19 Jul 2004
I decided at around lunchtime today that Sydney is the new Alaska. Random MSN conversations whilst doing “data entry” are an enthralling way to pass time… hehe. That’s about the only relevance of the news title to this post, although I still maintain it to be true. Tori was wearing 6 layers, not counting the cat worn (or endured?) as a scarf (n.b. I assume the cat was still alive. The LIVE cat was the scarf, she hadn’t killed one, so no-one go calling the RSPCA;)), whilst I was in an uberly heated office, yet still wearing 4… that means it’s cold, by my reckoning.
In my procrastination today, I discovered a cool app in PC Authority which is kind of like Bochs, only actually fastish. Apparently. I couldn’t get it to compile out-of-the-box on my SuSE baby, but I’ll tinker with some libraries and compile options later, and post if a) I remember to and b) It’s worth “writing home” about.
The application is called qemu, and can be found at http://bellard.org/qemu/ (redirects to a freehost) to anyone who cares to look. Just for the record, there ARE versions available for Windows, so don’t go calling me an elitist Linux snob who only cares about Linux software. Just think it. Because it’s true. I couldn’t give a stuff about Windows software, unless it does something incredibly cool that I haven’t been able to do for years over here ;)
Yeah. This thing is being touted as the OSS VMWare alternative in PCAU, so we’ll see what transpires in days to come, I’d imagine.
Anyway. Enough about emulation platforms which may or may not work on my computer. There’s a lot to be said for pre-compiled software that just works, you know ;) (note to the clueless – not pre-compiled software with a fifteen page list of depedencies. I don’t enjoy that.). That, however, doesn’t appear on my newly released wishlist, because really, it’d take half the fun out of running Linux. I might experience an increase in productivity!
Hmm. Productivity == achieved wishlist. Perhaps I should add binaries that JustWork™ to that list…
Anyway, take a look at it, even if just for fun. It’s all geek stuff, but that’s not the whole list… I was thinking in geek-mode when that list was written, tis all ;)
19 Jul 2004
Having nearly missed a comment from the incrrrrrrrrreeedibly cool Tomas from Lizette &, but for being notified by two people who DO watch my normal RSS feed (their readers are stuffed and don’t handle my updating comments number too well… long story – bottom line is, they know when new comments are posted, the rest of the world doesn’t), I decided it’d be somewhat valuable to have a comments monitoring feed.
So that’s what I coded. http://sc.dalegroup.net/rss-2.0-comments.php is it, so if you care, add it to your syndication list. If no-one else uses it, I don’t really care:p I will be! Hehe.
By the way, I’m still getting over a guy from a band I like actually coming and posting on my website. It’s a bit trippy! Lizette & aren’t exactly a household name (yet ;)), but still! Very cool, don’t know too many other bands that’d take the time to do that. You guys rock.
Hehe, AND, if you post more comments, I’ll even know about it straight away this time around!
EDIT:
If feeds aren’t working, click the two following links and email me the errors – if there are no errors, it’s your RSS reader:
http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http://sc.dalegroup.net/rss-2.0.php
http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http://sc.dalegroup.net/rss-2.0-comments.php
18 Jul 2004
Well, sort of. My RSS feed attracted a fairly sizeable number of hits in the last 24 hours, compared to the rest of my website ;). Hardly unique, of course, but still. It’s been live for all of a day, and has attracted about 1/5th of the traffic IN A DAY that the rest of my site has accrued in a month. That’s hits speaking, not bandwidth, but still! Mildly insane.
I can now see why larger sites with RSS feeds request you keep your updates to an hourly timing cycle or whatever! Not that I want anyone to do that… I don’t really care, and I’d imagine that, at 3KB a pageload, Dale’s connection doesn’t really, either.
So, when I was looking at my logs, trying to figure out what kind of traffic impact the RSS had had, I was looking at the clients people were using to access RSS. Awstats doesn’t identify more obscure User-Agent strings (despite reputedly having 97 browsers which it supports), so I looked under “Unknown”. Which was cool. A viewer called “Soup” came out on top, then KNewsTicker (I run that one in my panel, and updates are set to a meagre 5 minutes! Should probably set that value a little higher…), then FeedValidator.
Which is all well and good. But then I see another one in there. “Mediapartners-Google/2.1” – a few searches later, it’s revealed that this bot is used to spider websites using AdSense… gee, thanks guys. Nice to know that you think my measly 200 unique impressions a month is worth advertising to, really…
Okay, so now I’m really curious. Why am I being spidered for a service I’m not even advertising with?! Seems kind of stupid to me. Seeing this hosting isn’t costing me anything, I’ve got no reason to try and recoup costs on it… and really, that’d be all I could ever hope to achieve with Google Advertising, unless I saw a few hundred-fold increase in traffic. Which, of course, would probably mean I’d need to start paying for hosting somewhere with a nice amount of bandwidth and resources (got to love working for a webhost, at-cost hosting is a nice perk)… that said, it’d make more sense to purchase a TLD first. No, a frame-based redirect from some pacific island doesn’t count, as cool as Tokelau must be. At any rate, that kind of traffic seems to be a few months away yet. (Yeah, web expansion is the one area I’m an optimist… it WILL be months, not years ;) )
Has anyone else who is a bit pedantic about their log-checking noticed anything like this? I don’t care if you’re using AdWords on your site – that’s justifiable – but if you’re NOT, and still getting this weird spidering… yeah, if you’ve got any ideas, let me know.
17 Jul 2004
Not that I’d ever be one to follow a trend, but you know… these things happen. I’ve got an RSS feed running @ http://sc.dalegroup.net/rss-2.0.php for all who are interested.
I’ve taken an “embrace and extend” approach to it, though – I’m hoping that those I was influenced by in implementing RSS will take note of the new feature I’ve added, and enhance theirs accordingly! In addition to feeding the title of the post, and the first 128 characters (rounded up to the nearest complete word) of the body, my feed also denotes the number of comments.
Not that that is a particularly useful feature on a website such as this, though – I get hardly any comments, which is sad :( But hey! That’s not what this is about… I’m hoping other people will also add this to their RSS title so that I can see at a glance in Ximian if people have commented on a particular post.
Enjoy… comment more… speak Dutch…
16 Jul 2004
My current project (as of a few days ago, nothing long term ;)) is getting a working phpSysInfo page with trippy temperature monitoring and other such kah-razy features.
So, I grabbed the latest from the SF CVS server (2.3-cvs) and installed it, because my old version (2.2-release) has some serious issues with SuSE’s way of doing things – it “worked”, sans Memory Usage and missing much of the Hardware Information. Not that that is really relevant anyway, seeing I (of course!) wanted to try out the latest.
I’m not sure if 2.2 supported the trippy hardware monitoring thing, but even if it did, I’m over it already ;) 2.3 has a nicer version number :p
Yeah. So. Hardware monitoring. I downloaded a few (it supports 4 different backend programs) and tried to compile – xmbmon downloaded and compiled fine (well, okay – mbmon compiled fine, the x extension didn’t… not that it matters, because for my purposes I only want the CLI version)… except it’ll fail except when run as root. It’s a documented problem, although the only reference to it was in relation to *BSD systems, and the fix refers to some kernel-related file which apparently doesn’t exist.
So I gave up on that… it was probably a surmountable problem, but still, other peoples code scares me off. Moving on to the next (non-BSD-only) option!
LM Sensors… hey, that’s okay. Relies on kernel hooks, which prior to 2.6 kernels involved rolling your own with an i2c extension compiled in. I am, for the first time, as greatful as I should be for SuSE’s lean towards the cutting-edge! Hmm. That said, LM Sensors apparently won’t compile without kernel source.
So. I want to install a 780KB app, and wind up downloading ~700MB of stuff! Hmm. This works, really it does. Kernel sources are only ~180MB (at least, the SuSE respiritory RPM’s are that big… last time I checked the size of the kernel (admittedly, that was back when 2.4 was the new thing), it was about 60MB!), but I got distracted in package-selection, and saw that a newer version of Opera was available, so I grabbed that.
Apparently the old version of Opera had no problems at all without a certain dependency, but this latest one requires Eclipse… a ~170MB Java library thingo. At least, I think that’s what it was… OSS is way too trusting with dependencies! Hehe.
So after having downloaded all that, I’m thinking the compile still isn’t going to work! Doh!
Ah well. phpSysInfo is still cool ;)