What the hell??!? (blah, blah of a wannabe alien)
Tech Stuff
mpt-status For SuSE Linux
Jun 4th
mpt-status is a command line utility to check the RAID status for LSI 1030 RAID controllers. Now can someone tell me why in the hell SuSE Linux Enterprise bothers to come with a version of mpt-status that doesn’t work with the Linux kernel that SuSE Linux uses???
It’s basically like bundling some application with Windows XP, but the application only works on Windows 98 or earlier.
Really annoying man…
After an hour of screwing around with it, I finally got it to work (I intentionally broke the RAID mirror to test the rebuild)…
# mpt-status
ioc0 vol_id 0 type IM, 2 phy, 136 GB, state DEGRADED, flags ENABLED RESYNC_IN_PROGRESS
ioc0 phy 0 scsi_id 0 SEAGATE ST3146854LC D403, 136 GB, state ONLINE, flags OUT_OF_SYNC
ioc0 phy 1 scsi_id 1 SEAGATE ST3146854LC D403, 136 GB, state ONLINE, flags NONE
ioc0 vol_id 0 type IM, 2 phy, 136 GB, state DEGRADED, flags ENABLED RESYNC_IN_PROGRESS
ioc0 phy 0 scsi_id 0 SEAGATE ST3146854LC D403, 136 GB, state ONLINE, flags OUT_OF_SYNC
ioc0 phy 1 scsi_id 1 SEAGATE ST3146854LC D403, 136 GB, state ONLINE, flags NONE
Now if it would just tell me what percentage of the resync is done… Oh well, can’t have EVERYTHING I guess. 
BitTorrent.com Needs To Clean Up Their Act
Jun 3rd
So apparently the MPAA and BitTorrent, Inc. are working together to clean up piracy (specifically film piracy in this case [of course since they are the MPAA]).
From Dan Glickman (MPAA Chairman and CEO):
“We are glad that Bram Cohen and his company are working with us to limit access to infringing files on the BitTorrent.com website,†said Glickman. “They are leading the way for other companies by their example.â€
Okay, that sounds like a good first step (and hopefully down the road they will start selling movies for download). But uhm… they seem to be failing miserably at this. If you do a search for a movie using the search function right at the top of BitTorrent.com, it looks like you can download pretty much anything (and this is the company that the MPAA thinks is “leading the way for other companies by their example”?). I suppose BiTorrent, Inc. could be logging everything that people download and giving it to the MPAA so they can file lawsuits, but wouldn’t that be some sort of entrapment?
All this stuff is very bizarre, but terribly interesting at the same time. We have the MPAA promoting BitTorrent’s site, yet you can download anything illegally right from the site they are promoting. You have Warner Brothers getting ready to distribute movies legally via BitTorrent (and promoting BitTorrent as well), but then at the same time Warner Brothers own message board is full of people helping each other to download Warner Brothers material that is under copyright via BitTorrent (and WB doesn’t currently offer any legal downloads via BitTorrent that I know of).
Either way, if I was the MPAA (or any movie studio like Warner Brothers), I would tell BitTorrent, Inc. to piss off/clean up their crap and at the very LEAST I certainly would stop sending them traffic.
The underlying technology for BitTorrent is nothing short of revolutionary, and if done properly it could change the way any sort of media is distributed (legally), but for some reason they don’t seem to be leveraging what they have. If they can “fix” their issues, I hope they go public, because I would be the first in line to invest in them (the ideas/technology behind it is amazing). BitTorrent, Inc. needs me as a software developer/business consultant I think.
Links:
I’m Not Trying To Save The World
Jun 2nd
This is just more blah, blah about the whole MPAA vs. me thing.
One thing that I think people are not understanding here is that I’m not trying to change the world with this. I’m not trying to “take down the MPAA”, change any copyright or file sharing laws or anything else as grandiose as that. Hell, I have expensive billing software that I wrote that is pirated every day (I’m just too lazy to sue them… too much hassle and work IMO).
I’m still not 100% certain what the details are for the stuff the MPAA has against me (other than it was downloading “Meet The Fockers”), but I’m sure it will come out in the discovery process. I do think it will be very interesting to check out their methodology for pinpointing users for their John Doe lawsuits. Even if the world jury lost their minds and I was somehow found guilty and had to pay whatever the court sees fit, the whole process would have been a cool story to tell. And maybe I could even learn something in the whole process. I’ve learned a TON about all sorts of interesting stuff already as a result of this case – for example BitTorrent technology is actually pretty amazing from a purely technical standpoint [other companies like Apple, some Linux distributions, etc. seem to think it's a pretty good technology too]. Even Warner Brothers is going to be distributing movies via BitTorrent (legitimately with DRM intact of course), which I think will be *awesome*. When it comes down to it, it’s all about decentralization and utilizing whatever resources are available. I’m still hoping Apple will do an iTunes Movie Store, and if the backend works with file sharing/swarming technology where users could earn credits for ultimately footing Apple’s bandwidth bills, then all the better.
Anyway, my point is that I’m not trying to save the world… I’ve received countless emails/phone calls from people who treat me like the second coming of you-know-who, and just think people are blowing everything out of proportion (obviously). I’m not interested in writing a book about it or making a movie about it (well, unless maybe someone can somehow slip in a love scene for me with someone like Rachel McAdams… haha!)
Some useful advice from me… “Don’t ever take things at face value if your gut tells you that something is fishy. Ultimately knowledge is power, and the best way to get knowledge is to figure it out on your own. Sometimes you might even come up with a better way of doing things by ‘thinking outside the box’.”
BTW – if Rachel McAdams is reading this… can you call me please, I must have lost your phone number… 
No Sound With Flash
May 31st
Dude, this issue has been bugging me for months on my Mac… A couple apps would never play any sound (most notably Macromedia Flash). Anyway, I finally was able to find the solution, so hopefully someone searching Google will find this post useful.
Go to Applications -> Utilities -> Apple MIDI Setup
Check the Audio Output Format (somehow mine was set to 96000.0 Hz) and set it to 48000.0 Hz (or lower).
So to celebrate that I have Flash audio again, I’m glad to present you with a newly released Denny “Blazen” Hazen video (the funny thing about this video is it’s actually 100x better than his previous ones)…
Memory Is Here
May 30th
Finally got the last (physical) piece for the blade servers (120GB RAM [60 x 2GB DIMMs]). I’m a swell counter because I counted them 5 or 6 times, and each time I counted them, I came up with 40, so I thought they shorted me 20 DIMMs for a 10 minutes or so.
So I was messing around with init.d, and wrote a script for it to automatically start the memcached daemon on boot. No biggie there, but this is a newer init.d than I had worked with in the past, and you can put comments in your script to easily enable/disable it for various run-levels. For example insserv -d memcached will configure init.d for the default run-levels defined within the script. Sweet, that’s pretty handy. I also got rsyncd (along with it’s init.d setup) up and running, so keeping the servers in sync should be cake.
Oh yeah… I had an interesting idea last night when doing all this stuff… why not configure all 10 blade servers identically (for example database servers have Apache and web content locally and web servers have database server processes installed). Then set an environment variable within /etc/profile.local along the lines of SYSTEM_TYPE = "database" (for database server). Then when the server boots, have it automatically configure itself as needed based on the SYSTEM_TYPE. That would make it super easy to change the job of a server on the fly. Just change the SYSTEM_TYPE variable and viola!, a database server could become a web server and added to the web cluster instantly. It would be even more interesting if the servers all monitored themselves, and if they were under heavy web load (but light on database), have one of the database servers automatically reset it’s SYSTEM_TYPE variable. Basically it would be automatic reallocation of servers/resources to whatever was needed at the time. Could be cool…
I’m an f’ing dork BTW.
A Server Configuration Day
May 26th
I spent most of the day getting crap installed on the first blade as well as learning about little quirks with SuSE Linux Enterprise 9.3.
MySQL 5.0.21 was an easy install (a nice little RPM for SuSE Linux comes from MySQL).
Memcached was a pretty easy compile/install… just needed to compile/install eventlib first.
The big bitch was getting PHP 5.1.4 compiled and working properly with all the options I wanted (had to install all sorts of secondary stuff that PHP had dependencies on [and then a lot of those things had their own dependencies that needed to be resolved]) and compiled a couple dynamic extensions for it (eAccelerator and Memcache). Most of the problems with the configure script not being able to find libraries it needed was solved with the –with-libdir=lib64 parameter.
I really hope that once the first blade is setup exactly how I want it, I can use the hardware RAID mirroring to just swap out one of the drives into another blade and rebuild the mirrors (and repeat for each blade)… then just set a unique IP address and hostname for each blade/server.
I still need to code some stuff to keep some of the files in sync properly (for example each web server should mirror content on each blade), but I’ll do that next week I guess.
Once the blades are all configured and ready to go, I can do some of the more fun stuff… like setting up the load balancers. I think I’m going to use the load balancers for both web and database connections for both load balancing and fault tolerance. So much good dorky fun!
My 10 Year Anniversary
May 24th
My company, Digital Point Solutions (formerly known as Data Point Solutions) has been on the web for 10 years now. It sure seems like a lot longer though considering how much different stuff I’ve done in that timeframe (for example, I’ve dominated [hehe... no really] 3 different industries).
Will be interesting to see what happens in the next 10 years…
http://web.archive.org/web/19961101191016/http://www.data-point.com/
Fast OS Switching On Macintosh
May 22nd
Paralells has their Intel Virtualization solution for Intel based Macs, but someone combined it with VirtueDesktops for a “fast OS switching” system (basically like the fast user switching that is built into OS X).
So you can run OS X, Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc. all at the same time without needing an emulation layer.
Save Your Switch Info!
May 21st
Yesterday I spent about 2 hours configuring all sorts of crap in the new network switch… port assignments/names, QoS, SNMP crap, etc.
I forgot that even though changes you make are applied right away, they are lost if you power cycle the equipment. Hahaha… whoops!
Don’t forget this, I know I won’t ever forget it again.
Console# copy running-config startup-config
New Equipment Is Here
May 19th
The blade chassis arrived on a palette today (and boy, was that an awesome time getting it upstairs), so that means all the new server equipment is here (except for additional RAM).
We got 1 blade chassis, 10 loaded blades (except for RAM right now), 2 load balancers (1 is a hot spare) and a managed 48-port gigabit switch (along with redundant power supply).
Now I need to go to Home Depot and get an extension cord and plug adapter so I can plug the chassis into a 220V outlet.
Until the equipment is ready to be installed in the data center, we have Yashi (and his camera shy brother, Wiggly) standing guard over it all.
Map Of Digg Traffic
May 17th
At the beginning of last November, I had the idea to do an automatic geolocation system for blog/website owners called Geo Visitors.
This blog got quite a bit of traffic in the last 24 hours (because of a front-page digg). Anyway, check out what the maps look like for visitors to this blog in the last 24 hours… It’s crazy how much traffic digg can bring you in a short amount of time. Thankfully my quick little caching mechanism I did for WordPress last time I had something in digg, held up (last time WordPress was thrashing my servers because of the traffic).
Europe
United States
New York area
If you want to check out the map in realtime (or use it for your own blog/site), click here.
Dell Blade Servers Are Here
May 16th
The new blade servers were delivered this morning (10 of them). Hopefully should get the chassis tomorrow (it shipped separately), and the new switch and load balancers later in the week.
Wiggly (one of my cats) is terrified of change, and now he won’t leave my office because there are big boxes in the hallway. heh
Multiple Instances Of mysqld
May 15th
My primary MySQL server has been VERY overloaded lately (which is the main reason new blades are on the way), but today I decided to see what I can do about it in the meantime (the parameters have already been tuned as much as possible).
First I toyed around with a single node MySQL Cluster… it didn’t work terribly well. I think you really need 2 or 4 nodes for it to be effective.
Then I decided to run two different copies of mysqld on the same machine. Dude, this works *so* well under a high load that it’s almost unbelievable. While the memory fragmentation issues are still there, it’s 20x better (really). I should have done this a long time ago…
Net Neutrality
May 12th
“Ask A Ninja” tackles the topic of Internet Neutrality. For those of you that don’t know what it is, telecoms are trying to make it legal to prioritize Internet traffic based on the who’s the highest bidder.
MySpace Is Bigger Than Porn
May 10th
Google Trends is a neat little tool that lets you see how keyword searches compare historically over time. There seems to be more people searching for myspace than porn these days.
myspace 
porn APC Datastore Class For vBulletin
May 8th
On one of my ultra-high traffic web servers, I switched from eAccelerator to APC today (an opcode/caching system for PHP). So far it seems pretty nice… Especially the ability to disable stat for each PHP request.
I ended up making a datastore class for vBulletin also so I could use it for the forum, so if anyone else is using vBulletin on a server with APC, here you go (if you know what this is for, you will know where it goes ).
[code=php]// #############################################################################
// APC
/**
* Class for fetching and initializing the vBulletin datastore from APC
*
* @package vBulletin
* @version $Revision: 0.0.0.1 $
* @date $Date: 2006/05/08 16:51:06 $
*/
class vB_Datastore_APC extends vB_Datastore
{
/**
* Fetches the contents of the datastore from APC
*
* @param array Array of items to fetch from the datastore
*
* @return void
*/
function fetch($itemarray)
{
if (!function_exists('apc_fetch'))
{
trigger_error('APC not installed', E_USER_ERROR);
}
foreach ($this->defaultitems AS $item)
{
$this->do_fetch($item);
}
if (is_array($itemarray))
{
foreach ($itemarray AS $item)
{
$this->do_fetch($item);
}
}
$this->check_options();
// set the version number variable
$this->registry->versionnumber =& $this->registry->options['templateversion'];
}
/**
* Fetches the data from shared memory and detects errors
*
* @param string title of the datastore item
*
* @return void
*/
function do_fetch($title)
{
$ptitle = $this->prefix . $title;
if (($data = apc_fetch($ptitle)) === false)
{ // appears its not there, lets grab the data and put it in memory
$data = '';
if ($dataitem = $this->dbobject->query_first("
SELECT title, data FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "datastore
WHERE title = '" . $this->dbobject->escape_string($title) ."'
"))
{
$data =& $dataitem['data'];
}
$this->build($title, $data);
}
$this->register($title, $data);
}
/**
* Updates the appropriate cache file
*
* @param string title of the datastore item
*
* @return void
*/
function build($title, $data)
{
$title = $this->prefix . $title;
if (!function_exists('apc_store'))
{
trigger_error('APC not installed', E_USER_ERROR);
}
$check = apc_store($title, $data);
}
}[/code]
More Dell Pricing Craziness
May 4th
What in the hell dude???
Now we are back to the $66,030 pricing for the 10 blades. This is $30,000 cheaper than the pricing yesterday.
Getting Around Dell’s Whacky Pricing
May 3rd
As I mentioned previously, I’m looking to get a bunch of Dell blade servers, but their pricing system (seemingly random pricing changes every day) is really irritating me. So I think I may have come up with a solution… Just buy stripped down blades and add the RAM, hard drives (and maybe even 2nd CPU) yourself.
As of right now, a single loaded blade configured as I would want it is $9,062 (that’s 2 dual core CPUs, 12GB RAM, 2 146GB 1k rpm drives, 3 gigabit ethernet ports, SuSE Linux Enterprise 9, etc.)
But if I strip the CPU, RAM and hard drives down to a minimum (1 dual core CPU, 1GB RAM, 1 36GB 15k rpm drive), the cost is $3,025.
Dell doesn’t offer 4GB DIMM modules, but they do say the blades support them. It’s actually cheaper to use 4GB DIMMs instead of 2GB DIMMs because you can use double ranked for the 4GB vs. single rank for the 2GB. This also means by using 4GB DIMMs you can max out at 16GB of memory instead of 12GB. 4GB DDR2 DIMMs are $581 each.
146GB 15k rpm U320 SCSI drives are $275 each (would need to find out if Dell sells blank drive carriers since they are hot swappable.. if not, I found them on eBay for $8.95).
A 2nd processor is $935 (the user’s guide for the blades actually have instructions for replacing a CPU, so maybe you can add one yourself too).
So if we add it all together we could have an identically configured blade (except we would have 4GB MORE RAM) for $6,834 instead of Dell’s $9,062 price. Also, would probably just end up adding 8GB RAM for now (9GB total) which would bring the per blade cost down to $5,672.
Now if they would just use AMD Opteron processors instead of Intel Xeon……..
Dell Pricing Fluctuations
Apr 29th
Can I just tell everyone how annoying Dell’s price fluctuations are? I’m trying to purchase a blade chassis and 10 loaded blades. One day the blades are $66,030, then they are $105,400, then $66,030 again, now they are $88,040 (all pricing for identically configured blades of course). Finally I got pissed and called Dell, and their response was, “Well, we change our pricing every week.”
Gee, really??
What, do you have to roll the dice and try to guess when they will be a “normal” price again and buy them in that 15 second window? Really f’ing annoying…
High Tech Hooker Pumps
Apr 29th
Nice! These shoes have built in LCD and GPS so pimps can keep track of their hoe’s.
The Aphrodite platform shoes will have an alarm system, which emits a piercing noise to scare off attackers. The shoes are also outfitted with a GPS receiver and an emergency button that relays both the prostitute’s location and a silent alarm signal to public emergency services. Where there are problematic relations with law enforcement, the shoes will relay the signal to sex workers’ rights groups.
WordPress Is NOT Scaleable
Apr 28th
The core of WordPress (this blog software) is pretty much a piece of crap as far as it’s “guts” are concerned (although I knew this already, I just didn’t care because my blog doesn’t get enough visitors to really make that fact matter much).
Anyway, I woke up this morning to my servers being thrashed (database server was hitting it’s max limit of 2,500 concurrent connections). Turns out it was because of a front-page Digg (the 3rd one for digitalpoint.com in the last 60 days, but the 1st one for my blog with the crappy WordPress backend). That didn’t hold up to the “digg effect” for very long.
I ended up cobbling together a caching mechanism for WordPress real quick that actually made everything okay, but what I really want to know is if anyone knows of any blog software out there that doesn’t have a crap backend? One that can hold up under load if need be. Sure would be nice if there is one out there already so I don’t have to do it myself.
This is the digg in case anyone is curious. It was dugg by the same person that got a front-page Digg for digitalpoint.com previously. Digg is powerful… a crazy amount of traffic at once. It’s also what spawned the server fundraiser going on now. I think TOPS30 needs to be stabbed.
Boeing 797
Apr 23rd
This is an interesting plane if Boeing actually decides to build it…
A 1,000 passenger plane that is faster than existing commercial jets (mach .88), and also more efficient because of the wing design.
.There are several big advantages to the blended wing design, the most important being the lift to drag ratio which is expected to increase by an amazing 50%, with overall weight reduced by 25%, making it an estimated 33% more efficient than the A380, and making Airbus’s $13 billion dollar investment look pretty shaky. High body rigidity is another key factor in blended wing aircraft, it reduces turbulence and creates less stress on the air frame which adds to efficiency, giving the 797 a tremendous 8800 nautical mile range with its 1000 passengers flying comfortably at mach .88 or 654 mph cruising speed (another advantage over the Airbus tube-and-wing designed A380’s 570 mph).
It’s looks a bit like a stealth bomber. Maybe they could further save costs by dropping smart bombs while making commercial passenger flights.
Sony Qualia 006 (KDS-70CQ006) Discontinued
Apr 7th
Sony discontinued their entire Qualia line of high-end products. Okay… no biggie, but maybe they should come out with something to replace the products that are now gone. For example the Qualia 006 (KDS-70CQ006) was a 70″ rear projection TV with SXRD technology and it was freaking AWESOME. No seriously… AWESOME!
Sony now has 50″ and a 60″ SXRD rear projection TVs with the same picture quality (and true 1920×1080 1080p resolution), but I still think they should come out with a 70″ replacement.
Oh well… I guess I’ll look at maybe getting the 60″ (KDS-R60XBR1) for my new HDTV…
Regents Court (No HDTV)
Apr 7th
I really want to upgrade to a high definition TV, but get this…
I live in the middle of one of the most technologically advanced cities in the United States (like I can get a T1 on a fiber connection to my place for around $100 including local loop charges) and I have 6Mbit DSL for around $30/month. But guess what? I can’t get any sort of HDTV signal for any price (except HD over the air).
My apartment building (Regents Court in San Diego) has an exclusive deal with SBC Home Entertainment so all apartments are wired for DirecTV (without the need for a dish for each unit). That means you don’t even have the option to get cable. Okay… whatever DirecTV isn’t so bad. But the DirecTV signal used for this building is not high definition.
OMG Sweet!!! (not)
I’ll probably still get a high definition TV, pick up local stations over the air (does anyone know if HDTV over the air is digital or is it still an analog signal subject to degradation?), and maybe get an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 so I can actually watch something (a game in this case) in high def.
So dumb…
Gefen HDMI Extreme Cables (Fiber Optic HDMI)
Apr 7th
Looks like Gefen just expanded their fiber optic line of cables (all fiber optic components are built right into the cable) to also include HDMI cabling (they had them for DVI before), which means I don’t need the external HDMI extender units (7 of them from this post).
http://www.gefen.com/kvm/cables/fiberextreme.jsp#hdmiextreme
Now if they would just come out with a similar solution for dual link DVI, we would be all set…
Intel Virtualization
Apr 6th
Okay… this is f’ing COOL. I knew Apple was going to include the technology in a future version of their operating system, but a third-party has done it and it making it available now as a beta. For those that don’t know what Intel Virtualization is, it allows a CPU, memory, etc. to be split up into different isolated environments (running multiple operating systems natively [no emulation] at the same time on a single machine). Some more reading over here.
So guess what? Now you can run Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. all natively (WITHOUT EMULATION) at the same time on a single Intel Macintosh computer. Bad ASS!
It’s here! Parallels is proud to launch the Beta program the first virtualization solution specifically designed to work with Intel-powered Apple computers! Parallels Workstation 2.1 Beta for Mac OS X is NOT simply a “dual-boot” solution; rather, it empowers users the ability to use Windows, Linux and any other operating system at the same time as Mac OS X, enabling users to enjoy the comfort of their Mac OS X desktop while still being able to use critical applications from other OSes.
http://www.parallels.com/en/products/workstation/mac/
Boot Camp – Run Windows On Mac (Without Hacking)
Apr 5th
Apple made a excellent move today and announced the beta for a new Boot Camp utility. This lets you run Windows natively on the new Intel Macs without needing to come up with special hacks to trick old school OSes that need BIOS instead of EFI (and also includes all necessary Windows drivers in one place).
Another really handy thing is the utility it comes with to create/resize partitions without loosing any data from the existing ones (no format needed).
Apple is a hardware company primarily, so they still get to sell the hardware… and in the course of doing so, plenty of people will switch to OS X because it might be their first (incidental) exposure to it (if they bought the machine to run Windows).
Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it’ll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world.
Installing APC On BSD Variants
Mar 24th
Alternative PHP Cache is a PHP caching mechanism (like Turck mmCache, eAccelerator, etc.) that is being developed directly by PHP developers. In fact, PHP 6.0 is going to include APC Cache in it’s core framework, so it’s certainly something PHP developers/admins should start looking at.
Anyway, if you install APC Cache and Apache fails to start afterwards, check your Apache error log to see if you get something like this:
[Thu Mar 23 15:18:28 2006] [apc-error] apc_shm_create: shmget(0, 67108864,914) failed: Invalid argument. It is possible that the chosen SHM segment size is higher than the operation system allows. Linux has usually a default limit of 32MB per segment.
PHP Warning: Unknown(): Unable to load dynamic library './/usr/local/lib/php/apc.so' - (null) in Unknown on line 0
Most BSD variants (including Mac OS X Server in my case) don’t allow much shared memory to be allocated by default. Lucky, it’s an easy fix…
My OS had a default allowance of 4MB max for shared memory. You can alter that by adding this to your /etc/sysctl.conf file (or creating it if it doesn’t exist):
My new /etc/sysctl.conf file…
kern.sysv.shmmax=134217728
kern.sysv.shmmin=1
kern.sysv.shmmni=32
kern.sysv.shmseg=8
kern.sysv.shmall=32768
kern.sysv.shmmin=1
kern.sysv.shmmni=32
kern.sysv.shmseg=8
kern.sysv.shmall=32768
shmall should be shmmax/4096
So the above config will let you use up to 128MB for shared memory.
You can't dynamically set the shared memory kernel variables with the sysctl command because once it's set, it can't be altered. Because of that, you must reboot your server after you edit the sysctl.conf file...
Google Not Interpreting robots.txt Consistently
Mar 21st
I had an issue where Googlebot was spidering parts of my site that were not allowed in the robots.txt file…
My old robots.txt file…
User-agent: *
Disallow: /tools/suggestion/?
Disallow: /search.php
Disallow: /go.php
Disallow: /scripts/
Disallow: /ads/
Disallow: /tools/suggestion/?
Disallow: /search.php
Disallow: /go.php
Disallow: /scripts/
Disallow: /ads/
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /ebay_
Hmmmm... that's weird... Googlebot is still spidering stuff it shouldn't be...
www.digitalpoint.com 66.249.66.138 - - [14/Mar/2006:06:21:07 -0800] "GET /ads/ HTTP/1.1" 302 38 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
www.digitalpoint.com 66.249.66.138 - - [14/Mar/2006:10:26:18 -0800] "GET /ads/ HTTP/1.1" 302 38 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
www.digitalpoint.com 66.249.66.138 - - [14/Mar/2006:14:29:35 -0800] "GET /ads/ HTTP/1.1" 302 38 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
www.digitalpoint.com 66.249.66.138 - - [14/Mar/2006:17:47:21 -0800] "GET /ads/ HTTP/1.1" 302 38 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
So I made an inquiry to Google about this, and I actually heard back (nice!)...
While we normally don't review individual sites,
we did examine your robots.txt file. Please be advised that it appears
your Googlebot entry in your robots.txt file is overriding your generic
User-Agent listing. We suggest you alter your robots.txt file by
duplicating the forbidden paths under your Googlebot entry:
we did examine your robots.txt file. Please be advised that it appears
your Googlebot entry in your robots.txt file is overriding your generic
User-Agent listing. We suggest you alter your robots.txt file by
duplicating the forbidden paths under your Googlebot entry:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /tools/suggestion/?
Disallow: /search.php
Disallow: /go.php
Disallow: /scripts/
Disallow: /ads/
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /ebay_
Disallow: /tools/suggestion/?
Disallow: /search.php
Disallow: /go.php
Disallow: /scripts/
Disallow: /ads/
Once you've altered your robots.txt file, Google will find it
automatically after we next crawl your site.
Okay... I can live with that... easy fix. But check this out... Google's own robots.txt testing tool within Google Sitemaps show the old robots.txt as being able to block Googlebot as expected.
So how about some consistency here? And more importantly, if anyone at Google is reading this, how about someone tell me why my blog is banned in your index...
All About Darknets
Mar 18th
I ran across this excellent mashup when reading about some MPAA stuff (specifically how they got slammed at the SXSW 2006 event)…
http://ia310128.us.archive.org/2/items/All_about_darknets/darknets.mp4
Cat5 Action Figures
Mar 16th
Someone who is more of a dork than me (and with too much free time), decided to unwind CAt5 ethernet cables and make action figures out of them.
http://www.lobzik.pri.ee/modules/news/article.php?storyid=404
Japanese Robotic Fish
Mar 16th
A $250,000 robotic robot… wouldn’t it be cheaper to just buy a real fish?
Insect Cyborgs
Mar 15th
I saw this on Boing Boing this afternoon… it looks like DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is starting to research the feasibility of engineering insect cyborgs…
Quote from their website…
DARPA seeks innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs, possibly enabled by intimately integrating microsystems within insects, during their early stages of metamorphoses. The healing processes from one metamorphic stage to the next stage are expected to yield more reliable bio-electromechanical interface to insects, as compared to adhesively bonded systems to adult insects. Once these platforms are integrated, various microsystem payloads can be mounted on the platforms with the goal of controlling insect locomotion, sense local environment, and scavenge power. Multidisciplinary teams of engineers, physicists, and biologists are expected to work together to develop new technologies utilizing insect biology, while developing foundations for the new field of insect cyborg engineering. The HI-MEMS may also serve as vehicles to conduct research to answer basic questions in biology.
Google Earth In A Car
Mar 14th
Volkswagen stole my idea, but at least now we get to see some images from it. Looks pretty cool.
Basically it’s just Google Earth running in a car stereo for things like navigation.
Unregistering A Domain
Mar 6th
Apparently it’s possible to “unregister” a domain somehow… because someone registered shawnhogan.com 2 months ago, and today it was available for registration. So whatever, I registered it.
