You may wonder what exactly happens to a site when Slashdot sends its legions of page requests to it. Well, The Metric System blog has an analysis of what happened on November 6th when they received 31,218 page views. You see the breakdown by site and you also see an increase in traffic by 89,094%. While this may by anecdotal, it's the first time I've seen hard numbers on the Slashdot/Digg effect.

One of my favorite series has released its third movie, "Bender's Game." Wired has an interview with some staff from Rough Draft Studios (The Simpson's Movie, Ren & Stimpy) that was entertaining. Get out and buy Futurama to support the show!

Obama was brutally attacked by MPAA lobbyists mere hours after his acceptance speech today. Who else is already pandering to the president elect?

From the mouth of John Cleese, it's official: Sarah Palin is funnier than Michael Palin!

I hate to sound like an Amazon fanboy ... what with their 1-click patent crap and all ... but if you've read my comments related to anti-DRM you know I love their MP3 service. It's completely DRM-less (unlike Apple's) and has quite the selection. Well, today I discovered that the yet to be released David Byrne & Brian Eno album has a free MP3 listed for download on Amazon.

This excites me as I hope to see all music distributors (labels, retailers, sites, etc) move towards a model similar to that of Afternoon Records site where the artists pick one or two songs from each album to be distributed for free. Although this doesn't satisfy the N'Syncs and Britney Spears of the music world (where one pop single should sell an entire album of 95% filler), it completely draws me into purchasing more and more music from artists that write their own music.

These selections still seem few and far between on Amazon (Brian Setzer, Ted Nugent & The Apples in Stereo are the only others I can find at the moment) but let's hope this spreads.

I can't tell if this is legit or not but Torvalds may be blogging. It's just inane enough that it might be him though it doesn't have the same feel as his posts that I've read at the KernelTrap.

For example, he seems to use _exclamation_ on kernel threads instead of exclamation like the blog has.

If you're a coder who uses .NET, I recently came across some new neat tools by ItJustWorks. The four tools are:

• IJW Profiler for .NET & Java
• Corfu Text Editor
• IJW Framework
• IL to Native Compiler

Earlier this morning, Nintendo made several major announcements in a press conference in Japan. Ranging from a new Nintendo DS to a Wii storage solution. Nintendo's first announcement was a brand-new handheld in the Nintendo DS line of consoles. This revision of the DS brand will be a significant break from the previous DS Lite console. It will be named "Nintendo DSi". (Nintendo DS-Eye, get it?) Nintendo also announced a solution to the Wii storage problem. Unfortunately, it sounds like players will be able to download to their SD Card, but not actually play games directly from the card.

Firehose Link: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=1225579

(Still trying to figure out if the firehose does anything.)

There's a worthwhile This American Life episode about 419 scammers (Act I just past the intro).

Quite interesting (and I must admit it's a more than a little amusing). It begs the question: Do 419 scammer scammers take their anti-scamming too far?

A developer posted a brief blog outlining the libraries that Google Chrome uses. Since it's open source, you can see how many (and which) libraries they chose to use. Interesting stuff if you want to get an idea of what is needed to start an open source browser like Chrome. Another blog talks about the security implications of this.

I noticed a while ago that my spam filter was 100% accurate on all plain-text emails. Spammers are now forced to use obfuscation techniques like embedded images and HTML. It seems to me that this provides an easy way of totally eliminating spam:

1. Bounce anything that is not from a whitelisted sender and contains an non-plain-text MIME section.
2. Auto-whitelist anyone I send a mail to.

This means that anyone I email is free to send me whatever they want. Anyone can still contact me, but they are restricted to sending me plain text for the first email, until I reply to them.

Of course, spammers could start sending out messages saying 'I tried to send you some spam but your filter blocked it, please email me.' These will be caught in grey-traps for 8 hours, and by the end of the 8 hours there's a very good chance that the email will have been caught and the sender added to an RBL.

I'll probably try implementing this when I have time, but if anyone has time before me then please do and let me know how well it works.

Artists like the eloquent poet Kid Rock are taking a stand against iTunes as they continue to see album sales fall while their hit singles skyrocket in sales on the popular music distribution application. He will be joining Jay-Z in not putting his latest album up for sale on iTunes. I guess Kid's fans were either sending him a message he didn't want to hear or it's just not fair to give consumers a choice. Either way, the world will mourn the loss of Kid's music on iTunes. </sarcasm>

My current contract at the university expires a week on Monday. It's been fun. I've been employed to set up a History of Computing Collection - a chance to indulge one of my hobbies for a bit after finishing my PhD and relaxing after the immense stress of writing a book and a thesis (in more or less unrelated areas) at the same time.

Now I'm back to freelance writing and spare-time hacking. If anyone wants to employ me for a bit, let me know...

A couple of weeks ago, one of the hard drives in a FreeBSD box of mine died. This was mildly inconvenient, but since it was one of a RAID-1 array, not totally catastrophic. It seems to be the season for drives dying, because the disk in my MacBook Pro just died this evening.

The machine had been being a bit slow and randomly pausing for a while for no apparent reason. I now realise that the random pauses were caused by I/O errors causing userspace processes to block waiting for kernel locks to be released. Ho hum.

Over the last month, I've been becoming progressively more concerned about how long it had been since my last backup (October 2007!) and last weekend I finally got around to running a full backup of my home directory. As such, I haven't lost very much. Most of the work I did in the last week is in svn and the grant proposal I've been working on was rescued just before the drive died completely. I lost a paper I was working on and some emails and chat logs, but nothing particularly important.

I think my next laptop is going to be solid state. Mechanical storage is more trouble than it's worth.

What's up with the smiley spam I've been seeing lately? Anyone else run into emails where the subject contains only a smiley :) and there's nothing in the body? The email server implements greylisting (go spamd!), so the messages are being retried by the delivering system. Anyone know what the scoop is?