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Archive for April, 2008
WordPress 2.5.1 is out.
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008Futuroscope still rocks
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008I just got back from a short trip to Futuroscope (english site / french site) in Poitiers, France with Robert and Liesbeth (which they gave me as an early birthday gift…AWESOME!), and although I’ve been there twice before it still rocks. In fact, since my last visit a couple of years ago they updated appox. 50% of the experiences. Yowza!
It’s basically a theme park about movie technology, interactivity and effects, hosted in a series of very futuristic buildings.
There are some 20 “experiences” to enjoy, ranging from a fun kiddy park (skipped 
) to full-on Omnimax 3D movies. My favorites are still the 3D Omnimax and the live show at the end of the day (using projection on water-jet screens, lighted water jets, multi-color lasers, fire and smoke effects and fireworks), but the new stuff is very cool as well. Some are “immersion” rides using motion and screen tech simultaneously, some are closer to thrill rides like the “Danse avec les robots” (“Dance with the robots”) where you’re strapped into a seat connected to a huge industrial robot which then performs a choregraphed dance to music. It’s all great.
I always realy, really enjoy going anywhere or doing anything with Robert and Liesbeth, and add the really great Futuroscope to the mix and you have one awesome mini-trip, well worth the long drive!
Thank you guys!
Oh yeah, Liesbeth took some piccies, find them here on Flickr.
Small update: Liesbeth put a small clip of the dancing robots on YouTube:
Surprising images
Thursday, April 24th, 2008I’ve been browsing around FFFFOUND! lately, an image bookmarking site. The fun thing for me is that I scroll through images that are completely random and unrelated to me (only the bookmarkers in question know why they bookmarked it), and it’s great fun. You do bump into some really great pictures that I guess you’d normally not ever see, so I also use it as a jumping board to find out more about where the images I like came from, in te process discovering some really nice sites.
I also sometimes just enter random words in Flickr’s search, just to see what pops up. 90% predictable results, but the extra 10% is quite surprising sometimes. Example: I typed “frustration”, and the first image returned is this:
Not what you’d expect…turns out Jason Theaker does some really excellent picture taking, well wordt browsing through. A real find. And on his profile I found a link to Panorama Paul’s photostream, and thus another great set of phots.
I really advise you to try it sometimes, you end up in surprising places you’d normally never visit. Pretty cool.
Debunking the Wikipedia “Brain Surgery” myth
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008In a very interesting post on Techdirt, Michael Masnick attacks the oft-(ab)used “Brain Surgery” argument used by Wikipedia-haters.
It goes something like this: “If you needed brain surgery, would you trust someone who was trained as a brain surgeon, or someone who learned brain surgery from Wikipedia?” An alternative version of the question is “would you allow a ‘crowd’ of people to perform brain surgery on you.”
Masnick takes this (in my view very short-sighted) argument apart piece by piece (and does that very well), but is also open an honest about Wikipedia’s role as the source for information:
This isn’t to say that Wikipedia is perfect. It’s not. It’s got plenty of problems. But the lesson that this professor should be teaching is that you can’t trust any source by itself, and you should double-check and confirm any information you find, whether it’s from Wikipedia, a supposed “professor” or anyone else. It’s not brain surgery to understand such a lesson.
Read the full article here.
I’m not old, I’m Retro
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008I keep having to tell people this, so I thought I’d might as well bung it on a T-shirt. Available in dark and light colors, long and short sleeves, get some right here!
Yeehaw, y’all!
Monday, April 14th, 2008I watched O Brother, Where Art Thou? again last night (for the umpteenth time, I admit), and the song “Man of Constant Sorrow” keeps hunting me. So here’s a clip from the movie, and the man who actually performed that (Dan Tyminski) in a nice live version:
How bots can kill a server
Sunday, April 13th, 2008I’m running a pretty friendly little (LAMP) server here, hosting domains, email and web sites for friends and my own little side projects. Some sites are straight-up HTML and some are dynamic PHP sites, running WordPress or Joomla.
Last week I noticed a major dip in the server’s performance, which got worse and worse nearing the weekend. A quick scan revealed that my Apache processes were taking up around 90 – 95% of the CPU capacity with no real direct sign of the offending site. It took my 30 minutes to write and run a script that disabled the hosted sites one by one and then checked the CPU results. The ‘culprit’ appeared to be moqub.com, a (Dutch) blog run my a friend of mine with a steady following of readers.
As I had recently upgraded her WordPress to version 2.5 my first suspicion was that the new software was messing up my server…but then again my own site also runs WordPress 2.5, and if I put some stress on this blog the CPU was still quietly ticking over, not stressing out as with her site. But still…her WordPress was the result of upgrade upon upgrade, each version having been added on to with lots of plugins, so I just couldn’t be sure. I set up a fresh site on the server, did a clean WordPress 2.5 install, imported Moqub’s posts, comment and links, added the theme (after verifying its 2.5 compatibility) and diverted the visitors to the new site. Hey presto, the CPU was back up to 90% again, even when I disabled all customisations and the extra theme. Yikes.
As I now knew that the problem was not with WordPress itself, I started digging around in the logs. I found that there was an extraordinary amount of requests from a single IP address, identifying itself as a “Microsoft Search Bot 4.0″. Well, that should be easy to fix: I built a custom robots.txt that should have shushed all robot traffic except for GoogleBot, but to no avail. The bot never even tried to read the text file, it just went straight for the content, running several threads at once at high speed and thus maxing out the CPU.
A little research showed the IP address belonged to the Provincial Central Library in Drenthe (a province in the east of The Netherlands). This was no coincidence as Moqub writes about libraries and the use of information systems in them. Still, as their robot misbehaved I had no alternative but to completely block the IP address the robot was originating from. Ahh…peace and quiet on the server at last.
Now the question bugs me: why do robots still misbehave and completely ignore the robots.txt file, accepted (as far as I know) as the de facto standard in blocking or guiding robot traffic? And this was no home-brew, this was a Microsoft robot. Am I just being silly and naive in expecting “professional” software to behave according to the rules?
The lesson for me here was that badly run scripts can really mess up your server, especially if they decide to dig in to dynamically generated pages. And there really is not a whole lot you can do about it if they decide to completely ignore the standards in place.
Today’s track: Cowboys by Portishead
Friday, April 11th, 2008I’ve always loved this track and bumped into this excellent live version on YouTube:
Turn up tose speakers!
I knew it!
Monday, April 7th, 2008I knew it! i just knew it!
“A new study of computer gamers has found that a session in front of World of Warcraft can make players less stressed and more calm. The study questioned 292 male and female online gamers aged between 12 and 83 about anger and stress. They then played the game for two hours and were retested. “There were actually higher levels of relaxation before and after playing the game as opposed to experiencing anger, but this very much depended on personality type,” said team leader Jane Barnett from Middlesex University.”
T-shirt: “No Bullshit”
Sunday, April 6th, 2008We all face bullshit every hour of the day, and now it’s time to put a stop to bullshit alltogether. Wear a “No Bullshit” shirt proudly:
Available in different shirt models and colors right here.
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