May 2006 Archives

Google launched Google Trends today, allowing you to see the popularity of particular searches over time. If there are relevant news items it displays a position on the graph, as you can see on their results for V for Vendetta.

Unfortunately in the case of "Doctor Who", there aren't any, and for Doctor Who they don't match up well with what's going on in the graph. I've therefore taken the liberty of marking on the graph below the screening dates of Series 1 to make it more obvious what's happening where:

The first pre-series spike is, of course, the leaking of Rose onto the Internet. There's another high peak when the episode actually airs, then it tapers off a bit with spikes when Dalek, Father's Day and The Empty Child, and the last three stories screen. Later in the year there's a spike in November (for the Red Nose day special) and one in December for The Christmas Invasion. The graph ends in April short of the New Earth screening, but you can see it's leading up to another spike there. I'm interested to see if it matches the Rose spike. :)

And, coincidentally, the new Full Frontal Nerdity is Doctor Who related!

Mod_rewrite is a great tool in Apache for doing fancy stuff with URLs and redirections and blocking spammers. That said, while using it you should remember that the conditions and rules you add are checked by Apache on every single hit, be it for an HTML file, an image, or a style-sheet. So, here are some suggestions for reducing the amount of work Apache does for each hit:

Back in '92, when I was attending Victoria University in Wellington, my very first contact with the Internet was reading a feed of rec.arts.drwho on the University's BBS system. A year later in the newer labs, I was finally able to post to the newsgroup, and find other newsgroups to read. Before the web, Usenet was the first time I was able to read the thoughts of people on the other side of the world.

I was a bit of a terror on rec.arts.drwho during the early-mid 90s, and at one point even went to the trouble of writing a program to calculate weekly posting stats for the group. I stopped that after it became clear it was encouraging people to post large amounts of noise, though the "Weekly Stats 03/08" thread became a RADW legend. I've seen a few people from that period turn up again, especially on LiveJournal.

Fast foward to, well, now, and my ISP, Xtra, have announced that they're going to ditch their Usenet server. I haven't really read the newsgroups regularly for a while now. Occasionally I fire up Forte Agent (no relation to the annoying Microsoft characters) to see what's being talked about, but with the new Doctor Who series I've been avoiding rec.arts.drwho.moderated to avoid spoilers and many of the other groups I read are pretty quiet.

Still, I'll miss it when it's gone, even though I can theoretically read it through Google Groups. Usenet is, after all, one of the Internet's oldest services.

(See previously: Xtra Broadband speeds, and I'd like to reiterate that they should change their name from 'Xtra' to 'Less')

Pinched off Pete Wisdom: When you see this post, upload an image of your current desktop.

Though I may change that wallpaper soon: It's slightly unnerving having Billie Piper staring at me all the time.

Edit: It occured to me that the wallpaper on that screen shot was possibly a bit spoilery seeing as that episode of Doctor Who only played a day or so ago, so here's a screenshot with somewhat less spoilerly wallpaper:

The only drawback being I now have both Billie and David Tennant staring at me.

Edit: Note, if you want a proper copy of the wallpapers I'm using there without the icons and crap, you can find them in the BBC website's Doctor Who gallery.

I got a spam comment today with the following text in it:

My 20 year old said to me the other day that when he grows up, he's going to be a "real entrepreneur, like you used to be." When I asked him why I was no longer a "real" entrepreneur, he said it was because I wasn't making a lot of money. I guess it's more transparent now -- the cash side of things -- since he saw the rewards of a lot of hard work. But we had a long talk about why I am an entrepreneur and what it is that motivates me -- my love of what I do, the flexibility, mature sex creating something and watching it grow. Maybe too often, http://spammysexdomain.com people look at bootstrapping or being an entrepreneur or "doing your own thing" as something "cool" without realizing the energy, love, angst and tenacity that it requires to succeed.

Which only struck me funny because they're spamming a sex site using text which includes phrases like "watching it grow". Yes, I am 12. Not sure where the text originates from, since searching for bits of it just turn up spammed forum and blog entries.

The spammed domain is owned by someone calling themselves Anry who's provided an address in the Donetsk region of the Ukraine (Any relation?). Looks like they're heavily penalised in Google. So sad.