Archive for category Administrivia
Trinity Home Firefighting Robot Contest: 2013 Edition
Posted by Ed in Administrivia, Oddities on 5-April-2013
Dressing the Granny Doll
I’ll be volunteering at the TCHFFRC this weekend, so if you happen to be near Hartford CT, drop in to see some high-pressure robot debugging.
You’ll find me behind the Robot Inspection Table, making sure everybody’s building robots that meet the same specifications. That’s a step up from a few years ago, when I got to dress the Granny Doll used in the RoboWaiter Contest…
Leaked Spam Template
Posted by Ed in Administrivia, Oddities, Software on 8-March-2013
A wannabe spammer inadvertently sent me a nice comment-spam template:
{{You must|You need to|You have to|You should} {take advantage of|make the most of|benefit from|take full advantage of} {all the|all of the|each of the|every one of the} software advancements that {happen to be|are actually|are|are generally} {a successful|an effective|an excellent|a prosperous} {Internet marketer|Online marketer|Internet entrepreneur|Affiliate marketer}. {If your|In case your|Should your|When your} work {begins to|starts to|actually starts to} suffer, {the competition|your competition|competition|your competitors} could {leave you|make you|create} {in the|within the|inside the|from the} dust. Show {that you are|that you will be|that you are currently|you are} always {on the|around the|in the|about the} {cutting edge|innovative|leading edge|really advanced}, {and they will|and they can} {learn to|learn how to|figure out how to|discover how to} trust {you and your|both you and your|you and the|your} products.
Multiplying the number of choices together gives a tidy 4.8×109 different comments, each one heartbreakingly close to making sense.
It’s now in my spam collection, along with some other nuggets snatched from the Internet’s outfall pipe…
Blog Summary: 2012
Posted by Ed in Administrivia on 1-January-2013
Despite all the techie stuff I think is more interesting, this blog evidently remains The Source for bed bug and appliance repair help:
2012 YTD Blog Stats
I can’t explain the popularity of the End of an Era: Knights in Shining Armor post, either, but it must have SEO out the wazoo.
Who knew I have the definitive dragonfly and Giant Swallowtail Butterfly pictures?
It’d be nice to get Slashdotted or Hackaday-ed for something techie, rather than bedbugs again …
Surprisingly, most visitors arrive from image searches, rather than text searches:
2012 YTD Blog Referrer Stats
The largest non-search-engine referrer was Google Reader at 4000, followed by a Lifehacker traffic spike at 3000, and then everything else. As far as search engines go: Google and debris.
In round numbers, 650 visitors get 1000 total views per day; the overall views/visitor runs around 1.75, which I interpret to mean most folks find exactly what they want on the first page. As nearly as I can tell from the daily stats, 300 of you visit the main page and post-of-the-day, plus another 100 click in from the RSS feed. The numbers don’t add up, primarily because RSS feed clicks don’t seem to enter into their totals.
It’s definitely not a get-rich-quick scheme, that’s for sure…
It’s still fun and I really do use this blog as my notebook: some of those searches come from me. I appreciate you folks helping me out with useful comments and suggestion: thanks!
Spammers vs. Turing Test: Inching Along
Posted by Ed in Administrivia, Amateur Radio, Oddities on 14-September-2012
Most of the dozen or so spam comments I delete every day consist of little more than gibberish. At best, a spam comment will have a poorly worded paragraph or two touting pharmaceuticals, handbags, shoes, or other junk, with absolutely no relation to the post. It’s easy to tell they’re generated by a script: keyword-heavy verbiage, bogus usernames, junk websites, and so forth and so on. Boring, is what they are.
Recently an interesting comment appeared in response to that post on KG-UV3D audio levels which Akismet tagged as spam:
The microphone and radio matching capabilities are terrific. Adjust the wide-range input level for optimum drive to the built-in microphone amplifier [...]
Fluent, idiomatic English that started out pretty nearly on-point for the post! The rest of the comment sounded like advertising copy, though. Well written ad copy, but ad copy nonetheless. Feeding a representative chunk into Google produced a link to the description of the W2IHY Two-band Audio Equalizer on the Official Website.
Now, as it turns out, Julius lives up the river from here and I’ve met him several times. I also know he’s not spamming me, because the URL associated with the post points to some weird-ass Angola gold mining fraud that’s all too familiar from previous spammage. Oh, and the IP address resolves to a Tor server.
As I observed there, eventually the spammers will become bright enough to hold an intelligent conversation and then they’ll be provisionally human. Depending on what they want to talk about …
Website Analysis: Trustworthiness Thereof
Posted by Ed in Administrivia, Oddities on 4-September-2012
For reasons irrelevant to this discussion, I wound up looking at http://widestat.com/softsolder.com, which gave this view of my blog (typos in original, emphasis mine):
Softsolder.com has #12,773,578 traffic rank in world by Alexa. … Out of the 6 unique keywords found on softsolder.com, “chicken ark” was the most dense. … This site has Google PageRank™ 3 of 10.
OK, so it’s not a high-traffic site. I can live with that.
But … chicken ark?
If you search herein for chicken you’ll come up with zero hits (apart from this one) in the posts. Unleashing Google with site:softsolder.com chicken digs up some comments, none of which discuss arks. I have absolutely no idea where Widestat came up with that, which makes me distrust their conclusions even more.
Another Dirac Delta: Moen Faucet Repair (?!)
Posted by Ed in Administrivia, Oddities on 7-July-2012
Can anyone explain how it is that, all of a sudden, Yahoo! Image Search generates 466 hits for my post on repairing our Moen bathroom sink faucet, a sleepy post in my Long Tail that’s been ticking along at one view per day since last December?
The flash mob was here and gone within the span of an hour:
View spike for Moen faucet post – 2012-04-05
Does Yahoo! Image Search have something like a featured image of the hour? I can’t find anything obvious, but I cannot imagine what else would cause that many views of a single page that lacks buck-naked celebrities, jackass stunts, or hideously embarrassing personal revelations.
Given that all of their “trending image searches” show (typically female) human faces, I doubt that the grubby innards of a faucet would appear in that gallery.
This has happened before from the same source…
It’s a Small World
Posted by Ed in Administrivia on 4-July-2012
This quarterly tabulation doesn’t include the hundred-odd of you who click in through the RSS feed from wherever you may beq, but it’s in the right ballpark:
| Country | Views |
| United States | 37459 |
| United Kingdom | 4366 |
| Canada | 4243 |
| Germany | 2501 |
| Australia | 2342 |
| Netherlands | 1759 |
| Finland | 1723 |
| India | 1584 |
| France | 1491 |
| Spain | 1343 |
| Italy | 1304 |
| Brazil | 1157 |
| Poland | 959 |
| Belgium | 815 |
| Russian Federation | 748 |
| Argentina | 717 |
| Indonesia | 627 |
| Portugal | 614 |
| Turkey | 591 |
| Sweden | 582 |
| Thailand | 559 |
| Romania | 538 |
| Republic of Korea | 528 |
| Malaysia | 521 |
| Mexico | 510 |
| Czech Republic | 505 |
| New Zealand | 496 |
| Philippines | 476 |
| Hungary | 468 |
| Japan | 458 |
| Denmark | 452 |
| Singapore | 443 |
| Switzerland | 427 |
| Greece | 415 |
| Viet Nam | 401 |
| Taiwan | 385 |
| Ukraine | 345 |
| Ireland | 314 |
| Israel | 304 |
| Norway | 304 |
| Bulgaria | 300 |
| Austria | 295 |
| South Africa | 276 |
| Lithuania | 245 |
| Croatia | 240 |
| Slovakia | 238 |
| Slovenia | 232 |
| Hong Kong | 225 |
| Pakistan | 203 |
| Serbia | 198 |
| Colombia | 176 |
| Latvia | 160 |
| Egypt | 159 |
| Estonia | 136 |
| Chile | 129 |
| Moldova | 114 |
| United Arab Emirates | 108 |
| Saudi Arabia | 103 |
| Peru | 86 |
| Tunisia | 67 |
| Venezuela | 60 |
| Sri Lanka | 60 |
| Iceland | 59 |
| Bosnia and Herzegovina | 55 |
| Costa Rica | 54 |
| Belarus | 53 |
| Malta | 53 |
| Ecuador | 51 |
| Macedonia | 49 |
| Cyprus | 46 |
| Morocco | 46 |
| Syrian Arab Republic | 38 |
| Bangladesh | 37 |
| Algeria | 35 |
| Panama | 34 |
| Puerto Rico | 34 |
| Lebanon | 32 |
| Trinidad and Tobago | 31 |
| Iraq | 29 |
| Jamaica | 28 |
| Kuwait | 28 |
| Uruguay | 26 |
| Armenia | 26 |
| Kenya | 26 |
| Bermuda | 26 |
| El Salvador | 24 |
| Jordan | 23 |
| Georgia | 23 |
| Qatar | 22 |
| Luxembourg | 21 |
| Guatemala | 21 |
| Cambodia | 21 |
| Brunei Darussalam | 20 |
| Mongolia | 18 |
| Albania | 18 |
| Dominican Republic | 17 |
| China | 17 |
| Bahrain | 16 |
| Mauritius | 15 |
| Nepal | 15 |
| Monaco | 14 |
| Oman | 13 |
| Ghana | 13 |
| Bolivia | 13 |
| Sudan | 11 |
| Honduras | 10 |
| Nigeria | 10 |
| Guam | 10 |
| Libyan Arab Jamahiriya | 9 |
| Paraguay | 9 |
| Namibia | 7 |
| San Marino | 7 |
| Montenegro | 7 |
| Maldives | 7 |
| Macao | 7 |
| Yemen | 7 |
| Malawi | 6 |
| Barbados | 6 |
| Ethiopia | 5 |
| Vanuatu | 5 |
| Fiji | 5 |
| Togo | 4 |
| Netherlands Antilles | 4 |
| Bahamas | 4 |
| Cameroon | 4 |
| Mauritania | 4 |
| Nicaragua | 4 |
| Botswana | 4 |
| Norfolk Island | 3 |
| Myanmar | 3 |
| Uganda | 3 |
| Andorra | 3 |
| Belize | 3 |
| Côte d’Ivoire | 2 |
| Lao People’s Democratic Republic | 2 |
| Mozambique | 2 |
| Cape Verde | 2 |
| French Guiana | 2 |
| Swaziland | 2 |
| Liechtenstein | 2 |
| Azerbaijan | 2 |
| Jersey | 2 |
| Cuba | 2 |
| Haiti | 1 |
| Liberia | 1 |
| Guyana | 1 |
| Niger | 1 |
| New Caledonia | 1 |
| Zimbabwe | 1 |
| British Virgin Islands | 1 |
| Guadeloupe | 1 |
| Northern Mariana Islands | 1 |
| United Republic of Tanzania | 1 |
| Senegal | 1 |
| Antigua and Barbuda | 1 |
| Madagascar | 1 |
| Cayman Islands | 1 |
| Kyrgyzstan | 1 |
| Afghanistan | 1 |
| Saint Lucia | 1 |
| Papua New Guinea | 1 |
Mad props to whoever clicked in from Afghanistan: I hope you found whatever you were looking for!
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