What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]

Wednesday March 31, 2004

Gimme some linkin' love Criminy, I just checked how much love I'm getting according to Technorati. The news isn't good. I mean, I realize I only launched this blog a little over a month ago but I thought I'd start getting a little lovin' by now.

So here it is, in all of it un-glory, my Technorati rank. rank. Jeez, it's pathetic; maybe I should stay home and watch re-runs of the "Love Boat" and "Gomer Pyle."

OK, screw that. But if you link to me, I won't complain. Maybe I should make a business plan for my blog, set some objectives for my Technorati ranking. I can probably post pictures of Paris Hilton or something to get some links. Yea, that's it. ( Mar 31 2004, 05:07:24 PM PST ) Permalink

Wednesday March 24, 2004

I want free WiFi without 128 bit WEP (or maybe "I need to get a new WiFi card") This is my last rant of the day. I think. Sometimes when I'm downtown, I sure would like to be able to sit down, plug my laptop in (for power, I have a sucky battery) and just get a little bit done.

I went to Golden Gate Perk where they have free WiFi for paying customers. Great! I ordered a chicken pie but sat down to realize that my wireless card (I have an old Orinoco "Silver" card which only supports 64 bit WEP) wouldn't work, they only support 128 bit WEP. Well, the chicken pie was good.

If you go to Google's search results for WiFi downtown, there's no way to refine the search to show

which ones are free
which ones support 64 bit WEP (or are open, I'm using SSH and SSL for important stuff anyway...)

In the meantime, I guess I'll keep an eye on the Cheese Bikini page for this stuff. And if anybody has an Orinoco "Gold" card (are these credit cards or NIC's?) that they feel like sending me, donations are gladly accepted! ( Mar 24 2004, 11:17:25 PM PST ) Permalink

I, Robot I took a look at all of the robots that hit my site. It's really astounding how many of these beasties are running around, crawling up and down links old and new.

Some of these robots are very persistent (or just plain dumb). They try to access pages that haven't been around for a long time getting 404's or redirects elsewhere. I'm presuming that after some number N occurences of non-success responses, that these robots will get a clue and just crawl the links that are there... for some reason, new links that've shown up aren't crawled. Here's a list of crawler URL's:

And while I'm ranting about noise in the logs, what's with all of the Nimda type virus attacks? I would've thougt that that is stuff is done and played out already. But no, everyday the onslaught of IIS vulnerability probe requests come hammering my Apache web server instance. What a buncha BS.

Between the robots and viruses, I probably have as many software entities hitting my site as I do human readers. ( Mar 24 2004, 11:01:06 PM PST ) Permalink

Tuesday March 23, 2004

GNU Arch Source Control The only source control systems I generally hear from people (except when they're bitching about how much their SC sucks) are CVS, Perforce and, recently, subversion. Well, today I talked to some folks who are using GNU Arch.

While I'm not especially enamored with CVS, it's like an old shoe. It's kinda stinky but still comfortable; you know how it fits and what its limitations are. Arch looks like a whole new beast, with funny naming conventions and this concept of categories being central to its repository model. I suppose the motivation is in part to replace bitkeeper as the linux source repository (inferred from all of the references to it be "suitable for free software development" but perhaps I read the wrong inference). Now I like Larry McVoy, he's really a good guy. It'd be weird for me to use a product the is intended to to undermine his business. On the other hand, that's the wrong reason not to pursue what may be a better technology.

From time to time, it's good to just go out and try on some new shoes; I guess I'll look more closely at Arch. ( Mar 23 2004, 07:19:42 PM PST ) Permalink

Friday March 19, 2004

Bugs in the Icons Since I habitually use Mozilla's tabbed browsing to follow parallel web paths and I've been working on my own pages (for instance, putting my old talks and tutorials online), I've been wanting to be able to quickly find the tabs that have my web pages displayed quickly.

On the one hand the favicon.ico icons have always seemed somewhat silly to me. But Mozilla does something nice: it puts the icon in the tab, not just in the location bar -- ah, that is useful. So I set out to make my own arachna.com icon. I had to install the kdegraphics rpm for redhat9 (kdegraphics-3.1-4.i386.rpm) to get kiconedit but once that was all said and done, I set to work making a little 16x16 icon.

Working with a canvas that small is hard; my spider looks more like an ant! I'll have to assign a problem report to myself in bugzilla. ( Mar 19 2004, 11:41:03 PM PST ) Permalink

Thursday March 18, 2004

MS-Word to your mutha At first nobody I spoke to about work options cared about what format my resume was presented in; the plaintext I could generate via XSLT or the web-based resume itself was sufficient. Recently though, HR/recruiting types want to see it in MS-Word.

It never ceases to amaze me how a product such as Word can be so easy for the straight forward things but get so messed up as soon as things get a little complicated. I went through what I was planning on being a quick exercise in pasting the plain text in to Word's "Elegant Resume" template but I found that formatting defaults carried in by Window's clipboard were not desirable and in fact, the template itself had some things in it that required adjustment. Next thing you know, Word is crashing every other minute. At first I threw up my hands and tried getting what I needed to get done in OpenOffice but it's word processing application also blows as soon as you need to do anything slightly complicated. I went back to Word and finally got it to behave by walking through all of the table cells, selecting the text blocks and removing all of the pasted in formatting attributes; letting Word just use the default fonting attributes from the template seemed to make it much happier.

Well, it's done for now and posted online. Given how deficient the OpenOffice word processor is, MS-Word continues to be a necessary evil. And OpenOffice's only application that is remotely useful is the presentation (Powerpoint replacement) application. ( Mar 18 2004, 08:40:33 AM PST ) Permalink