Hits

Stardate 57081.4 (08-14-2004)

Whoa, there were a load of hits on the site this last week. I'd love to say it was because I had put something interesting up here, but no. Eric Gunnerson posted an entry on what to get his wife for her birthday. In it, he comments that one time he got her a trebuchet. That elicited so many comments he put up another post soon after to explain, titled "It's only a model." He ended it with the remark that he pitied the people who did not understand the reference. I added a comment with a link to the True Programmer's Test. And therefore, all the hits. In retrospect, I should have included a link to the index page.

The weekend did not start out as planned. I was going up to Bear Lake for the Seventh Fleet Olympics. I had taken a few extra days off, which started the problem. There was a big crash at work the day of the release, and I was called to help. One developer told me it created a seven gigabyte core dump. That's hard to believe since the file system allocation is only two gigabytes. I am still working on why this Saturday around noon. I laughed when he told me it was no more than twenty seconds before the sys admin was calling him wondering what was going on. The sys admin is a smart guy, and I know he has a few monitor programs running. We used to play cat and mouse years ago. I'd set up an FTP server on my machine, and see how long it took him to notice, or program a listener on a port, and fire a message to quit the port scanner to him when it triggered. The developer also told me the kestral was back, feeding on a mouse.

Speaking of fun, I am tempted to try this at work. I don't know if it will work over an MS network, but it might be funny.

On the other hand, I have quite a bit to do around here. Weed, clean the garage, weed, fix the van, weed, download the pictures from the camera (which is full), and weed. I did get an RSS feed going for the logs. The tag is on the Welcome page. It's a little more effort, because now I need to title the entries, and add a short description. Only the last few entries are on the feed because of this. I might add another channel for the Enterprise reviews. The Feed2JS is fun, but the problem is there is way to much content to add. NPR, the New York Time, Washington Post, and many, many others have feeds. CNN is the exception.

Sci-Fi Wire's feed is not valid, hence the messed up dates. The date format does not conform to RFC-822 specifications because it ends in an AU. I looked at this and could not figure out what it was. The web based validator can't either. It's not a big deal, since I don't usually look at the dates anyway. I should inform them of this.

Patrick's pumpkin is getting nice and big. It should be fun come Halloween to carve it up. Rachel's is coming along, but it is growing halfway up the fence. I need to take it down before it falls under it's own weight.