The web is said to be about free access, and I certainly agree. When China’s Great Firewall entered a more rigorous phase, and Google decided to leave China, some said that free access to information on the internet was a basic human right, I disagreed. Still, here in Toronto, Canada I do appreciate open internet access. There are limits, however, when certain people take advantage of your hospitality. People try to scrape your site to use for their purposes, they try to break in and use your site to launch their own malicious doings, they try to spam you so that your site’s comments increase their link and trackback stats. There are all kinds of schemes that cost the site owner bandwidth, and eventually money. The site owner is forced to increase his level of service from his ISP (or get kicked off of his shared service), or move to another ISP. This is not a zero sum issue: The site owner loses financially.
Procrastinate I did, and for a long time, but I bit the bullet today and upgraded my Drupal install. I had known that this was required a long time ago, as I had a suspicion that bots were attacking it. I do hate bots that attack me. It went well, all without drama. It was a minor upgrade.
Riding a motorcycle is hazardous to your health if you are not very careful and conservative. As a rider this is unsurprising. Yesterday here in Scarborough/Toronto, Ontario, Canada I made a riding error that involved a bus. Luckily for me I did not crash, there was no traffic behind me, and very little traffic around me. Still, I give pause to analyze my actions, improve my riding and ultimately to ride another day.
Olympia Nomad motorcycle jacket: nice jacket, well constructed inside and out
Textile motorcycle jackets are really for one time crash use, then they are trashed. “Face”, from Toronto, Ontario, Canada had bought an Olympia Nomad textile motorcycle jacket in May 2012, then lowsided at 80 mph in Montana in July 2012. With only a couple of months of use and about $300US later, it was a shame to trash the jacket. We opted to try a repair of the damage. The jacket had minor melting and a hole in the left elbow, some teeth missing from one of the air vent zippers, small rips of the cordura that covered the zipper, and abrasion and stitching destroyed in the slide. The right elbow had a couple seams abraded away that needed to be resewn.
Automonous Bot: Arduino, Ardumoto board, and the Dagu Magician Chassis
Late am I with this posting, but life gets in the way and takes over. The Little Weed wanted to delve into robotics, so we bought an Arduino Uno and the Dagu Magician Chassis. This chassis is a robot platform for a three wheeled vehicle, complete with two wheels and two motors, a single ball caster, and all the nuts and bolts to put it together. Programming of the robot is done with the Arduino IDE or in Eclipse. This posting steps you through our experience putting together this robot platform.
Busy I have been recently, with not much time for my blog, but it was all for a good cause. My internet service provider (ISP) informed me that I was taking up too much CPU time on their shared service and banned me. I am a good guy and generally follow the rules, so getting banned is out of character. After a frantic email they restored my account so that I could figure out what happened. I truly am a “less is more” type of guy, and that includes IT resources, and my online sites are pretty consistent, so a propensity of new content was not the issue. Eventually I took some steps to rein in the numerous bots that were scraping and doing whatever to my site, wasting my CPU usage on my tab, and eventually getting me banned. If your site is suffering the same fate, you may glean some hints and tips for reducing your CPU usage.
Disbelief is what I felt when I first saw two pedestrian texters walk straight into each other, head to head. So engrossed with their lives that they could not spend the time to watch where they are going? As a technologist I am always interested in the social effects of technology on society. Distracted walking shows that the vast majority of people cannot do two things at the same time, that multi-tasking is really not feasible for most people, and that this behaviour can be potentially dangerous to the person and those around them.
Ever since I started this blog I have been wanting the ability to write in Chinese. Every time I did WordPress would dutifully save the content but would then replace my characters with rectangles. Well, now I think I solved the problem: UTF8 encoding. As roundabout as life is, I solved my Chinese input problem while trying to track down the remnants of the Pharma Hack injection.
Damn I was infected by the Pharma hack yet again. While my web site content was without error, page titles into Google were being hacked, appearing as if I was flogging pharmaceuticals. I assure you that I do not do this. Google stated that my site might be infected, yet in Google Webmaster Tools they saw no malware and there were no fetch errors. This time I found four offending files and two offending SQL table entries. Here’s what I found and how I found them.
Anyone who lives here in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada, a suburb of Toronto, can tell you that incomes have markedly dropped. We see it in our schools and neighbourhood. A Toronto Star article on the widening income gaps here in Toronto brought me to a couple interesting maps by Dr. J. David Hulchanski. His paper “Report: The 3 Cities within Toronto, Income Polarization, 2007” gives much food for thought.
Dr. Hulchanski’s paper includes a couple of maps of Toronto by change in income from 1970 to 2000. It is a very sobering map for those of us who live in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto. It is not that we are special, because other suburbs of Toronto have also experienced similar income drops.
