This google string:

"list+of+all+episodes+of+dragonball+z+of+high+school+after+buu+was+killed"

Um, there weren't any. There were only six episodes or so after that until the very end of the series, and none of them were in or near a high school.

The only high school episodes in DBZ were in the "Great Saiyaman" saga, which is at the very beginning of the Buu arc.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 09:34 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 62 words, total size 1 kb.

Not exactly a new observation, I know. But my reason may be a bit different.

This afternoon someone linked to my TMW about The Matrix from a comment on "Cracked.Com", which I think comes close to being the strangest refer I've ever gotten. I didn't know what to expect from that, and it hasn't resulted in a lot of traffic.

But links at high-traffic sites nearly always cause secondaries, because people see my stuff for the first time and in turn link from somewhere else. Someone who saw it at cracked.com linked to it from their Facebook page.

The problem is that Facebook opens individual pages inside a frame. If you follow the link, the referer is the outside frame, not the inside page. And that is just a link to Facebook's main page. So I have no idea at all who it was or what they said about me. All I know is I'm getting lots of links tonight from someone at Facebook.

Strangely enough, when I load Facebook's main page, it's in Japanese. That's the page you get if you say "English (US)". It looks exactly the same as the one you get when you click the Japanese choice. I do believe someone fouled up.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 11:41 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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I was just cleaning up a couple of comments which were mistakes, and I didn't get the right ones. That means I just deleted a legitimate comment from someone that happened just as I was going into the control frame.

Whoever it was, I'm sorry. Please enter it again.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 09:33 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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A long time ago I did some messing around with the site format with the goal of making the body of an individual post wide enough to accomodate an 800 pixel image.

I failed. Somehow or other I ended up with a 45 pixel margin on the left side, and only 770 pixels in the middle where images and text could be displayed.

Tonight I dug into it again, and figured out what I did wrong. Or at least I think I figured it out. This post is an experiment to see if I was right. Below the fold are five 800*450 images from ep 13 of To Aru Kagaku no Railgun of the girls in swimsuits, to test to see if I got it right.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 12:26 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Brickmuppet, what did you do to your site formatting?

When I opened a post in order to leave a comment, half the comment box was underneath the "recent comments" bar on the left. So was the "post" button.

(Which is why I couldn't leave this as a comment on your site.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 05:34 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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I just received an email from NuNames, forwarding a letter from someone else who wants to buy "denbeste.nu" from me.

For a porn site, no doubt. I am not interested.

I've prepaid for another year and a half. When I first got the name, back in 2001, I paid for 10 years. And through hard work, and nothing better to do, I've managed to get it to the point that even now it does considerable traffic, and it's linked up the wazoo.

I can see why someone who is less than savory might want the thing, but I don't want my name or my reputation connected to what they certainly have in mind. Not a chance.

I'm not even going to respond to the guy.

UPDATE: The guy's email included a link to a page about him. There's a part that lists his "specialties", and the second entry on the list is "search engine optimization".

Which I think makes clear that the reason he wants denbeste.nu is because Google thinks highly of it (I have a good ranking) and he wants to use it to link-spam his customer sites.

UPDATE: This really bugs me, and I've been thinking about it some more. There's a perfectly good email contact link on "denbeste.nu", but he didn't use that. Instead, he wrote to NuNames.

The various name vendors in the ".com" space keep waiting lists for high profile names, and if one of them expires (usually because the owner forgot to renew) then it'll be sold nearly immediately, at a premium price, to someone on the waiting list -- to be used for SEO or porn or something unsavory. It's happened a lot of times.

When I originally got a .nu URL, one reason was because NuNames doesn't do that shit, or didn't back then. I don't absolutely know for sure that they still don't, but I believe that to be the case. And I bet this guy wrote to NuNames because he thought they did have a waiting list, and he wanted to get onto it. NuNames forwarded it to me either because it's got another 1.5 years to run, or because they don't have a waiting list at all. Maybe both.

UPDATE: I just bought another 5 years. It's mine through April of 2016. So there, you vulture!!!

UPDATE: I just added this to the main page on "denbeste.nu":

Note to SEO vultures: "denbeste.nu" is not for sale.
The registration on "denbeste.nu" has been prepaid through 2016.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 06:33 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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It froze here last night, first time this season. And this morning when I got online, I didn't get online. I had a devil of a time accessing anything. Messing around with ping plotter I eventually noted that I was having problems with the first hop.

I was getting about 10% packet loss between my cable modem and the first Comcast router. Which doesn't sound like much, but that's enough to make HTTP a big fail.

I waited a couple of hours, hoping that Comcast would notice and do something. Then I noticed some other anomalies, and decided that as a precaution it was time to reboot some things. So the cable modem, and Regulus (the server) and my LAN ethernet router all got rebooted, and afterwards everything was muuch better.

Earlier today, on 500 pings to the first hop router I'd get 45-55 misses. Just now I tried it again and the loss rate was 12 on 500 pings. It ought to be zero, but 12 is tolerable.

Anyway, if it was crippling my ability to get out, it would equally have been crippling your ability to get in. So if you were having trouble reaching my server this morning (including loading the top rotation picture) that was the reason why.

UPDATE: And now it's evening, and I pinged it again. Only one dropped packet out of 500 pings. It's going to freeze again tonight, and it'll be interesting to find out if the same thing happens.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 12:13 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I just received an email from Comcast. Comcast is pleased to announce that they've implemented online usage meters. Since, they say, usage is capped at 250G per month, then they are providing a place online where you can look to see how much you've used so far.

I am really hoping that this is for "home" users, not us "commercial" users. I pay twice what a normal user does, and what I'm paying for is the privilege of running a server. The whole point of having a commercial account is to be able to use more bandwidth than a normal user, and that's why I pay more than a normal user.

I better get more; I'm using somewhere between 400G and 500G per month just uploading for torrents.

I think it probably is. I've received "service related" spam from Comcast before which clearly wasn't intended for commercial users.

I'll tell you this: if, around the middle of the month, my link suddenly goes dead, then I'm going to be calling Verizon to find out about their FIOS, because I've got one of their fibers, currently unconnected, in my front closet ready to be used any time.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 07:23 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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1 I have FIOS, and like it, though I'm only an ordinary home user.  I'm never giving a cent to Comcast again, ever.  Not after the disaster that was my first attempt to get Comcast service set up at a new apartment.

Posted by: metaphysician at December 01, 2009 07:46 PM (vM63Z)

2 How much does it cost you?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 01, 2009 07:53 PM (+rSRq)

3

I'm virtually certain I'm OK. The way the letter read, the user-accessible meters is new but the traffic cap already is in place.

And I've definitely been using more than 250G per month for a hell of a long time. I'm sure that if there is a cap for commercial users, it's a lot higher. As well it should be, considering what I pay.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 01, 2009 08:36 PM (+rSRq)

4 I, too, have been happy with FIOS.  My only real complaint with Comcast was that when the outside temperature dropped to around freezing, I lost internet access.  Since I live in the Dallas area, that didn't happen very often.  But when it did happen, it was almost always at night when I was at home wanting to use the damned internet versus when I was at work.

Posted by: Mark A. Flacy at December 01, 2009 09:09 PM (Lbkvv)

5 Be careful, Steven... it seems that Verizon just changed its FiOS Acceptable Use Policy.  Seems a little draconian: it is now a violation to post something off-topic in a thread.

Posted by: Wonderduck at December 01, 2009 10:29 PM (C32SO)

6

Fios is not terribly expensive.  I think it's around $60-70 a month, but in Dallas, that gets you 20Mb down and I don't know what the upload speed is currently.  (Before they bumped me up, I was getting 5 down and almost 2 up.)  Like everyone else these days, they offer bundles if you get more services; that's why I can't tell you exactly what the cost is.

I don't know how assymetrical your Comcast is, but one of the things I like about fios is how it's much less assymetrical than regular cable, which in my experience is usually about 10 to 1.  That'd probably be pretty useful for you, given your described usage pattern.

Posted by: RickC at December 02, 2009 07:08 AM (oHPmi)

7 SDB-  Where I live ( Maryland ), it costs me 90 a month, but thats for the phone/internet package deal.  So, yeah, 60 sounds about right for just home internet service.  I have no clue what the bandwidth limits are, though.

Posted by: metaphysician at December 02, 2009 09:03 AM (vM63Z)

8 Currently my service is 12 megabits down, 3 megabits up, and it costs me about $100 a month. But normal home users pay about half that for 12 megabits down, 1.5 megabits up (I think), and a bandwidth cap.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 02, 2009 09:46 AM (+rSRq)

9 I recently changed from Comcast to Verizon FIOS, and I'm wishing I'd done it much earlier when I first considered it.  I've got a mid-level package including FIOS TV, and 25/15 internet.  This costs me right around $100 a month.  Speed tests show that I'm getting almost exactly the advertised rates.  Even above raw bandwidth, things just seem faster, Comcast was really getting laggy of late, where it would take 15-30 seconds before pages would even start loading for me much of the time, and their support didn't have any answer other than "something in your area is broken, and we're trying to figure out what" for well over a month.

And despite everything Comcast says, I suspect they're still throttling torrents, I uploaded more my first day on FIOS than I had in several months of Comcast usage.

Posted by: David at December 02, 2009 09:55 AM (rlE2m)

10 Anybody on AT&T U-verse, or is that considered a derailment -- by either Verizon or the host? 

Posted by: ubu at December 02, 2009 04:09 PM (XExaN)

11 It's not available to me here; my only choices are Verizon and Comcast. Still, it's nice to have choices; it's the first time I have had. In San Diego it was Road Runner or nothing. (Fortunately, Road Runner wasn't too bad.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 02, 2009 04:59 PM (+rSRq)

12 It's the continuation of the same policty of openness that Comcast established back during the trumped-up torrent controversy. Comcast long was the only provider who published the limits (ok, not very long: DirecWAY also published some limits soon thereafter). It's still impossible to find out what the caps are on any DSL or FTTH provider like Verizon or AT&T. They just disconnect whenever they fancy. So, now Comcast took steps to export the DB records into external Web.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at December 02, 2009 06:59 PM (/ppBw)

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For years now I've been seeing this kind of thing:

http://www.denbeste.nu/essays/mars.shtml -> /libImage/blocksTile.gif 161.45.219.20 0pct.
http://www.denbeste.nu/essays/mars.shtml -> /libImage/warning.gif 161.45.219.20 0pct.

What are those two files, and given that I don't have any such directory and don't link to them, why is that browser trying to load them?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 11:52 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Finding my old archived top rotations wasn't really all that hard. Below the fold are a few old friends.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 09:48 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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