Blag

Everyone whinges about it, but I feel like I’m missing out.

SPAM!

I have 13 e-mail accounts, and I get on average a grand total of 1 spam e-mail a month across all of them. So like, what’s up with this??? I want my fair share of penis enlarger, Viagra and Nigerian 419 scam e-mails!

This blog used to get spam comments – 552 of them, gained over a period of 10 months – but even they have dried up.

Perhaps my digital identity paranoia is keeping me from the oh-so-desired offers for $20, 000, 000 USD dollars from Mrs. Doraty Sithole from Zimbabwe, whose husband was brutally murdered Robert Mugabe’s lackeys for supporting white farmers.

*scans passport and e-mails to xxxxxxxxxxxxx@gmail.com*

Somehow or other, this blog (blag) has somehow made it into the indexes of over 15 search engines including Google, Yahoo, Live/Bing, Ask, Alexa & Netcraft. Amazing, considering there weren’t any inbound links to theparanoidtroll.com in the beginning yet somehow Google caught on within days of the domain being registered, and all the other followed suit.

Stats make for interesting reading -

• Average of 6-7 unique visitors per day (excludes RSS feeds, and returning visitors)
• 72.8% of visitors use Internet Explorer, 15.2% use Safari, 8% use Firefox, 0.9% use Chrome and the remainder are all random browsers/feed readers
• 95.9% of visitors are Windows users, Macintosh accoutns for 1.2% and <0.1% use Linux. I have no idea what the remainder is.
• Top 5 keywords were  – “cheap”, “discount”, “billion”, “KFC” and ”pointless”
• Top 10 countries are – Australia, US, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Spain, Brazil, Russia and Germany

I actually received 3 offers via e-mail from various dodgy SEO companies offering to ‘promote’ my site to make it to the front page of Google. It already does, thank you very much -.- No thanks to you, J. Walker, H. Ellis, and K. Lampton. All you succeeded in doing is wasting 15 kilobytes of space in my inbox.

In other news, more server changes to come

I’ll wait until I’ve moved all my websites and domains away from host “X”, before I tear into them, lambast their shitty service and name them publicly. The server load of 70.34 and memory usage of 88.20% is atrocious, let alone the support staff who ignore support tickets, or take 4-5 days before replying to those marked as ‘crtical’, or the high packet loss and latency. And that’s before I start complaining about corrupted SSL data, terrible PHP/SQL performance and the intermittent FTP service. -.- *rage*

For those not in the know, a typical server packed with hundreds of websites only has a load of 1 to 4, and memory usage around the 40-60% usage mark under normal conditions.

So, time to shift all my domain names to Layered Networks, and move my other sites to IGXHosting. (Free plug for Layered Networks here actually, they have very cheap domain names which come with free WHOIS privacy, which still beat Australian registrars for price, despite the AUD to USD exchange rate and conversion). This blog shouldn’t be affected as it’s already hosted by Layered Networks and the domain is already pointed towards their nameservers. Still, if something does bugger up, max downtime should be 24-48 hours, while your ISP re-caches DNS lookups.

*yawn*

Yet another post with no discernible topic – perhaps it’s like a mini twitter? Ginormic pile of random comments, tid bits and news…

Begin early morning 1:37AM ramble:

(Actually, am testing something at the moment, but decided I may as well make an effort to fill this post with something remotely amusing… better than all the RSS readers getting a bunch of white space).

I hate being throttled. -.-

Especially midway through working on a website update, and the back end is so packed with AJAX and PHP it’s not funny.  I think he who pays the internet bill would be very annoyed if I purchased a 2GB data block (2GB being the lowest denomination available for $5) at 1AM, given the rollover time is 2AM…

I must say, I am disgusted yet curiously attracted to the movie Bruno… can’t wait for the DVD to come out. Did I say DVD? I meant torrent. Not that I would do something as dastardly as pirate a movie.

And yes, I’ll finish off the finding the perfect browser series soon. Opera and Google seem to be pushing out updates for their browsers on a bi-weekly basis now. That’s a good thing I suppose, but annoying as I constantly have to re-evaluate each browser in light of the updates.

End ramble.

Random news:

The International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg has announced that they’ve discovered two previously unknown compositions by Mozart. Yay! I can’t wait to hear more classical music… http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25827706-401,00.html

MSN Messenger turns 10! Now in its latest re-incarnation as Windows Live Messenger, latest stats have active users at 330 million, and 10 billion messages sent per day. 10 years on, and MSN still has 80% market share, followed by Skype and Yahoo! (NB: Stats are buoyed up somewhat, as MSN and Yahoo signed an agreement back in 2005 to consolidate their chat networks).

Windows 7 is RTM. Can’t wait for the official launch on October 22nd – no more crappy 32-bit limitations of XP (namely max 4GB of RAM, and 2GB RAM allocated max to each application). Anyone wanna buy 4GB of DDR2 4-4-4-12 overclocking ram incidentally?

Aside: WOO! Unthrottled right at this very moment, as I’m typing this now

Queensland cops plan to go war driving around the state, looking for people with unsecured wireless networks, handing out informational leaflets and holding demonstrations to teach people how to secure their home networks. Props to them I suppose…

Yet another aside: Why do I keep running out of hard disk capacity? I’ve already got 3x 250GB, 1x 750GB and 2x 1TB in my main computer.

Bleurgh. Bored and hungry. Would be asleep now, if I wasn’t staying awake to take a final dose of meds.

Hmm, so I overhauled the main website, fixed the 101 bugs and it’s now reasonably professional looking. Now to integrate this blog into the main website, instead of having it as a separate mini-site. Don’t want to think of the damage it would to to my existing SEO efforts or Google Page Rank.

*yawn #2*

Off to play flash games.

Ta.

Copied verbatim from their blog post:

As always, check back at http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-trial-the-verdict-090417/ and Torrent Freak for the latest news.

A blog from an expat Australian couple who have recently emigrated to New Zealand – http://www.fushnchups.co.nz/. They’ve far exceeded the usual sheep jokes, tearing the shit out of the Kiwi’s with their caustic comments. Examples include:

When you arrive in New Zealand, chances are you might hire a car. Chances are also that you may die due to the batshit crazy haphazard way many Kiwis drive.

and (describing Rotorua, a popular tourist destination):

I was always under the impression that the locals just ate too many baked beans, but no, apparently it’s the bubbling mud pools which create the stench. The smell is pretty striking when you’re just visiting the place, but I suppose the locals get used to it. Scientists tell us that the smell is actually an aphrodisiac, but I highly doubt it. It just smells like the whole town let rip at once. It still got me to thinking, does good old-fashioned flatulence still provide the giggles to Rotoru-ians that it does to others? Can blokes get away with letting out a silent-but-deadly in bed next to the missus? How do people tell when their eggs have gone off?

and

Number of times overtaken by a a fellow motorist who couldn’t handle me only doing the speed limit: about 30.

Number of times this happened when approaching a blind corner or crest: at least 10.

Number of times this happened when the overtaker was heading in my direction and I momentarily feared for my life: twice.

Yeh… it doesn’t sound that impressive reading quoted text. It’s a lot funnier reading the full articles. The blog even made headlines, havign pissed off a lot of New Zealanders. http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/world/5426019/aussie-bloggers-upset-kiwis/

Bleh, no point creating 4 separate posts for 4 small issues so here they are amalgamated into one:

1) As is the inevitable fate of all blogs, Russian spammers have found Blag Akismet has been installed to filter out SPAM comments… (Those Russians really need to try harder – “nice blog ————- (url to mp3 website) – by default, most blogs should block their comments anyway, without the need to install anti-spam plugins but no harm done beefing up security)

2) Coles, the supermarket chain owned by Wesfarmers which supports terrorism has stopped selling “Pacific” branded 50-pack made in China ultra unhealthy packed with MSG spring rolls

3) Looks like the 301 redirect worked! Google, MSN/Live, Yahoo, Netcraft and Alexa have started crawling this new URL

4) Wiki’s are so freaking annoying to set up and maintain!!! Especially mediawiki (what Wikipedia uses), being one of the most un-user friendly pieces of software ever created by man.

Blag is moving home!

From the 2nd of February 2009, it will be hosted at www.theparanoidtroll.com

Access blag using the navigational pane at the top of the site, or go directly to www.theparanoidtroll.com/blog

All search engine requests, page vists and RSS feeds should automatically redirect to the new website from tomorrow onwards.

People are actually visiting this blog blag… visitors from China, US, Aus, Turkey, Sweden and Germany.

Speaking of which, how did this end up being Crawled by Net Stats, Web Archiver, Google, Live, and Yahoo anyway? I don’t think anyone would have linked to this, not in the 3 months or so its been running anyway. And what did I say to attract the attention of social opinion/networking RSS crawlers…

*OMG the government is onto me*

As an aside, I wish the chaps who develop Siteworx/Alloy hosting or whoever’s responsibly would update Scriptworx more often. Manual updates are a pain, though WordPress’s new auto-update feature should reduce the stress.

As a second aside, still waiting on Billion/Internode for new firmware. Nothing wrong with the device – I just like having the latest and greatest