May 2009

There were 62 posts published in May 2009 (this is page 1 of 7).

Rankcrawler bot update

Sheesh. Just after I finished blocking Rankcrawler from accessing my site, I found yet another connection attempt from them – this time from a totally new IP address:

94.23.51.159 – – [31/May/2009:07:14:02 -0400] “GET /2009/05/30/conn-clusion/ HTTP/1.1” 200 5574 “http://real-url.org” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.01; Windows -NT 5.0 – real-url.org)”
94.23.51.159 – – [31/May/2009:07:15:25 -0400] “GET /2009/05/30/conn-clusion/ HTTP/1.0” 200 5574 “-” “-”
94.23.51.159 – – [31/May/2009:07:15:25 -0400] “POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0” 200 473 “-” “XML-RPC for PHP 2.2.2”

This IP resolves to rps6637.ovh.net. OVH.Net is the same ISP that Rankcrawler uses. They just can’t take no for an answer.

[Update: 1 June 2009] Rankcrawler says this isn’t them. Duly noted.

Weekend spent outdoors

It was a weekend spent outdoors.

Friday evening I stopped by the Seaboard Music event to meet my neighbors and hear some music. Saturday morning the kids rode their bikes while Kelly and I Rollerbladed up and down the streets in our neighborhood.

Then they went to a birthday party while I pulled on boots and waded through Cemetery Branch creek picking up trash along with six or so neighbors. We picked up many bags of trash and got that section of Cemetery Branch looking great. Unfortunately, we had to stop before we worked further downstream, as I suspect that’s where all the trash is (and the homeless people). After the stream cleanup was done, Kelly told me that the Dolls had invited us over. I got cleaned up and we all spent time visiting with them, heading home around 8 PM.

Today we talked about going to the pool or going biking, but instead Kelly took to weeding the flowerbeds and I mowed the lawn and sprayed the poison ivy. Before we started though I recalled finding an injured baby opossum during my morning walk, so we all piled in to the car and went to fetch it and deliver it to an animal rescue place. The kids really enjoyed helping out an injured critter and so did I.

After lunchtime piled into the car again and headed to Five County Stadium to take in a free Mudcats game. In spite of the 90+ degree day in the sun and the kids’ lack of understanding of the game, we all had a great time.It was surprisingly affordable, too, so I think another baseball game is in the cards.

Now I’m home and quite tired. But, hey, I earned it!

Bad bot alert: Rankcrawler

Looks like a bot has been scouring my website without properly identifying itself. I noticed that my older posts were getting a lot of unexplained hits. I checked the logs, looked up the IPs, and discovered the visitors were bots from the rankcrawler.com domain. The bots don’t properly identify themselves in their user agent field, as good bots should do:

Some of the bots came from these IPs (though there may be others):
87.98.249.75
87.98.133.249
91.121.26.45
94.23.152.34
94.23.153.8

As you can see, Rankcrawler prefers to disguise itself as a regular browser. This is a no-no.

87.98.249.75 – – [29/May/2009:23:56:09 -0400] “GET /page/2/ HTTP/1.0” 200 34160 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6”
87.98.249.75 – – [30/May/2009:00:11:16 -0400] “GET /2006/07/ HTTP/1.0” 200 41171 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6”

91.121.26.45 – – [29/May/2009:20:47:22 -0400] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 34467 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”
91.121.26.45 – – [30/May/2009:00:01:23 -0400] “GET /2008/05/ HTTP/1.0” 200 27858 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”

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Conn-clusion

Yesterday I gave the last of my GPS talks at Conn for this school year. I went into it thinking it would be like the last one, where the kids were bored and unengaged (I found out later that because I was a bit late, the kids felt denied a free trip to the playground). I also thought I would be tired of hearing myself talk.

Instead it was the best talk I’ve given yet! The kids were engaged and so was I. I got many good questions from the kids, some of which I’d not gotten before. They were practically falling out of their seats to answer them! The thing that really impressed me was when I asked if anyone knew what a sextant was. One young man began explaining how you line up the its two mirrors to get a fix. Wow! It takes a special kind of fifth-grader to know that! Heck, most adults don’t know that. Also. when I mentioned that GPSs don’t work inside, another young man asked how some mobile phones show your position when you’re inside. It was a very good question!

I had to end my talk a bit early as there was a school meeting that afternoon but it turns out I timed my talk just right and was done right on time. Mrs. Jarrett inquired if I would be back next year and I have to say I will. I’ve had a blast talking to Conn students about GPS and look forward to next year!

Admiral Mullen and Guantanamo

Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen was on ABC News This Week when the topic came around to Guantanamo. Here’s one snippet from the transcript that caught my eye (my emphasis):

STEPHANOPOULOS: The Republican leader of the Senate was quoted in The New York Times today saying there’s actually a very slim possibility now that the Congress will allow Guantanamo to close. If he’s right, and Guantanamo doesn’t close, what would that mean for your military mission?

MULLEN: Well, the concern I’ve had about Guantanamo in these wars is it has been a symbol, and one which has been a recruiting symbol for those extremists and jihadists who would fight us. So and I think that centers — you know, that’s the heart of the concern for Guantanamo’s continued existence, in which I spoke to a few years ago, the need to close it.

Admiral Mullen makes it sounds like that his only concern about Guantanamo is that it’s a jihadist recruiting symbol. While that’s certainly a concern, I would hope his bigger concern is that we are imprisoning people without habeas corpus, trial, or often any solid evidence. Admiral Mullen’s remarks seem to imply that what we’re doing at Guantanamo would be okay as long as it is done in secret. I hope that’s not the case.

America’s justice system is strong enough to handle terrorist trials. What remains to be seen is whether our cases against these individuals are as strong.

Apple tax incentives

I’ve been following the proposed state tax incentives the General Assembly is considering providing to a mystery company widely considered to be Apple. The list of incentives appear to be pretty hefty, considering Apple’s proposed facility will employ 50 full-time employees at the most.

I know of a datacenter in RTP capable of hosting 84,000 computers that is managed by about 20 people. An Apple iTunes Store datacenter could run very comfortably with a staff of 20. So anyone expecting lots of jobs from this company is fooling himself.

The incentives bill intends to lure this company to an area of the state with high unemployment. This would typically mean a rural area of the state, and thus not an area likely to be wired for high-speed Internet access. An area without high-speed Internet access makes an iTunes Store datacenter a non-starter. Let’s hope the lawmakers keep that in mind as they attempt to keep affordable broadband out of our cities and rural areas.

MT.Net recovers from another hack

MT.Net has been down for about 28 hours due to my WordPress installation being hacked. Fortunately, I had a copy of the database from the day before (yay, backups!). I am still not sure how it happened as my code was all up-to-date but the WordPress folks are now checking into it. I suspect an xmlrpc.php attack but do not know for sure.

Yesterday morning, my friend Scott reported that my comments links were simply refreshing the main page rather than taking him to the comments. I studied the links my WP site was now spitting out:

http://www.markturner.net/2009/05/?y%/credit-cards/#more-6422
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