I frankly don’t use AIM that much these days, but will often sign on and think, “Wow, lots of people are on tonight!” or, “Wow, almost no one is on tonight!” So I just wanted to list my thought process after noticing this:
I’d be interested in seeing a graph of my “buddies” online over time.
It wouldn’t be too hard to write a little script to sit on AIM 24/7 and watch this.
If I was doing that, I might as well log each time someone signed on and off, which would let me answer those, “I wonder if x has been online in at all lately?” questions.
As long as I have a stalker bot going, it’d be even more interesting to grab their away message text and buddy profile.
And as long as I’m doing that, I might as well add support for using diff to show changes in the above between any two points in time.
Is there anything that can’t be graphed? Or made into a shell script?
I’ve always been a little creeped out by some of the stuff on Craigslist. There’s pretty obvious prostitution and drugs going on, in addition to people seeking affairs. And if you read through the “personals” section (which is pretty entertaining), watch out for ones with pictures… Something they’re, uhh, graphic.
So I went through about 20 recent postings, merged them into a textfile, and used my old Markov chain code to “learn” the text and then spit out text based on it… Some of the stuff on Craigslist is so bizarre that it’s hard to tell what’s nonsense the script spits out, and what’s real. (I’ve omitted anything wildly obscene.)
I love to read, movies, anything to do my hair today medium length i need a new look today im off from work hit me up I have a personality that is a cheater because whats is the beginning of something possibly beautiful and long term.
I love to have a great day! A little about me…I am very mature. I am a very comfortable passenger seat. I may or may not have a degree
Good stimulating companionship and conversation is the point of being with someone if your going to cheat on them. I’m new to this online service and hoping to make new friends.Hope it works…
I love to read, movies, anything to do my hair today medium length i need a new look today im off from work hit me up
I have a personality that is a cheater because whats is the beginning of something possibly beautiful and long term.
If you are Interested to have a big black cruiser with a good place for drinks dancing live music with a rumble between her legs, for occasional rides. Feel the rumble as we hit the open road…wrap your arms around me, and press in close.
meet you, after some phone conversations, in public places only unless of course it is business related or anohter type of function, in which case I would meet you, after some phone conversations, in public places only unless of course it is business related or anohter type of function, in which case I would meet you, after some phone conversations, in public places only unless of course it is business related or anohter type of
normal and fun people, between 30-40 years of age, who are looking to meet some new people to hang out today and maybee 420 a bit. I love being out in the rewards you crave. Where you do not. Once a week, I will visit you. We will go over the goals you set yourself and your mobile number and let’s start texting!
I’m looking for someone to be a hypocrite.
Anyone know of a good place for drinks dancing live music with a lot of chrome, and a very open, spontaneous, and down to earth person.
I’m not looking for a coffee and a very comfortable passenger seat. I may or may not have a great companion. My friends think Im mischievious and I hate writing, so that’s it for me.
I have all camping gears. I am burned out of shape so don’t be shy, just be sensual.
Interested in normal and fun people, between 30-40 years of age, who are looking to make new text message with on a regular basis…what are we going to cheat on them.
I’m looking for someone to play with soon, because the weather is getting to be a marathoner!!!
I’ve heard about Cuddle Parties on the back of a good bar to watch the Celtics where they actually put the sound on the radio and internet but there are none
I’m certainly not someone who puts a twinkle in my stomache
hey im a leo male looking for possible another mom who is self motivated
I am open to a totally awesome 2-year-old boy. My problem is that I am looking to spend some time with an older 30-50.
so please be mature and not very interested in going out at night.
I consider diversity to be really nice !
If you’re not interested in talking through emails because, honestly, I can respond to anyone with a picutre
Good stimulating companionship and conversation is the point of being a hard worker. It’s simply that you have one? Reply now for flirty fun on the TV.
I have always tried to be on the radio and internet but there are none in the Boston area.
I am thankful for every day that I feel like I have no friends!!
this poing in my eyes and butterflies in my eyes and butterflies in my stomache
Please be a real person, please be open-minded and if you would like to get to know me, please just hit a back button, don’t reply.
Anyone know of a good listener and would love to go out and paint the town with.
I look forward to talking to a loser
I work 2 jobs and do not allow myself to be really nice !
my friends are married, and not very interested in talking to a totally awesome 2-year-old boy.
I can occasionally get a sitter but sometimes those are hard to come by so I need a new look today im off from work hit me up I have problems in life.
I am open to speaking to people of all races.
Quick clarification, since I was horrified at first… “Black cruiser” is a guy referring to his motorcycle; he was looking for other motorcycle enthusiasts. As was the “rumble” bit. It just happens to come up in the most inappropriate places. Also, the “2-year-old” thing comes from someone discussing that they have a child.
I used to get a couple hosts bounced a week… They’d try to brute-force username/password combos over ssh and DenyHosts would ban their IP after 5 failed logins.
For a couple days last week, I probably had about 50 in a 24-hour period, and then they went away as quickly as they started.
Today… Well, today is insane. As this site confirms, GMail limits a “conversation” to 61 conversations. So as this screenshot shows…
This falls into the category of things very few people would notice, but….
Microsoft provides time.windows.com, a public NTP server, operating in stratum 2.
I just came across NTPmonitor, a novel Windows app to monitor a handful of NTP servers. (Sadly, it doesn’t offer the option to sync to any of them, probably because most peoples’ computers let them configure it… Mine syncs to a domain controller which seems to want to give me the time, but not with too much accuracy.)
As with most full-featured NTP clients, it shows you what the remote timeserver reports as its reference clock. I’ve got my server in there, ttwagner.com, showing that it’s currently synced to clock.xmission.com. The “pool” server is pool.ntp.org; whichever of the many machines I connected to is synced to rubidium.broad.mit.edu. On the right we have time.nist.gov, synced to “ACTS,” a NIST protocol.
On the left is time.windows.com, the Microsoft NTP server. Its upstream timeserver?
clock3.redhat.com.
Screenshot attached, since I wouldn’t believe it without one.
I keep coming across things like this eBay listing. Sun Enterprise 4500, 12 SPARC processors (400 MHz, 4MB cache) and 12 GB of RAM. This one looks to have a couple Gigabit fiber NICs, too. (Although it’s fiber, so you’d need a pricier switch to use it on a “normal” copper home LAN.)
Even if you foolishly assume that a 400 MHz SPARC is no better than a 400 MHz Celeron, with 12 processors, this is still a net of 4.8 GHz. With a dozen processors, this is clearly best for something that’s very multi-threaded.
Of course, there’s one problem: these machines use SCSI disks. SCSI’s great and all, but it’s expensive, and you can be sure that, if this machine even comes with hard drives (none are listed?), they’re 9GB. So pick up one of these. What’s that you say? Oh, it’s ATA and won’t work with SCSI? No problem!
Nowhere that I see does Sun mention whether Solaris 10 / OpenSolaris will run on older hardware, but I assume it will. Some Linux distros also excel at running on platforms like SPARC.
Now the real question: how much electricity does this thing use?
It’s no secret that gzip is handy on UNIX systems for compressing files. But what I hadn’t really considered before is that you don’t have to create a huge file and thengzip it. You can simply pipe output through it and have it compressed on the fly.
That backed up all the databases on this machine and compressed them. (It’s a 31MB file, but that’s nothing when you realize that one of my databases is about 90MB in size, and I have plenty others at 10-20MB each.)
The Web Developer toolbar, which is (1) the #1 hit on Google for “Web Developer,” and (2) now compatible with Firefox 3 beta, is totally awesome. You may recall that, in the past, if you had text after a bulleted list or similar on this page, the text would suddenly be mashed together. I never took the time to fully look into it, but it always irked me.
A quick “Outline… Outline Block Level Elements” drew colored boxes around each element of the page, which was exceptionally helpful. This shows the problem: posts start off inside a
tag, and adding a list or similar closes the
tag. This would have been an easy catch, except that the list looked fine. Upon a closer review, it’s because the lists specified the same line-spacing, thus looking right. While I most likely could have solved this by staring at the code for a long time, Web Developer made it much easier to spot: the first text is inside one box, followed by the list, but the other text is floating outside, leading to a quick, “Oh, I should look at how the
is set up” thought, which ended up being exactly the problem. (There’s a bit of excessive space now, but that’s caused by me using PHP to inject linebreaks.)
Web Developer also includes a lot of other useful tools, including the ability to edit the HTML of the page you’re viewing, view server headers, resize non-resizeable elements frames, show page comments, change GETs to POSTs and vice-versa, and much more. Whether you do design full-time, or if you just occasionally fix things, it’s worth having. And you can’t beat the fact that it’s free.
I’ve alluded before to using gzip compression on webserver. HTML is very compressible, so servers moving tremendous amounts of text/HTML would see a major reduction in bandwidth. (Images and such would not see much of a benefit, as they’re already compressed.)
As an example, I downloaded the main page of Wikipedia, retrieving only the HTML and none of the supporting elements (graphics, stylesheets, external JavaScript). It’s 53,190 bytes. (This, frankly, isn’t a lot.) After running it through “gzip -9” (strongest compression), it’s 13,512 bytes, just shy of a 75% reduction in size.
There are a few problems with gzip, though:
Not all clients support it. Although frankly, I think most do. This isn’t a huge deal, though, as the client and server “negotiate” the content encoding, so it’ll only be used if it’s supported.
Not all servers support it. I don’t believe IIS supports it at all, although I could be wrong. Apache/PHP will merrily do it, but it has to be enabled, which means that lazy server admins won’t turn it on.
Although it really shouldn’t work that way, it looks to me as if it will ‘buffer’ the whole page then compress it, then send it. (gzip does support ‘streaming’ compression, just working in blocks.) Thus if you have a page that’s slow to load (e.g., it runs complex database queries that can’t be cached), it will appear even worse: users will get a blank page and then it will suddenly appear in front of them.
There’s overhead involved, so it looks like some admins keep it off due to server load. (Aside: it looks like Wikipedia compresses everything, even dynamically-generated content.)
But I’ve come across something interesting… A Hardware gzip Compression Card, apparently capable of handling 3 Gbits/second. I can’t find it for sale anywhere, nor a price mentioned, but I think it would be interesting to set up a sort of squid proxy that would sit between clients and the back-end servers, seamlessly compressing outgoing content to save bandwidth.
