Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Apparently CBS is going to be providing absolutely free wifi access for a large swath of midtown which thrills and tickles me, except I don’t work in midtown anymore. Still, the hordes of Apple iPhone toting yuppies will be delighted to read Valleywag from Times Square. The so-called CBS Mobile Zone will fall inside this perimeter:

Citi and Salesgenie.com are sponsoring the MTA / CBS venture, which will support itself through a default ad-supported homepage featuring content from Tropos, BIG, Fon, Ning, Goowy, Veoh, Yelp, 1020, Aptilo and Can-Do Entertainment.

I’m not sure how well this will fly, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. I feel like all the US should be a wifi mesh network, but it’s not. Why can’t cell phones, for example, bond with each other to create local peering and routing? We could get global connectivity out of these kind of schemes…

The NYT has an article called In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice that’s worth a look

Given that I’ve reported two Google finance bugs (overflowing numbers, color updating), I’m more than happy to report the third. See, this time, there is a stock that really went up asymptotically today:

I know the product is not yet out of beta, but still that is no excuse for displaying “inf.” Google’s market data seems awfully out of sync sometimes…

Today I had the pleasure of a random guy in Mexico recursively downloading as much of my site as he could, which sent my CPU load to 2.0, a level that Dreamhost would find acceptable but which I personally freak out about. The r-dns and IP of this guy are:

dsl-189-171-15-59.prod-infinitum.com.mx
189.171.15.59

He started at 04/Nov/2007:12:04:36 and ended (by iptables ban) at 04/Nov/2007:20:17:03. In those 8 hours and thirteen minutes, he made over 250,000 requests. That’s an extra 8.5 requests per second from a single IP, which is clearly unacceptable behavior:

[root@fc624389 ~]# cat access_log | grep 189.171.15.59 | wc -l
251923

If you don’t believe me, the next biggest offender over the last 24 hours made only 4,400 requests:

[root@fc624389 ~]# cat access_log | cut -d’ ‘ -f1 | sort -n | uniq -c | sort -nr | more
251923 189.171.15.59
4403 66.249.73.116
2012 76.88.78.239
1646 70.141.105.233

The user agent of this guy doesn’t tell *me* anything about him, but maybe one of you readers has an idea?

189.171.15.59 - - [04/Nov/2007:12:04:38 -0500] “GET /wp-content/themes/greenmarinee/images/links_bullet.gif HTTP/1.1″ 200 467 “http://celebrity-photos.elliottback.com/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Media Center PC 3.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)”

Another thing that bugs me is he requested each URL about 7 times. WTF? Do you really need to spider my site as fast as you can seven times?

[root@fc624389 ~]# cat access_log | grep 189.171.15.59 | cut -d’ ‘ -f11 | sort | uniq | wc -l
35414

I am either thinking of writing a very evil script to confuse non-google/msn/live/ask/yahoo bots by writing in an infinite number of invisible links into my websites, or installing some kind of mod_throttle into my apache. It looks like mod_limitipconn might help here, too.

If you go to Ask.com and start typing, it will try to help you find what you’re looking for by displaying a list of suggestions it thinks are relevant to your query (and give the arrogance of Ask’s marketing department, probably your life as well).

But not every suggestion is a hit; most are ok, reasonable extensions, but in nearly every phrase I type in there is something hilarious. Take, for example, “learn to speak” which has the usual suspects Spanish, English, Italian, German, and the most unusual Gibberish:

If you ask me, it’s the most expressive language in the world

While most people want to learn to play a guitar, freestyle, or draw, little Johnny is learning to levitate objects:

With his mind, what else?

Americans love to sue you. They’ll do it for wrongful imprisonment, slander, or just about any kind of distress they can of, including tubal ligation failure:

I’d rather check her phone logs…

Ask’ers don’t know much about themselves, so naturally they don’t know if they are pregnant or not, as seen in this query for “how can i:”

Also, your dog is expecting!

A typo on “how do i find” led me to this gem of feng shui confusion:

Since when is this a verb?

I saved the best for last, which is the auto-complete results for “is it legal to,” a horrifying look into modern culture:

The answer is a categorical NO!

There’s an indication that this data is filtered–try starting lesbian, for example–so I’m not sure if I believe these results. My operating assumption is that this is a marketing gimmick to try and get some churn on the blogosphere and free PR. It wouldn’t be hard to drop in a single unlikely phrase to spice things up, now would it?

p.s., don’t type “how should I” or “can I sell my” or “ask me about” because they’re sophomoric. I bet Google’s users are equally idiotic, but they certainly don’t go out of their way to show that to us!