29 Jul 2004
…but close enough for me to engage in a favorite past-time! Yay for log speculation! The game where Josh picks random facts and figures from log files and tries to make himself feel important because of it!!
Muwahahaha. Yes. So, whilst Google and certain MSN search engines struggle to find my website when I type “Joshua Street” into them (I have an unfortunate last name, it’d seem), it would appear that content around these parts *IS* attracting attention… even if that attention is ill-founded and soon ignores this website and heads off elsewhere.
At the top of the search list are various references to phpSysInfo CVS versions, and how to download it, etc. After that, it’s more phpSysInfo stuff (popular one, that), then references to using SuSE with my onboard sound card (the Realtek thing – ALC650 chipset) which I don’t think was the main focus of that article (the other card was – the Realtek onboard stuff was an aside – actually, it was quite irritating), but hey!
Things just go downhill from there, with some people apparently finding this website by searching for mug warmers (regarding comments made previously about certain USB gimmicks).
That said, though, I must be doing *something* right, as I got a hit or three from CSIRO this month! Hey, that’s cool. I hope they’re not taking anything said here as authoritive, though, in the interest of international science ;)
Hmm. What else? I’ve been overrun by Swedes!! Hehe. Comments made on Lizette &‘s website sent a few hits flying this way, as well as some comments by various band members – I’m still impressed by that level of involvement on their part!! Yes, Swedes and Canadians (okay, .com and .net namespace ranked higher, but that’s so generic I can hardly call it US hits) were the highest international visitors this month, which is pretty funky stuff.
The world domination is well underway, but I’ve been kindly informed that between eight and sixteen MB of traffic needs to hit this website this month in order to push traffic over the amazing psychological barrier, the “1GB mark!!”. How that’ll happen, I have no idea! Maybe MSN will let their crazy search bots out of the cage again, that’d do it nicely. So far this month, they’ve thrown over 750 hits this direction… aaaaaaaaaaannnnddd they then seem to be sending that information to /dev/null, or whatever the crappy Windows equivalent is ;) Why do I make this horrible accusation? Well, last time I checked (only briefly, to be fair), my website wasn’t showing up at ALL on MSN search, but was coming up on Google (less than 20 hits this month) just fine.
World domination, one step at a time. World dominators don’t need MSN, anyway.
28 Jul 2004
Before I get onto the Milo, there are some other things to address. I was going to post an IT department rant, but I’ll hold myself back for a few days until I have more to rant about. It’s coming.
Yay, I finally have an intranet page for myself which I’m happy with! I’ve got an RSS reader in a floating DIV on the left, and my links down the right, all of which feature handy dandy accesskey codes (I can press “Alt+I” and goto my system status page, or “Alt+G” and go to my Gallery, things like that). Woohoo. What’s changed from my previous intranet incarnations? This time around, I’ve added my RSS reader, stripped links to the bare essentials only, and added accesskey attributes to the links. So that’s ocol.
I went and saw the dentist yesterday. I resisted the temptation of running up yet another WAP bill, because last month was sort of expensive (and that was a month sans dentist visits!). Fired a few messages off all over the place, though ;) So yeah. I was there getting two preventative fillings, whatever that is. Something about a hole that isn’t really a hole and isn’t really there because of decay, but has the potential to become a problem because food could get lodged in there and stuff. Sounds like an excuse for them to get $300, to me. But hey! I got trippy numbing stuff injected into my gums, so that was all good.
Because the fillings were plastic and UV treated (well, I think it was UV… they had this insano torch which they seemed to be baking my teeth with, whilst shielding themselves from the evidently harmful radiation the ray gun was emitting… so it mightn’t be UV, but it was some kind of lightish stuff that glowed), I could eat as soon as I wanted. Yay! So I went home, and did the Milo thang.
Note to self: BAD IDEA!!! NEVER AGAIN!!!
…on with the story! Yeah. Milo with numbed gums and reduced-mobility lips is fun. The fact that I couldn’t say “provisioning” should have been a bad sign – alas, I didn’t let anything stand between me and the Milo!
Now, I’m one of those people who’ll fill a glass up halfway (so it’s half EMPTY, folks)… with Milo. And then the milk starts going in. And then it’s stirred slightly, and the Milo rises to the top, and it is CONSUMED!!! Muwhahahahaha. Yes, it’s a food-drink. Not a food, not a drink. (Aside: Well, occasionally a food, rarely a drink.) Eating half-dampened (by milk) Milo is an intricate procedure, involving extreme mobility of the upper lip.
Firstly, the person who is to devour the Milo (hereafter: “the Devourer”) must carefully load the eating device (“the Spoon”) with Milo from the cup, taking care not to lose any of the precious substance in the process.
Secondly, the Spoon must be raised to the mouth of the Devourer, placing it inside with great precision.
Next, the spoon must be removed from the mouth, scraping against the upper lip in order to dislodge Milo from the spoon into the mouth.
*insert record slowing to stop sound here*
Using your upper lip is fun when it’s pumped full of miscellaneous numbing drugs. That has to have been THE most challenging Milo I’ve ever eaten!
Moral of this story? You’ve got to be made of Milo. But just avoid if for a few hours if you’re drugged.
26 Jul 2004
Voice recognition. All the way. Sure, it could get expensive, but presumably not more so than WAP would be (well, okay; it would be, but if any value at all is placed on time, then calling a number and dictating ownz trying to type into a mobile keypad anyday!).
It’d mean I could walk between buildings and blog as I go, not in a crappy wi-fi enabled kind of way (although, admittedly, if SACS coverage extended to the vicinity surrounding the school, I’d probably have bought a wireless card by now and had a hack at making it work), but in a fluent, hands-free, talk-into-phone-and-content-appears-online kind of way.
How cool would that be?! Never again would there be a complaint of “you haven’t updated your blog since last time I checked a few hours ago!”, because not an hour would pass without a phonecall and a voice-enabled update of the website!!
Well, okay. An hour would pass. In fact, many hours would pass. But it’s a cool idea, don’t you think? Still, several phone calls a day (let’s throw three in the air as a ballpark figure, not counting at-home updates) would add up. Let’s do the maths, shall we? Okay. So, let’s say an Orange phone serverside, so I get free five minute phone calls from my baby Samsung. Let’s make it prepaid – not as though we’re making calls from it.
A chargeable call must be made within a 12 month period, or the service will get narfed. Okay. That’s cool, I can setup an SMS gateway online and use that occasionally. Bonus. Cost? Assuming I keep the calls under 5mins, nothing to connect – there’s a limit on the amount of free Orange-to-Orange time I can have a month, but it’s pretty ridiculously high, so I’d not worry about that too much – and the cost for the prepaid? Well, between $33 and $90, depending on the expiry length required. So if I go for $90, that gives me a year to use the credit.
At what rate? $0.18/message sent, and of course, recieving calls is free.
So let’s say about $50 a year, plus initial handset cost. Let’s face it, I’m not really one for bothering to login to a web interface to send messages most of the time – I’d use it, but not incredibly often.
All this is of course ignoring the technical feasibility of using telephony as a voice-recognition medium – not only do current systems struggle with microphones already, this is also without the other conditions imposed on mobile lines! The software side of things (i.e. interfacing with web panel/directly with MySQL) also presents a little bit of a challenge, although not prohibitive – it’d be a bit of fun, to say the least.
| This’d make me blog more, though. A lot more. That said, I blog more when procrastinating, or when holidays are on – the simple solution? Give me more holidays (or assessments: |
)!!! |
Overcomplication of a simple problem rocks.
25 Jul 2004
At some time between 4am yesterday and 4am this morning, my news syndication feed became the most requested file on this website, surpassing even the image-generation file (you know the fancy titles for news that appears on the front page, and above all news articles?), which is loaded several times per single impression on the front page.
So the old RSS is getting a bit of a workout, evidently.
Since its introduction last Saturday, the RSS feed has attracted 2491 hits, at an average of 3.28KB/page load. Nearly 8MB of raw XML served in one week. Pretty funky stuff, all things considered (heh, “all things” in this instance being the readership of ~3 people).
That said, incidental traffic seems to be up this month (I know we’re not there yet, I’m getting in early), with unique impressions on track to remain level with last month, but a clear rise in overall visits is evident. Repeat traffic is good, providing it’s not just F5-leaning.
There’s a bit of insight into what RSS is doing around here for you…
24 Jul 2004
I’d been having a few good months, so I guess it was finally time to destroy a bit of gear. Nothing spectacular, unfortunately. It just went from being marginally fnarked to unbootable – originally, I was getting BIOS checksum errors (but it’d still reluctantly boot from a floppy, although IDE/ATAPI wasn’t anything more than a pipe-dream).
Downloaded FreeDOS, banged on AWDFLASH.EXE and (what it turns out WASN’T) the firmware, plugged it in, got errors. Overrode errors, screen goes black.
Josh says some bad words.
Josh (still in third person) looks at other screen, re-reads bad Taiwanese translation carefully. It turns out that the “latest” firmware under 693A wasn’t actually for that motherboard. God only knows what it WAS for… but me, I have no idea. So, kiddies. The moral of this story is that the /nbl switch for AWDFLASH is evil, and should never be used unless you’re 100% certain that it’s the right firmware, are God, or read Taiwanese.
Grr. I’ll bang the BIOS chip in another computer in a while and flash it with the correct image this time around.