Monthly Archives: July 2005

Pirates! Spammers! Gyroscopes! Bandwidth thieves!

This is officially getting ridiculous. Not only are my blogs getting a lot of comment spam, but my personal blog site is burning huge amounts of bandwidth, as particular (I assume zombie) hosts hit the site.

Below are the top ten bandwidth users of danielbowen.com for June:

Top 10 of 15312 Total Sites By KBytes
# Hits Files KBytes Visits Hostname
1 14380 4.10% 3801 1.77% 111235 2.22% 159 0.24% host-148-244-150-58.block.alestra.net.mx
2 17558 5.01% 3191 1.48% 99441 1.98% 157 0.24% host-207-248-240-119.block.alestra.net.mx
3 3927 1.12% 3640 1.69% 75989 1.51% 3 0.00% csr010.goo.ne.jp
4 3062 0.87% 2797 1.30% 74881 1.49% 171 0.26% rrcs-24-97-174-130.nys.biz.rr.com
5 3057 0.87% 2200 1.02% 62547 1.25% 392 0.60% msnbot.msn.com
6 2691 0.77% 2248 1.04% 60684 1.21% 153 0.23% 64.124.85.78.become.com
7 2256 0.64% 2082 0.97% 56383 1.12% 124 0.19% 98-101-196-200.linkexpress.com.br
8 2146 0.61% 2033 0.94% 51665 1.03% 279 0.43% dsl-250-198.monet.no
9 2001 0.57% 1755 0.82% 47605 0.95% 23 0.04% host133.sprintnetops.net
10 1686 0.48% 1571 0.73% 35979 0.72% 325 0.50% corporativos

It’s not like this site is hosting pr0n or something — there’s just no reason why any single host would need to grab 110Mb of traffic in a single month. In total traffic topped 4Gb for the month, which is ludicrous for a diary site with a few photos on it. 4Gb is actually my monthly limit — thankfully my web ISP isn’t too strict about charging extra for hitting that, but there’s always the risk if this is consistent that it’ll be costing me real money.

As a result I’ve started a list of bandwidth hogs’ IP addresses, which I’m putting in the .htaccess file. Anything with lots of hits and grabbing above about 5Mb per month is going onto the list, and the list is being duplicated (manually unfortunately) across to the other WordPress sites that I run.

Inspection of the access_log is particularly enlightening, with at present a staggering number of requests coming in with a referer at poker-related sites. Of the 6665 hits in the file for today (covering about 13 hours) there are 674 from texasholdemcenteral.com (note the wonky spelling) and 1212 from sportscribe.com. All of these too are now being blocked with a 403 (forbidden) via .htaccess.

Sigh. I suppose it’s just too much to expect people to place nice?

.htaccess extract – Feel free to copy for your own site to block miscreants.
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Wifi, Apple, smartcards

Interesting to see the gradual spread of Wifi coverage in Australian cities. Shame they’re mostly in McDonalds and Starbucks outlets, which don’t exactly provide the pinnacle food and coffee. But I suppose if you’re sneaky, you should be able to find somewhere offering decent food and drink nearby (or even next door) where you can pick up the coverage.

Fascinating article speculating why Apple really switched from IBM to Intel CPUs.

Smartcards are the answer to public transport ticketing! But, err, what was the question? (from my blog)

A buncha stuff

I don’t normally link to the excellent DailyWTF, because it’s full of good stuff, I’d be linking every day. But yesterday’s picture of the server room with a fishbowl to catch the airconditioner water outlet is an absolute classic. (Make sure you read the article as well as look at the picture.)

Classical music labels have criticised the BBC for offering Beethoven’s symphonies as a free download. This strikes me as a tad narrowminded. I’d imagine there’d be a number of people out there who might otherwise not be interested in classical music who might listen to these then go out looking for more to buy. (via Dave Winer)

Microsoft are now offering free evaluation sessions in their products, making use of their Virtual PC technology so you just try things out on a remote session via your browser and Citrix Java client.

New version of Firefox (1.0.5) is available, fixing some vulnerabilities.

Antenna saga

As part of the ongoing antenna saga, the weekend before last I acquired some coax from Bunnings (I thought 20m would be plenty – wrong! Just enough), and a mast. I mounted the mast on the facia and strung the coax up in the roofspace, and left it at that.

This weekend it rained cats and dogs Saturday and I was out of the house until mid-afternoon Sunday, so I wasn’t left with much time to finish the job before sunset Sunday. But, like a fairly well oiled machine I managed to disconnect the antenna, loosen all the bolts that needed loosening, cut it down, fold it up, drag it to the manhole, try putting it through, pull it back out again, fold it up better, put it through the manhole, drag it outside and up to the roof, mount it (very cool that the mounting bolts were still hanging on the antenna even though it had originally been hung in the roof space), realise there wasn’t a hope in hell I was going to hook up the coax with the antenna floating out in the air like that, dismount it, hook up the coax (noticing of course how easy it is to slice through the braiding when slicing through the plastic sheath and having to do it again), discover that the weather sheild for the connector was knackered and ‘repaired’ it with a metre of electrical tape, remount it, discover the mounting bracket was on back-to-front, remount it, tighten up all the bolts, tape down the coax to the mast and return to ground level just as the sun set.

A very tidy piece of work, which only required me to attach the other end of the coax to the splitter and away we’d go. My figuring was, hook what we’ve got into the splitter and I’d see how the picture was and make adjustments later; worst case scenario was that our TV reception for a week would consist of bunny ears. Except the modern coax differs from what’s already in the house in two ways: firstly, it’s aluminium shielded instead of copper; secondly it’s smaller and thus the mounting clamp in the splitter wouldn’t actually grip the de-sheathed coax. I ended up creating a solid mechanical connection by restoring the sheath on the top half of the coax.

Testing revealed a miraculously improved analogue picture quality, including rock-solid SBS reception and Channel 31 visibility. Some negative ghosting was evident, and the Channel 31 picture could improve a little more, so perhaps there will be some fine tuning of the direction next weekend utilising the advanced technolgoy of our radio phone. The splitter doesn’t seem to be detracting too greatly from the signal, so it could be staying. I ought to get some 75 ohm resisters ‘tho. I think there are only two active leads from the four-way splitter.

Signal strength reported by the HDTV cards on all channels has improved to the 95-98% range.

Frontpage Express lives on

Want a cheap (free) and cheerful web page editor for Windows? Frontpage Express doesn’t handle niceties such as CSS, but it will do basic page editing, including things the latest versions of Word and Excel make a hash of, such as tables. It also doesn’t have the nasty hooks into Frontpage servers that the old full versions of FP had.

Originally it was bundled with IE4 and 5. It’s not officially available for download anymore, but Google can find it for you.

System capacity planning for major incidents

Transport for London web siteThe terrible events in London overnight do have some relevance to us as humble IT workers. While there are many critical jobs performed in such situations by the emergency services, communications and other systems are also important.

Obviously top of the pile in this respect are the systems dealing with the emergency services themselves: their communications and despatch systems — and we know that mobile phone networks were affected by the chaos. A few notches down, but growing more significant, are the web sites (and background systems that feed them) to inform the public.

While the BBC News web site seemed to generally cope as events unfolded (I’m sure they’re well-versed at this kind of incident), their live video and audio streams were swamped. Likewise CNN responded okay, though ITN was sluggish. The Transport For London site didn’t respond for some time, before they switched to a plainer, less server-intensive basic information page.

Last week Connex in Melbourne suffered a shutdown, and similarly, their web site didn’t cope. While most disruptions are also communicated to SMS subscribers, the shutdown itself was caused by problems with the same systems used for sending out the alerts. Melbourne’s public transport umbrella site Metlink was responding, but the problem there was a lack of updates.

As the web becomes more pervasive, and media outlets also use it to gather information, capacity planning for peak demand becomes important. Obviously no organisation wants to spend up big on servers that never get used, but for mass communication of detailed information, the web is cheaper than employing operators or even installing masses of phone lines, and will play an increasing role in keeping the general public informed of events.

Software patents

There’s an interesting article by Richard Stallman on software patents in The Age/SMH IT section this week. It looks at the pending EU vote on software patent legislation, and points out the differences between patents and copyright — something some of the EU legislators seem to be confused by.

Examples of spurious patents already granted by the EU include those for a progress bar, and accepting payment by credit card. I’m reminded of the patent application an Australian put in a coulpe of years ago for… the wheel. Clearly there is no basis for giving any party the rights to such basic concepts.

You need copyright to protect investment in IT, and I’m not convinced that no patent protection should be available for software authors. But a line in the sand needs to be drawn so that the whole IT industry isn’t crippled by being unable to use and re-use established ideas. Perhaps the code/algorithms should be patented — but the concepts not.

Or at the very least, given the speed at which the tech industry works, the patents should have a much shorter lifespan.

Long Shot

Okay, this is a long shot but if Robert Scoble is listening is there anyway you could post the audio of your videos as podcasts? I don’t have time to sit and watch a video at my PC for half an hour but I’d love to listen to it in my car on the way to work, especially the OneNote guys interview.

Primus – not with-it, hoopy froods

Primus are hopeless. They make Telstra look like really with-it, hoopy froods. I had no problems at all for about 4 years while I had just one phone line connected and didn’t try to change anything.

We signed up for another line. They connected the new line, and cut off the old one. Ring, complain, apologies. Disconnect the new line, reconnect the old. Ring, complain, apologies. The fun continued for a while.

Remember I said iPrimus had a great deal on ADSL? Not long after we signed up for ADSL, our line went dead. “Completely unrelated” says Primus. “Telstra line fault”. Sure. Have you tried reporting a dud phone line when the phone line’s dud? Doesn’t work so good.

Then there was a massive delay with the modem. Eventually we rung up and asked where it was. “We tried delivering it two weeks ago. No one was home. We left a card.” Searching high and low produced no card. However, we found the card the following weekend – they tried to deliver the modem to our old address. Which is not our billing address, or the address where the ADSL line was being set up. I have no idea why they’d want to deliver to that address.

They rung up last night about a missing payment. I didn’t get that bill. Somehow they sent it to 457/457 St Kilda St so I don’t know what would have happened to it. Probably lost in that great postal delivery hole in the sky. Much apologies later, late payment fee waived, all that stuff.

These guys seem to have a lot of bugs in their computer system. Being a telco in Australia only requires that you bill the customers and pay Telstra’s bills. So all primus needs to do is run a billing system. How hard could it be?

But their customer service after these stuff-ups is always really good. Once you get through to a human which can sometimes take a while. At least their call centre isn’t in India. That would be the last straw.

Looking for the perfect Jumpman

Jumpman Lives!Why has nobody made the perfect Jumpman remake?

Caveat: it has to run on my secondary 1.7 GHz Windows 2000 PC, which though it has a 3D graphics card, the 3D doesn’t work because of some weird-arse issue with DirectX (Short version: It’s a Diamond Viper V550. I’m sure DX 7 and 8 worked okay with it, but DX 9 doesn’t… and it’s pretty much impossible to downgrade without re-installing Windows.)

Given this computer is over a thousand times as fast as a Commodore 64, that shouldn’t be too hard.

Of the Jumpmans (Jumpmen?) listed at remakes.org there are:

  • Classic Jumpman — runs in DOS, using the PC’s on-board speaker for sound. Bleuch, no volume control, etc
  • Jumpman Deluxe — for the Amiga, it looks like. I don’t have an Amiga. I used to, but I only used it for playing Aladdin.
  • Jumpman Lives! — also in DOS. Looks terrific, and graphically is about as close to the original as it gets. Some sound works, but a lot (eg the music) is missing, and I can’t get the arrow keys to work.
  • Jumpman Project — this is the original IBM version, tweaked to run okay on fast machines. So it’ll be DOS again, so no volume control, and horrible CGA colours, until it’s enhanced at some stage in the future.
  • Jumpman Under Construction — has a terrific screen editor, but has been written in such a way that on a PC without 3D graphics, it is as slow as molasses. WTF? This game dates from 1983 and ran on a 1Mhz Commodore 64!
  • Jumpman Zero — only runs on 3D, because it’s been super-jazzed up in a way the author probably thought looked really cool. I disagree — I care nought for making the blocky graphics have a 3D perspective, and I really hate the way it’s been turned into a scrolling playing field. How can you possibly plan your ideal path through the level?

Okay, so maybe it’s time to look at a C64 emulator instead.

The amazing vanishing files

When you open an attachment in Outlook 2003, it saves it into a temporary directory then shells the appropriate program to open it. If you then do a Save As from that program, it defaults to that directory, which appears to be something like this:

c:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLK85\

A colleague of mine “lost” a bunch of files into there. Try and browse there through Windows Explorer, and you can’t find it. In fact you can get locked out of it even from the application Save As, if you go to the parent directory. The only way to get back in is to type the path manually, or search for the OLK85 directory on the filesystem.

To further confuse things, in a completely different directory:

C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\Recent\

…are shortcuts for all those files in the OLK directory, which are back where we started:

Confused? I am.

The default temp directory is also in that general neighbourhood by the way, and deserves a cleanout every so often.

C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Temp\

A quick look in mine for files more than a week old found 557 files taking 272Mb, as well as 38 directories with another 316Mb. Apart from a Temporary Internet Files directory in there, it all went happily to the recycle bin, and thence to Silicon Heaven.