I’m a pretty pessimistic guy (ok, brief pause while everybody who knows me says “No shit, Sherlock” and rolls around laughing), and so as I’m working in a job I like a lot (ok, I’m partially responsible for delivering all those god-damned ads at the beginning of movies, but really it’s not my fault) and I’m making a ton more money at it than I ever have in the past, I naturally have to wonder what’s next after this gig runs out.
Continue reading “What’s next?”
Category: Geekery
Recognition – only 8 years too late
One of the projects I’m proudest of having worked on, Cineon, won an Academy Award for technical excellence a few days ago. Too bad they shut down the project 7 years ago. (Yeah, the article says it shut down in 1997 – my resume says I left in 1998, not 1997).
The local paper has a badly written article about it:
Democrat & Chronicle: Business
But a better article can be found at Australian IT.
iTunes Meme
Seen on somebody else’s (friends only, so I can’t link it) LiveJournal.
How many total songs?
18474 songs, 48:15:38:51
Sort by song title – first and last?
“? (Modern Industry)” by Fishbone
“遠き時代を求めて” by 久石譲
(No, I have no idea what that means, I’m just a cut and paste machine)
Sort by time – first and last?
“Jim Bachus” by 3rd Bass 0:04
“Terrors of Pleasure” by Spaulding Grey 1:11:32
Sort by Album – first and last?
“�Jonathan, Te Vas A Emocionar!” by Jonathan Richman.
“紅の豚 飛ばねぇ豚は、ただのブタだ!” by 久石譲
Top five played songs?
This is probably meaningless because 90% of the time I just use iTunes to load my iPod.
Find ‘sex’, how many songs show up?
89
Find ‘death’, how many songs show up?
92
Find ‘love’, how many songs show up?
990.
I don’t know what they’re up to, but I don’t like it.
Watching my logs scroll by (doesn’t everybody?) I see an awful lot of hits on obscure parts of my web site from the IP 68.7.32.213. Grep back, and see that they’re evidently crawling my blog, and every link from my blog. And even weirder, every URL they grab they use the same URL in the referrer string – an obvious attempt to defeat one of those redirections that shows you a different page if you deep link something instead of going to it from the place you saw it referenced. – although wouldn’t it be simpler to use the page you found the link on instead? Further grepping shows that they did NOT get my robots.txt file. They’re also downloading the pages as fast as they can with no pause before getting the next one – it’s possible that they’re doing several simultaneous ones. Ok, three strikes, you’re out.
Into the /etc/http/conf/httpd.conf file, and a few well-placed
Deny 68.7.32.213
restart the server, and now Mister Badly Behaved (and probably Badly Intentioned) Crawler is getting a lot of 403s instead of pages.
Cool toy OTD
The new Google Maps service is very nicely interactive. You can drag maps around with the mouse instead of clicking and waiting for a refresh. Plus the directions search works extremely well, as does the “nearby business” search. Unfortunately it only supports Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers and IE, but then again why would anybody want a browser other than Firefox?
One interesting quirk – if you ask for directions to ROC (it takes airport identifiers as well as addresses), it gives you directions to the general aviation area at the south end of the field off Scottsville Rd, instead of to the passenger terminal at the north end off Brooks Ave. I’m not sure why that would happen, since a web search for the airport’s name finds my flying club’s web page ranked well below the airport’s own web page, and the airport’s official address is on Brooks Ave, not on Scottsville Rd.
In other news, GMail must be about to come out of beta, because I suddenly have 50 invites to give out, instead of the usual 4-5. If you want a gmail invite, email ptomblin at gmail.com.