Stan’s Obligatory Blog

It’s a warm and still night here in Pasadena, so I got out my telescope. Jupiter, Saturn, and the Moon are all up in the early evening right now. So Lucinda and I went outside and set up the telescope.

We had a look at Jupiter first. The air is very still tonight, so even though it’s a bit hazy, the seeing was quite good. I was able to run 200x and still get a good image. I was able to see the Great Red Spot, which crossed the meridian at 8:03 PDT.

Saturn was nice, too. It’s not completely dark, so I was only able to see three of its moons. But it’s still fun to look at.

The moon is a crescent, which allows for lots of nice shadows from the mountains and craters.

So, in the interest of making an experiment, I got my camera out. I don’t have a fancy camera, or even a way to actually attach it to the telescope. I just used some packing tape and taped it to the eyepiece. Then I set it on no-flash-night-mode and a 10-second timer. And here are the results. You can’t see the cloud bands or Red Spot on Jupiter, but you can see the four Galilean satellites. You can’t see any of Saturn’s moons. But the craters on the Moon came out pretty well.

I discovered today that some guy on Myspace was hotlinking one of my photos as the background for his page. That is pretty seriously lame. I’m kind of annoyed by hotlinking images, but I think it’s all right if you’re linking the picture to post it to a blog for discussion or some such. But to link it as the background to your page? Like my web server is a utility or something? So I added myspace.com to my blocked referrers list.

I mean really… If he wrote to me and asked if he could use the picture, I’d say sure, just make a copy of it. If he just made a copy of it without telling me, I’d probably never even know. But to just hotlink it? So he can use my bandwidth and server capacity that I pay for?

This isn’t really of great interest to most people, but I wanted to write it down just so I would remember, and also just in case it might help someone else in the future.

I just did a major version upgrade of FreeBSD on my home machine. And the printer no longer worked. It’s an old Laserwriter on the parallel port, and when I tried to print to it, the jobs just stuck in the queue and the printer blinked like it was getting data, but nothing ever came out. I also noticed the following message in the system log:

May 3 22:47:43 moe kernel: Interrupt storm detected on “irq7: lpt0″; throttling interrupt source

I did some searching in with the Great Oracle (a.k.a. Google) and found this:

www.freebsdforums.org/forums/showthread.php?s=93e0c4fc7f1cb345f9a52787035dd76c&threadid=12015&goto=nextoldest

This contained the answer. I had to edit /boot/device.hints and insert this line:

hint.ppc.0.flags=”0×20″

And voilá! Now it works.

I was looking at my site statistics, and I saw some referrals in the logs from a livejournal site that I didn’t recognize. She had hotlinked one of the images in my photo gallery. I’m on record as being annoyed by hotlinking, but I’ve not found a fully-reliable way to prevent it, so I just let it go. She also had this ‘Are you a Republican‘ quiz linked there. With a score of 86%, I’m guessing that this is someone I wouldn’t get along with.

Anyway, I scored only 6% on their scale. So my soul is safe. But the little cut-and-paste code to display the badge and link back to their site was broken. And I’m not going to spend my time debugging somebody else’s silly blog toy.

Here’s a link for the Googlebot to follow: Online Poker

I got this from frenchfragfactory.net/ozh/archives/2005/02/19/bloggers-of-the-world-unite. The basic idea is that if we all put a link to the Wikipedia page about online poker, then that will become the #1 match for the phrase in Google. All the comment and trackback spam we’ve been getting lately is all in pursuit of page rank, so this is a way to try and prevent them from getting what they want.

Dunno if it’s going to work, but I thought it was a funny idea.

I was looking at my site statistics and I noticed a big spike on Thursday. Turns out a news site in Argentina had an article about the Pomona Body Art Expo, and they had a link to my tattoo convention photo album. So where we usually serve about 80-120MB a day, on that day we did just over 1GB. That’s the equivalent of about two weeks’ worth of normal traffic. So I guess this is where I stop and be glad that I moved our site to PHP Webhosting last summer. There is no way our little DSL-based home server could have handled this load.

My page is back to #1 in Google again. Yee-hah!

I see that my “I hate Texas” page is up to #4 in a Google search now. It’s been almost six months since I moved our site to it’s present domain, and I guess that a lot of the sites that archive the Tattoo FAQ have now archived the new versions with my new sig that has a link to our new site. So our page rank is climbing again. Heh. It’s amusing, if nothing else.

We got another 166 spam trackbacks last night. This is getting mightily annoying.

Last night we got another 57 spam trackbacks. This is pretty annoying, but I was still able to delete them easily from the command line.

In other news, I asked phpwebhosting to move us to another server, since the server we were on was very slow. I know that they don’t have an easy job, administering shared servers that are used by all sorts of different sites. I’m very fortunate that the web servers I administer at my job are all dedicated to a single site. It’s got to be difficult to deal with trying to please a lot of users all at the same time. Anyway, they finally moved us last night, so the site is a bit snappier today.