Alden Bates' Weblog

Results "1 - 100 of about 87"? You printed 100 right there! You know there's more than 87! WTF?

Xtra are so great, right now their DNS server is buggered. I can't resolve any domain names at all. To even post this, I had to get someone overseas to do a dnslookup on DNS Stuff so I could stick it in my hosts file, and then use DNS stuff to lookup the IP address for Tetrap.com. Worst ISP ever.

Edit: I stuck some public DNS servers into the router and can surf the net again!

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!

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')

Xtra here in NZ have been making a big fuss over how they've finally brought their broadband service speeds up to a 1/3 of world standard instead of only 1/30th. Of course, I'm not seeing any difference at all, because we've burned through the paltry 10GB data cap which Xtra insists on placing on accounts. Our connection (shared between three computers) is therefore currently choked back to worse than dial-up speeds, and web pages are taking 5 minute or so to load. An online transaction I was attempting to make timed out because the connection was so slow.

So, will the extra speed which Xtra has provided just mean we burn through the 10GB monthly allowance faster?

Perhaps they should change their name from 'Xtra' to 'Less'.

Every time I got to check my Yahoo! mail now, this advert is totally trying to guilt me. It's like:

<advert> If you love animals, help free them from cruelty.
* Alden ignores the advertising as usual.
<advert> YOU HATE ANIMALS! WHY DO YOU HATE ANIMALS?! WHAT KIND OF A PERSON ARE YOU?!
<Alden> WARGH! WTF?
<advert> LOOK AT THIS DOG! ISN'T IT CUTE?! WHY DO YOU HATE IT?!
<Alden> *mutter*

I don't hate animals, and I'm sure the WSPA is a great charity, but since I'm in NZ, I'm more likely to donate to the NZ SPCA...

No, stop looking at me with puppy-dog eyes.

(BTW, why is the Auckland SPCA bogarting the spca.org.nz domain?)

The reason for the title up there is a bit of a story. Several years ago now, I noticed that Alexa didn't have any "Related Sites" listed for Tetrapyriarbus. There was a link to suggest some sites, so I did, and Alexa dutifully added them to the list, which you can see here. Fast-forward to now, and three of the sites are now defunct.

So I looked around to see if there was any way to take, say, Flying Pig off the list, or even notify them the site's no longer there, but it doesn't seem like there is... Perhaps Alexa should look at going through their database and checking which sites are still there and which aren't?

It seems to be that on occasion Yahoo! Groups tries to send a mailing list message to me and it bounces (probably because the mailing server is temporarily down). Any sane person would just wait a bit and try again, but from what I can tell, Y!G simply suspends all mailing list emails to that address, waits four or five days, then sends a "reactivate your subscriptions" email. Which is fine, except that way you unnecessarily miss a whole pile of emails.

Come on, Yahoo! Try again! It's not like bouncing emails are cosing you money.

I suppose I should have noticed I wasn't getting any emails from Yahoo! Groups.

I noticed recently that tetrap.com has been upgraded to the current Basic account limits of 3GB of disk space and 125GB of bandwidth per month. Kudos to HostForWeb! However that lead me to notice something else:

At home, I pay $NZ40 a month for 10GB a month bandwidth (shared between me and 3 other people) while I'm also paying $US10 a month for a site which has 125GB of bandwidth a month.

The main reason for this, of course, is because all ADSL here is provided by Telecom, giving them a monopoly which the government has completely failed to break.

I wonder if HostForWeb would mind if I camped out in the server room...

I'm trying to work out something: Exactly why is the University of Mannheim so interested in my robots.txt file?

The only reason I block robots from indexing the "shared" directory is because stuff in there is hotlinkable - I put pictures in there so people reading my weblog via the rss feed can see the pictures without having to come visit the site itself. But I don't want random people finding the pictures on Google Images and then hotlinking to them from message boards/myspace/etc.

So far as I can tell, it's some sort of security project... perhaps they're looking at robots.txt because people will be blocking directories containing supersecret files. If you have files you don't want people to find, don't put them on the Internets!