Unbalanced Load
I started using Google Analytics a while back to track visit information for this site, because my server logs and AdSense report very different things. And Analytics doesn't report anywhere close to the amount of traffic, either. Where Analyitics may say I only get 15 page views in a day, AWStats will show I've at least 100. It's never made sense, so I decided to make a little tracker of my own. A simple PHP script I added to the end of all my templates for a couple days, to just record a few peices of information. And when I checked them, I found a lot of those 100 hits were various search engine bots, some more were spambots that are filtered, leaving relatively few of them actual people.
Since I'm all about the sharing of code snippets, here's the code for the script. It's removed now.
$namefile = "../../log.asw";
$fn = fopen($namefile, 'a');
$ip = getenv('REMOTE_ADDR');
$name = substr($_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"],
strrpos($_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"],"/")+1);
$curdate = date("m\-d\-Y");
$fullname = $ip . ">" . $curdate . ">" . $name . "\r\n";
fwrite($fn, $fullname);
fclose($fn);
?>
Date posted: 08 October, 2009Tags: programming regularspelling website_design
The Green House
So after I cleverly quoted the line from my old halloween story, and since it's October once again, I remembered it's existence and that I can post it on here now. So I decided to do so, and put it on Booksie as well, and after I wrote the prologue for The Pocketwatch, I got the idea to maybe do a collection of short stories joined together by that line. I've got one more idea, but I might do a fourth one after those are done to tie everything together, depending on how I feel then.
"Celebration" wasn't ever an actual title for it, though, so I decided to give it a proper title. I wanted to follow up with the naming convention of The Pocketwatch and name it The House, but Booksie said there was already something had that name, so I altered it to be "The Green House" since it's an ugly green house. I didn't realize until after I had finished putting the two peices I did on Booksie that the title could be interpreted as "The Greenhouse" which this is not, but I don't care now. Not all of what was written in the Google Doc is here or on Booksie, because I hadn't finished writing the next part.
Starting off talking about the house, since I haven't really talked about that before, the house I pretty much came up with from scratch. I don't particularly know any houses with the floor plan I described. The spoon is a recurring joke I use whenever it fits, based on the random changes in Final Fantasy IV for the original SNES release (the first Final Fantasy game I ever played), and the fact that according to that a spoon is the most powerful throwing weapon for a ninja.
Switching to talk about The Pocketwatch, I hadn't originally conceived of placing any specific dates or locations on what was happening, just that it was somewhere in Europe at the late 16th Century, because that's when and where pocketwatches really started picking up. My "Celebration" line, though, had reminded me of one of the parts of the Otherland series, the second book to be exact, where the character Paul Jonas was in Venice during Carnival, and had mentioned something about a recent battle victory where people were even more pumped up. I decided to pull out the book and find out more information about that, and found it was the Battle of Lepanto. After reading it a bit, I decided that would be the setting, and worked it into the conversation between the witch and the watchmaker.
Because for some random reason Word decided to paste completely different than it did when I posted the prologue of The Pocketwatch, and AbiWord, which I used to put up every page before, has decided to betray me and hard force every paragraph tag to have a margin, individually, the two pages of The Green House have their tabs intact, which I don't usually use for the space constraints, using a double line to separate paragraphs instead. Oddly enough it created those as well, so I don't really know what it's smoking. I'll fix it later, I don't want to mess with it right now.
Date posted: 04 October, 2009Tags: celebration novels the_pocketwatch writing
The Pocketwatch
I haven't really said much lately, because things have been relatively uneventful. The main necessary functions of the NPC scripting engine for Spiral Island are nearly complete, special things can be made later as they come up but in it's current state a good amount of the game's needed scripts are in place and events can be written.
But aside from that, I have been bothered trying to come up with an idea for a story. A little while back I got a pocketwatch, modern built but made with old mechanical methods. Ever since I received it, though, I have had the urge to tell a story. But what, I could not figure out, and it was bothering me.
I finally figured out what I wanted to do, and so have begun the story. I'm not sure if I'll have enough to make it a full novel, so for now I'll just consider it a short story. But there is the story, "The Pocketwatch", which is now added to the side navigation of the site. It is the first time I've written in first person in years, so it may be kind of odd. But we'll run with it, and see where it goes.
I'm also posting this onto Booksie, which I recently found by accident while doing some research.
Date posted: 02 October, 2009Tags: regularspelling the_pocketwatch writing
Pattern Flux
Probably because of the chaotic nature of my speech, I tend to not only shift accents from time to time, but also shift expressions in my speech as well. These can vary from time to time, from the way I present information in discussions, to regional or cultural expressions in my sentences, to even the way I order sentence fragments in a sentence. And these change constantly, with a new one appearing suddenly, and being used frequently.
The latest one I noticed, I started using this evening in fact, then proceeded to use it on several locations on the internet, with the phrase "the other half of this is" to join together multiple points of a discussion. I'm not sure where I might have picked it up, but it started spontaneously, I used it multiple times in succession, and I only noticed it as I was closing the multiple tabs I had open and saw them all in sequence.
Date posted: 28 September, 2009Tags: english linguistic
Neutral Good
For a good amount of time now, Net Neutrality has been on the topic of the US Government. While most popularized be the gibberish speech by Ted Stevens, the problem has been a very serious matter. As a brief recap, the issue at hand is ISP's slowing down or blocking entirely certain content that they don't want or may be competing against them, while giving preference to other content that they want. Something very much against the grain of the function and foundation of the internet, which has always provided all information to anyone who has wanted to look for it.
Finally, the issue is coming to a close, on the side of Net Neutrality, at least as far as the US is concerned. With an announcement today by the Federal Communications Commission, they are adopting new rules for dealings with the internet. These two particular additions, on top of a set of four already in place, are explained as follows: "The fifth principle is one of non-discrimination -- stating that broadband providers cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications" and "The sixth principle is a transparency principle -- stating that providers of broadband Internet access must be transparent about their network management practices."
The reason we have needed these in place as actual rules have been because of 21st century companies attempting to shape the internet otherwise. Comcast, for one example that was being directly addressed by the FCC, was secretly using packet filtering and slowing techniques to disfavor BitTorrent traffic on their network. Setting piracy aside, BitTorrent is one of the primary distribution methods today for Linux, and is used in numerous other applications by various other companies, including Amazon in their S3 service, and Activision Blizzard for the content delivery for the mega-popular World of Warcraft.
That's just the most plain example. It's also a tactic known to be used by cellular telecom companies, with AT&T filtering and slowing certain traffic for the iPhone, and other cell companies using it for various other phones. At the end of the day, what matters most is these were just the things being tried now, if these rules had not been set, they would only be pushed further and further by internet service providers, to become who knows what in the future.
So I say this, to Chairman Genachowski and the FCC. From the internet, from a user, and from a developer, I thank you. Thank you for allowing a path for us to continue to enjoy and grow the internet in the future, the way we want to see it.
Date posted: 21 September, 2009Tags: internet