The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: Administrivia

Overhead

  • Another Dirac Delta: Moen Faucet Repair (?!)

    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
    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

    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!

  • Blog Hits: Dirac Delta

    The admin pages for this blog have a “sparkle bar” along the top that shows the hourly hit rate, which is usually a simple diurnal cycle: most activity happens during the Western Hemisphere daylight hours.

    Yesterday was different:

    Blog Hourly Hits - 2012-05-19
    Blog Hourly Hits – 2012-05-19

    In the space of about 10 minutes, my sleepy post about a bicycle saddle advertisement received 207 hits from “bike riding” at Yahoo! image search. For the last two and a half years, it’s been ticking along at about 1 hit/day, so I think that spike represents a nice example of a Dirac Delta Function in action.

    I no longer even pretend to know what’s going on…

     

  • Did You Notice Any RSS Feed Problems?

    Normally, about 100-150 people arrive here every day through the RSS syndication feature, mostly looking at the daily post.

    Over the last two weeks (more or less), that number dropped to 10-50. I prefer to believe something has gone wrong with the WordPress RSS mechanism, rather than that 100 readers suddenly vanished. Of course, the wordpress.com Happiness Engineers can’t find anything amiss…

    If you use the RSS feed and experienced any recent problems, please leave a comment explaining the situation.

    Thanks!

  • Trinity College Robot Contest: Bounding Boxes

    New this year at the Trinity College Firefighting Home Robot Contest will be a Checkout Table, where teams can verify that their robot meets some initial specifications (Section 2.5 of The Rules). The overall size should be the easiest spec to check; I just glued up a pair of suitable Bounding Boxes:

    Trinity Robot Contest - bounding boxes
    Trinity Robot Contest – bounding boxes

    Robowaiter robots must fit in the smaller cube, which is 30 cm on a side. Firefighting robots must fit in the larger box, with wheeled / treaded robots inside the 31 x 31 x 27 cm outline and walkers within the larger 46 x 31 x 27 volume.

    Next step: fluorescent orange paint over a white shot coat to kill the lettering.

    And I didn’t even give myself a hot glue burn…

  • Website Pwnage

    Despite the fact that nobody bothers to crack your web passwords, as it’s easier for them to crack the entire server and scoop out everyone’s personally sensitive bits like so much caviar, all websites remind / require you to pick strong passwords. So, when I registered myself on a high-value website, I did what I always do: ask my password-generation program for a dollop of entropy.

    It came up with something along the lines of:

    Gmaz78fb'd]

    You can see where this is going, right?

    Pressing Submit (which always makes me whisper Inshallah with a bad accent) produced:

    The mumble.com website is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.

    Little Bobby Tables rides again!

    [Yes, pwnage.]

  • Blog Summary: 2011

    For the last year, it seems:

    • This is the go-to place for butterfly pictures
    • There’s an obvious need for Arduino PWM and SPI information
    • Houses are trouble
    Blog Summary - 2011 YTD
    Blog Summary – 2011 YTD

    Despite having no publicity, the site gets about 850 views per day: half from search engines, a third from RSS, and the rest from folks rattling around inside. Not much by commercial standards, but I’m pleased you’re interested enough to stop by…