Alden Bates' Weblog

Here's an interesting comment spam attempt. The spammer loaded a post, then attempted to comment to it (in the same second) but fell for the fake comment form which normal surfers don't see because it's commented out in the source. The interesting part was that the referrer they userd when fetching the post seemed to indicate that they had come from an email in a web-based mailbox. The spammers are sharing URLs, perhaps?

Also today I got around to banning Mr 195.95.219.6, who's been trackback spamming me for a while now using the user agent "Net::Trackback/1.01". I'm not banning on user agent as Net:Trackback appears to be a Perl project to enable people to create Trackback applications more easily and therefore it's not necessarily true that anyone using it will be a spammer. I wonder if the creator knows his work is being used for evil purposes. This spammer appears to be using one IP address all the time, so until they discover open proxies, I'll be safe from them for a while.

With the increasing amount of trackback spam, it's no wonder people are claiming Trackback is dead. So far, over the life of this weblog, I've had one legitamite trackback... Of course, I probably just need to be more interesting. :) I don't think trackback is dead, I think it just needs to adapt.

Dear myspace.com users.

My site is not your private image hosting server. Please do not remote link to my images. Thank you.

Yours in crankiness,
Alden (Do I have to put "please do not remote link" in every piece of alt text?)

The NZ National Party's latest political advert is very amusing and looks like it was done using Shockwave Flash. Most entertaining NZ political ad in recent time.

I'm still not voting for them though. :)

Doctor Who: The Long Game is on TV at the moment - it's actually better than I remember!

You may remember a while back, I posted about how Yahoo hadn't indexed the NZDWFC subdomain very well. I said I'd update with the results in a few months but, um, I forgot.

The results are that the number of pages from the subdomain listed in the Yahoo index has gone from 5 to over a thousand (about 1630, Yahoo reports). This is good. There were only about 2300 redirects last month, as opposed to 4600 in August last year, 432 of last month's resulting from Slurp (Yahoo's web spider) and 140 of them from people searching on Yahoo for stuff. Reducing these values to 0 is impossible, because Yahoo strips the trailing / off URLs, meaning they will always link to (for instance) http://www.tetrap.com/lj instead of http://www.tetrap.com/lj/ and thus causing an unnecessary redirect.

And I see they finally caught up with my music subdomain

Of course, other than the trailing / problem, Yahoo seems to be indexing a lot better than they were last year. And recently announced they had something like 20 billion pages in their index.

OTOH, the www.doctorwho.org.nz domain which points to the NZDWFC site used to show up in Google's NZ index but doesn't any more. I think this is because the domain registration company switched it from doing a permanent redirect to bringing up a page with a meta refresh on it. I have now pointed the domain directly at tetrap.com and I'm doing the redirect myself, so hopefully the NZ domain will reappear in Google's NZ index...

Level: CBP2-Tropica
Type: Onslaught
File Size: 10.1 MB
Rating: 9/10
(Part of Community Bonus Pack 2)

Description: Tropical island with ruins.

Continue reading "UT Review: Tropica"

The War of the Worlds

Sadly not the recent Spielburg/Cruise version, which is quite fab, but the Timothy Hines Pendragon version. To say this is an awful film is an understatement.

One scene near the start of the film has the main character stargazing with his wife, during what appears to be mid-day, with a starry sky laid in during post production. The design of the Martian tripods is fine, but subject to the worst CGI animation I've seen - they move so rapidly they look like they're at most a foot tall and actually looks at points like they've used bad stop motion. At one point a tripod crushes a woman beneath its foot, a sequence which would have been horrific had it not been so badly done. At times, it looks more like a computer game than a movie.

The picture is also highly colourful. Much use is made of coloured filters, and often the picture is so saturated it's almost painful to look at. A lot of the dialogue appears to have been layed on later, with completely inappropriate accoustics.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that it makes Ed Wood look like Orson Welles, but it is dreadfully bad.

(via Boing Boing)

S.Korean man dies after 50 hours of computer games

A South Korean man who played computer games for 50 hours almost non-stop died of heart failure minutes after finishing his mammoth session in an Internet cafe, authorities said on Tuesday.

Now, that's an insane amount of time to be playing a computer game, but they don't mention which particular game it was he was playing! I'm interested in knowing...

Lately I've been playing Popcap's latest game, Chuzzle. Chuzzle is not dissimilar to Bejeweled, in that you have to match up groups of critters of the same colour to eliminate them from the board. Rather than merely swapping adjacent critters, you move whole rows or columns to match them up.

Insidiously, once you get to higher levels the game begins to demand you make combos, else it starts putting locks on the critters to prevent you from moving a particular row and column.

WARNING: highly addictive game! Also, you will experience the disappearance of time. Do not be alarmed, this is normal.

As an additional side effect, I've found that after playing this game that the Windows GUI looks extremely square.

Edit: several people have asked what a "Bad Move" is. I believe this is when there was another move you could have made which would have eliminated more critters. I haven't played Chuzzle in a while now though...

Last night I went to the Wellington show of Inside the TARDIS. In a nutshell, it was a 2.5 hour show, involving Katy Manning, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy, and also some guy called Tim Ferguson.

Outside of a nutshell is...

Continue reading "Inside the TARDIS"

I posted this to my LiveJournal at the beginning of 2004 when I switched web hosts, but I thought I'd update it here...

Sometime prior to June 1996 - Planet FreeNZ

I'm not 100% sure about the month. That's the date of the earliest posting of mine I could find on Google Groups which mentioned the URL. During this period I created the Mel Bush page (the first major part of the site), and then TSV Editor Paul Scoones was so impressed with it he asked me to make the NZDWFC page as well.
Oct 1996 - First Doctor Who Web Guide to mention my site. Actually here's the first Web Guide from December 1995!.
URL: http://www.wn.planet.gen.nz/~bates/

Mar 1998 - IHUG

Moved to IHUG and my site moved with me. It expanded a bit during this time, but not a huge amount because it was an ISP page and therefore there wasn't a lot of disk space provided.
URL: http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~abates/

Aug/Sep 1998 - tetrap.simplenet.com

This was the first time I bought hosting. Simplenet was a very good web host at the time, though they didn't have Perl, but offered MIVAscript for creating dynamic web pages. It worked quite well. They were recommended to me by Jason Fraser who had his site on there as varos.simplenet.com.
(The simplenet URL first appeared in the 18 September 1998 Doctor Who Web Guide.)
URL: http://tetrap.simplenet.com/

20 Jan 2000 - tetrap.com registered

Due to the impending buying out of Simplenet by Yahoo, as Yahoo were going to scrap the xxxx.simeplenet.com subdomains.

Oct? 2000 - Simplenet swallowed by Yahoo

Unfortunately from there the service went downhill, with the MIVA server going down, disk space reduced to 100MB, and eventually Yahoo announced they were going to scrap SSI which my site made (and still makes) heavy use of. I therefore opted to jump ship.

July 2001 - switched to CIHost

Worst decision I made. Lots of site slowness and unexplained downtime. Unfortunately I signed up for a year in advance. When July 2002 rolled around again, they charged my credit card without asking me. Despite canceling, it took them several months to give me my month back. The only good thing about this period is that CIHost supported both MIVA and perl, so I was able to convert my miva scripts into perl.

6 Aug 2002 - switched to Sectorlink

Sectorlink were pretty good. Anything was a step up after CIHost, but there were niggly little things that annoyed me. Mainly to do with the site statistics system (ISTR this was the monthly reports I was supposed to be emailed not turning up or turning up months late).

6 Jan 2004 - switched to HostForWeb

HostForWeb have been pretty good. Their control panel and stats are pretty good, I can download the raw access logs, and their technical support is prompt. The only thing I think they need to work on (and this has been a problem all along) is that they rarely announce scheduled down-time, thus occasionally I'll find my site is down, report it, and be told that they're doing a server upgrade. Other than that, they're a pretty darn good web host.

I'm working by the assumption that Tetrapyriarbus started in June 1996, so the site is currently nine years old. That's 90 in Internet years. :)

The name, incidentally, was due to the fact that many other Doctor Who sites took their names from planets from the show, usually something like "Frontios" (there were about three web sites named Frontios at the time, ISTR...) and so I picked a planet name from Time and the Rani.