No one wants their last words to be "Oh my God! The old gypsy woman was right..."
I was very honored today. Bill St. Arnaud, of CANARIE, one of the most respected and well known voices in broadband mentioned my work blog
Thanks to Doug Alder also maintains an excellent blog on this subject
He also invited me to be a speaker at a large conference this fall on the topic. I’m sending my boss Brian instead 
no way I get up on stage!
Wow.
Technorati Tags: Bill St. Arnaud, CANARIE, broadband
It seems everyone and their dog has a web bot these days. They are a major source of bandwidth use (which could cost you money), but, worse, each time one scrapes your site it registers in your web stats as a visit. Identifying bots is not easy. Some stats programs, like Firestats, the one I use on my blogs, have a list of known bots and ignores any hits from them. This is a good thing but there are unscrupulous bot overlords out there who try and disguise their activity by faking their browser/OS identification packet headers and spreading their hits out several minutes apart. Here’s a good example of one such bot out of the Ukraine* - probably a SPAM bot as the former SSR states are the major source of SPAM bots (it’s not just SPAM bots that are being unethical - there’s one bot out of Sweden that pulls the same trick and when one site owner confronted the bot owner he claimed to be developing a Nordic search bot.)
Note: those stats are not referrers, they are actual hits on the site from the same IP. 92.112.201.0/24 (that a Class C or 0-255 in the IP range) just hit my firewall deny rules
*inetnum: 92.112.109.0 - 92.113.255.255
netname: UKRTELNET
descr: Ukrtelecom IP access network
descr: NCC#
country: ua
remarks: E-mail for SPAM and abuse postmaster@ukrtel.net
admin-c: ARM42-RIPE
tech-c: ARM42-RIPE
status: ASSIGNED PA “status:” definitions
mnt-by: AS6849-MNT
source: RIPE # Filtered
person: Remiga Alexander
address: JSC UKRTELECOM
address: 18, Shevchenko blvd
address: Ukraine, Kiev
phone: +380 (44) 230-9024
nic-hdl: ARM42-RIPE
mnt-by: AS6849-MNT
source: RIPE # Filtered
Technorati Tags: web bot, bandwidth, web stats, Identifying bots, Firestats, SPAM
I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.51 please let me know if something isn’t working
Technorati Tags: WordPress 2.51
I have been lax - I should have pointed to this interesting article by Diane on the Ethics of Aging some time ago. It’s a good article (yes I’m biased but…) so you ought to read it if you have elderly relatives etc.
Technorati Tags: interesting, Ethics of Aging, elderly
I have quicktags.js installed in the right place /wp-includes/js/ but they are not showing up in the editor. If anyone has any ideas on how to fix this I’m listening
I’ve also noticed that WP 2.5 does not seem to like switching back and forth between Visual and HTML editors.
test
Technorati Tags: test
I’ll be upgrading to WP 2.5 today
I noticed something interesting today when looking at my stats for my humour blog. I’m not certain if it is someone scraping my site, a potential spam bot, an indexing bot or something else entirely. There were 26 hits spread over 42 minutes coming from 82.99.30.0/26 (that’s a 64 IP subnet in Sweden). Each hit was from a separate IP in that subnet. No two hits were from the same IP.
Information related to ‘82.99.30.0 - 82.99.30.127′
inetnum: 82.99.30.0 - 82.99.30.127
netname: MUNAXNET
descr: Munax AB
country: SE
admin-c: JG3201-RIPE
tech-c: JG3201-RIPE
status: ASSIGNED PA “status:” definitions
mnt-by: IP-ONLY-MNT
source: RIPE # Filtered
a traceroute to one of the IPs ends at
22 218 ms 320 ms 218 ms SESTO0001-RD2.ip-only.net [82.99.32.98]
before it hits a firewall
IP-only.net is an infrastructure backbone provider in Sweden
As there was no referrer listed in the stats I’ve ruled out someone posting a link to these jokes (and each hit was to a different page.)
AHA! - after spending the last 30 minutes or so researching this I found http://incredibill.blogspot.com/2007/11/munax-stealth-crawler.html, a very useful source of information on bots and Munax appears to be a very arrogant crawler out of Sweden - arrogant as in it ignores your robot.txt . Well screw you Munax - your entire IP range is now blocked at my server’s firewall.
I’m getting really sick of all the crawlers out there sucking up server resources and bandwidth.
Technorati Tags: MUNAXNET, robot.txt, Munax, crawlers, server resources
Stu has a new post up “Hillary Clinton Hairy Naked Ass Photo“. Sorry Stu I just can’t visit that. My mind would never be the same after seeing Hillary’s naked hairy derriére 
Technorati Tags: confounding Google, Hillary Clinton Hairy Naked Ass Photo
Who’d a thunk it, this blog is 6 years old
Technorati Tags: 6 years old, drivel
| IP | Timestamp | URL | Referrer |
| 64.185.196.60 | 2008-03-21 05:42:17 | Karl’s legacy lives on | unknown |
Now if you do a whois on that IP you get
Office of Management and Budget OGP-64-185-192-223 (NET-64-185-192-0-1)
64.185.192.0 - 64.185.223.255
Office of Management and Budget OGB-1-EA (NET-64-185-192-0-2)
64.185.192.0 - 64.185.199.255
# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2008-03-20 20:45
You can learn all sorts of interesting data on your visitors by using a good blog stats program such as Firestats. 
Now why would someone from OMB be looking at my blog and specifically at a post about Karl Rove’s influence on John McCain I wonder…..not. Same IP checked out a post last month on Hillary as well.
(to the person visiting from OMB - if you are a regular reader just goofing off at work do contact me and I’ll remove this post so you don’t get your ass canned)
For the masses reading this via an aggregator there’s a new poll on the site asking
What do you like best about this site
* Music Videos
* Political Drivel
* Science & Technology stuff
* Personal Drivel
* Something Else
* Can’t stand your site and don’t know why I’m even reading it
You can choose multiple selections. Pleae visit and let me know
I’ve just put up a new blog for my wife Diane (Modified the Dalari Dark v1.01 theme by Andreas Viklund). For not being an artist at all I thought I did a pretty good job on the main graphic to replace the one that came with the theme - learned as few new tricks in Paint Shop Pro 11 doing it too Let me know what you think.
It will be a few days before she can get at her blog but do keep an eye on it over the next few weeks as I think she will have some interesting things to say. In the meanwhile go say Hi to her at http://www.soundvisions.ca and welcome her to the world of blogging
RB discusses witches past and present. While you’re checking out his post enjoy this version by Luna of Donovan’s old classic
Oh you wanted to see his version, very well
Technorati Tags: witches, Luna, Donovan, classic, Season of the Witch, Rageboy