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

1. which ones are free
2. 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:

• http://www.nameprotect.com/botinfo.html
• http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler
• http://www.whois.sc/
• http://www.NationalDirectory.com/addurl/
• http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/crawler
• http://www.iltrovatore.it/aiuto/faq.html
• http://www.WISEnutbot.com
• http://www.breakingblogs.com/timbo_bot.html
• http://www.kototoi.org/zao/
• http://www.girafa.com
• http://www.openfind.com.tw/robot.html
• http://www.technorati.com
• http://dznet.com/kevin/
• http://www.tutorgig.com/crawler
• http://www.voila.com/
• http://gais.cs.ccu.edu.tw/robot.php
• http://dir.com/pompos.html
• http://www.brightcode.com
• http://www.NJ0Y.com/mercubot.html

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