Kintiskton

I found a bunch of web hits from a subnet belonging to an organization called Kintiskton. Their server was spidering my blog without identifying itself as a bot or a spider:

65.208.151.113 – – [23/Apr/2009:07:50:24 -0400] “GET /wp-content/uploads/2009/03/amazon.gif HTTP/1.1” 403 362 “http://www.markturner.net/category/Musings/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)”
65.208.151.116 – – [23/Apr/2009:07:50:29 -0400] “GET /2009/01/06/interview-day/ HTTP/1.1” 403 350 “http://www.markturner.net/category/Musings/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)”
65.208.151.114 – – [23/Apr/2009:07:50:33 -0400] “GET /2008/06/ HTTP/1.1” 403 333 “http://www.markturner.net/category/Musings/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)”

Bad spider! Bad!

Here is the whois record:
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Sun and Oracle

Farewell, Sun. What a pioneer you were. Oracle will keep Sun alive and possibly even treat it well, but it will never be the same.

The upside of this is that there should be a spate of start-ups soon as Sun folks (and some Oracle folks) head for the exits and try their own thing. The other upside is that Red Hat avoided Oracle’s clutches. Oracle can’t make a move for Red Hat now without raising antitrust concerns. Will IBM continue shopping?

Chapel Hill urged to oppose Senate broadband bill

BY DANIEL GOLDBERG : The Herald-Sun
Apr 14, 2009

CHAPEL HILL — For the second time in two years, North Carolina municipalities are being urged to push back against legislation that would make it more difficult for local governments to provide cable and broadband services.

The Chapel Hill Town Council will receive a citizen petition on Wednesday that asks for a resolution in opposition to Senate Bill 1004, the so-called “Level Playing Field” bill. Small business owner Brian Russell, the petitioner, believes that the bill essentially prevents municipalities from providing broadband services and stifles economic development.

Read more behind the Herald-Sun’s idiotic RegisterWall.

Ty Harrell sponsors anti-municipal Internet bill

Now that Time Warner Cable feels secure enough in its near-monopoly of high-speed Internet access to greatly raise its rates, it has turned its attention to strengthening its monopoly by effectively blocking any N.C. city from providing alternatives.

N.C. Rep. Ty Harrell of Wake County has sponsored just such a bill, known as House Bill 1252. Just when high-speed Internet users stuck with Time Warner Cable (or its partners such as Earthlink) were dreaming of one day having what our neighbors in Wilson have, Time Warner Cable seeks to take that away.

I know Ty and consider him a friend, so it makes it all the more distressing to know he’s sponsoring this. Please contact Ty and other representatives and let them know how you feel.

Also, if you can attend Wednesday morning’s N.C. Science and Technology committee meeting, please do so. And add the Save North Carolina’s Broadband site to your daily reads!

Raleigh buses add digital TV

Looks like the mystery Raleigh announcement for today is indeed mobile digital TV on a Raleigh bus. WRAL posted the announcement 10 minutes ago. According to the story, riders of Raleigh’s R-Line downtown circulator will be able to watch digital TV as well as get city updates and real-time information on bus routes. By August 2009 four CAT buses will also provide the service. The article also mentions “two-way” and “interactive” but doesn’t provide details about what this means. WiFi on the buses?

Something’s afoot in the City of Raleigh

I got a mysterious email invitation this afternoon from the City of Raleigh. It reads:

The City of Raleigh invites you to enjoy your coffee break Tuesday, April 14, celebrating a local partnership that is producing a significant “FIRST IN THE U.S.A.”

10 A.M., Tuesday, April 14
Raleigh Convention Center
Salisbury Street and Lenoir Street

I understand a different invite went to the city councilors that read:

The City of Raleigh and the Transit Authority invite you to enjoy your coffee break Tuesday, April 14 celebrating a local partnership that is producing a technological “FIRST IN THE USA!”

Please join us at 10 a.m., Tuesday, April 14 at the Raleigh Convention Center’s Salisbury Street and Lenoir Street plaza.

As you can see, the second one mentions the “Transit Authority” and “technological first.” I wonder what this means.

A GPS bus locator? No, that’s old hat. Been done already.
WiFi on city buses? Certainly possible, but what’s the local partnership angle?.
Mobile digital TV on city buses? This one makes more sense.

Capitol Broadcasting (home of WRAL) has been tinkering with mobile digital TV and has some devices built.

Capitol’s new mobile technology spinoff company is called News Over Wireless and is certainly local. But would transit passengers be forced to watch all-WRAL, all the time, or would other stations also be available?

On the other hand, it could have nothing to do with TV and could be some sort of other transit innovation. A Prius-branded bus? Electric vehicle recharging stations? Again, what would be the local partnership angle, and what about this would be worthy of such subterfuge?

This is all speculation at this point, as I haven’t gleaned any more insights. I do hope to be around for Tuesday’s unveiling of Whatever It Is.

Robtex

When I noticed a store’s webserver was unreachable, I decided to find out why. With a little sleuthing I found that its nameservers were not resolving.

Normally when this happens there’s no trace of the company left on the Internet, but The Google took me to the robtex DNS tool. Thanks to this site, I was able to find the missing nameservers’ IP addresses and verify that these servers were indeed offline.

I consider it poor system administration to host your domain nameservers entirely in your own namespace for just this reason. If you make a mistake in a zone with your own nameserver, your whole foo.com site becomes invisible to the Internet.

I hope this major store gets itself back on the web soon!

Time Warner becomes more evil

Just when you thought you couldn’t possibly hate the cable company any more than you do, they raise the bar on suckiness. Time Warner Cable will soon be implementing bandwidth caps on their high-speed internet users in what looks to be an effort to kill streaming media companies like Netflix. Watching a handful of Netflix-streamed movies each month like my friend Greg Brown does would be enough to push you over the bandwidth cap.

I found out tonight that I’m not immune for being an Earthlink customer and not a Time Warner customer. According to the advocacy website StopTheCap.Com, Time Warner plans to cap Earthlink customers as well. So much for the illusion of competition!

All of this makes me wish we had municipal Internet like down the road in Wilson.

A look at Google’s hardware

Google for the first time gave the public a look at its server hardware. It uses custom-made motherboards, 12-volt-only power supplies, and each server has its own built-in UPS battery. Also, Google datacenters consist of standard shipping containers – containing thousands of these custom-made servers. Very interesting!

Roombas tend tomatoes

I was running our Roomba vacuum around today for the first time in a while and noticing its battery is on its last legs. This has been the first real issue with our robotic friend since we’ve had it. I’m contemplating whether to buy a new battery or consider an upgrade to a newer model.

On a related note, a fellow Roomba fan alerted me to this interesting MIT project that uses souped-up Roombas to tend tomato plants. I thought it was an artificial intelligence milestone for the Roomba just to dock itself, but these Roombas not only do that but they also pick specific tomatoes on command. Amazing! Watch them in action here.

Now if I could just get mine to overwater my plants so that I don’t have to.