What do you call an "io9 flood"? I guess you call it an io9 flood. Anyway, I'm getting one today.

Putting a giant mech in space gets rid of the problem of overloaded bearings, since you're in freefall. But it doesn't solve the motion control problem. And it makes the cooling problem vastly worse. A mech in atmosphere can at least use convection to exhaust all the waste heat, but one in space can only use radiation -- and that's a lot more difficult.

UPDATE: The flood is even worse: someone found the link to me from that io9 post and put it on "Stumbleupon". But I can't tell where, because all I'm seeing in my refers is the page at Stumbleupon which does a redirect to me. grumble...

I suppose if I were a member there I could use search mechanisms, but that's too high a price to pay. (Joining, I mean.)

UPDATE: Sorry. I turned comments back on.

UPDATE: I like this one:

I don't recognize the name Den Beste, but if that is considered the treatise on the viability of humanoid battle vehicles I have some serious issues with his technical knowledge of anything.

No, it wasn't intended to be a treatise. It was intended to be an amusing blog post. Mattaku...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 03:40 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Any idea what in hell this Chinese guy was looking for? It's evident that it's searching for some specific piece of server code, because that code has a vulnerability.

Whatever it was, he didn't find it here. But the pattern of files it was looking for is quite tantalizing.

Excerpt from my referer logs below the fold.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 11:02 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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These days, when I see referer spam, three times out of four it's coming from the former east bloc. I don't think it's bots. I think it's people in the former Soviet bloc who are falling for some sort of get-rich-quick scheme where they think they'll make lots of money by helping with SEO for paying customers.

After a couple of cases where I blocked obnoxious IP's only to have them change to another IP in the same license, I've gotten in the habit of looking up the license and banning the whole damned thing, if it's Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. So here are a few that I have killed off:

83.4.0.0 - 83.11.255.255 Poland
79.191.0.0 - 79.191.255.255 Poland
95.79.64.0 - 95.79.95.255 Russia
94.255.112.0 - 94.255.127.255 Russia
91.135.144.0 - 91.135.159.255 Russia
109.111.184.0 - 109.111.191.255 Russia
77.244.212.0 - 77.244.213.255 Russia
213.155.28.240 - 213.155.28.247 Ukraine

And just today I banned 91.213.163.0 - 91.213.163.255 in Russia.

The reason I think these are all of a piece is that they have the same MO. They find one, just one, thing on my server, usually an old blog post, and send lots of obviously-bogus refers while accessing that single same file, over and over. Usually there's a burst of 5-10 of them, then a pause of maybe an hour, then another burst of 5-10 -- and none of them repeat. Every time it's a different referer.

Now it's true that if I kill off an entire block of IPs, then no one in that block can use my server even if they are legitimate. But how many legitimate readers do I have in Sevastapol, anyway? Or other places like that? Hard to believe there are many.

What's stupid about it all is that there are only a couple of web pages on my server where these refers can even be seen, and search bots don't know where they are. No one sees those refers except me.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 04:59 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Pete:

...Steven cannot decide if he wants to blog about ducks, beavers, computers, or Obama-sama...

I don't know what he's talking about. I do want to blog about those things.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 06:26 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Pixy is moving us to new hardware in the middle of the night tonight. Outage is scheduled to be about an hour.

UPDATE: The server move is complete, and everything seems to be working fine.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 07:43 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I occasionally get emails like this one from last night:

The first time I open Chizumatic, your title graphic displays a "bandwidth thief" warning instead of the expected fan-service pics. After I expand one of your posts or click on the comments link, the fan-service pics reappear.

Over the last few years I think I've gotten similar reports five or six times. When I've looked into it, every time it's been because the person was using this: http://www.chizumatic.mee.nu

Pixy has set up the mee.nu servers so that they handle that correctly. However, my server (which hosts the top rotation pictures) doesn't consider that a valid refer, and sends the deterrence GIF instead. (Yes, I could fix it. No, I'm not going to.)

When you follow one of the links on this page, it's formed correctly and so my server will send you the top rotation picture. When you then return to the main page with your "backup" button, the URL is still wrong but the top rotation picture is in your browser cache, so it displays properly.

The solution is for you to fix the link or shortcut you're using to visit me, to eliminate that leading "www.". This is the correct url for this site:

http://chizumatic.mee.nu

If you use that, you won't have any problems.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 12:05 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Me either.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 04:21 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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1 So, what are you sayin'?

Posted by: Mark A. Flacy at April 08, 2010 07:50 PM (Lbkvv)

2 I'm saying that this is the only post you're going to get today, and maybe tomorrow too.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 08, 2010 08:38 PM (+rSRq)

3

"I don't have anything to say" should be worthy of commendation in this day and age.  Just imagine how much better Facebook and Twitter would be...

Now if only the current president would believe that (At least, on issues other than someone trying to blow up an airliner.)...

C.T.

Posted by: cxt217 at April 09, 2010 12:32 PM (vBd1q)

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Does Pixy's new image toy work over here?

UPDATE: Evidently not quite. But it still saves me the work of creating my own thumbnails, so it's handy.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 07:17 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Just a bit early, by my calendar. A bit late, by Pixy's. It loads a bit slow (it's 3.8 megabytes) but once it's in your browser cache you don't have to load it again.

UPDATE: TokyoTosho sure as hell has got me beat!

UPDATE: Show's over. (The SWF is below the fold now.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 01:25 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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1 Too bad you can't have those up all year 'round. 

To be honest, I think the Ikkitousen animations in your headers are better than in the actual show...

Posted by: Wonderduck at March 31, 2010 02:50 PM (mfPs/)

2 Aiee!  I moved over a hotspot before I read your post.

Next thing you'll have an animated Chuck Norris pop out of the screen whenever someone types "You need to watch..." or "Why don't you..."

Posted by: Ben at March 31, 2010 03:16 PM (7/zoI)

3

I didn't realize until I posted it that it would treat the center of the area as a rollover hotspot. I thought only the corners would do that.

Wonderduck, it's not impossible. But they'd be a lot  more work to prepare, and so there's no way I could reasonably have hundreds of them.

It's possible for an SWF to load another SWF and run it. I haven't learned how to do that yet, but I suppose I could. So the page would load a master SWF which would randomly choose another to load and display. As I got around to creating new ones, I would update the master with the list of file names.

The big problem with it would be, as I said, that the selection would necessarily be much smaller and I think that reader fatigue would be a problem.

(The other problem would be that it would abuse Pixy's hospitality by chewing lots of bandwidth.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 31, 2010 04:44 PM (+rSRq)

4

To be honest, I think the Ikkitousen animations in your headers are better than in the actual show...

I'm running them faster. Mostly they're running 15 frames per second. In the actual show the frame rate is anything from 5-10 fps. (Yeah, the underlying frame rate is 24 fps, but they don't swap images on every frame time.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 31, 2010 04:45 PM (+rSRq)

5 Also I need to learn how to turn a sequence of still frames into an FLV. That would decrease the size considerably.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 31, 2010 07:16 PM (+rSRq)

6 Well, if you're concerned about bandwidth, you could always switch your top rotation image/flash to an ascii version like Youtube's done.  They claim it saves them $1 per second... Genius! ;-)

Posted by: EYanyo at April 01, 2010 12:06 AM (wZCd9)

7
Are the images supposed to be animate? (I suspect so based on comments.)  I'm not seeing them animate in either Firefox or MSIE.

Posted by: Tom Tjarks at April 01, 2010 10:09 AM (GJA7G)

8 Nevermind.  I'm not patient enough

Posted by: Tom Tjarks at April 01, 2010 10:09 AM (GJA7G)

9 If you don't do anything, it runs the animation after 15 seconds of idle time. If you click the upper left corner it runs the animation about  every two seconds.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 01, 2010 10:53 AM (+rSRq)

10 I'm organising a metric ton of new bandwidth to arrive this month, so that part won't be a problem.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 01, 2010 11:34 AM (PiXy!)

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Just found this in my refers, a search string at ask.com:

who+was+the+leader+of+the+u.s.a++during+the+manhattan+project

Mickey Mouse, wasn't it?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 12:23 PM | Comments (20) | Add Comment
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1 No, no, that was during Korea.  WWII was Popeye.

Posted by: Wonderduck at March 21, 2010 02:31 PM (mfPs/)

2 Mickey's just in charge of copyright policy. For atomic energy, you have to talk to (who else?) Pluto.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at March 21, 2010 03:01 PM (pWQz4)

3

...And Goofy to reign above them all...

C.T.

Posted by: cxt217 at March 21, 2010 04:18 PM (KEW2w)

4 Didn't Scrooge McDuck have something to do with it?

I mean, building Manhattan is a big job, but he's rich enough.

Posted by: karrde at March 21, 2010 04:55 PM (F3U2E)

5 That's nothing; I saw an article just in the last week or so where somebody passed around a picture of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima, and almost nobody recognized it... in the DC press room in which they worked.

Posted by: BigD at March 21, 2010 05:47 PM (LjWr8)

6 Um, yeah.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 21, 2010 06:25 PM (+rSRq)

7 I didn't know what the Iwo Jima picture was until I was 35, I think. Heck I still don't know if Grant was Union or Confederation (although, I know that Sherman marched to the sea). Still, for an American it's a bit strange not to know. I even suspect that the article may be made up.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 21, 2010 07:16 PM (/ppBw)

8

Pete, unfortunately I find it to be very plausible. The problem here is not inadvertant cluelessness, it's deliberate cluelessness.

There's been a concerted effort by American educators over the last 30 years to try to avoid as much as possible telling their students anything which would make them proud of America and proud to be Americans. Instead, they study all the reasons why America is dirty and grimy and why they should be ashamed to be Americans.

Regarding the Japanese in WWII, students don't learn about the Rape of Nanking. They spend their time studying the American internment camps. As to Iwo? Well, it was a terrific battle that America won. We don't study American victories; they're too likely to make us proud of those American soldiers. Can't have that.

What I just wrote is deliberately a bit of a caricature, but not as much so as you might think. Some schools use "A People's History of the United States" as their text in American history courses, I was appalled to learn. Which could be described as, "American history as Pravda would have written it". Its author, Zinn, was an unapologetic Marxist and his goal with the book was to advance the revolution.

I'm not really surprised that you didn't recognize that picture of Iwo, and I'm not too concerned. I'm sure you do know a hell of a lot (and more than any of us) about the Great Patriotic War -- and rightly so. I'm sure you studied it in school. And I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that relatives of yours died in it. (Especially if you're from Petrograd, as I have a vague memory might be the case.)

What's really sad is that our students don't study our military campaigns any longer. The only thing they learn now is about how America is a monster and a military bully.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 21, 2010 07:30 PM (+rSRq)

9 The American participation in WWII was consistently downplayed in USSR, mostly by playing the numbers card: "Germans put up so and so many divisions at the Eastern Front and that much less at the Western Front, stupid ineffective strategic bombing campaigns, yak yak yak". There was also the a very ghastly angle of "they only lost 365000 people and we lost tens of millions! *CLEARLY* we won the war and they only helped!"

Still, I am beginning to suspect that I might have seen the picture before, but never knew the story of Iwo Jima. A graphic based on it graced the headpage of freebsd.org for a long while.

My paternal grandmother actually spent the blockade in SpB and survived because she worked in NKVD (yep, the Russian Gestapo... AFAIK she didn't actually torture anyone, just pushed papers). NKVD personnel had better bread allowance that supplied enough calories to survive. Her husband, my grandfather, was a POW. Fortunately, it was not known. After the war she used her connections to save him from summary incarceration. POWs were treated as traitors back then.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 21, 2010 07:59 PM (/ppBw)

10

I will agree on the concerted effort to prevent the teaching of actual history in school. Even when I was in school, history courses seemed to be just a random mash of whatever the teacher happened to believe in... one of my teachers taught that the South won the Civil War by assassinating the Union President Abraham Lincoln, and that's the only reason there are such things as state governments today, instead of one big Federal bureaucracy. (Somehow slavery was never mentioned, except as something the North forced on the South before the Revolutionary War.) No doubt the teachers' unions have been busy planting their own seeds on such fertile soil in the decades since.

Posted by: Tatterdemalian at March 21, 2010 08:04 PM (4njWT)

11 I thank my parents for making the sacrifices necessary to put me into a private school for the last four years of my education.

Posted by: ubu at March 21, 2010 08:22 PM (cxiqH)

12 We could not pull it off, so we homeschooled.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 21, 2010 08:59 PM (/ppBw)

13 And she probably got a better education that way, as well as learning to speak Russian.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 21, 2010 09:05 PM (+rSRq)

14 That's rather embarrassing, I'd forgotten already that you had posted on it, too.

I got stuck with public education.  It was the small-town edition, so it was decent and not thoroughly converted into a bastion of indoctrination (like my humanities courses at college were).  What really helped me was the fact that my mother and grandmother are voracious bookworms, and got me to reading at a very early age.  Even then there was (and probably still is) a lot of stuff that I "knew that ain't so"; for example, I learned the standard modern history of the Vietnam War, and didn't learn the *real* timeline or events, especially the 1972-1975 part, until a few years ago, on the Internet.

And that's the thing that might, maybe, save us.  As long as children (or adults) can be convinced to go out and look stuff up online (and not just from their favorite politically-oriented site) for their own curiosity, the truth will out--or, at least, it may have a fighting chance.  While I groan and moan about being sucked into Tropes or "The Other Wiki", I learn a lot from those lost hours.  Heck, just this evening, I burned considerable time stuck on Wikipedia after I came across the entry on Lord Cochrane, who I had never heard of before.

Posted by: BigD at March 21, 2010 11:15 PM (LjWr8)

15 I was fortunate to have gone to school in a decent suburban public school system in the late eighties / early nineties.  Some teachers were unabashaedly liberal, while my senior government teacher was a conservative mormon health-food nut, so there was a token balance to the nuttiness.

I don't think that I saw a deliberate effort to downplay American exceptionalness, but more the requirement that certain special interest topics get covered, and anything else had to get crammed in where it would fit: Women's Sufferage, the Civil Rights movement, slavery, the internment camps, the American Indians, Hiroshima, the Holocaust;  all got their preference before anything else.  I do know it's gotten worse since I graduated.  Looking at it from a college graduate military history buff perspective, I could write a curricula covering World War II and how it has influenced the modern era that would be at least a semester's worth of work, all of it important, but modern students will never have that sort of luxury.

I think there is a marked lack of common sense in looking at history where people can't derive lessons from the past even when they know their history.  I remember hearing lefties complain about the unprecedented level of civil rights violations during the G. W. Bush administration; you'd have thought they'd have remembered their own lessons on the internment camps, etc.

Posted by: Civilis at March 22, 2010 06:31 AM (ww2Aa)

16 I can sum up the quality of education in my high school in one short phrase: the Honors Biology teacher was a Creationist.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at March 22, 2010 11:28 AM (fpXGN)

17 I had a lot of teachers in school who... it's not that they made a special effort to exclude American war history, it's just that they didn't understand it very well, and so they weren't ever really engaged in it. They taught those sections pretty much out of the textbook. I had one World History teacher (a coach, and also one of the best teachers I ever had) who made a spirited attempt at covering military history as well, but there's only so much you can do covering the history of the entire world in a year. Another US history teacher turned her WW2 unit over to a couple of enthusiastic students in her class (which seemed to work pretty well).

Part of it's due to the curriculum. Teachers tend to take a lot of time with the Revolution, expansion and migration, the slavery issue, and social stuff in the early 1900s (women's sufferage, labor, "The Jungle"...) Then the Depression and its alphabet soup of new government agencies. By the time you get to WW2, it's late April and a lot of schools are running out of time; either you give it short shrift so you can at least mention the fifty years since then, or you do a decent WW2 unit and then end up not even getting to Watergate. Bad scheduling, really, more than malice.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at March 22, 2010 11:41 AM (pWQz4)

18 Seems to me US history really shouldn't be a single year course.  We may be a young nation, but we have enough history to at least fill a two year course.

Posted by: metaphysician at March 22, 2010 12:06 PM (DQ9zJ)

19 I administered the test and my vaunted homeschooling fell on its face. Upon being shown the image, the subject said that "it's the WWII, but I don't know where or when; I certainly saw it before, but..."

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 22, 2010 12:57 PM (/ppBw)

20

Pete, if the subject even got the correct war, that puts him/her in the top 80th percentile of full-grown journalists. Plus props for being willing to admit they weren't sure which theater; a lot of people would have said it was from D-Day and then tried to bombast their way through an excuse when told they're wrong.

Posted by: Tatterdemalian at March 23, 2010 04:37 AM (4njWT)

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