolution erased because one researcher was trying to turn water into a viable replacement for fossil fuel. Poof. Every day, there must be millions of experiments happening at any given moment…

What will you be doing when run #83 vaporizes you, only a flash of light for warning before you cease to exist?