X-Geek

Extreme geekiness

There are 700 posts filed in X-Geek (this is page 49 of 70).

The power of Facebook

A little thing happened with Facebook today that made me appreciate one of the best things about it: the ability of my friends to make new friends through me.

Whenever I want my Facebook friends to know I’m still alive but I don’t have much to say, I’ll sometimes post a song lyric as my status. Here’s one I posted this morning:

Mark Turner is a detective down in Texas.

It’s a song lyric from the Steve Miller Band’s Take the Money and Run. It wasn’t long before my friend Jon Carnes chimed in:
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Moon missions

NASA launched the first lunar mission in over a decade last week. The LRO and LCROSS shared the same rocket launch of June 18th to begin their missions of mapping and probing the moon in support of future lunar missions. Though their missions began the same way, each will end quite differently. LRO go into lunar orbit, producing high-resolution maps for use as potential landing spots. LCROSS will have a more abrupt finish: slamming kamikaze-style into a dark lunar crater in hopes of kicking up signs of water ice.

The missions are due to reach the moon tomorrow morning at 5:43 AM EDT. If you’d like to follow along, you can check out NASA’s moon mission blog.

The life of a startup

Driving by the hole that is John Kane’s North Hills project, I was reminded again of the building that used to be there at 4200 Six Forks Road, where I once worked for HAHT Software 13 years ago.

One day at HAHT the weather was just too nice to be spending the day indoors. Some conspiring took place among the HAHTsters – whispering in the halls, that sort of thing – and before you knew it, the entire company was filing out to their cars. We assembled again at Capital Bouelvard’s Adventure Landing, where we proceeded to race each other on go-carts for the rest of the afternoon. Man, that was a fun place to work.

I’ve got video of that event somewhere. I’ll post it once I get it digitized.

Rankcrawler update

I received an email this evening from Philippe Martin at RankCrawler, apologizing for the bad bot behavior:

Dear Mark Turner,

I apologize for not properly identifying our crawler (RankCrawler) by using the user agent. Our reverse-dns go to rankcrawler.com but we don’t use our own user agent. We will fix this problem soon. We have stopped to crawl your website as soon as I read your message.

We DO NOT crawl with the IP 94.23.51.159 as you claim in your second blog post about Rancrawler. It should be another company that we don’t know and that uses the same ISP (OVH is a very large ISP). We uses at this time only 5 IP that goes to rankcrawler.com.

I apologize again for this problem and I hope you will let our crawler access your website once we properly identify our crawler with our own user agent.

Thank you for your message,

Philippe Martin
http://rancrawler.com

I’m pleased that Mr. Martin chose to respond to my complaint and as such, I will allow RankCrawler to access MT.Net once again.

Rankcrawler bot update

Sheesh. Just after I finished blocking Rankcrawler from accessing my site, I found yet another connection attempt from them – this time from a totally new IP address:

94.23.51.159 – – [31/May/2009:07:14:02 -0400] “GET /2009/05/30/conn-clusion/ HTTP/1.1” 200 5574 “http://real-url.org” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.01; Windows -NT 5.0 – real-url.org)”
94.23.51.159 – – [31/May/2009:07:15:25 -0400] “GET /2009/05/30/conn-clusion/ HTTP/1.0” 200 5574 “-” “-”
94.23.51.159 – – [31/May/2009:07:15:25 -0400] “POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0” 200 473 “-” “XML-RPC for PHP 2.2.2”

This IP resolves to rps6637.ovh.net. OVH.Net is the same ISP that Rankcrawler uses. They just can’t take no for an answer.

[Update: 1 June 2009] Rankcrawler says this isn’t them. Duly noted.

Bad bot alert: Rankcrawler

Looks like a bot has been scouring my website without properly identifying itself. I noticed that my older posts were getting a lot of unexplained hits. I checked the logs, looked up the IPs, and discovered the visitors were bots from the rankcrawler.com domain. The bots don’t properly identify themselves in their user agent field, as good bots should do:

Some of the bots came from these IPs (though there may be others):
87.98.249.75
87.98.133.249
91.121.26.45
94.23.152.34
94.23.153.8

As you can see, Rankcrawler prefers to disguise itself as a regular browser. This is a no-no.

87.98.249.75 – – [29/May/2009:23:56:09 -0400] “GET /page/2/ HTTP/1.0” 200 34160 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6”
87.98.249.75 – – [30/May/2009:00:11:16 -0400] “GET /2006/07/ HTTP/1.0” 200 41171 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6”

91.121.26.45 – – [29/May/2009:20:47:22 -0400] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 34467 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”
91.121.26.45 – – [30/May/2009:00:01:23 -0400] “GET /2008/05/ HTTP/1.0” 200 27858 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”

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Ducting

Some WRAL viewers had trouble watching the channel yesterday morning and wondered what was happening. WRAL’s crack team of meteorologists checked into the issue and found a strong temperature inversion to be the culprit. Nate Johnson describes the phenomenon in the station’s WeatherCenter blog.

I worked extensively with radio while in the Navy. Once I was blown away when I tuned in San Francisco FM radio stations from 800 miles away in the Pacific! This phenomenon still fascinates me, if you couldn’t tell!

Raising the broadband bar in NC

There’s been plenty afoot in the N.C. General Assembly this session regarding broadband internet, as those couple of you who read my blog are well aware. Now there’s an effort by the telecom industry to define “broadband service” in North Carolina. House Bill 283 would define any Internet service with speeds faster than 1.5 Mbps down and 384 kbps up.

So let me ask you … how many of you would consider that “broadband?” How many of you would die a slow death using the Internet at those speeds? A measly 1.5 Mbps/384kbs might have been considered “broadband” 15 years ago but it certainly doesn’t pass for that today, now that countries like Japan have jaw-dropping 160 Mbps cable modem service. Arguably these slow speeds weren’t considered “broadband” 15 years ago, either!
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