Alden Bates' Weblog

The liquor store down the road from work recently renamed itself from "The Mill" to "liquor.co". Looks like whoever put up the sign on the side of their building may have been sampling their wares beforehand:

I hadn't noticed before, but they put the "u" up backwards...

When TSV 37 first popped through my mail box back in 1994, it gave me a huge surprise to find that a picture I'd drawn of a Dalek had ended up on the front cover (I'd drawn it to accompany a story I'd written for the issue called The Last Words). I was also proud of my picture of the secondary TARDIS console which is to date the only piece of artwork I'd done for TSV that I was completely happy with.

In fact, that issue's artwork was generally well praised in the next issue's letters column. I like Chris Girdler's illustration for the New Adventure Shadowmind. Illustrations for the novels (outside of the covers of the books) seem to be rare, which is a shame because I like seeing how other people have visualised the characters and events.

I also got a cartoon published called Good Omens which suggested we should watch out for things like flying pigs and hell freezing over to signal that the BBC was bringing Doctor Who back. Sadly, Russell T. Davies has somewhat taken the wind out of that by actually making new episodes. I intend to write him a letter of complaint.

There's also a couple of piece resulting from Jon Preddle's trip to the UK: an interview with Gary Russell and some behind the scenes for the 30 Years in the TARDIS documentary (he stumbled on the filming!).

There's lots of other cool stuff too, like another installment of Beyond the Book covering three of the New Adventures, and Graham Howard on Witch Mark, so go read! :)

If you installed Blue Security's Blue Frog software, you should uninstall it ASAP. Spammers may be able to get control of it any use it to attack other sites or do other nefarious things.

On a somewhat lighter note, I love this cartoon. :)

I'm shocked! The NZDWFC general message board got a spam post! Usually spammers don't bother because the forums are blocked from search engines. Of course the anti-spam measures in the board software caught it before it could appear on the site.

The URLs spammed included a smattering of beam.to, some MSN spaces, a rapidforum, a bravenet guestbook, a Chinese wiki, and a number of subdomains on sekob.com and osarex.com. Both of these domains are registered to one Jar Duchovni who claims to live on 127 Duane St, New York, but the IP address the spam came from appears to be in Israel (on bezeqint.net). Don't know any more information on this spammer, other than he seems to be spamming mainly guestbooks and message boards.

A couple of weekends ago, I had the pleasure(?!) of seeing the last story of the original 70s Tomorrow People series, titled War of the Empires. This brings me to...

Continue reading "Dodgy Aliens #3 and #4"

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!

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:

Continue reading "Optimising mod_rewrite Part 1"

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')