eviljim.com: the mac days

I am extraordinarily proud with myself.

Yahoo is sending 3 requests a second to my webserver for no apparent reason, requesting files that do not exist, and using a HTTP/1.0 browser (WTF is up with that? Can Yahoo not access virtual hosted websites? Are you serious? Is it possible they are further behind than Microsoft?)

I realized this when trying to search my logs for an IP that a spammer used to sign up for a webhosting account with — at first I thought *he* was flooding my site with requests to prevent that information from being available to, say, figure out who he is.

The requests already violate common sense, check this out:

[Fri Sep 7 15:13:13 2007] [error] [client 209.191.87.215] File does not exist: /home/sites/sitesurvival.com/public_html/1ktnm
[Fri Sep 7 15:13:13 2007] [error] [client 209.191.87.215] File does not exist: /home/sites/sitesurvival.com/public_html/1ktnm
[Fri Sep 7 15:14:21 2007] [error] [client 209.191.87.219] File does not exist: /home/sites/sitesurvival.com/public_html/1ktnm
[Fri Sep 7 15:14:21 2007] [error] [client 209.191.87.219] File does not exist: /home/sites/sitesurvival.com/public_html/1ktnm

First off, don’t request the same URL twice in the same second. The reason this does not make sense is obvious. Second, if you receive a 404, that file does not exist. It is quite unlikely that some random jib of content was created between your first and second request (which are only separated by one minute).

Also, it’s complete rubbish to NOT IDENTIFY YOURSELF CORRECTLY AS A ROBOT:

209.191.87.219 - - [28/Nov/2007:20:19:45 -0600] “GET /nmfjopqw80gty HTTP/1.0″ 404 284 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”

This gives me no information as to who is constantly barraging my server with requests.

Going through the last 50,000 requests (which only reaches to about 15 hours ago) over 49,000 are requests from Yahoo for non-existent pages.

I noticed the following story in my Google mail:

And this made me reminisce.

You probably won’t know it unless you ever did paste-up on the staff of a newspaper (my experience being from my high school newspaper), but typically headlines are not written by the same person who wrote the article. This is typically because it’s unknown what size the headline will need to be — it’s often not until the day of layout that the width, height, and specific layout of a story is determined.

So the two things you need to know:

- Those people laying out the stories for the paper also write the headlines.
- Paste-up is typically a several hour tedious process. I never even had to do the worst parts, because I wasn’t an editor, but I helped out a lot. I thought it was fun; most people didn’t share my opinion.

Paste-up is putting together a puzzle, except every piece is looks the same, it’s just a different size. Also, you can kind of cut pieces of the puzzle off. Or split them in half. But doing so sometimes means that other piece you already cut needs to get glued back together and put somewhere else…

Anyway, enough rambling. By the time you start writing headlines you know how much width you have and are given a point size. This means, since printed fonts are not fixed-width, a varying amount of characters that again you have to fiddle with to fit yet not be too short.

(We used a WordPerfect 5.1 macro for this, if you were curious. I’d include a WordPerfect 5.1 screenshot, but it’s completely unnecessary. Close your eyes and imagine a completely blue DOS screen. Now imagine gray fixed-width characters which represent variable-width characters. Or just Google it you lazy jerk).

It’s pretty much the only creative part of the entire paste-up process I got to participate in. As such, I tried hard to write some great headlines.

Let me tell you: there are not many literary devices one can employ in 5-8 words. Allegory? Characterization? Certainly you can’t build an entire climax in there.

The headline writer’s crutch is alliteration. It’s the only thing you can do to make a headline pop.

Thus, you get so many “W”s in a headline.

Personally, though, I think this shows this guy’s a newb… “W” is the widest point-size character; I would have tried to alliterate on “I” or something, to get more words in.

My personal best was an entire headline — 7 or 8 words — with words starting in S. I had to fight my editor (Ericca Pollack, if I recall correctly) and eventually our teacher said it was OK. I need to dig up that Tiger Tales (more alliteration! I told you!) if I still have it. I’m still very proud of it.

I’m leaving on an airplane in a few hours to go to Vegas to celebrate a traditional Thanksgiving with my family.

Seeing as I recently picked up an iPod Touch, I figured I should throw some video on it in case I don’t sleep through the flight (which is at 6 AM — in other words, the need for videos is actually academic).

I’d been hankering to re-watch Firefly for the hundredth time, so I figured I’d pop the series on my iTouch and enjoy.

Last time I attempted to convert a DVD to anything else it took about a day for one DVD. With this outdated knowledge, I decided to acquire some AVIs of the show, even though I already own it, as I figured that’d run a lot quicker.

While that acquisition was taking place, I figured a dry run would be in order. I had the entire Arrested Development series on my HD, and figured there’s nothing wrong with taking one of the funniest shows in history along as well.

Things did not go well.

I found a piece of free software — ffmpegX — that would convert the AVIs to MP4 (iPod format) but it didn’t have a built in option for iPod Touch/iPhone size. Also, it wouldn’t let me add more than one AVI at a time, and it would reset the settings each time I tried to load a new file. This led to incorrect settings and skewed pictures and all sorts of unhappiness.

So everyone was talking about this other thing, VisualHub, so I give it a go. Converts the first video quite fine, so I drop $22 to get a licensed copy.

Of course, once I do that, it decides to no longer work and all the converted files have audio off by many seconds. Tweaking options didn’t help. They were useless.

“Bah,” I say to myself.

Then I remember some co-workers telling me about Handbrake, a nice little tool to convert DVDs straight into whatever you want - DiVX, iPod Touch, ASCII, etc. I figure I can rip the first disc overnight and the second today — I’ve got a few cores now so I assumed it would take at most 12 hours each.

I was wrong - apparently the state of DVD conversion has come leaps and bounds since my last attempt. To convert the whole DVD (which includes ripping the content and decrypting it from the disc) only took about 1.5 hours for a bit over 3 hours of content.

Not only that the quality was leaps and bounds better than re-encoding the AVIs I had downloaded. Despite the same bit rate, they looked fantastic. I understand re-encoding causes quality to suffer, but the AVIs were pretty good quality, so I was surprised to see it cause such a large difference.

Huzzah! I will have Firefly on the plane. How exciting for me. I might rip Arrested Development, too.

(By the way, one HUGE thing — despite ripping stuff, consuming both cores 100%, the Mac responded instantly throughout the entire process. Even playing a video file while ripping didn’t skip. I was shocked that I could both encode AND still use my machine. On my Vista box, which was a 3 ghz machine, I couldn’t do *anything else*. I could hardly open a run window).

Amazon announced their eBook reader today, The Kindle. As an Amazon Junkie, I of course must give my opinions:

- “We wanted Kindle to be completely mobile and simple to use for everyone, so we made it wireless. No PC and no syncing needed. Using the same 3G network as advanced cell phones, we deliver your content using our own wireless delivery system, Amazon Whispernet. Unlike WiFi, you’ll never need to locate a hotspot. There are no confusing service plans, yearly contracts, or monthly wireless bills—we take care of the hassles so you can just read.”

Amazon is the first company to realize integrating wireless at no cost to the user is HUGE. Sprint is brilliant working with the company to provide this (it’s something, I think, a large number of devices will start to do). It’d be ridiculous for someone to expect me to pay a service fee for my eBook reader. While I don’t expect the Kindle become widespread, I expect this concept to catch on.

- The price is way too high, and I suspect Amazon knows that to be the case. I’d expect, especially with the service tie-ins, the price will drop to their cost or lower in a year or two. Especially considering they’ve got you as far as purchases go — you have to buy your books from Amazon — they’re going to make a good amount of money off of you just on the book purchases.

- It’s ugly as Betty

- Once again, as I felt with Amazon Unbox, they’re in a position to do combination purchases. For example, with Unbox, if you buy Season 2 of “Lost” you should get a free digital copy (you don’t, but you should). With Amazon, if you buy a hardcover, you should get a free or extremely discounted eBook copy (no more than, say, 99 cents). After all - you already own the book. If Amazon did this, I’d most likely buy this hideous device and also buy all my books from Amazon.

- Prices are reasonable for lots of things: 99 cents a month for full, wireless delivery of blogs isn’t bad (again, seeing as you grab them over a cellular network adds that value), $9.99 for a hardcover release isn’t bad, $.10 to send any document wirelessly to your reader isn’t bad (free cable-based support is allegedly there; if not, it should be). Some blogs appear to cost $2; that’s getting a bit expensive.

- This is a great delivery method for newspapers, and I can see their relevance returning if devices like this catch on.

- Free access to Wikipedia on the device and an integrated dictionary are awesome. I certainly could have used the latter when reading “Name of the Rose.”

If you travel a lot, I could see the expense making sense (though if it was half the price, it’d make it a no-brainer). Clearly they need to get Apple to design them some hardware.

The huge negative, of course, is the simple fact that I own a lot of books — I even own a lot of books I want, but have yet to have the time, to read. I don’t want to re-buy those books in order to read them on the new device.

I found what I believe is a hidden feature in the Wii controllers.

A while back I noticed that some of my controllers, when I turned them on, would only blink 3 of the 4 LEDs while trying to connect. “Weird,” I thought, “Maybe one of the LEDs is burned out.”

I ignored it until I spoke with support (about my green pixel problem), and the rep said it’s normal, but didn’t expand as to why.

Today I turned my Wiimote on and only two lights blinked. On a hunch, I hit the Home button and noticed the battery meter had only two bars - out of four.

So, apparently, when you boot up your controller, it will flash the battery life remaining. Neat. Wish I had been able to figure it out earlier.

As part of the NaNo experience, Alfonso and I have had a few meet-ups at local coffee shops. Alfonso is bad at picking shops as he typically picks ones that have 5 minutes remaining before they close, and they won’t even sell you any coffee or old bread.

Anyway, I’d been wanting to check out a local coffee shop opened by a fellow Googler (though I can’t say I know him, I think he works in another building). You can check out the astoundingly and surprisingly bad website here. Don’t expect hours of operation or even an exact address.

So, the gist of this cafe is that payment is on a voluntary basis. You go in, order whatever drinks or snacks (small sandwiches, FroYo, bagels, CostCo muffins, etc) and you receive them. There is no cash register. There is — off to the side — a small slot where you can put money, if you so choose. You can also give the barrista your card and just tell her whatever you want charged. Or pay online at the previously mentioned website via PayPal. (Wait: why doesn’t this dude accept Google Checkout?)

My supposition is that, because payment is voluntary, the median visitor ends up paying more than they would at a Starbucks, or what have you. This is, however, quite necessary to make up for the people that pay nothing. And by “people” I kind of mean “teenagers.”

They also have an Xbox 360 hooked up that you can go to town on, complete with several games. How do the games not get stolen? Nuclear technology.

You know that part of the Simpsons opening where Homer handles a nuclear rod inside a lucite case with some gloves? Well, Terra Bite has a 360 and a bunch of discs inside a similar case. You stick your hands through some holes in the case - too small to fit a CD through - and you can change out the games. I don’t know what keeps people from stealing the controllers, though. Hmmm.

Anyway, the cafe itself is pretty nice. It’s also convenient when you know you’ll be sitting there for two hours - you don’t have to go up and pay $2 each time you need a coffee refill, or feel like an incredibly delicious bagel. You can just settle up for whatever you feel like you owe at the end of the day. Or end of the week. Or just not pay.

Some strange events and such:

- At one point on our second day visiting Terra Bite, the owner came in. His demeanor kind of made me feel unwelcome there — Alfonso asked a good question (how do they handle sales tax) and through the entire 30 second conversation, the owner seemed to be bothered that he was forced to have it. And the entire time he was there — sitting out of sight on the other side of the cafe — I felt vaguely like I shouldn’t be there. Like I have broken into this dude’s house and was using his coffee maker, but he was too polite to ask me to leave, but not too polite to offer me biscuits. I’m not certain the entirety of this feeling is his fault though; I think it’s from the concept of the place. I hadn’t paid for anything I had taken (yet), so I felt like a freeloader, even though I fully intended to pay when I was done consuming his goods.

- Tatiana didn’t have any cash, so she felt like she could not get anything. This confused me. So I offered to pay, which she accepted. Me paying for her consisted of going with her to the counter, standing next to her while she ordered and got her drink, and then sitting back down. A couple hours later I put money into the little hopper. With new payment guidelines comes new and odd social situations that I don’t have the ability to understand.

- We went to eat afterwards, and felt slightly put out that restaurants were now telling us exactly what we had to pay. It seemed very presumptuous of them to do.

In all, I kind of like the concept. In some respects it heralds to the mom-and-pop kind of store; I could imagine in such a place, if you visited daily, they wouldn’t make you fork over $1.72 for coffee. You could probably just throw them a twenty every week and call it even. It’s a certain kind of convenience you rarely get.

PS I feel it is BS that this near-800 word essay does not count towards my horribly-low word count.

Any time I get a new electronic goody, I feel certain “firsts” for the device are very important to set the tone of my experience with said device.

With my new iPod Touch, the following seemed appropriate.

First website: jailbreakme.com
First song: CSS - Music is My Hot Hot Sex
First (possibly only?) over-the-air iTunes purchase: Spice Girls - Headlines [Added bonus - it’s iTunes Plus so it’s already an MP3. Score)
First video watched: Wes Anderson’s Hotel Chevalier
First game of blackjack played: I busted to a dealer blackjack

jimr became an active employee on Monday November 6, 2006 (365 days ago).

One year!

Exactly one year ago I was in Mountain View, sitting in the courtyard eating Wagyu steak from Charlies’ Cafe, watching to my left a scale-model T-Rex get assembled, and to my right, a bunch of engineers running through one of those inflatable obstacle course things.

It’s crazy. Seems like I’ve been here much longer, but also, like I’ve only been here a few months.

Oh and, of course, my non-solicit with Microsoft has expired and as such, I now can concentrate on recruiting everyone I enjoyed working with at Microsoft. Bwa-ha-ha-ha.

For a while now, my Wii has been displaying little green pixels every now and again while playing games (especially when playing Resident Evil 4). It was only a little annoying, but I finally got sick of it, so I called Nintendo for support.

Their first bonus point is that they were open on Saturday. The rep took my serial number, and asked what was wrong. I explained the problem and she asked if I was using Nintendo-official cables, I said yes, so she set up a repair. I said I was in Washington, and she asked, “Do you live within driving distance of Redmond,” and it just so happens I live in Redmond. She said instead of waiting for a repair, I can pop into the Nintendo repair center and get it fixed while I wait. Not only that, they’re open Saturdays, 9-6.

I jumped into the car, walked in (turns out it was about 2 blocks from my old Microsoft building), and the guy said they’d just swap me over to a new console. He went back to go do that, and I looked at some old-school Nintendo systems in a display case. They had most everything in there, though surprisingly none of the rare top-loading NES machines. They did have a ROB, though.

I also noticed a Wii set up, and it had Super Mario Galaxies in it, so I played that for about 5 minutes until my new Wii was ready. He handed me the new system, said I have a 1 year warranty on the new system already set up in my name, and sent me on my way. Took about 20 minutes including driving there and back.

Sure beats the 360 experience I had: they refused to fix my machine (it was before they extended the warranty to 3 years for the red-ring-of-death), so I had to swap it out at Costco. Plus I had to deal with their “helpful” automated debugger “Max” and useless India-based technical support who had me do everything “Max” did again. All this before telling me it’d be $179 to fix.

(According to the Invoice I got repair of a Wii is $75, though obviously my warranty covered that amount. That’s a fairly reasonable price - especially since you also get a new warranty to go along with your replacement system).

Kudos, Nintendo. I wish I knew how to buy your stock.